Be sure to read the small type on the full size poster.

  2:19:52 PM  Google It!  comment

Big Brother, Alive and Well

You already know your credit record weighs heavily in the interest rates you pay for your home, car, and plastic. Now your credit rap sheet is playing a bigger role than ever in your humdrum life.

Home and auto insurers are now consulting credit scores to determine premiums. Your borrowing history may even be used by cell phone carriers and utility companies to decide if you are worthy of using their services without paying a premium. Scary? Heck, yeah. Forget your stellar driving record and whether or not you can afford basic electricity, let alone a hefty fee because you were late paying a few bills back in the 1990s.
  1:49:41 PM  Google It!  comment

Recordable DVD drives, media, and applications will experience "dramatic growth" next year and through at least 2006, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. He told this to the 100-plus attendees of the Recordable DVD Council (RDVC) ISV meeting at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
  1:25:15 PM  Google It!  comment

Woodward interviewed Mr. Bush in August at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

"He said, 'One of the things I learned is, the vision thing matters,'" Woodward tells 60 Minutes about what Mr. Bush told him.

And his vision includes getting rid of the evil from what he calls the axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, North Korea. Talking with Woodward, Mr. Bush dropped all pretense of diplomatic language as he tore into North Korea's leader Kim Jong II. And the President permitted Woodward to tape record his interview.

John Robb says this interview has changed his view of the future.
  12:29:49 PM  Google It!  comment

Raiders 27
Patriots 20

Box Scores

The Patriots are in the gray area of not bad and not good. 500 ball at this stage of the season isn't bad but it won't be good enough to win the division. Everyone on the team needs to put out that extra effort to find a way to win each game from now on.

Sunday, Nov. 24	MINNESOTA VIKINGS	1 p.m.
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28	at Detroit Lions	12:30 p.m.
Sunday, Dec. 8	BUFFALO BILLS	1 p.m.
Monday, Dec. 16	at Tennessee Titans	9 p.m.
Sunday, Dec. 22	NY JETS	8:30 p.m.
Sunday, Dec. 29	MIAMI DOLPHINS	1 p.m.

	W	L	T	Pct.
Miami	6	4	0	.600
New England	5	5	0	.500
N.Y. Jets	5	5	0	.500
Buffalo	5	5	0	.500

Go Patriots

  12:09:51 PM  Google It!  comment

The OXUF922 marks the next milestone in high-bandwidth, high-speed data transfer for external drives. It combines an 800 Mbps FireWire 2.0 (1394B) Link layer and Phy controller with a 480 Mbps USB2.0 Phy in a programmable device that results in a fully integrated solution for high-speed data streaming.

FireWire is an Apple trademark for the IEEE 1394 standard. This cross-platform digital peripheral interface standard is suitable for multimedia devices and many other high performance applications. FireWire's benefits include fast real-time transfer, plug-and-play, hot swapping, a higher-speed growth path, and easy-to-use cables and connectors

New Standard Extends Connectivity to 100 Meters in Many Interconnect Media

1394 products and methods to make your home the center of your digital universe.

What is changing with 1394b? To start with the most simple improvement, speed is dramatically increased from a maximum of 400 Mbits/sec to 3.2 Gbit/sec by the end of 2003. By year's end, 800 Mbit/sec products should hit the stores, and an intermediate maximum of 1.6 Gbit/sec will be achieved in 2002. With its high speed, IEEE 1394b is one of the best technologies to transport video images and other multimedia content from one device to another. The architecture of IEEE 1394b is especially suited for transporting streaming media, because it consists of continuous dual simplex transmission. There are two transporting wires within a regular IEEE 1394b cable: one carries the signal from the host to the peripheral and the other one carries the signal from the peripheral to the host. Both are operational all the time.
  2:05:12 PM  Google It!  comment

Email to Weblog Post

I have been successful enabling and configuring email to weblog on this weblog. Unfortunately I don't see a simple method to send photos or direct email posts to a specific category so we will be happy with plain text and html to the main page only. It should help me stay connected when and if I start traveling again.

posted via email
  1:38:52 PM    comment

Not all wireless middleware platforms are created equal

Consider the example of a sales executive who travels daily. The challenge comes when the executive, responsible for a quota of one million dollars, needs to boot up a laptop, find a network connection, get into the e-mail system, check for messages and re-synchronize a PDA. This process could consume up to 45 minutes a day.

This may not seem like much, but over the course of a year it comes out to more than three weeks of lost time or productivity.
  6:54:12 PM    comment

Roxio snapping up Napster assets

The company said it will offer details about how it will use Napster's technology to "expand Roxio's role in the digital media landscape" after the deal closes.
  6:38:28 PM    comment

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend [~] all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you [~] passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance [~] and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

Chief Takes Over New Agency to Thwart Attacks on U.S.

John M. Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, has returned to the Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give federal officials instant access to vast new surveillance and information- analysis systems.

Air Security Focusing on Flier Screening

From the moment the Transportation Security Administration was formed, agency officials have been consumed by the idea of a vast network of supercomputers that would instantly probe every passenger's background

Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe [~] including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant

U.S. Hopes to Check Computers Globally

"We can develop the best technology in the world and unless there is public acceptance and understanding of the necessity, it will never be implemented," Poindexter said. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy."

Getting the Defense Department job is something of a comeback for Poindexter. The Reagan administration national security adviser was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair, which involved the secret sale of arms to Iran in the mid-1980s and diversion of profits to help the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

You Are a Suspect

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" [~] "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.

  10:11:29 AM  Google It!  comment

I just had to go with Norwegian Woody for this title. What else could it be called?
  7:40:53 PM  Google It!  comment

Where do your politicians get their funding?

  8:59:58 PM  Google It!  comment

The American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC) is a nonprofit group of technologists with the mission of educating elected and appointed officials about technology. Unlike most other factions you can name, technologists have never been politically influential as a group.

The AOTC focuses most of its attention and efforts on the Internet and has assembled a list of the worst coders in Washington. Code is law, as Lawrence Lessig observed. “West coast code” is the code that runs our computers. “East coast code” is the code that runs our lives.

AOTC took the time to research the sponsors of the most egregious “East coast code:”

1. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), H.R.2281
2. Communications Decency Act (CDA), S.314 / H.R.1004
3. Child Online Protection Act (COPA, “CDA II”), S.1482 / H.R.3783
4. Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), S.2048
5. P2P Piracy Prevention Bill (“Berman’s hacking bill”), H.R.5211
6. Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), S.97 / H.R.543

The results of the AOTC research are not surprising:

“These laws were written and sponsored by a tiny handful of lawmakers, backed by a tiny handful of wealthy financiers. These bad coders and their backers have done more damage to computing, the Internet and freedom than all the virus authors, spammers and crackers combined.”

  8:48:52 PM  Google It!  comment

* Fastest access time of any storage device

* Secondary external DC power for data security when the host is powered down.

* The Rocket Drive does not cannibalize existing system memory nor is it a memory expansion card. It is a drive.

* Rocket Drive looks and acts just like another drive to the host system.

* Multiple Rocket Drives can be used simultaneously, as long as there are available PCI slots, by spanning the drives or striping the drives.

Review
  7:56:53 PM  Google It!  comment