Gravytrain ...

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Airbags can snitch on speed-demons. Air-bag computers can be used to discover how fast a car was travelling at the time of collision. This is, of course, very interesting to law enforcement (and, presumably, insurance companies).

An electronic device on board the Pontiac, however, told police exactly how fast the car had been going — 124 mph in a 40 mph zone. And it enabled Trotwood to join the growing number of police departments and insurance companies across the country experimenting with data stored on computers, originally designed and installed on cars and trucks to control air bags, to determine what happened in the seconds leading up to accidents.
Called a Sensing Diagnostic Module, the electronic "brains" behind an airbag were developed by General Motors and are now manufactured by its spin-off company Delphi at an electronics plant in Kokomo, Ind. GM's air bags are made in Vandalia at Delphi's Interior & Lighting Systems plant and are later hooked up to the black boxes on assembly lines for GM and other auto companies.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Loopback filesystems (Sol8/9)

Testing an ISO image via loopback filesystem, lofiadm is/was added in Sol8 (useful before burning ISO image after cdrecord): lofiadm -a filename.iso /dev/lofi/1
mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

Colligo Home

"Portable Collaboration. Colligo provides collaboration software that makes it easy to connect and communicate with the people you need to, regardless of location, network or device"

Accounting scandals

The second shoe in the auditing scandal is going to be stock options. Stock options represent a wage expense and should be charged against earnings. When that happens, Microsoft's earnings history will be restated to look like this (this was done by Bill Parish, who did some good work, but is a little over the top on other issues concerning Microsoft). He estimates that a stunning 65 percent of Microsoft's cash did not originate from product sales but rather from tax benefits associated with the exercise of stock options, employees prepaying their own wages, and the sale of put contracts on its own stock. Yikes!!

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Sun Microsystems

"Join us as we unveil the Solaris[tm] 9 Operating Environment."

Here is a little demo