* Gearhead: Excited about virtual appliances * Backspin: Vista, not improving security? * Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Gearhead: Excited about virtual appliances
We started to circle back this week to the geographical information systems stuff that we started a couple of weeks ago but got distracted by something that is really exciting.
To read this week’s Gearhead in its entirety, click here.
Backspin: Vista, not improving security?
Longtime reader and correspondent Phil Daley, a developer for a software vendor, dropped me a line saying he’s three weeks into a four-week project to evaluate one of his company’s products on Windows Vista. The goal is to identify any problems and recommend changes and fixes.
To read this week’s Backspin in its entirety, click here.
Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Exploding Batteries No Surprise to Dell (or Sony)
A couple of weeks ago Dell recalled a batch of bad batteries that were potential Molotov Cocktails and then this week Apple did the same thing.
Now we find that in the case of Dell, whose batteries were manufactured by Sony, both Dell and Sony knew there was a problem ten months ago!
If We Can Build the OLTP, er, CM1, What About Our Own Kids?
Some time ago in Backspin I wrote about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program that created to provide a high-tech. PC-type teaching tool for distribution to children in Third World countries.
The original goal was for the machine to cost $100 but it appears that at least for now that goal is not attainable and the current cost is $140 per laptop. And rather than being called the One Laptop Per Child it will be called the Children’s Machine 1 (CM1).
What is remarkable is what the project has achieved for the price. What’s interesting is what the CM1 could make possible outside of Third World use …
Pluto Stripped of Status
Apparently Pluto is no longer a planet. (No, this is not from The Onion.)
Update: Not everyone is happy with this: Now there is the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet …
Apparently there was a proposal earlier this month to call large almost planet-like things past Neptune “plutons” but because of strenuous objections from geologists (a pluton is an igneous rock thrust up among other rocks) the proposal was dropped.
[Thanks to Adam Gaffin]
Update the 2nd: Scott Adams weighed in on this important debate.
