PCIN.net Update

From BusinessWeek:

The World Wide Web makes Tom Pitoniak’s job harder. As an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, publisher of dictionaries and other reference books, Pitoniak must distinguish between words that legitimately should be in the dictionary and all that other matter sloshing around the English language: slang, industry jargon, onomatopoeic fillers, brand names, buzzwords, abbreviations, and the like. The new Web—flooded as it is with blogs, message boards, and Web pages containing the computer literati’s conversations—is awash with such words. “It’s kind of dizzying,” says Pitoniak.

Telling the difference between a true word and a nonword was once as easy as reading. Time was, a cluster of sequential letters constituted a word if it appeared in printed sources a few hundred times or so over a few years and had an accepted meaning. Not anymore.

From CNNMoney:

Tim Spalding was 9 years-old when he had the idea of using his first computer–an Apple II–to make lists of the books he owned, like the Adventures of Tintin series and Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective.

Flash-forward to 2007. Spalding is now a programmer, and he’s still keeping lists, but on a far grander scale. A couple of years ago, on a lark, he created an online version of his original Apple application, one that allowed anyone on the Internet to post a list of the books in his or her library, compare it with other online book lists, and talk about literature with people of similar reading tastes.

“I was trying to scratch my own itch,” Spalding admits. That itch became LibraryThing, a social network based not on who you know but on what you’ve read. It’s already producing a nice revenue stream for Spalding from the sale of thousands of premium memberships at $10 to $25 apiece.

Spalding’s creation is quietly achieving cult status among bookworms around the world, creating a network with one of the highest IQs in cyberspace. Less than two years after it opened its doors to the public, LibraryThing’s users have listed, tagged, or recommended more than 10 million works–a collection that, were it not virtual, would be the third-largest private library in the United States, behind those of Harvard and Yale.

From TechRepublic:

Microsoft has come under attack for the way it advertises the Vista operating system.

A lawsuit, filed in Seattle, alleges that the company advertised systems as “Vista capable,” when in fact the systems were not able to run Vista properly. The suit alleges that the marketing around Vista was designed to deliberately mislead potential customers.

The outcome hangs on the precise definition of the circumstances under which a machine is “Vista capable.”

Microsoft has allowed PC vendors to put stickers on their systems saying that they are “Vista ready,” when the system could run only Vista Home Basic, which does not allow many of the core features of Vista to run. The suit maintains that it was unreasonable of Microsoft to assume that every person to whom it was marketing Vista could understand the system requirements.