New, tips, and more
From MacWorld: No doubt about it — Apple’s announcement that it’s selling a four-button, scroll-wheel-bearing USB mouse is big news. Not in the earth-shattering kind of way that you’d greet the announcement of a new Mac or iPod. It is, after all, just a mouse. But the Mighty Mouse marks the end of 21 years …
From ComputerWorld: Microsoft Corp. is working on plans to make a recent hacker meeting held on its Redmond, Wash., campus a twice-yearly event, according to a spokesman for the vendor’s security group. The company plans to host another Blue Hat security event in the fall, though no specific date has been set, Stephen Toulouse, a …
From USA Today: American farmers are buying computers and using them for business, but at a much slower pace than they did just two years ago, a new federal study shows. The rate for both computer ownership and business usage increased just 1% from 2003 to 2005, according to a survey conducted every two years …
From the NYT: The nation’s public schools are rushing to reconfigure scores of traditional courses from basic composition to calculus so students can take them via the Internet. One of the unlikely new offerings in this vast experiment is online gym. Sound like an oxymoron? Not in Minneapolis, where a physical education course joined the …
Microsoft started forcing all users to verify their Windows product was genuine this week after making the step an optional step for updates for several months. Within 24 hours, the code had been broken allowing users to bypass the verification. The following was from the BoingBoing.net post where I first read about it: Before pressing …
From Yahoo! News (AP): On a hot summer weekend in India’s technology capital, 28,000 young graduates converge on a suburban indoor stadium and create a stampede for jobs in the exploding software and business service industries. A large board advertising Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. falls to the floor with a thud, jostled by a crowd …
From USA Today: J.D. Lasica used to visit 20 to 30 Web sites for his daily fix of news. Now, he’s down to three — yet he consumes more news online than ever. Lasica is among a growing breed of information consumers who use the latest Internet technologies to completely bypass the home pages of …
From BBC News: People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans. Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs …
From VNUnet.com: Microsoft may be in trouble for naming its forthcoming operating system Vista after it transpired that the name has been registered by an American company for nearly six years. Vista, which operates a small business internet interchange, is actually based in Microsoft’s home town of Redmond. It was started in May 2000 by …
From CNet News: Legal digital song downloads around the world have tripled in the past year, while the growth of music piracy on peer-to-peer networks appears to have slowed, according to record labels. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said Thursday that 180 million songs had been sold worldwide through services such as …