The subscribe/unsubscribe interface for Conversant can now be invoked by e-mail as announced here:

Conversant "conversations" have always had the ability to act like mailing lists (as well as web sites and newsgroups), but until now it's been a little bit too difficult to sign up for the "mailing list" side of things. No longer! Now, it's as easy as it is with any other mailing list: just send an email to the site's "subscribe" address.

You can now sucbscribe to this site by e-mailing this subscribe address and, of course, unsubscribe but you don't want to do that do you ;-)?

Also as part of MISS Month there's now an improved prefs interface

Improvements include:

• Tab-panel interface, so that prefs are displayed in smaller, more focused groupings
• Contextual help (help links next to almost every item in the preferences)

The Member Pages have undergone improvement too. And for me the Conversant Manager interface is now easier to assimilate and use.

Many thanks Macrobyte.

The Register: Gateway to unveil Linux-based AOL box Friday

Gateway will take the wraps off its Transmeta-based, AOL-oriented Net appliance tomorrow [Friday], company sources have claimed.

The announcement will follow today's alliance between Gateway and chip-maker Broadcom, which will see the duo co-develop systems capable of pumping streamed digital audio and video content to a variety of consumer electronics devices, such as TVs, PCs and (hint, hint) Internet appliances.

Here's the original Gateway AOL Internet Appliances to Be Powered by Transmeta's Crusoe Processor press release. So far no official announcement about the launch of the IA - understandable since the USA is still asleep at the time of this post.

Sun's Analysis of .NET

There is no doubt that Microsoft has come to the same conclusion as everyone else in the industry: The Java platform is an excellent technology that enjoys tremendous success. Rather than embracing the cross-platform, vendor neutral solution which is the Java platform, like most of the industry, Microsoft is still pushing a single platform, vendor specific solution. The .NET platform is an improvement for Visual C++ and Visual Basic programmers, but it is yet another proprietary Microsoft platform which will tie the developer to Windows, albeit possibly a .NET-ized notion of Windows.

Sun's analysis of Microsoft .NET vs. J2EE: How Do They Stack Up?

Current ruminations about .NET in various forums are reminiscent of the fable of the three blind men attempting to identify an elephant: It's perceived as very different things, depending on your perspective. Some see .NET as Microsoft's next-generation Visual Studio development environment. Some see it as yet another new programming language (C#). Some see it as a new data-exchange and messaging framework, based on XML and SOAP. In reality, .NET wants to be all of these things, and a bit more.

Sharky Extreme - PC - Articles - Intel Pentium 4 Unveiled

The Pentium 4 processor has several new features from its Intel NetBurst Micro-Architecture that boost performance over the older P6 micro-architecture: a 20 stage pipeline, improved dynamic execution, double clocked ALUs, level 1 trace cache, a quad-pumped 100MHz system bus, and SSE2.