via The Register

Vulture-eyed reader Georg Klein has trawled the Internet and found not only a description of Project Ginger but also where you can buy it from.

Mind you some of the top hits from a Google Search: Project Ginger would reveal a similar sighting ;-)

From the Stanford Learning Lab - Speaking of Computers, Issue No. 55; January 8, 2001

Mobile Learning Explorations at the Stanford Learning Lab

Cell phones, Palm Pilots, wireless Web - they help us check email, trade stocks and stay in touch - but can they help us learn? Can we, should we, try to fill in gaps of daily time with learning opportunities?

FUD from Microsoft - MS Exec: Linux Is Going Down

Microsoft thinks Linux is doomed, and predicts that many Linux businesses will falter and fail before the end of the year.

I can't help but wonder whether or not the FUD is due to the fact that:

Lately, Microsoft has vacillated between dismissing Linux entirely and seeing it as a vast and looming threat on the competitive landscape.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in a presentation given to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter earlier this month, said, "I think you have to rate competitors that threaten your core higher than you rate competitors where you're trying to take from them. So in some senses (that) puts the Linux phenomenon and the Unix phenomenon at the top of the list."

So my take on this is that Linux is seen as a threat within MS and a worthy enough competitor to rubbish.

Susan now has Gigs to Spare

Gigs to Spare ...just after midnight....Whew!! Surgery inside this powerbook is complete! The 20 GB drive replaced the 6GB (thanks to friend Liz, who had the right tools and had done similar surgery to her powerbook -- grrl geeks rock!).

Complete with photos of the process. Which reminds me I've been running with only 1 gig free from the 4GB drive on my PowerBook. I really should investigate upgrading to a larger hard drive. Either that or an Itanium PowerBook ;-) Hmmm!

A List Apart - Breaking out of the cubicle: The tale of one small Swiss company

Up until about 6 years ago, I was a typical cubicle worker in the advertising industry in New York. I had the nice title of creative director, a very decent salary and benefits, crazy working hours and little social life. I was far more intimate with my Mac than I was with my boyfriend.

Now it's 2001 and I am one of two people running a small company in the suburbs of Zürich, Switzerland. We are one of those independent dot-coms that is, knock on wood, doing fairly well despite the current gloomy news and our very small size.

Here is how we got to this point, which may be of interest to anyone who might be considering going independent too.

I have to say I was impressed with the engineering of their website - PRODOK Engineering, Switzerland: Smart Scripted Solutions. I hadn't realised until now how smart PDF can be. Their toolbox is impressive too ;-)

I'm currently downloading version 4.15 of Analog for Macintosh that was released today. It's been while since I last used Analog and I am curious to see what the logs for this site tell me. I might even find something worthy of Disturbing Search Requests ;-)

Dave links to a google search for Microsoft CLR and suggests that we

read these articles about Microsoft's CLR, and think and read between the lines. I hadn't understood how pervasive the CLR was going to be. My surprise is not based on anything new, MS has been talking about the CLR since last summer, I just wasn't fully tuning in.

The most pertinent articles appear to be:

Introducing ADO+: Data Access Services for the Microsoft .NET Framework -- MSDN Magazine, November 2000

The Microsoft.NET Strategy: Risky, Brilliant, or Both?

Handling Language Interoperability with the Microsoft .NET Framework

The following is a bit OT but interesting nevertheless: The BYTEmark and C-versus-Java

Andrea's Weblog

I think it would be a good idea to think about ways to conserve energy and about renewable energy sources - instead of sacrificing National Parks for being able to keep oil cheap.

Amen! I calculated my ecological footprint and it came out to just over 50% of a typical American's footprint. Still way too much B-(

There's an Overclocking discussion going on in a local cad.chat newsgroup I set up as a forum for those with an interest in my Computer Arcjitectire and Design class. It appears that overclocked processors may harbour subtle errors when calculating SETI@home results: Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop - Statistics and Benchmarking

Unsettling news...
The 3.03 benchmarks started to trickle in and a few results were obviously in question because they contained extra spikes or the values were ridiculous. About this time along came Roelof and the fun started - not content with my slow old ways he cobbled together some code to check the result.sah far more thoroughly than a mere eyeballing could achieve. Boy! Did the results ever give us a shock. Many of them produced on highly-overclocked processors contained errors. If you overclock there's a good chance you fall into this category. Many of you OC to the point where it locks and then reduce it a few MHz believing it to be now 'stable'. The debate about whether overclocking and its ramifications was acceptable in a scientific enterprise suddenly loomed up. It seemed that although machines completed the benchmark in seemingly reasonable times the results showed that errors aplenty had been generated in the result.sah file! So actually reaching 100% completion of a WU is not a satisfactory measure of your systems reliability. You cannot be sure that your machine is producing kosher results just because it completes WU's at a close to average time! Just because you can play games, burn CD's and run the SETI client concurrently does not give any guarantee your system is error free.

Of course, this means that if you get dodgy results for SETI then you're likely to have dodgy results for other things. It might not matter so much when playing games but it may (will!) be a big deal for other applications. Thought provoking...

EVHEAD!: Essay - And Then There Was One

Wednesday, January 31, 2001

It's probably become obvious to the careful observer that all is not well in the Land of Pyra. Rather than wait for the public speculation and debate, I'm going to say what exactly is going on (from my perspective -- not speaking for anyone else on the team or as an official Pyra/Blogger representative). I'm sure the public speculation and debate will happen anyway, but I don't plan to take much part in it. I have other things to do.

It's a shame that the Pyra team split up. Although not a Blogger user, it would seem to be a nice weblogging tool.

The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

THE PENTIUM 4 IS THE FIRST truly new processor design from Intel since the Pentium Pro debuted at under 200MHz. Believe it or not, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Celeron processors were all based on the same P6 microarchitecture. Intel added some goodies like MMX, SSE, and integrated cache over the years, and they changed the way the processors were made, but they were all the same basic design.

The P4 is based on Intel's radical new NetBurst microarchitecture, and it's a different animal altogether. To best understand why I'm calling the P4 design radical, we could use a car analogy.

But I hate car analogies, so let's not.