The Register | Why Sun threw in the towel in Mankind vs. Microsoft the lead paragraph of which is:

"Principles are fine things to have, but only if you can afford them. With its stock declared a 'junk bond' and finishing a terrible quarter, Silicon Valley's leading Microsoft antagonist Sun Microsystems has now decided it can't."...

Looks like my citing of that famous Groucho Marx quote on Thursday was prophetic.

Groucho Marx Quotes and Quotations - BrainyQuote

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

I guess some people may be taken in by The Register | Intel's Itanium rockets to 64-bit shipment lead article. Before heading over there my linkees might want to ponder the date of posting ;-)

Behind the iTunes Music Store: A Technical Description of iTMS and FairPlay by Aaron Swartz:

"This document explains how the iTunes Music Store works. This information is useful to computer science researchers, cryptographers, and politicians, who may be curious to understand the largest deployed DRM system to date."

Actually, this grand-sounding document is only a couple of pages in length but contains some interesting information nevertheless.

via HtP - POWER to the people | A history of chipmaking at IBM with an emphasis on the POWER and PowerPC processors. A great resource. I must tell my students about it.

Note to my CADets: check out the Wired News | IBM Bets Chips on Open Source article:

"Big Blue now wants companies and developers to actively participate in the design of IBM's Power microchips, and is encouraging researchers, chip fabricators and electrical engineers to customize Power chips for use in specialized systems or devices."...

Reuters.com | Bill Gates: Hardware to Be Nearly Free in 10 Years

"Hardware costs will fall sharply within a decade to the point where widespread computing with speech and handwriting won't be limited by expensive technology, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Monday.

"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Gates said, referring to networked computers and advances in the speed of the Internet.'

Perhaps Microsoft doesn't see the writing on the wall. (Almost) free hardware will drive the demand for (almostst) free OS and applications. But I guess Microsoft's $6.8 R&D annual budget needs to be borne in mind when dissing thier ability to buy^h^h^invent new marketshare.

CocoaMySQL - A MySQL GUI for Mac OS X

"CocoaMySQL is an application used to manage MySQL databases (locally or over the internet). It lets you add and remove databases and tables, change fields and indexes, view and filter the content of tables, add, edit and remove rows, perform custom queries and dump tables or entire databases.'...