15 November 2002

"Longhorn" Alpha Preview. "Longhorn is now considered a major Windows release by Microsoft, and early alpha builds are now testing at the company's Redmond campus. Last month, some of those builds leaked to the Internet, causing a stir in the Windows enthusiast community. I take a look at one of those builds here." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Including the snippet: "Display Properties application, which was written with the new .NET-based Avalon APIs (Figure)." posted at: 10:34:56 PM   SIAA lobbies to shut down other free access resources. More Sites Targeted For Shutdown. Having successfully shut down PubScience, a site that offered free access to scientific and technical articles, commercial publishers are now looking to attack other sources of free information. The lobbying campaign is led by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), a trade association of commercial electronic publishers. According to the SIAA, "it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free." As Peter Suber comments, "Let's get this breathtaking assertion straight. When the research is funded by the government and the articles donated by authors, then taxpaying readers should have to pay a second levy to read them, and pay it to a third party with no role in the research?" Suber calls the SIAA action "piracy." It's hard to disagree. By William Matthews, Federal Computer Week, November 13, 2002  [OLDaily] [Seb's Open Research] Um, this is all going to get very messy. I'm not sure that articles are, as a generality, 'donated' by authors but are written during their paid for time. Reader's are going to have to pay somehow for access (and lets face it they are paying ISP charges of some sort, so web access isn't free) its whether it is via taxation or via a fee to a commercial host. What is weird, IMHO, is this generates such heat (piracy), and this in a country in which you have to pay for health care.  posted at: 5:13:56 PM   Minicopter 'to revolutionise travel'. Inventors are working on a miniature helicopter to help commuters get to work. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY] I dunno, need something a little more radical than this - all those whirring blades and really we need to get away from the internal combustion engine. posted at: 4:57:40 PM

© Copyright 2003 Pete Cole. Last update: 30/03/2003; 02:17:39.