"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)."

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. 

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.

Web Publishing for Everyone. Today, Macromedia launched Macromedia Contribute, a powerful new desktop application that aims to unleash web publishing for everyone, while providing control to web professionals ultimately responsible for websites and applications. It's amazing that after 8 years we haven't had technologies like this --- it's still much much too hard for the average end-user to use the web as a personal communications and publishing tool. Norm Meyrowitz, our president of products, ruminates here about this fact. We went through years of everyone believing they need "content management systems", and have learned that what we really need are powerful, usable, and affordable tools that are pragmatic and open, not expensive, complex, and inflexible, which has become the norm in content management. On a side note, Contribute opens up some interesting potential synergies with the weblog universe -- Dreamweaver MX Templates + Contriute could make a powerful one-two punch for enabling a far greater number of users to easily publish weblogs. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

Also follow the rumination link. I am in awe at how people can write this garbage and sound so sincere - but that's why I'm not in marketing!

Yesterday I wrote a very simple suite in Frontier called aggyBaby, that uses the new aggregator XML-RPC interface to build a very bare-bones but super-fast static page of the latest stories from the channels I've subscribed to. I think I'll release the UserTalk code in the hope that someone will convert it to Python and/or Java. [Scripting News]

Something like this is what I'm looking for on Windows (Zeepe). Netnewswire

ping - getting tired of having to do this. Is it the Internet thats unreliable, Radio Userland or my firewall - dunno!

Why you should move to C#. The migration to the .NET platform offers many development choices. This top 10 list explains why C# is an important offering and why you should consider moving to C#. [.netWire Headlines] I haev been doing a lot of stuff with C++ lately and don't agree with all of this but here it is anyhow. [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

If these are the top 10, .Net is in trouble. The trouble with the article is it says rather too often "you can do this [dire thing] in C++, not C#". Most (and certainly MS VC++) compilers will give you warnings on those dire things these days. 

ping

I first got notice of LSW DotNet Reflection-Browser Release 1.0 from the Dotnet-Products mailing list. I asked how if it was was different than Lutz's free and most essential kick-ass tool Reflector (whoo, just noticed new version there 2.7.1.0):

Highlights Smalltalk-like code browsing.
References / Callers / Callees / Implementers
Built in Decompiler + Disassebler C# / Smalltalk / PCode
Documentation View and Substring - Search
Multiple Browser-Wndows / Navigation Hierarchy
The differences I got from the company:

Download here
[Sam Gentile's Weblog]