Slashdot Mirror

weink writes "Tim Berners-Lee has made a career out of resolving Internet pet peeves. Ten years after he invented the Web, making the Internet user friendly, he is still drafting lists of things that could work better. "

An anonymous reader sent us a link to a PC World story that talks about a new wavelet based image compression algorithm that (you guessed) produces smaller images at a higher quality. As usual, I'll believe it when IE and NS integrate support for it and webmasters use it. I bet we're still using gifs and jpegs years from now. What a crock.

Polaris writes "Article in PCWorld about web tablets, which are wireless handheld PCs, about the size of a thick magazine with touchpad color LCDs. Cyrix and Anigma are said to be releasing soon. Although they both run WinCE, the Cyrix one is apparently capable of running other os's." One of those puppies running Linux would rule. Are tablets the future of computers? Maybe if laptops put the muscle in the screen half, used touch screen LCDs, and made the keyboard detachable we'd have something interesting.

Josh Baugher writes "Big Monitors Go Flat Mitsubishi and Viewsonic offer big-screen monitors with truly flat CRTs. Finally vendors have truely flat screens. (and they mention a nifty 18" lcd display at bottom of article)." CRT won't be dead any time soon at this rate- the prices are reasonable for the 22" screen.

Nicholas Petreley explains his recent InfoWorld statement that "Should Microsoft ultimately win the case, however, I guarantee vendors will abandon Linux faster than a rat out of an aqueduct". While his point that the war is not won is valid, he has missed some crucial details: home computer prices are collapsing making Microsoft's software a very expensive component. In the business world, Windows-terminals save money by reducing administration costs and reducing the number of software licenses that must be bought. Windows-terminals can run other OS's than Windows -- for instance, Linux with the Citrix client. Finally the enormous emerging market is the consumer appliance market which needs an idiot-proof UI -- not Windows compatibility. Some links from LT.

YuppieScum wrote in to send us a link to an article talking about the relationship between the Apple II and ClearType. This article says that the technology that Microsoft claims to have invented was actually in use in the Apple II 20 years ago. If thats the case, it is currently residing in the Public Domain along with the rest of the Apple II technology.

First reported by the German magazine C'T, a new virus has been discovered. This one damages your computer by flashing the BIOS with garbage. I'm surprised how long it took for someone to come up with this. It only works on certain boards since there is no standard way of flashing roms. Also, it requires the installation of a promiscuous operating system that does not protect memory and I/O locations by default. AVP has released more details here. At least it's not this bad.

Phillip brown writes "Found yet another story on the Avalon beowulf system making top 500 supercomputers list," while ML wrote to us saying "CNN shows the Avalon Supercomputer in pretty purple light, gives credit to Linux, and throws in a nice dig at Microsoft. " Mmmm...I love to start my morning with good publicity.