Update: A HUGE thanks to Daniel for providing some EXTREMELY beneficial information and a list of links that at face value confirm what I assumed was probably the case… This is another case, similar to the recent O’ReillyGate incident in which standard, legal, and ethicial business practices continued to take place during a time when ANYTHING that even remotely smells like an attempt to “own” and idea, or a phrase, term, etc… both looks and quacks just the same.

Far out as in going life in 11 years and 306 days from today. Really far out as in 100,000 km (62,000 mile) out into space. I remember late night conversations after Future Salons where some of the more-out-there Saloners would marvel over Dyson Spheres and Space Elevators.

About a month ago I asked for opinions for a Cause for iPod nano spontaneous reset?. I seemed to run into this problem every couple of months on my iPod nano. I didn’t have any good theories, but fortunately, other people did. And, even more fortunately, Billy Oregon performed some detective work and found two MP3 files that can consistently cause a soft reset after selecting the Menu item. You can find his blog and sample video below. Anyone at Apple reading this? Fix it please!

Economists now use the Big Mac as a guide to inflation and the cost of living across the world, assuming that the price of the Big Mac will always tend towards equilibrium. In the IT business Microsoft might equally be used as a point of comparison for the popularity of community tools. If Microsoft start using Wikis then [...]

No surprise.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

[QUICK-UPDATE] : Russ (Miles), in whom is the co-idea-developer of this mentioned project, will be home around 5pm UK time at which point we plan to launch our posts regarding the announcement at the same time. Sorry for the hold up, but this is something we developed together in the early stages, and then began to invite a few of our hacking friends to join us, which things just blossomed from there… None-the-less, we both want to be a part of the official announcement, so @ around 5pm London/UK expect to see the mentioned announcement.
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I’ve been playing around with the beta of flock, the new browser that integrates with Flickr, delicious and your blog tools, as well as providing new search functions. At first glimpse flock looks like the integration a user like me needs. For example being slow on the uptakethe first thing I did to blog flock [...]

More than a thousand years ago when I worked as a DJ at an album-oriented-rock (AOR) station, we relied on up-timers to keep us on track with our show clock and to monitor airtime. As a podcaster, I’ve been craving just such a tool. You can buy an expensive up-timer from a company like Broadcast Supply Worldwide. But if you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, you can get a software version for free.

This is a test of the flock blogging facility. Well a bit more than a test. I haven't been able in wordpress to use tags so far. Flock has a straightforward way of doing it. technorati tags:browser, flock

DISCLAIMER: This is not an anti-label project. This is a pro-Artist/Musician and pro-Fans of these same Artists/Musicians. There is nothing about this that suggests that the labels can’t be a part of this… In fact we hope that MANY, if not ALL of them embrace these ideas, while gaining a real-world understanding of just how much power exists when the ideals of a free culture are embraced and built upon.
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Bootcamp vs Parallels [NotebookReview]
Parallels announced today that their Desktop for Mac virtualization software has emerged from beta. Pick up a copy for 50 bucks. So? Apple’s Boot Camp or Parallel’s Virtual Machine? As far as I’m concerned, it’s Boot Camp for speed and true Windows performance and virtual machines (any implementation, not just this one) for data sharing and interaction. The Notebook Review article is a nice summary.

I enjoy reading Dan York’s blog and listening to the excellent Blue Box VoIP Security podcast that he does with Jonathan Zar, and Dan recently posted an interesting response to the Business Week article about the Pena/Moore VoIP hacking story that has been getting a ton of attention. Dan agrees with the article’s conclusion that it’s important to consider security when deploying VoIP systems, but takes issue with how it uses a broad brush to paint all things VoIP-related as having the same level of security issues and concerns.

Like many others I was not particularly impressed with the announcement that came out of the eBay Developers conference this week indicating some partial Skype/eBay integration would now be turned on. Techdirt points out that nine months after eBay purchased Skype, just now adding a Skype Me button to certain select auctions seems like a very small step, and questions whether eBay users really even want this feature in the first place and how it could possibly justify the multi-billion dollar price tag eBay paid for Skype. I know I’m not the only one hoping there’s more to eBay’s plans for Skype that we haven’t seen yet.

Dev2Dev has just published an excellent article by David Burke and Darragh O’Flanagan that describes an IMS application based on SIP servlets and VoiceXML. The article provides nice introductions to IMS and VoiceXML and then goes on to demonstrate how to build a full-featured Personal Assistant application that is consistent with the IMS architecture. Chock full of flow-charts, sample code, and an extensive resource list, this article looks like a great starting point for developers looking to learn about IMS, SIP Servlets, and VoiceXML.

I can tell you one thing, you guys are really imaginative. The response to my Movie-Plot Threat Contest was more than I could imagine: 892 comments. I printed them all out -- 195 pages, double sided -- and spiral bound them, so I could read them more easily. The cover read: "The Big Book of Terrorist Plots." I tried not to wave it around too much in airports.

ARC has released their views on the growth of the supply chain management (SCM) marketplace where they expect to see 8.6% annual growth.

The rumors are true: The WildPackets OmniPeek Personal edition is out. Since it’s available at no charge, perhaps “OmniPeek Free” or “OmniFree” may have been a better moniker, but for some strange reason that movie Free Willy keeps popping to...

Baltimore was home to 5,000+ attendees of the Special Libraries Association annual conference this week. For a recap of the week's events, take a look at the following blogs: The InfoToday blog has extensive coverage, with details of everything from...

Paul Boutin struggles with remote desktop assistance. “It took me most of an hour to do the installations and find the right combination of settings,” he reports. Dude, try Copilot. Secure out of the box, works through all firewalls, and never takes more than a couple of minutes to get working.

As of now, Microsoft stock is surprisingly quiet given the announcement that Bill Gates will step down. It should probably be going down. Ozzie is smart but not in the same class as Bill Gates. And it's really Ballmer that needs to go.