A consortium of technology companies is fighting telecom excise tax enforced by President William McKinley back in 1898. The tax was supposed to provide the funding for Spanish-American War, and now AT&T, MCI, Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Skype and some others requested that VOIP be exempt from this tax.
Brad Silverberg (ex-Senior VP) and some other Microsoft veterans are starting a new company “to procure and maintain open-source products”, News.com.com.com reports. Their Web site is up and running, and they’re selling their testing and support services.
Attendees of Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan were in for a treat. Multiplexed Optical Data Storage is developed by researchers from London Imperial College and is capable of storing almost a terabyte of data on DVD-sized disk. The official measurement the scientists used? The disk has space “enough for 472 hours of film, or every episode of the Simpsons ever made”.
CmdHere.exe is included in Powertoys for XP, however, there’s nothing similar available for a download for Windows 2000 and other systems. For development purposes this option is quite efficient, as it allows one to instantaneously get a command line in some folder with awful path name like C:\Documents and Settings\Yourfirstname YourLastname\My Documents\Coding, to which one would cd for several hours if starting at the root.
These few lines saved as .reg file and then run against the Registry (by simply double-clicking) allow that option for Windows 2000:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\cmdhere]
@=”Cmd&Here”[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\cmdhere\command]
@=”cmd.exe /c start cmd.exe /k pushd “%L\..”"[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\cmdhere]
@=”Cmd&Here”[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\cmdhere\command]
@=”cmd.exe /c start cmd.exe /k pushd “%L”"
I installed Service Pack 2 and upgraded to Firefox 1.0 Preview at the same time. Deciding that it was well worth it to revamp the entire browser look, I downloaded and installed Noia 2.0 eXtreme, which is more than nice looks. The buttons in the links toolbar are now as small as possible and don’t require any whitespace at the top and bottom, leaving more screen real estate for the Web page itself.
There are few other nuances - when connecting to a secure Web site, your address bar now gets pale yellow color, hinting that it’s not the normal browser mode, and when you’re back to white background, it’s good old Internet once again. The RSS auto-discovery feature is nice. TechInterviews.com, as any other site built on WordPress, features 3 XML feeds (two RSS in different formats and one Atom). It looks like after you hit the Bookmark… button, what’s getting bookmarked is the entries in the feed themselves, not the RSS file. Firefox does have an RSS and Atom reader extension, but it’s limited functionally, although it does produce a nice on-the-fly page from a single RSS feed.
The popups are managed in a nicer way, you get a warning below the Links bar, and from there a single click either puts the site on a whitelist or tells the browser to block the popups forever. The installation went pretty clean, which was surprising considering the previous versions of Firefox always told you to uninstall the ones you had before, and then the new install inevitably would botch the bookmarks and links toolbar. The 1.0 Preview installer actually went ahead and checked the updates for the available extensions, instead of leaving the exercise to the user. Nice.
New issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley hit the shelves. They have a single page where they post all the articles, nice.
Brad Fitzpatrick presented at OSCON with on overview of his little project. Interesting facts about back-end architecture.
MSDN (which stands for Microsoft Developer Network, so reader beware) publishes a comparative review of ASP.NET versus J2EE architecture with Struts. A quick jump to conclusion:
The .NET Framework stack offers several significant advantages over its J2EE counterpart. Because .NET is fully integrated with the Windows operating system, and the OS provides the application server, .NET applications can take advantage of much closer integration, richer feature content and faster performance than most J2EE systems. On a development level, developing with ASP.NET involves less code than JSP. In addition, many features, such as validation, caching and tracing, are built into ASP.NET, whereas JSP requires third-party components.
Information Week talks about those mornings, when an owner of an online business receives an e-mail message with his customer accounts and other personal information quoted, and extortionist asking for certain amount of money to be transferred to a foreign bank. Although 70% of the businesses surveyed for the article claim they never had to deal with extortion on the Internet, the article claims those small businesses who think they are not interesting for extortionists, are in for a surprise.
The New C++: Introduction to the New C++ (Part 1 of 6)
The New C++: More Basics, Properties, Delegates, and Events (Part 2 of 6)
The New C++: Deterministic Cleanup (Part 3 of 6)
The New C++: Operators, Conversions, and Casting (Part 4 of 6)
The New C++: Overriding, Templates, and Generics (Part 5 of 6)
The New C++: Interacting with Native Code and Other Languages (Part 6 of 6)