The, case, of, the, million, dollar, comma

The position of a comma in a 14-page contract is at the heart of a dispute that could cost cable TV company Rogers Communications one million Canadian dollars.
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Move That Mouse: Mouse Distance Measurer

Mouse Distance Measurer is a crazy yet cool application by AlphaOmega Software. What does it do you ask? It perches in your menu bar, calculating the distance your mouse has traveled in any given day.
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Battlestar Galactica Moving To NBC - iTunes Confirms The Move?

I recently got an email from Apple's iTunes support about my season pass to Battlestar Galactica was being trimmed by 5 episodes due to a change in the number of episodes the network (SciFi) was planning to air. Besides the latest insider rumors, this is the most solid proof we have that Battlestar Galactica is indeed moving to NBC, and soon.
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Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love It

Six Apart announced last night the launch of its newest social networking site, Vox (Vox announcement here). The company that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad has done a lot of things right with this new site. The benefits of having waited for consumer desire to mature before launching a social networking site are clear in Vox.

The service developed a reputation among some people during its beta period as a social network for artsy San Francisco elitists - but everyone needs a beta testing group and that’s a pretty good one to have. Vox was originally known as Comet and we first wrote about it here.
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For AMD Success Means Problems

"AMD's success with its dual-core Opteron and Athlon processors has created something of a happy problem for the company. It can't make its products fast enough to meet demand. Just the same, with the Intel price war heating up and new 65-nanometer manufacturing technology being implemented in its factories, AMD has a lot of balls in the air right now."
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GoogleBot Is Getting Lazy

The cache of CNN.com is 4 days old. The cache of Digg.com is 5 days old. GoogleBot used to fetch new pages within 15 minutes, something's not right.
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Pando Moves Beyond Email File Sharing

New York based Pando has been breaking away from the P2P file sharing pack, which we reviewed in late August. They claim over 1.5 million downloads of their client software, and move up to 20 TB of data per day between users.

Pando is very easy to use. Once the PC or Mac software is installed, you simply drag a file or a folder (up to 1 GB) into the open window. Pando begins uploading that file to its servers immediately, and opens an email form. Simply type in the email address(es) that you would like to receive the file and hit send. When the recipient opens the email and clicks on the small .pando attachment, Pando begins delivering the file, using Bittorent, from the sender’s computer as well as Pando’s servers and any other people receiving the file. Transfer speeds are unreal - my testing shows minimum speeds of 500 kp/s and top speeds at double that. If the recipient has not installed Pando on their computer, they’ll be prompted to do so before the download begins.
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Ubuntu 6.10 is Out

"Apparently they were watching me to see when I downloaded the 6.10-rc release isos, as I did that last night, and the full release happened this morning. :) Neat stuff, including Firefox 2.0, Gnome 2.16, myth 0.20, faster booting thanks to upstart (sort of a replacement for init, among others), etc. The announcement and download pages are up. I've got *my* torrent running..."
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Windows XP SP3 Postponed Until 2008

"With Microsoft now saying that its next major service pack for Windows XP will not ship until 2008, some Windows users are wondering whether the software upgrade will ever be released." and then later "Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, agrees that Microsoft may very well decide to drop XP Service Pack 3. "It absolutely could happen. Microsoft is under no obligation to produce any service packs, ever," he explains. "They feel that because these fixes are available through the auto-update that there's less need to create a service pack."
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Political bloggers coordinate 'Google Bombs'

The 2006 campaign is about to be "Google-bombed." Both liberal and conservative bloggers have embarked on plans to manipulate the Google search engine so that negative articles about the candidates they oppose appear near the top, potentially influencing undecided voters.
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One Long Trip: NASA’s Spirit Rover Hits 1,000th Martian Day

NASA’s Spirit rover hit the 1,000-Martian day of its mission on the red planet Thursday, but the mission continues for the hardy robot.

To celebrate the Martian milestone, rover mission managers released the McMurdo panorama [image], a mosaic of some 1,449 individual images taken by Spirit’s panoramic camera.

“It has been a surprise and delight to see the vehicle survive as long as it has,” Jake Mapijevic, engineering team chief for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. “We had anticipated a much shorter mission.”
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IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team

"The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2! "P.S.: No, it was not poisoned" "
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UK gov plans to bury nuclear waste

The government said today that it plans to bury Britain's nuclear waste. Speaking in the House of Commons, environment secretary David Miliband told MPs that waste will not be forced on communities, instead, local authorities will be invited to volunteer sites, the BBC reports.
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37signals shows how ridiculous it is to install something in Windows Vista

Clocking in at a stunning 35 clicks, the video shows that installing a script debugger in the new operating system is not only not made any easier, but it still takes a series of hoop jumps. They offer the same process in OS X for comparison.
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3 Million IE7 Downloads in Four Days!

Tony Chor, the IE team's Group Program Manager, said that IE7 was downloaded over three million times during the first four days of availability. He also said that Microsoft expects many more downloads in the coming weeks thanks to the distribution of IE7 via Automatic Updates.
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Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Battle Head to Head

Xeon Woodcrest Vs. Opteron
Over the past few years Intel and AMD have been fiercely competing to outperform one another and gain market share by constantly introducing new "faster" processors. This competition has resulted in a fast and steady rate of innovation and has also kept prices down; no one manufacturer can monopolize the market.

Today we will be looking at processors from these two firms designed for the server market. Intel's server line processors go by the name of: Xeon, while AMD has named theirs Opteron. AMD's Opterons have enjoyed a lead in performance in the server market for the past few years due to their superior architecture resulting in better performance and lower power consumption (higher performance per watt). Learning from its mistakes and realizing that the current design could not compete with the mighty Opteron, Intel has introduced a completely new Xeon processor, based on its Core 2 microarchitecture.
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New Improved Yahoo Bookmarks

An interesting article about the new Yahoo Bookmarks. Apparently Yahoo has removed the 1000 bookmark restriction.
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Aussies Eye Sun to Beat Blackouts

SYDNEY -- Australia will build the world's biggest solar power plant amid warnings of blackouts within five years unless it can increase electricity generation to meet growing demand for air conditioners.

With climate change becoming a major issue in Australia as a severe drought eats into economic growth and cities impose water restrictions, the government has begun to support alternative forms of energy.
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The Day the Music Died

Dozing in my usual semi-vegetative state through another daily Wired News story conference, I thought at first I had misheard him.

"... library of 90,000 songs, and iTunes can't handle it."

That was Mike Calore, one of our editors, pitching a story about new software designed to help aficionados store their vast troves of music, collections so enormous that, without help, the iTunes library would collapse under the sheer volume.

"Nine thousand songs?" I interjected incredulously. "Who the hell has 9,000 songs?"

Mike shot me a withering look. "Ninety-thousand songs. I said 90,000 songs. And, I do."
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IBM gives chips a cooling rinse

Someday, you may hose off your microprocessor with water to keep it from overheating.

IBM estimates that some chips may have energy densities equivalent to the surface of the sun, when left uncooled. That's 6,000 degrees Celsius.
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MIT engine boosts mileage by 30 percent

Researchers at MIT say they can boost mileage in cars by as much as 30 percent, depending on the car, by a carefully planned injection of ethanol in the cylinder.

The engine, which is only about half the size of a conventional gas engine, could be on the market in about five years and could add about $1,000 to the cost of a car. That's less than the $3,000 to $5,000 added by a hybrid engine. Thus, consumers will recover the cost more quickly (because the engine uses less gas) and get about the same mileage as a hybrid.
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Ubuntu update is 'Edgy' on boot speed

Canonical on Thursday plans to release the new "Edgy Eft" version of its Ubuntu Linux, which includes a faster boot-up process.

The boot process, called Upstart, is among several dozen new features in the Linux version. Canonical releases Ubuntu updates every six months; the previous 6.06 "Dapper Drake" arrived in June, a few weeks late.

Canonical, based in South Africa, hopes to turn a profit by 2008 by selling support for Ubuntu.
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It's back to school for IT

The latest findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that by 2014 the IT industry will create close to 1 million jobs.

With all of the opportunity that lies ahead for the IT professional, there still remains a significant IT skills gap. Especially when you consider that the number of students majoring in computer science continues to decline, with the latest reports showing a 70 percent drop from the years 2000 to 2005.
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Cisco spends $31 million on mobility start-up

Cisco Systems is expected to announce Thursday plans to spend $31 million on a small start-up called Orative, a move meant to help Cisco extend its Unified Communications software to mobile devices.
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Mozilla rebuts Firefox 2 bug reports

A day after shipping Firefox 2.0, Mozilla on Wednesday largely rebutted two claims of security flaws in the latest version of the Web browser.

Bug hunters appear to be in a race to uncover new security flaws in both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, which Microsoft released last week. Word of what appears to be the first publicly disclosed IE 7 vulnerability came Wednesday.
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Oracle to offer Red Hat Linux support

Oracle will sell support to Red Hat Linux customers and offer its own free clone of the open-source operating system, posing a major competitive challenge to the leading Linux seller.

"As of this moment, Oracle is announcing full support for Red Hat Linux," Chief Executive Larry Ellison told thousands of attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here on Wednesday. "If you are a Red Hat support customer, you can very easily switch from Red Hat support to Oracle support."
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