Pioneer Dies Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, the ESC key, and even the man who named the COBOL programing language died this week at the age of 84. According to Reuters: "He worked for several years for IBM Corp. in the late 1950s and 1960s, and it was there that he helped develop the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a format code used in most computers in the world that allows them to read text as a binary number.
"Bemer is also credited with writing the computer sequence that allows for the "escape" command. The escape command was seen as a major innovation in computing because it allowed users to move backward or sideways in a program."
HP forgets! Get ready for some Blue Screens of Death you HP portable users! Hewlett-Packard sez it has about 900,000 notebooks out in the general population that could have memory problems. Figuring out whether or not your portable is on that short list will be a little like consulting a Quija board. The problem only occurs within a certain combination of Intel processors, chipsets, and memory module manufactures. Okay, but don't start yelling at HP. Dell had a similar problem four years ago --although it only affected 200,000 to 400,000 laptops.
(Do you see these numbers?! "Oh, it's just a little thing. Don't worry about it..." )
Click on the headline above to get to the ZDNet story this is from where you'll also find a list of probable notebooks affected and a lot of other hilarious stuff. # Permalink
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4:12 PM
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Anti-Spyware Bill Heads for House The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 45-4 in favor of the Spy Act, which targets software that hides in personal computers and secretly monitors people's activities or displays unwanted advertising. The measure is backed by Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, and has 28 co-sponsors.
The Spy Act includes 21 pages of dense regulations that specify what software can and can't do and under what circumstances it must seek explicit permission from the user to proceed. It covers activities such as taking control of a computer, modifying browser settings, installing a keystroke logger, and bypassing antivirus software. # Permalink
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6:17 AM
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New Virus Alert! A dead blue jay found in Godfrey tested positive for West Nile virus, the Illinois Department of Public Health said Monday.
Okay, okay... There is a new computer virus around also. Strange one too. Apparently, it was sent out initially to infect popular business sites on the web where it sits waiting for folk like you and me (all right, maybe you, there aren't any other folk like me) to log on. When we do, it jumps to our computers and then hangs out. Why? According to news stories floating around, the infected personal computer then becomes a stealth mail center for spammers whenever it's powered up. So far, there's been no real bandwidth denting reported but think about the implications. A couple of million computers sending out a couple of thousand e-mails could put a serious hurt on the Internet --and about 13 percent of our economy is derived from Internet commerce at this point.
And the frightening point? You don't even need to know how to steer an airplane to do it.
AOL Employee Steals 92 Million Names Ever since Time Warner took the AOL name off its building we've wondered what AOL would do. Now the truth can be told.... Jason Smathers, 24, was fired from his job as a software engineer for AOL after being arrested at his home in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, company officials said. He was charged with conspiracy. Smathers, who worked at AOL’s offices in Dulles, Virginia, sold the list to Sean Dunaway, 21, of Las Vegas, according to a criminal complaint. Dunaway, also charged with conspiracy, then used it to promote an internet gambling operation and sold it to spammers.
So when you AOL folk have mail, you'll already know where it's coming from... # Permalink
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3:01 AM
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Comdex has not been doing well for years. In fact, you can trace its slow downhill spiral to the introduction of the first Spring Comdex. And the first time the rights to Comdex were sold, someone should have sat down and figured out, "Hey, why would someone sell a golden cash cow...?"
Comdex was a beautiful thing. I know this because Alice made me walk back from the convention center to our hotel ("Oh c'mon... It's only a stone's throw!" Yeah, if you had a catapult.) and I got to see everything and everyone up close and exhaustedly personal. Things got stinky when the powers-that-were turned it into a business proposition rather than a celebration of computing. Hopefully it can get back on track but I don't think many will miss it in its current iteration if it doesn't. # Permalink
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1:08 PM
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THE LATEST NEWS
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
New Versions of Skype Launch If you haven't downloaded what we consider the MOST innovative tech product of the year, here's your chance. Skype - the free VOIP download that sounds better than a real phone (we are not kidding) just released a new version of its beta that includes the ability to upload your photo, as well as some future hints about being able to dial non-Skype phone numbers. Oh...and they also released a Linux version.
New iPod-Based Field Guide To NYC Pizzerias Mama Mia Dept: Slice, billed as "America's Favorite weblog" has developed a field guide to NY York pizzerias that runs on the iPod.
The guide codes pizza places for fast reference, such as C for coal oven, P for pies only, and of course ++ for highly reccomended sites. Makes us wish we were in NYC right now. # Permalink
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12:02 PM
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Alice Meets Prince Charles As promised in the July issue of Alice and Bill's Computer Shopper column, The Hard Edge, here are some pictures of Alice chatting with Prince Charles. There is even a short movie clip for those who want to see the real deal.
Why should you care? Because Bill bet Alice she wouldn't tell HRH something technical, and she ended up chatting for some time with him about computer viruses. After he moved to the next person, Alice heard him discussing web viruses with the next few groups in the receiving line. Score! # Permalink
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11:00 AM
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THE LATEST NEWS
Monday, June 21, 2004
Web Draws in Euro Football Fans From the BBC, "Football fans are flocking to the net for Euro 2004 news, research shows. Analysts Nielsen/NetRatings found that almost a million people logged on to the BBC Sport site during the first week of the competition. Visits to the BBC soared on the day of England's game against Switzerland on 17 June, which took place while many people were still at work."
Not from the BBC, because of the fear of violence, British "hooligans" were prevented from leaving England to attend the games in person. If the BBC was an actual news agency, it might follow up with a report on how many computer monitors were smashed at the end of the game. # Permalink
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9:49 PM
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Intel Shares Technology with Chinese Chipmaker Intel Corp. has signed an agreement to transfer chip-making technology and equipment to Nanotech Corp., a start-up contract chip maker in China. So this means what? Intel has grown weary of suing AMD for patent infringement? Considering the problem Microsoft is having with the Chinese market, Intel hopefully got better intel than this deal might lead one to believe. # Permalink
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9:42 PM
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Microsoft submits patent for outer space After the successful flight of SpaceShipOne earlier today, it's rumored that Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder turned investor and philanthropist in the SpaceShipOne project, has submitted a patent to the U.S. Government for outer space. Unnamed sources suggest that Allen is basing his application on SpaceShipOne being the first privately owned space ship to enter outer space and therefore the holder of a valid claim.
If the rumor is true and the U.S. Patent office agrees to the premise, outer space, the distance from the edge of the atmosphere of our planet to the boundaries of infinity, will become an enterprise royalty cash cow for Microsoft. The estate of Gene Roddenberry may file an objection. # Permalink
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2:37 PM
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Further News on Teleportation Breakthrough Reported Last Week "When physicists talk about "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of "quantum states" between separate atoms. These would be such things as an atom's energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties." In layman's terms, that's roughly the same thing most of us can do, with varying degrees of success, on a pool table.
Now remember, when you do it you're being a bum, squandering your money in a pool hall. When physicists do it, they're performing serious tests about teleportation, displaying a wise use of grant money for the public good. # Permalink
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3:01 AM
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Today's Task If you find yourself at work today with nothing to do, here's a task that might prove interesting to you:
Find the rough date on which aspirin was declared harmful to our health and then plot the time line during which aspirin was removed from almost everything in which it had been included. Then, using that same date as a starting point, plot the rate of death resulting from heart attacks. As an adjunct and for extra credit, do the same for aspirin usage and heart attacks from the date when aspirin was once again proclaimed, "Hey, maybe it's not so bad..." # Permalink
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2:53 AM
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Cost of Warming on the Rise According to a Wired story, "Climate change is a fact, so the question of what to do about it boils down to this: Pay some now or pay a lot more later. Scientists at two special briefings this week warned that the effects of global warming go beyond the environment and dip into everyone's pocketbook, but the extent of the economic damage will be determined by when action is taken."
Some thirty years ago, we were being warned of the imminent arrival of the next ice age within 50 years. Who knew that the scientists of that day, armed with just 130 years of reasonably accurate weather data on which to base the cyclical weather patterns of a 4.8 billion year old planet, could be so wrong. Thankfully, the extra 30 years of data collected by today's scientists allows them to be so much more accurate. Better still, neither I nor any of the men I know use a pocketbooks so it looks like women will finally be paying their fair share unless they too switch to fanny packs, wallets, or just stuffing their money into their pockets on top of their keys, next to their cigarettes. # Permalink
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2:35 AM
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Farms go WiFI Farms of the not-too-distant future could be managed through wireless computer networks that allow farmers to sit in their pickups with a laptop and drive tractors, monitor soil moisture and even feed the hogs remotely.
Of course, that assumes there are any farmers left in the future and that they all drive pickups and not SUVs, sedans, coupes, or sports cars. # Permalink
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SpaceShipOne If all goes as planned, at 9:30 a.m. EDT the White Knight carrier plane, with SpaceShipOne slung beneath it, will take off from Mojave, Calif. and begin a one-hour climb to a launch altitude of 50,000 feet. SpaceShipOne's flight should last roughly 25 minutes. It will rocket to space, spend about three minutes weightless outside the atmosphere, then enter the earth’s atmosphere in a high-drag configuration.
Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, the ESC key, and even the man who named the COBOL programing language died this week at the age of 84. According to Reuters: "He worked for several years for IBM Corp. in the late 1950s and 1960s, and it was there that he helped develop the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a format code used in most computers in the world that allows them to read text as a binary number. 
Get ready for some Blue Screens of Death you HP portable users! Hewlett-Packard sez it has about 900,000 notebooks out in the general population that could have memory problems. Figuring out whether or not your portable is on that short list will be a little like consulting a Quija board. The problem only occurs within a certain combination of Intel processors, chipsets, and memory module manufactures. Okay, but don't start yelling at HP. Dell had a similar problem four years ago --although it only affected 200,000 to 400,000 laptops. 
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 45-4 in favor of the Spy Act, which targets software that hides in personal computers and secretly monitors people's activities or displays unwanted advertising. The measure is backed by Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, and has 28 co-sponsors.
Ever since Time Warner took the AOL name off its building we've wondered what AOL would do. Now the truth can be told.... Jason Smathers, 24, was fired from his job as a software engineer for AOL after being arrested at his home in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, company officials said. He was charged with conspiracy. Smathers, who worked at AOL’s offices in Dulles, Virginia, sold the list to Sean Dunaway, 21, of Las Vegas, according to a criminal complaint. Dunaway, also charged with conspiracy, then used it to promote an internet gambling operation and sold it to spammers.
If you haven't downloaded what we consider the MOST innovative tech product of the year, here's your chance. 
Mama Mia Dept: Slice, billed as "America's Favorite weblog" has developed a field guide to NY York pizzerias that runs on the iPod.
As promised in the July issue of Alice and Bill's Computer Shopper column, The Hard Edge, here are some pictures of Alice chatting with Prince Charles. There is even a short movie clip for those who want to see the real deal. 
From the 
Intel Corp. 
"When physicists talk about "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of "quantum states" between separate atoms. These would be such things as an atom's energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties." In layman's terms, that's roughly the same thing most of us can do, with varying degrees of success, on a pool table. 
If you find yourself at work today with nothing to do, here's a task that might prove interesting to you:
If all goes as planned, at 9:30 a.m. EDT the White Knight carrier plane, with SpaceShipOne slung beneath it, will take off from Mojave, Calif. and begin a one-hour climb to a launch altitude of 50,000 feet. SpaceShipOne's