Aug 24th, 2009 - Since its inception in 2004, Ubuntu has been the beneficiary in what seems like a bottomless money pit for South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth via his commercial support and development venture, Canonical. Since Canonical, Ltd. isn't an American publicly-owned company (and I don't know... (Read More)

May 20th, 2009 - Where would we be without the Global Positioning System? Well, without GPS I probably would not be at this hotel nice and early, waiting for a meeting to start. Forget the idiots who end up driving on train tracks or toppling over cliffs, for some of us SatNav has become not a car gadget but an... (Read More)

Feb 15th, 2009 - Look, I am a British father of four. Two of my kids have been through the teenage years, so I know all too well just what a love affair the UK has with text messaging. As does my bank manager. So it really should not come as any surprise to discover that here in the UK we send an average of 200... (Read More)

Dec 19th, 2008 - If you ever wondered just what it takes to look for aliens, then prepare to get informed. Sure, you might imagine it doesn't take much more than hooking up a load of computers to form a gigantic zombie network which, for a change, does not use spare CPU cycles to send spam. Indeed, the SETI@home... (Read More)

Sep 30th, 2008 - Ever looked at something, done a double-take, looked again and yes, that is what you saw but your brain told you it could not be? That is exactly what just happened to me when I read the NASA press release which informed me, in no uncertain terms, that it was snowing on Mars. As if that wasn't... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2006 - I guess when you are a billionaire, finding somewhere new and exciting to go on vacation gets difficult after a while. No such problem for Charles Simonyi, who as part of the original Xerox PARC team helped developed the mouse, the GUI and even laser printing, and went on to Microsoft for 11 years... (Read More)

Aug 15th, 2006 - OK, so that would just be silly, would it not? Nobody in their right minds would accept a job working in IT on Mars. Yet so far 70 people have applied to the Mars-500 project in Russia, for the unusual position (literally) of an IT Manager willing to be sealed inside a metal container simulating a... (Read More)

Mar 3rd, 2009 - Skype is an excellent VoIP phone service for telecommuters or company employees who travel a lot. You can make and receive calls from your computer for free, and get a personalized phone number, voicemail, and other upgrades for a small fee. Skype announced a new fee-based feature this week,... (Read More)

Sep 22nd, 2008 - NASA is looking for organizations to become members of its CIO Executive Board, which serves under the Corporate Executive Board. Now that's a job I can get behind. According to the official solicitation, "The membership includes unlimited accesses to proprietary council research for staff... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2008 - What can your IT department learn from Microsoft's latest advertising bungles? Plenty. When the company released its "Mojave Experiment" ads (which I'd link to but the site forces you to install Silverlight to view them), the premise was rather sad. It seemed to suggest that at least one of the... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2008 - Richard Garriot; a famous Game developer has just returned from his tour in space on the Soyuz TMA-12 a tourist cruise line in space called “space adventures”. Garriots father Owen Garriot is a former NASA Astronaut; which may have been why Richard Garriot Paid $35 million dollars for his 12 day... (Read More)

Jul 15th, 2008 - So I get this call. Would I like an exclusive briefing on a new technology that's going to turn text into speech - the first one to do this 'native'. Forgive me, but no I don't. This typifies, in my view, the all-too-common view that a technical advance ought to be done for the sake of it. Let's... (Read More)

Jun 20th, 2007 - According to a press release I have received from Wind River, a Device Software Optimisation (DSO) company, a Linux platform has been selected by Honeywell Aerospace for a space mission for the first time. Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the underlying OS... (Read More)

Mar 28th, 2007 - Starting May 2007, Yahoo is going to offer unlimited inbox storage. That's right, to celebrate their 10th anniversary, there will be absolutely no limit on the number of messages you can hold in your mailbox. This is obviously to compete with Google's Gmail and other similar providers, which are... (Read More)