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| Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com. |
| Self-healing plastic |
| 1:12:07 am mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in inventions / source Nature 62 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Illinois scientist Scott White has invented a new kind of self-healing plastic by imbedding tiny capsules within the polymer matrix. As the matrix slowly fatigues and develops microfractures, it breaks open the capsules and releases the "liquid healing agent" into the fractured plastic. |
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| Ten things you MUST know about Windows XP |
| 2:15:25 am mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in operating systems / source ZDNet 286 hits / 1 comment / 1 e-mail |
| ZDNet columnist David Coursey is surprisingly positive about the upcoming Windows XP. |
| On the other hand, Wired called it "Your Mother's Windows". |
| read 1 comment |
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| Do you know your tech acronyms? |
| 4:33:11 am mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in culture / source The Times 165 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails |
| A recent survey of CompuServe users show that a large fraction do not know what many of the standard technology acronyms stand for, including RAM, WWW, SMS, and URL. |
| Amusingly enough, "7 per cent of those surveyed claimed to have used the acronym VPL (Visible Panty Line) in conversation about the Internet... 63 per cent of those who talked about VPL knew what it stood for, making it the third most recognised acronym in the survey." |
| read 1 comment |
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| You, Too, Can Write an Anna Worm |
| 7:13:37 am mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in security / source Wired 110 hits / 0 comments / 1 e-mail |
| From the article: "The Anna Kournikova e-mail worm that whacked networks this week was not the work of a skilled cracker. It was created using one of the many virus-generating kits that are easily available on the Internet." |
| This is just the beginning. |
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| Office love is booming |
| 11:47:13 am mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in culture / source Ananova 75 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Over half of all workers have had a romantic fling with a co-worker, at least according to a jobs website in the UK. However, most of these did not lead to a long term serious relationship. |
| It would be interesting to know how those figures compared with online romances. |
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| Amusing new subdomain names for Deja |
| 12:03:41 pm mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in business / source Register 49 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Now that Deja.com has been bought out by Google, some pranksters have decided to help them out by creating a few new subdomain names. These include: The-King-Of-France-Has-Left-The-Building.deja.com, And-All-I-Got-Was-This-Lousy-T-Shirt.deja.com, Goodbye-To-All-The-Cracksmokers.deja.com, Goodbye-Krewel-Worrold-Bang-Bang-Bang.deja.com, and Deja-Is-Frickin-Dead-As-Disco.deja.com. |
| You can see them here, unless Google takes them down first... |
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| Napster raids |
| 3:53:09 pm mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in digital media / source Nando Times 138 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Belgian police have raided the homes of Napster users on the grounds that they were illegally trafficking in copyrighted material. |
| The party's finally over... |
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| Pat Schroeder vs. the public libraries |
| 5:08:11 pm mst / 15 February 2001 found by paul / filed in legal / source Washington Post 102 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Former Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder is now a lobbyist for the book publishing industry. Who has she identified as their biggest threat? Yup, the public libraries. "We have a very serious issue with librarians", she says, because they want to give away the content for free rather than charging people to read it. (Link from MetaFilter.) |
| Leaving aside the fact that taxpayers actually do pay for library materials, the idea of demonizing librarians is about as shrewd from a public relations perspective as attacking the Girl Scouts or the Red Cross. |
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