The BBC news is reporting that "people are becoming so dependent on their mobile phones that one in three are concerned that losing their phone would mean they lose their friends."

"We're a nation of lazy so-and-sos," David Noone from Intervoice said."

I've been watching MadPenguin's rm -rf contest with voyeuristic interest and hoping for a real plethora of entries, however, I've yet to receive many thrills.

IBM may be committed to furthering it's involvement with Linux, first with it's announcement a few days ago of significant investment, and today amidst accusations from M$ that it's all talk, they state they currently employ approximately 8 to 9000 developers to work directly on open source projects.

February 22, 2005: Houston,Tx: PCLinuxOS has obtained approval from Codeweavers, Inc to include a trial version of Crossover Office in an upcoming release of PCLinuxOS. Crossover Office allows users to run popular office productivity software, such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and Lotus Notes, in Linux, without any Microsoft OS license costs.

Reuters is carrying this story about "A Georgia woman has sued Hewlett-Packard Co. claiming the ink cartridges for their printers are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they are even installed in a printer."

It kinda makes me wonder if Epson's do the same thing. I knew I wasn't getting many pages out of a cartridge before it claimed it was empty, but this last time

"Microsoft and telecom gear maker Alcatel have created a development and sales partnership for software that delivers services to TVs over the Internet."

Million Dollar Baby is a character study slash friendship movie directed by Clint Eastwood. He does an adequate job though nothing ground breaking. The story centers on Franky, a boxing trainer/manager as he tries to cope with boxers in his charge and some mighty powerful internal demons.

"IBM said its sales of Intel-based servers surpassed sales at Dell Inc. in the fourth quarter, a first for Big Blue, a company better known for its mainframes and high-end Unix machines."

"The board is looking for an executive search company to help find a replacement for Carly Fiorina, who resigned Feb. 8 at the request of directors who no longer felt she could execute on the strategy she had laid out for the Palo Alto, Calif., company."

"ChoicePoint, under fire for being duped into allowing criminals to access its massive database of personal information, said yesterday that consumers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories may have been affected by the breach of the company's credentialing process."

"Judge Legal, who is hearing Microsoft's appeal against a European Union antitrust decision, said in a Bloomberg interview that there is no sign in sight of a settlement."

"It was wild idealism, really, around the notion that software should be developed communally and distributed freely that spawned Linux more than a decade ago. It's an ideal that has resonated up the chain of command to become a major disruptive force in the business world. While much is made of the threat to Windows, the Linux operating system and accompanying open-source movement threaten to put other decades-old IT mainstays, notably Unix and RISC-based processors, out to pasture. As the new products and big ideas swirling around LinuxWorld last week show,

"Version 2.6.12 of the Linux kernel is likely to include packet filtering that will work with IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol."

Gates: 'Microsoft created the PC industry'

Jo Best contends that M$ built the pc industry. Gates surely agrees and stated as much during that interview with Peter Jennings reported here a few days ago. Best offers reasons for this opinion and the comments...

Joel Strauch, of PCWorld, has written an interesting article on the proliferation of broadband connectivity in South Korea. He says, "When my wife and I arrived here last fall to teach English, we stepped into perhaps the most Internet-crazed country in the world. What tipped us off? Well, one example is that South Korea has a high school where students train in the game Starcraft like Texas high schoolers practice football."

Paris Hilton's address book, famously kept on a T-Mobile Sidekick, has been popping up all over the internet after someone managed to figure out her password.

For 20 years, Microsoft Corp. has made the software on which hackers feast. Now, after three years of planning and several acquisitions, it's sending shudders through the industry as it prepares to move into the expanding market for security.

Some of the industry's most powerful vendors came to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston last week with a simple message: Linux is ready for prime time.

"2005 will be a watershed year," Computer Associates International's new President and CEO John Swainson said in a keynote address.

Following a path laid by open source developers, eBay may open up some of its source code in order to quicken the pace of application development and open up new business opportunities.

As everyone has heard PCLinuxOS pre-8.1 was released officially yesterday. And in response we have posted our little screenshot presentation of this historical event. Please join me...