These are things I’m too busy too look into in depth, but caught my interest somewhere recently, and might be of interest to you also.
Virtual PC
http://www.connectix.com
A product apparently similar to VMWARE. Interestingly, they also sell what they call “OS Packs” which are operating systems preconfigured to work with Virtual PC.
Holographic Storage
www.inphase-technologies.com. Apparently holographic data storage will soon be real. Imagine 100GB on something the size of a CD.
Auto Diagnostics
www.autotap.com and www.rinda.com are both manufacturers of hardware/software for backyard auto mechanics. I stopped doing that stuff years and years ago but it still interests me.
Halloween Documents
I’m suprised by how many people have never even heard of the so-called “Halloween Documents”: osi.open5ource.net/halloween/. Interesting reading about Microsoft and their fear of Linux.
A Common Linux
Speaking of Linux: Caldera, Suse, Turbolinux and Connectiva are talking about producing a “united” version. I can’t see this helping much without RedHat, but we’ll see: www.caldera.com/unitedlinux/pressrelease.html
CodeWeaver’s Crossover
These folks have tackled just (for the moment) Microsoft Office, and have come up with something that lets you run just that under Linux. They also make a “crossover plugin” that lets you use Microsoft browser plugins with Linux Netscape or Mozilla browsers: www.codeweavers.com
Ruby
Here and there I’ve been hearing about Ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org as being a contendor against Perl and Python. I haven’t had the time to look into it at all.
Distributed Boycott List
This is a pretty simple idea. The DBL list is a list of servers that could be used to relay spam: http://dsbl.org
Download AudioBooks
I drive a LOT. Although National Public Radio is my constant companion, sometimes I’d like more. I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks great: http://www.audible.com
Ximian Exchange Connector
The Ximian exchange connector (http://www.ximian.com/products/connector) works with Ximian Evolution only, but allows Microsoft clients to work with their Linux/Unix email server as though it were Exchange.
IIS vs. Apache
You may be aware of the constant battle over web server usage. Apache still leads IIS ( 60% vs. 28% at this moment), but the Linux side claims that Microsoft’s “penetration” is inflated by unused web servers running on personal PC’s that happen to have Internet connectivity- in other words, yeah, that’s an IIS web server but it isn’t serving any pages! Microsoft’s defenders retorted that 50% of all web sites run IIS. The Linux folks smiled a moment and then asked why it takes 50% of the servers to run 28% of the web sites: can you say “unreliable” or “underpowered” ?
Real 3-D
Real 3d: www.dti3d.com.
CrashProof Windows
Turns out that you can make a crash-proof Windows: it just takes 4 systems hooked together (rather expensively, of course): www.marathontechnologies.com
Open Office
Another Linux office suite I wish I had time to look at: openoffice.org
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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
