Stories about: SIR

New York's recent Last HOPE hackers conference offered sessions on lock picking, escaping high security hand cuffs and a lock picking village.

Hitting a major milestone in nanotechnology, IBM researchers have figured out how to measure the amount of force needed to move an atom.

The basic framework of Nathan Myhrvold's story is well known. Born in Seattle in 1959, he went to college at age 14, taking a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1979 at the same time he earned master's in geophysics and space physics at UCLA. Then, came the master's in mathematical economics two years later before Ph.Ds in theoretical and mathematical physics, both at Princeton. He was 23 at that point when he headed to Cambridge University in the U.K. for post-doctoral work in cosmology and quantum theory with Stephen Hawking, who holds the mathematics chair that Sir Isaac Newton held 300 years ago.

According to Webster's Online Dictionary semantic means "the relationships between symbols and what they represent." Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, has used the term to christen the Internet of the future.

A report carried out by Capgemini SA was the clincher in the decision by the London Borough of Newham to scrap its plans last year to switch to Linux on the desktop.

Fueled by the ongoing legal battle between Unix vendor The SCO Group and IBM, someone in the open-source community has apparently decided that the whole situation is a mockery in need of mocking.

I promise. This is not going to be another long tirade about Microsoft's latest FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) assault on free software and the GNU General Public License (GPL). There may be a short screech or two, but by the time this column appears, most of us will have gotten past Craig Mundie's May 3 speech in New York and moved on to the next RAT (Really Annoying Thing).