More Adventures With the Penguin
I haven't had time to document my great Linux experiment the way I'd like, but the project has started. I went to the Office Depot to pick up a copy of Mandrake Linux (recommended from several sources), and after digging around the back shelves (they had none on display) they managed to scrounge a copy of 9.0 (which, as I recall, is the current distribution). More...

ISO SC36 'Metadata for Learning Resources' Working Group Approved
The first paragraph says it all: "Following a ballot of its national members, the ISO JTC1 SC36 educational standards body will set up a working group for "Metadata for Learning Resources". More...

IEEE to Lift SCORM, IMS Content Packaging to Standard Status, Clarifies LOM Future
There's a lot packed into this story, the lead of which is that the IEEE is going to adopt a number of current initiatives, including SCORM and the IMS content packaging specification, to standards. More...

LaunchCast
I spent several hours last night exploring Yahoo!'s LaunchCast service, which yesterday announced a premium subscription service. LaunchCast is the Yahoo! version of web radio, but it is a lot more sophisticated than any previous version I have seen. In particular, it allows you to select genres and artists to tailor your radio feed. More...

Fathom.com Shuts Down As Columbia Withdraws

More coverage of Columbia's decision to shut down Fathom. "The people who committed themselves to this believed that the Internet universe would expand at a certain rate and with a certain profile, and it didn't happen," Professor Richard Bulliet said. More...

A Big Test for Linux
You need to read between the lines of this story. It's not so much that SCO Group (formerly Caldera) is seeking to obtain royalties for work it feels it ownes, and which may have found its way into open source software. Rather, it's the shift in tactics against the open source movement, a shift from trying to compete against it in terms of quality and support toward trying to litigate it out of existence. More...

Companies Test Prototype Wireless Sensor Nets
Ah... I just want you to ponder this for a minute. Self-organizing wireless-sensor networks, a realization of the Pentagon's "smart-dust" concept, have reached the prototype stage worldwide. More...

Not Your Father's Encyclopedia
What could be Britannica's major competition is not published by World Book or any other corporation. It's not published by anyone: it is the free and open source Wikipedia, a collection that has just reached its 100,000th article. The Wikipedia is the work of thousands of volunteer authors. More...

Several consumer products to get 'tagged'
By the end of the year, products are going to begin shipping with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags embedded in them. The chips are ting and can be attached to packages of razors, bottles of shampoo, or clothing. Most of the discussion on RFIDs centers around the commercial applications with some discussion of security. they will also be used in schools to track inventory and resource. More...

Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential
According to Jakob Nielsen, speech will not replace screens as the medium of choice for most user interfaces. And it won't, if we think of voice interface as consisting of selecting tasks, finding commands, or selecting from lists (think about how much you hate those automated answering systems). More...