Tech Stuff

• Dion Hinchcliffe has a very interesting article on Web 2.0
  
• Bad News for Microsoft Office In a first for a U.S. state, executive branch agencies will adopt the OpenDocument standard by 2007. — The state of Massachusetts has finalized a proposed move to an open, nonproprietary format for office documents
  
• Does Vista Really Matter? Microsoft will ultimately spend many hundreds of millions of dollars developing and marketing Vista in a bet-the-farm strategy on the new operating system. Unasked is the question: Does Vista really matter? The real danger to Microsoft isn't from another company overcoming it with a rival operating system. It's from Google, which is taking an end-around, and building applications on top of the Internet, which in essence has become the world's largest operating system, dwarfing even Windows.
  
• By the same token, How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers?
  
• Remove result A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results.
  
• Free 411 for the mobile masses If you've ever been driving around, trying futilely to find a specific restaurant but refusing to call directory assistance on your cell phone because it's too expensive, the folks at Jingle Networks may have a solution. Free411, which can be reached by calling 800-free-411, is an interesting utilization of a free service that requires users to bear with a bit of advertising before getting the goodies.
  
• Goof Lets Times' Content Go Free On Monday, The New York Times introduced the first paid section of its online version. In less than 24 hours, someone found a way around the TimesSelect paid subscription service. Never Pay Retail was created on the same day that TimesSelect began. The blog links to other newspapers that syndicate the Times' Op-Ed content and are putting it online for free. To access the Op-Ed content and archives on the Times' site, readers have to pay $50 a year. The Times continues to insists that this loophole won't last long, but who knows.