Darpa Wants Replacement Arms by 2007. [DefenseTech 4/11/2005 [via Gizmodo 4/11/2005] Darpa, the funds-holding financier of many military project, has put out a "Revolutionizing Prosthetics" challenge to modern prostheticists to build a fake arm with, "enough finesse to pick up a raisin or to write in longhand. It needs to be sensitive enough for the wearer to demonstration to do day-to-day tasks in the dark. And the limb will have to be strong enough to lift 60 pounds at a time. So, basically, what Luke Skywalker gets in Empire Strikes Back, after Darth chops off his hand. Except, researchers won't have a long, long time to get this limb ready. Darpa wants the robo-arm stat -- in four years or less. 4/11/2005 11:06:27 AM    

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How Long Is Your Misperception List? [VARBusiness 3/17/2005] Your decisions could be clouded by misguided ideas. I suggest gathering the team and writing on a whiteboard everything your company collectively believes that, frankly, is not true. They might be as simple as, "We are making gains against our rivals," or "Our processes are better than last year," or even "Our competition is slipping." Or more specific: "Our go-to-market strategy is well-founded," or "There's no way Jim in accounting or Stan in engineering would leave if they got better offers." How long is your misperception list? If it's longer than when you started in this business, you're going the wrong way. 4/11/2005 10:54:18 AM    

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Engineers Redesign Roads to Save Moose - And Squirrel? [Yahoo News 4/11/2005 via Fark] Standing six feet at the shoulder, weighing up to 1,000 pounds, with massive antlers more than five feet across, moose tower over automobiles and have no fear of them. Increasingly the undisputed giants of the northern forest are tangling with traffic as they expand south. But now some traffic engineers around the country are experimenting with redesigning roads to accommodate wandering wildlife and using high tech laser and infrared devices, developed for space exploration and anti-missile systems, to warn motorists when a moose wanders into the road.

"We're investigating ways to manipulate the drivers and also ways to manipulate the animals," said John Perry, a biologist with the Maine Department of Transportation. "And when moose are involved, it might be easier to manipulate the driver."

4/11/2005 9:53:22 AM    

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Robot jockeys to ride Gulf camels. [BBC News | World 4/10/2005; 1:53:39 PM] The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season. Camel racing is one of the UAE's traditional sports and an important part of the region's heritage. The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races. Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia. 4/10/2005 9:17:28 PM    

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Our Ratings, Ourselves [Slashdot: 4/10/2005; 8:52:30 PM] This long New York Times article (10 pages; no registration required) reports on the mismeasure of television (TV). "One of the great contradictions of modern American life is that almost everyone watches TV while almost no one agrees anymore about what it really means to watch television....when it comes to figuring out how many of us are watching these shows, and whether we're paying attention while we're watching and even whether we're actually noticing the advertisements among the shows we may or may not be watching -- well, this is where things get tricky..." 4/10/2005 9:03:38 PM    

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These computer bugs can kill [The Globe And Mail: National 4/10/2005; 6:52:24 PM] Keyboards are easily contaminated with germs, which in hospitals can take the form of antibiotic-resistant pathogens — the so-called superbugs, a study suggests. And once they take up residence, there's almost no getting rid of them. Tests show that bacteria are capable of surviving on keyboards for at least 24 hours. Hospitals often use plastic keyboard covers that can be removed and immersed in cleaning solutions. Even so, more attention has to be paid to the cleanliness of hands — a suggestion no infection-control practitioner would argue against. Any contact with a keyboard in a hospital setting should be followed by hand washing. 4/10/2005 8:57:42 PM    

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Bill Gates 0wns Einstein, Groucho, Freud, Asimov, Fuller, et al. [Cory Doctorow - Boing Boing 4/9/2005; 12:53:27 PM] Rick Prelinger writes: Corbis, the image licensing company owned by Bill Gates, has bought the Roger Richman Agency, who represents, in its words, "a roster of legendary personalities including actors & actresses, comedians, musicians, film directors, sports figures, fictional characters and historical icons. What Richman, and now Corbis/Gates, control includes "full persona usage, consisting of name, voice, signature and image (photo, illustration, animation and/or look-alike)." Dead or alive. This is the first time an image licensing company has integrated with a personality licensing company. And guess whose personas Gates now controls: Isaac Asimov; Leonard Bernstein; George Burns & Gracie Allen; James Cagney; Maria Callas; Andrew Carnegie; Maurice Chevalier; Bobby Darin; Albert Einstein; WC Fields; Sigmund Freud; Mark Foo; Betty Grable; Harry James; Al Jolson; Boris Karloff; Burt Lancaster; Gypsy Rose Lee; Vivien Leigh; Marx Brothers; Walter Matthau; Steve McQueen; Basil Rathbone; Gloria Swanson; Rudolf Valentino; Johnny Weissmuller; Mae West; the Wright brothers 4/10/2005 10:55:02 AM    

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South Korea Considers Using Armed Robots Along DMZ [Slashdot: 4/9/2005; 8:52:29 PM] S. Korea and N. Korea (aka the ROK and DPRK, respectively) share the most heavily fortified border that has ever existed. Now the ROK is considering deployment of armed robots sometime in the 2010s. Hundreds of thousands of combat troops are deployed along the border by both Koreas, which remain technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The ministry expects it will cost about 20 billion won to set up 250 robots with one every kilometer along the border. Robots with weapons mounted on their frames are each expected to be able to observe from 2 and 1 kilometers during the day and night, respectively, and will have the capability to record voices and take pictures in a 180-degree circle. "The ability to shoot at targets is a matter which needs to be discussed and worked out very carefully." 4/10/2005 10:42:21 AM    

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Fly brains manipulated by remote control. [MSNBC 4/7/2005] "This is a new approach to neuroscience," said Gero Miesenbock from Yale University. "We can not only passively observe but actively control behavior." Using the lasers to stimulate specific brain cells, researchers say they were able to make the flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly. Even headless flies took flight when researchers stimulated the correct neurons, according to the study, published in the April 7 issue of the journal Cell. Biologists have long known that an electrical stimulus can trigger muscle response, but this approach used focused beams of light to stimulate neurons that would have been impossible to study using electrodes. 4/10/2005 10:14:53 AM    

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Open Source Developers Are Rock Stars. [LinuxWorld 4/7/2005 via Linux Today 4/9/2005] "When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a rock star. I wanted to play guitar, get up on stage, and have everyone scream while I cranked out some hard rockin' tune..."

Open source developers are the rock stars of the software world. You can say they don't get the money and fame, but I think you're wrong. I've met open source developers who have founded software companies and are doing pretty well financially. As far as fame goes, they may not do quite as well as real rock stars but some do pretty well; Linus Torvalds is fairly famous, but I guess not like Kurt Cobain. They're also usually the most talented developers. Rock stars get where they are in the music world by being great musicians; open source rock stars get where they are by writing great code. Naming their projects is a lot like naming their bands. When you hear people talking about Subversion, Ethereal, or Excalibur (all open source projects), it's hard to tell if they mean software projects or rock bands.

A good friend of mine called me once and went on excitedly for 30 minutes about his patch to the Jakarta Struts project. After he was done telling me about it, he was almost out of breath. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a lighter, and stood there holding it lit in the air.

4/10/2005 9:28:21 AM    

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Music Industry P2P Claims Dismantled [via Slashdot: 4/10/2005; 6:53:17 AM]  Canadian law professor Michael Geist dismantles the recording industry's claims about the peer-to-peer. Using actual data from Canada, Piercing the P2P Myths, demonstrates that the loss claims are greatly exaggerated and that P2P has had little, if any impact on the income of the artists themselves. Other reasons for the decline in CD sales revenue include: the explosive growth of DVD sales; the declining number of hours spent listening to music; the shift in music retail merchandising to big–box retailers which focus on a small number of new releases; Wal-Mart's $10US price cap (which could account for the "loss" all on its own); and the economic slowdown, with similar "losses" in all sectors. The significant decline in new releases over the past six years is probably a factor too - less product results in fewer sales. 4/10/2005 9:19:02 AM    

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Google Delivering Factual Answers [Slashdot: 4/7/2005; 7:52:55 PM] Google Inc. on Thursday began delivering factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other sites and look for the information. For example, if a user enters the query 'Portugal population,' Google returns the answer -- 10.5 million -- along with a link to the Web page where the information came from, which in this case is the population page of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Factbook. The query 'who is Jane Fonda?' triggers the answer '... is an Academy Award winning American actress, model, writer, producer, activist and philanthropist' and provides the link to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia's entry for the actress. A small percentage of queries currently trigger these factual answers, but the service, called Google Q&A, is in its early stages, said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality. 4/7/2005 8:09:35 PM    

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Ask these key questions to test application security. [TechRepublic.com 4/7/2005; 3:52:39 AM] Companies should conduct application testing from both an authorized user's and an unauthorized user's perspective. This testing should include all systems that make up the application. Not sure where to begin? Mike Mullins suggests some key questions to ask when testing. Let's look at some main areas to focus on and some key questions to ask when testing.

• Scripting: Could someone script an attack that overwhelms the application?
• Enumeration: Is it possible to enumerate account information of other users?
• Passwords: Have you changed the default passwords?
• Sessions: Have you based tokens on easily re-created variables, such as sequential, time, date?
• Error handling: Does your application reveal information about the products used to create it?
• Field variables: Have you fixed SQL injection and buffer overflows?
• Code commenting: Have you cleansed HTML of comments and unused metadata?
• Session time-out: Do sessions expire after a reasonable period of time?
• Session cache: Does information expire to prevent someone from replaying a session?
• Network parameters: Have you documented ports and protocols and filtered for origination?

4/7/2005 6:19:41 PM    

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One Size Fits One: Tailoring Technology to Consumer Needs. [Knowledge@Wharton 4/6/2005; 5:53:01 PM] While a number of commentators these days suggest that the web could ultimately make newspapers, magazines and TV obsolete, Jeff Weiner, senior vice president for search and marketplace at Yahoo!, doesn't buy it: Bloggers may critique and supplement the big outlets, but they won't soon replace them. The future, he predicted, won't belong to either mass or micro players, but rather to consumers who will increasingly tailor their information gathering to their needs and tastes. The move toward more personal media isn't limited to the web, he said. Its musical analog is the digital music player -- iPods are the most prominent example -- which lets users not only download songs but also mix and store them in varied ways. The TV versions are TiVo's digital video recorders and cable's on-demand video services. "Talk to people who have TiVo, and they will tell you that it absolutely changed their lives," Weiner noted. "TiVo users have an evangelical zeal." 4/7/2005 6:14:14 PM    

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File-Sharing Is the Latest Battleground in the Clash of Technology and Copyright. [New York Times 4/7/2005 via Tomalak's Realm] This is just the latest installment of a longstanding battle between technology companies and copyright holders. In the early 1900's, the disruptive technology was player pianos. Manufacturers of player piano rolls purchased a single copy of the sheet music of a song, hired someone to record the music and then sold these mechanical reproductions to consumers. The sheet music publishers held that this was copyright infringement. Congress responded with the Copyright Act of 1909, which required piano roll manufacturers to pay songwriters a fee for each roll. Subsequently, mechanical reproduction fees have been extended to new technologies like phonographs, audio tapes, CD's and online streaming digital music.
Almost 100 years later, up to $1 of the cost of each music CD still goes to the sheet music publishers. -- Eric 4/7/2005 6:00:44 PM    

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Sinister Heresy: Microsoft's Open Source Message Gains Subtlety. [NewsForge April 07, 2005 09:00 AM by Bruce Byfield]
This article appears to be a review of a seminar describing Microsoft's revised attitude towards Open Source. As I read it, though, I started wondering when the Spanish Inquisition was going to show up. The article is actually a warning to all True Believers that Microsoft has started using the "time-honored debating tactics" of being polite, reasonable, honest, and thoughtful, to promote its Microsoft-Is-Not-ALL-Evil heresy. It ends up with a warning that "even these informed people" can be influenced to stray by these sinister "tactics", and that it "shows that the rules of engagement can change at any time -- and that the FOSS Community had better be ready when they do." What ever happened to the Apple fanatics? -- Eric

"Barnaby Jeans, an IT Pro Advisor at Microsoft Canada, has a new approach to Microsoft advocacy. ... Warning that "not all distributions are created equal or even compatible" without giving specifics, he goes on to say that most of the highly customized distributions fall into the Roll Your Own category that most corporations lack "the skill or the money to maintain." The implication is that the advantages of having access to the source code is overrated. ... Because Jeans demonstrates a knowledge of his subject, the implications of his argument are likely to be accepted without question, except by audience members who already know something about the subject. ... The result is a much more sophisticated and effective defense of Microsoft than consumers usually see. ... The effectiveness can be judged by the fact that the people who approached him after the seminar were the open source users in the audience. Although their opinions were unchanged, even these informed people seemed to respect the Microsoft perspective in a way that they had not at the start of the presentation. ... Many people in the FOSS communities are used to the Microsoft response to open source being crude and hysterical. What Jeans proves is that it can just as easily be subtle and sound reasonable. Even more importantly, he shows that the rules of engagement can change at any time -- and that the FOSS Community had better be ready when they do."

4/7/2005 5:00:20 PM    

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Discovery's Rollout Viewed - From Orbit. [NASA Watch 4/7/2005; 1:52:24 AM] Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 10 Commander Leroy Chiao used a digital camera April 6 to photograph the rollout of the Space Shuttle Discovery at NASA's Kennedy Space Center from an altitude of 220 statute miles. Chiao used the same lens arrangement for the photograph that will be used by the next Station crew to photograph Discovery's heat shield as it approaches the Station on its Return to Flight.
You can also view KSC's Shuttle launch pads using Google's new satellite imagery service. 4/7/2005 4:26:02 PM    

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MTV announces an Internet "channel." [Scripting News 4/7/2005; 8:53:04 AM] MTV is launching a free "channel" on the internet that will show some of the station's TV programmes, including reality hit The Osbournes. The MTV Overdrive website will let users with high-speed computer connections watch music videos and extended programmes on demand. The website is currently being tested and will launch fully on 25 April. MTV president Van Toffler has said he is not worried about the web service drawing viewers away from their existing TV channels. "The TV experience is still great," he said. "Our ratings are moving higher and we don't fear that." 4/7/2005 4:21:50 PM    

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Best Buy Has Customer Arrested For Using $2 Bills. [Baltimore Sun 3/8/2005 via Anandtech 4/6/2005] A Baltimore man tried to pay for a Best Buy car stereo installation with $2 bills—and was arrested. "I'm just here to pay the bill," Bolesta says he told a cashier. "She looked at the $2 bills and told me, 'I don't have to take these if I don't want to.' She took the money, like she's doing me a favor." He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, "Are these real?" "Of course they are," Bolesta said. "They're legal tender."
When an employee noticed some smearing of ink, the cops were called in. The customer was locked into handcuffs and leg irons, in front of a store full of customers. He was transported to the County lockup, where he sat handcuffed to a pole and in leg irons while the Secret Service was called in. Finally, the Secret Service arrived, examined the bills and said they were legitimate, adding, according to the police report, "Sometimes ink on money can smear."
A police spokesman said, "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world." 4/7/2005 4:18:40 PM    

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Microsoft Exec Broaches Open Source Paradigm. [InfoWorld 4/6/2005 via Linux Today 4/7/2005; 12:53:55] Like a Roman Catholic speaking to an audience of Protestant evangelicals, a Microsoft representative at the Open Source Business Conference Wednesday focused on similarities between traditional commercial projects and open source ventures, rather than cite sharp differences. Recognizing that some see Microsoft as anathema to open source, Microsoft’s Jason Matusow, director of the company’s Shared Source initiative, nonetheless said that companies building a business around open source operate in the same manner as commercial, proprietary vendors. 4/7/2005 4:04:52 PM    

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IBM: Proprietary Technology Not Enough. [CNET News 4/6/2005 11:51 AM] At the Open Source Business Conference, IBM said it's time to learn how to share. IBM itself has taken a mixed approach to open-source. It has aggressively promoted Linux and assigned hundreds of programmers to improve it. It also launched the Eclipse programming tool project. At the same time, IBM sells a lot of proprietary software, including its WebSphere business software and DB2 database. When it comes to legal actions, IBM also is mixed. The company permits use of 500 patents for open-source projects, but continues to win more patent awards than any competitor.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy at IBM, described "a new kind of innovation cycle" in which companies move ahead of an expanding wave of open-source software. "A big part of your power is to have your people work with the communities and donate some of your intellectual property to those communities so they can get better. Then you build proprietary offerings on top of the open-source platform. Those proprietary offerings at some point will lose their value as proprietary offerings. Then there probably will be more value donating it to an open-source community, and on and on and on." 4/7/2005 4:01:14 PM    

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Call of the wild: animal ringtones. [Boing Boing 4/7/2005; 1:53:38 PM] This website offers animal sound ringtones for your mobile phone. Respond to the "true tone" of the turkey gooble, interrupted by a rifle blast. Other earthycrunchy options: Barred Owl, Canada Geese, Common Loon, Cougar, Mallard, Elk, Pintail, and Goose. Kinda pricey at $2.50 a shot. Free preview, though. 4/7/2005 3:50:38 PM    

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The Official Rules of Calvinball. [Bernie DeKoven's FunLog 4/6/2005; 10:52:33 AM] We are fortunate indeed to have in our virtual playground someone like Sam Ryan who has the wisdom to go to the needed lengths to document the essence of the prototypical Junkyard Sport, Calvinball. "IMPORTANT: All rules are subject to be changed, amended, or dismissed by any player(s) involved at any time...." 4/6/2005 2:42:46 PM    

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Microsoft Keeps Up Presence at Open-Source Events. [eWeek April 5, 2005] Determined to have its presence seen and its voice heard by its core customer constituencies amid the growing open-source chorus, Microsoft is coughing up cash and sponsoring targeted open-source conferences. The software maker is a platinum sponsor of the Open-Source Business Conference held in San Francisco this week. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source program, will give a talk examining the effects of commercialization on open-source software and discussing strategies for adopting source-code licensing in a commercial software organization. 4/6/2005 2:21:42 PM    

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They can't steal data that you don't have. [Computerworld IT Management News 4/6/2005; 1:53:14 PM.] You can help beat data thieves by using effective data management. If you collect information that you don't actually need, not only are you spending money needlessly, but you're also opening yourself up to the risk that the unneeded data might be stolen or misused. If you can't define a valid business need or some legal or regulatory requirement for each piece of data, why are you keeping it? IT people should step back and ask whether it's appropriate to store the data they are holding, whether it's being stored for an appropriate period and whether it's being stored in a sufficiently secure fashion. 4/6/2005 2:12:42 PM    

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Think Week, the WSJ, and those Ten Crazy Ideas [Mini-Microsoft 4/4/2005; 9:53:14 PM] by Who da'Punk: We read a bit about Bill Gates' most recent Think Week in the March 28 Wall Street Journal article In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft's Future [Paid subscription required, but you may be able to access the google cache or some other on-line copy for free - Eric.] First, this Think Week is a great idea for everyone. Here's an interesting bit:

Four days into this Think Week, Mr. Gates had read 56 papers, working 18 hours straight some days. His record is 112 papers. "I don't know if I'll catch my record, but I'll certainly do 100," he said. Among the unread papers: "10 Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft."

Figures. About a month ago, a friend emailed me the "10 Crazy Ideas" paper off of Think Week. For those in Microsoft, you can go and read it yourself by navigating through the http://thinkweek/ web site and finding the Winter 2005 papers. I don't think they are crazy ideas at all and it's unfortunate, and very telling, if the paper went unread and not commented upon. Perhaps they should have chosen a more subtle title. I wish that Kentaro and Sean would go ahead and share their ideas broadly, posting either their own edited versions in a blog or emailing me text they'd like to share. I'd even serialize it! The ten crazy ideas? Mostly, more common-sense than craziness ( ooo, cut back on Bureaucracy! Craaaaaazy... ). Okay, I'll share that part:

1. Schedule Unscheduled Time into Performance Reviews
2. "Break Up" the Company
3. Encourage Loose but Prominent Couplings
4. Exile and Empower Incubation Projects
5. Offer Super-exponential Rewards
6. Offer Different Risk-Reward Compensation Profiles
7. Cut Back on Bureaucracy
8. Review Cost Cutting
9. Reduce Headcount on Large Dev Projects
10. Eliminate Exec Reviews

4/6/2005 1:52:19 PM    

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Developer Site CodeZoo Launches [Slashdot: 4/5/2005; 6:53:14 PM]  CodeZoo is an archive of Java code pieces, which plans to do for Java what cpan did for Perl, according to an announcement from O'Reilly. From the announcement: "We're not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we've hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects -- whether you are an open source or commercial developer. It’s a fast-forward button for your compiler." 4/6/2005 9:35:54 AM    

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The secret of effective scope change management. [TechRepublic.com 4/5/2005; 3:53:07 AM] One of the conflicts project managers face is that they don't want to say no when someone asks for a scope change. Here's a "trick" that takes away the need to do that... [also known as "Pass The Buck" - Eric] Ask the client to send you an e-mail explaining the new capability and the business value of the change, including a description of the consequences if the change is not made. Determine the impact to the project on terms of budget and schedule and then send the benefits and costs to the sponsor for a decision. 4/6/2005 9:29:00 AM    

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Zinc shown to sharpen teenagers' mental skills [Globe And Mail 4/5/2005; 4:54:38 AM] Teenagers who take zinc supplements are more attentive and responsive at school, according to a new U.S. study. The research, among the first to look at the impact of the essential micronutrient on adolescents, suggests that many suffer from zinc deficiency. Teens are believed to be at particularly high risk of zinc deficiency because they are growing quickly and tend to have poor eating habits. The problem is particularly acute for girls because many adopt vegetarian diets in adolescence. 4/6/2005 9:25:11 AM    

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Write-on Poly Sheets - Instant whiteboards [Cool Tools 4/5/2005] Avery Polysheet instant whiteboards are thick, static-laden sheets of plastic, like ultra-heavy garbage bags. Just unroll one, slap it on the wall, and instant whiteboard! The 27 x 34 inch pad fits standard flip chart easels or conference cabinets; Rolls up for travel and storage. Dry erase markers wipe off fairly easily, and/or perforated sheets tear off cleanly. 4/6/2005 9:19:56 AM    

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Internet Explorer Search Prefixes. [via Lockergnome 4/5/2005] Internet Explorer has a little known feature that lets you quickly search for something on any site: IE Search prefixes. After the search prefixes are set up, you can type a single word identifier (prefix) and search query in the IE address bar to send the query to any website.  For example, the prefix "kb" can go to the Microsoft Knowledge Base, "syn" to a thesaurus, or "quote MSFT" to a stock quote. This script installs several MSN search prefixes to your machine.  You can add and customize your own search prefixes using the Microsoft Tweak UI utility for Windows XP. 4/6/2005 8:47:21 AM    

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NASA Presolicitation Notice: Sponsorship Opportunity for Bandwidth Support to Return to Flight Missions (STS-114, STS-121) [NASA Watch 4/6/2005; 1:53:29 AM] As Discovery and Atlantis are readied for their respective Return to Flight Missions, NASA is preparing to meet public demand to see the launches and missions via the NASA Web Portal (www.nasa.gov). Based on data from previous missions we expect 20 to 30 million visits with 250,000 to 500,000 Internet users also accessing NASA TV coverage via Web Streaming. NASA is seeking proposals to sponsor the bandwidth costs. In exchange for this sponsorship NASA will consider offers to display the logo of the sponsor(s) and give credit to the sponsor(s) ... 4/6/2005 8:31:18 AM    

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Copy This. [Fast Company 4/6/2005; 6:54:10 AM] Anne M. Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, has the company cranking again. Here are her thoughts on changing an organization, taking risks, and telling stories. "In a crisis, you have the opportunity to move quickly and change a lot -- and you have to take advantage of that." 4/6/2005 8:19:51 AM    

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One Handset, Five Operating Systems. [SmartPhoneToday via  Linux Today 4/6/2005; 7:52:10 AM] In theory, Palm smartphones and PDAs should work with other operating systems besides the Palm OS. There have been rumors that even the platform's founder, palmOne, may introduce a Windows Mobile edition of the Treo 650—the highest profile Palm-based device currently on the market. Oswin Technology plans to release Palm, Pocket PC, Linux, MXI, and Windows CE editions of its new Zircon Axia A108 smartphone ($899), all using the same exact hardware. The Windows CE version of the Axia A108 is already shipping with the MXI and Pocket PC editions due for release during the third quarter. Axia A108 owners will be able to ship their phone back to Oswin and have their smartphone's OS changed. 4/6/2005 8:16:14 AM    

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