BRUCEB NEWS
The Nine Billion Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
There are monks in a Tibetan lamasery working patiently to list all nine billion possible names of God, according to a 1953 story by Arthur C. Clarke. By an extraordinary coincidence, there are nine billion Windows keyboard shortcuts. Good news! You already know some...
PRIVACY: BANKS vs. MICROSOFT & AOL
A recent study discovered that almost half of you would trust banks to handle online wallets, but most people would not trust Microsoft or AOL to hold the same financial...
CITIZENS FOR A MURDER-FREE AMERICA
Any Philip Dick fans out there? Take a look at Precrime, the web headquarters of Citizens for a Murder-Free America. Precrime proposes using a revolutionary new technology called...
KLEZ VIRUS
There's yet another e-mail virus running around loose, the "Klez" worm. It's finding a lot of unprotected systems, and causing the usual problems. Here's an article about the...
WEB SITE HIJACKING
If you own a domain name, make sure its registration doesn't expire accidentally! The number of domain names being allowed to expire--intentionally or accidentally--is at an...
SEGWAY
I feel like I missed something obvious. Maybe you already knew this. Remember the Segway scooter created by Dean Kamen and announced in December? Battery-powered, using computers...
DATAPLAY – THE NEXT BIG THING (not)
Miniature CDs will hit the market this summer, presumably with a heavy advertising blitz. The "Dataplay" discs look like CDs that are one inch across and come in a small plastic...
PRIVACY INVASIONS AND THE PATRIOT ACT
According to this story, the Patriot Act (passed last October) has produced results that might take you by surprise. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement officials expanded...
WILCO AND THE FUTURE OF MUSIC
Wilco's new album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, will be released next week. And if you buy it, you might help improve the future of recorded music. Wilco is one of the few great bands...
COSTCO DEALS
Some good deals at Costco right now. A stack of 100 blank TDK CDRs is $29.99 at the register, and there's a $20 rebate from Costco. (Unlike other rebates, Costco processes rebate...
TRAVEL WEB SITE SHENANIGANS
I had to chuckle (to avoid crying) reading this article about the squabbles between Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. At first, you'll be sympathetic to the claims that Orbitz is...
RECORDABLE DVDS
Most consumers have stayed away from recordable DVDs, since there's a blizzard of competing acronyms representing different, incompatible media and disk formats. DVD+RW, DVD-RW,...
KAZAA SPYWARE
Kazaa is one of the popular file sharing programs that took over after Napster was gunned down. It had always had a reputation for installing "spyware" - nasty little programs...
TIME WARNER HELL
Two announcements from Time Warner today that should strike fear into your heart, as we move into a future controlled by corporations and inundated by advertising. America Online...
GENDER GRAMMAR
I don't know if this is correct, but it's interesting. The Register quotes from a Microsoft technical note that uses "she" to refer to actions by a potential hacker, and adds...
POP-UP DOWNLOADS
You're familiar with pop-up ads - the windows that appear spontaneously when you visit many web sites. Are you ready for pop-up downloads? Watch for a box to appear asking you to...