Use DropBox to seamlessly sync files

"DropBox is a new synchronization service that works seamlessly between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X clients. With it, you have a specific directory that is synchronized between various systems linked to your account. By dragging a file into this special DropBox directory, it will be automatically pushed to every other system’s DropBox; remove a file and it will be removed from every system. This can be used to share documents, configuration files, photos, music, or anything else you want. Beyond synchronizing files between linked systems, you can also access files via the DropBox Web site."

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=288

The end of an era - Windows 3.x

"An application has expectedly quit.

Windows 3.x has come to the closing moments of its long life.

On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing licences for the software that made its debut in May 1990 in the US"

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7707016.stm

Unknotting knot theory

"How many different ways can you tie your shoelaces?"

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38237/title/Unknotting_knot_theory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ub2mNyd9M

Google OCR

"If you upload a scanned document to the Internet, Google will now not only find it, it will read the contents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology."

http://www.googletutor.com/2008/11/03/google-is-using-ocr-to-expand-its-reach/

People Search

"There are various reasons why you might need to search for people, you may need to find a lost relative, an old flame, a classmate or a business contact - but if you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for people, you have probably realized by now that it might work in some cases but in most cases it won't.

How come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called "the deep web".

Also known as "invisible web", the term "deep web" refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.

Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine. "

http://pipl.com/

Change is Scary

"Imagine what it was like to walk into a room and not know what to do. When the gas companies were spreading rumors that electricity is harmful to health and will affect the soundness of sleep. Fortunately, when something is such an immediate and obvious improvement, it overcomes the naysayers and the rumors in no time flat."

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/change-is-scary.php