Peter Rysavy's Lonestar screenshots and discussion: Microsoft handed out Lonestar alphas at the Tablet PC get-together at Comdex. Oh man, I should have listened to that little voice in my head that told me to go to Vegas. Most interestingly, Peter says that Lonestar is a small (\~10MB), user-installable and …

Citing an "arms race" in the ongoing spam wars, the company defends its patenting of a technology to thwart antispam filters. via [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Okay, I can see the point of increasing the legal liability of spammers, but that this patent was granted is infuriating. It patents …

Penabled Tablet PC replacement Pens at Comdex? Hey -- with Christmas coming up, can I ask my in-laws for a decent Tablet PC pen? Such as the long-awaited Cross pen?

20-inch iMac. A 20" flatscreen at 1650 x 1050 with a 10.6" footprint, 802.11g, and one of those weird processors that I guess work fast enough. Geez. I mean... Geez.

Is InfoPath the New Excel? I ask in my latest SD Times column.

I installed the Whidbey preview on a VPC virtual machine at the weekend, hoping to check out the new features, but they don't seem to be implemented in this build. via [Cook Computing]

~~Can anyone confirm if the C++/CLI extensions are in the PDC bits? My initial attempts to …

Sure, Gates announced the next version of Windows XP Tablet "by the middle of" 2004, but in the near future, Waggener Edstrom's Tina Warner tells me that the Tablet PC 1.7 SDK will ship with the PDC post-show attendee kits "so timing may be another few weeks." I can't …

GPS-based Anti-Terrorist "Stop Speeding Trucks" Tech Under Attack

Perhaps I haven't had enough coffee this morning because it seems obvious that one should be able to construct a pithy logical statement that encapsulates the notion that it can't be a good idea to mandate a remotely-controlled software-based solution that provides …

Chris Woofruff wonders if Python's built-in facility for dictionaries / associative arrays satisfies Ted Neward's desire for relational language extensions. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think so. To me, Ted's post jumped off the idea of relational operators creating new types (although Ted didn't explicitly discuss it): 

relvar[person …

Ted Neward wants relational language extensions:

Basically, I want the object-relational impedance mismatch to go away, just like everybody else does. But instead of continuing to try to force objects on top of the relational model, how about we give up going in that direction, and instead try lacing relational …