Technology

This morning a friend and I caught up with others from the Redcliffe Aeroclub, and three aircraft with eager passengers flew into Brisbane international airport to welcome the arrival of the Airbus A380. Photos are in the Gallery.

A reasonable crowd accumulated at the airport and the media had a significant presence, as this was not only the first A380 to arrive in Australia, but the first to land anywhere in the southern hemisphere. A humble yet historic moment.

Yet most people just wanted to see the 'really big plane' which in the flesh only has a little more 'presence' than a Boeing 747, yet what most managed to miss is that this Aircraft represents a whole lot more than advancement in aerospace technology.

The A380 is a visible sign of the struggle and decline of the US as the primary economic global power and the gradual rise of Europe. This annoys the stuffings out of many commentators in the US, and they've been rather vocal about it. The USD being less valuable than the Euro was embarrassing enough.

Linux is everywhere and knowingly or not, most people depend on it for many things. Web, database, file, auth and print servers to embedded firmware in routers, cameras, game consoles and phones, to name a few. Linux already touches our lives daily.

Poor Microsoft have fought Linux hard for many years, first with invincible ignorance, then with FUD attacks that continue to this day. However, somewhat secretly, they also are blessed by the penguin and use it to keep themselves alive.

The Halo movie, based on the Xbox game by Microsoft will directed by Peter Jackson. Weta Digital will do all the effects - on 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora distro of Linux. Most of Hollywood use this kind of Linux based renderfarm.

This certainly isn't the first time Microsoft have had to run to the penguin for assistance. In 2003 Microsoft were in turmoil after weeks of significant and intense worm and virus attacks directed squarely at them. In their need for a cure, they turned to Akamai to hide behind.

Cringely has a recent interview with the father of not just the mouse, but of many of the concepts that today's computing is based on - Doug Engelbart.

We're talking pre-PARC here people; the year is 1950 in fact. The day after he'd proposed to his girlfriend, Engelbart had a vision of what computers could be like, driving to work.

If we were to give credit where it's due, then quite a lot should go to Doug Engelbart.

12 years is a while to be supporting the GUI desktop environments, of Mac OS and Windows. Prior to that there were other GUI desktops I used and supported that most users today have never heard of.

I've been using various Linux desktops seriously for the past 7 years, and during the normal course of my work, I'll use Mac OSX, KDE on Linux and Windows many times each day. Sometimes intermingled a bit with each other thanks to X over ssh and various remote GUI clients, as well as the odd emulator.

Although it seemed just a matter of time, I'm still surprised by IT industry research firm IDC's claim that "Linux captured the No. 2 spot as desktop operating system in 2003."

This has come about as HP announced it's now shipping its first notebook, the Compaq nx5000, to come with the Linux operating system preinstalled.

Be nice to your skin and bones, because they might just save your heart or grey matter. Adult stem cells are showing impressive results in helping heart attack, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's patients recover.

Dr Helmut Drexler, of the Medical University of Hannover in Germany, used adult stem cells from bone marrow of heart-attack patients to see if they could improve heart function . They Did!

"Our results lend support to the concept that bone-marrow cells can be used to enhance functional recovery in patients," he said in a report in The Lancet medical journal.

It's official - Internet Explorer is evil.

Many were surprised when in the MSN Slate eZine Paul Boutin recommended that windows users ditch IE and use Firefox. You just don't expect to hear that from a Microsoft company.

Firefox is a web browser based on Mozilla, that is developed under an Open Source License.

At the same time Microsoft has released an "emergency configuration update" for IE as it's vulnerabilities are the cause of some serious exploits that have recently happened.

Gmail is a new free web based email service provided by Google. It's caused a lot of commotion because while the likes of Hotmail was offering 4Mb of email storage, Gmail was offering a mammoth 1Gb of storage - that's 250 times more storage, for free.

Since the Beta trials of Gmail have started both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have increased their storage quota's in an attempt to prevent the mass exodus to Gmail once it becomes publicly available.

However, Gmail has a very different approach to web based email. You don't need to make email folders, because there are labels instead, messages are bunched together via thread into "conversations", and at all times you have the stunning search power of Google to find any shred of info in any of your messages. They encourage you not to delete messages, and doing so takes quite some effort.

As one may expect, Slashdot has a story on the lastest stable release of the finest web browser available - Mozilla.

It just so happens to be free also, thanks to it's Open Source License.

I've been testing Mozilla 1.7 since it's beta, and it's much faster than previous versions, even under Mac OSX, where it did tend to run slower.