[via CICLOPS]

As if drawn by an artist, this sublime scene speaks of the powerful beauty in the outer solar system: the domain of giant planets encircled by rings and orbited by small cratered moons of ice. In this view, Dione (1,118 kilometers, 695 miles across, at left) and Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across, at right) orbit the mighty ringed planet, while two bright storms swirl in the atmosphere below. This vantage point shows that the deceptively expansive rings are actually paper-thin in comparison: only tens of meters thick.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the wide angle camera on February 28, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 154 kilometers (96 miles) per pixel.

[via PointBlog]

A great interview of Tim Berners-Lee – you know, the guy who invented the World Wide Web with Robert Cailliau and President of the W3C – in BBC News.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

[The Web is] a new medium, it’s a universal medium and it’s not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographical boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.

The idea [of the Web] was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

One of the reasons that I want to keep [the Web] open like that, is partly because I want humanity to have it as a clean slate. My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can’t imagine now.

[via whatsnextblog.com]

Technorati is about to be sold to a large search engine company. The deal should go down in about a week.

[via Seth]

Again, a very good, solid and interesting development of the Long Tail concept from Chris Anderson. Have a look, this analysis represents a *huge* trend.

The rise of shorter, smaller content is actually a trend that’s affecting all media and entertainment, reflecting not just the taste of a quick-change generation but also an increasing variety and flexibility in the ways we can consume media. As we leave the era of one-size-fits-all distribution, we’ll increasingly see the end of one-size-fits-all content. Indeed there’s an increasing amount of evidence that this is already underway:

• Music: Consumers are moving from albums to singles.
• TV: Networks are looking for short video that works as well online as on broadcast.
• Movies: Online distribution is creating a big new audience for short films.
• Videogames: Between cellphone games, “casual” web games and downloadable content, smaller games are on the rise.
• Magazines: Reflecting the pace of a browse-and-skim culture, articles are getting shorter.

[via BetaNews]

Windows Internet Explorer 7: new look, new name.

[via vowe]

I haven’t tested this, but it seems to be interesting. If you have a *dynamic* WinXP installation – i.e if you are instaling/uninstalling/testing a lot of softwares and tools, you surely have already re-installed your machine, because of the performance.

It seems that there is a way to avoid the re-activation process after your re-installation, by backup-ing a small file called WPA.DBL (in \windows\system32\) and by replacing this file after the re-install.

Have a look at the full article.

CDex is an old-fashioned tool (release 1.51 from September 2003!!) but surely still one of the best Audio CD Ripper. Completely free (Open Source), very powerful but quite easy to use, very stable. A must-have.

I ripped about almost all my CDs (> 900) with this tool.

CDex is a tool to do all sorts of things audio related. Mainly focused on ripping and converting, things like turning your home Compact Disc collection into an mp3 collection on your hard drive become extremely easy. With built in support for many encoders you wont find any shortage of options for your media files. Below is a more in-depth explination of CDex features.

CDex Feature List:

* Easy to use interface
* Media File Player
* Create PLS and M3U playlist files
* Advanced jitter correction
* Support for many file formats/audio encoders (WAV, MP3, OGG, VQF, APE, etc)
* Support for ID3 V1 and V2 tags
* Support for normalization of audio files
* Support for transcoding of compressed audio files
* Support for CDDB
* Support for recording from the analog input line

CDex is one of the most downloaded application (all-time) at sourceforge (more than 24 million downloads!).

[via Rodrigo]

If you have some interest in the Open Source field, worth a bookmark, to my mind ;-)

InfoWorld released a very extensive and *great* report about, I think, all the current Open Source projects for the following fields:

• A buyer’s guide to open source
  Open source provides low-cost, community-supported alternatives to commercial enterprise apps
• Open source business intelligence
  Low-cost alternatives to costly reporting tools will arrive soon
• Open source business process management
  Orchestrating SOA is a heady task, but new projects are stepping up to the plate
• Open source content management
  The hardest part of choosing a CMS solution is narrowing down the choices
• Open source CRM
  Manage sales and customer relationships without spending a fortune on software
• Open source ERP
  The features of free ERP packages vary widely, but some gems can be found
• Open source enterprise service bus
  Middleware options proliferate, but jumping ship from commercial vendors may be premature
• Open source identity
  Free tools can give developers a head start on advanced security infrastructure
• Open source directory
  LDAP servers move closer to becoming commodity items
• Open source portals
  Competition in the open source Java portal space heats up
• Open source point of sale
  Free commerce terminals lend flexibility to businesses of all sizes
• Open source RFID
  Free tag and EPC data management software is in its infancy, but looks promising
• Open source VoIP/Telephony
  Options abound for PBX applications and interactive voice response
• Open source licensing offers many choices
  Before you use that code, make sure you understand its terms

InfoWorld also published a PDF report (free subscription required).

Synop, the company which was developping SauceReader, my RSS/Atom reader for quite a while now, has closed for business.

The SauceReader source code and product are for sale.

I will have to move to another reader, although this one was ok for my own usage :-( I am actually not really convinced that you have a big chance to *sell* a product of a company which is out. Strange process, to my mind.

I’ve missed this news from May ’05 but I haven’t read anything about this on-line. Standard&Poor;’s cut debt ratings for General Motors and Ford to “junk status” or “non-investment-grade” in May 5, 2005. In other words, G.M. and Ford are rated as junk bonds….

End of March 2005, G.M. had a consolidated debt of $292 billion and Ford a total debt of $161 billion!! That means, G.M. and Ford together have a cumulated debt of … $453 billion.

Just to give you a possible comparison: Spain, with 43 million inhabitants, had a public debt of $485 billion in 2004 (source: Wikipedia)…

Have a look at this NYTimes’ article (free registration required).

In explaining the downgrades, the agency used nearly identical language to describe a range of parallel concerns at each company, like falling sales of sport utility vehicles as gas prices have risen.

G.M.’s downgrade “reflects our conclusion that management’s strategies may be ineffective in addressing G.M.’s competitive disadvantages,” S.&P.; said in its report. For Ford, “the downgrade to non-investment grade reflects our skepticism about whether management’s strategies will be sufficient to counteract mounting competitive challenges,” S.&P.; wrote.

[S.&P.;] also blamed much of the companies’ problems on their huge financial commitments to its retirees, both in pensions and in medical benefits. Ford’s unfunded pension liability was $12.3 billion and its unfunded medical liability $32.4 billion at the start of the year, S.& P. said, while G.M.’s unfunded medical liability was $61 billion.