Bye-Bye Data: Glitch in Panther. Apple's Panther has a serious bug that wipes out external FireWire drives during the upgrade procedure. Worse, many Mac users are backing up to external drives before upgrading. Some are losing everything. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

Peter Rysavy: “Some of the greatest tablet applications are coming from small developers, who don't have a lot of money to fund their projects, and an army of lawyers to protect their ideas. Redmond really needs to give them a chance, support their work, and even promote their applications.” Peter: you're absolutely right. I'm interested [...]

Ventureblog has an excellent article on how Dartmouth students and faculty are utilizing their ubiquitous wireless connectivity.  Worth the read.  NOTE:  I want a matchbox-sized wireless access point (more a relay station than a wired access point) that I can plug into a wall socket.  If anyone builds one, I will order a dozen (if less than $30 [...]

New Version of PowerControls Released.  Version 2.0 of Ontrack’s excellent PowerControls tool has been released. The latest edition of this great (but not cheap) tool which can work wonders with, and extract data from, unmounted .edb database files, and allows you to pull out data down to individual message/attachment/contact/calendar item level, contains a number of [...]

Replace and defend. Reading the Longhorn SDK docs is a disorienting experience. Everything's familiar but different. Consider these three examples: … Joe Hewitt sums it up nicely: I think the bottom-line of XAML is that it is equally useful for creating both desktop applications, web pages, and printable documents. This means that Microsoft may be [...]

Avalon isn't about Web/GUI convergence. Edwin Khodabakchian echoes what seems to be a common — but I think incorrect — perception that XAML, the XUL-like layout language revealed this week to be a building block of Longhorn's Avalon presentation subsystem, heralds some kind of Web/GUI convergence … To my way of thinking, you don't have [...]

Open source citizenship. On the world stage, both failures and successes can loom larger than in the corporate cubicle. Developers who plug into the reputation-driven meritocracy of open source — while advancing the goals of your business — are a force to be reckoned with. [InfoWorld: Open source citizenship: October 24, 2003] This column was [...]

Lessons from Dartmouth. Naval Ravikant at Ventureblog has a good analysis of what Dartmouth is learning from its extensive deployemnt of WiFi and VOIP.  [Werblog]

E-Vote Software Leaked Online. For the second time this year, software used in an electronic voting system has turned up on the Internet. This time, the company is Sequoia Voting Systems. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News]

Why buy desktops?. It's hardly surprising to me that IDC is predicting that laptop sales will far outstrip analysts' previous predictions.  In most companies comprised mainly of “knowledge workers,” a desktop is really just a laptop waiting to happen.    Almost everyone needs to work at home occasionally and almost everyone has to work while traveling at [...]