I found this rather good introductory-level article on quantum computing in Scientific American. I last mentioned QC a few weeks ago. #
Scary spy-on-your-customers database software from Sybase. Surely you remember Sybase? They used to be big, once.
A couple of articles, here and here, on the impending deregulation of radio in the UK, and its impending take-over by Clear Channel. Basically, listeners get an even narrower range or even more pre-digested, zoo-format pap than they do now. As someone who doesn’t listen to anything except Radio Four, I don’t expect this to affect me, but its depressing anyway. Radio can be such a great medium, but its dying of blandness. #
If you need real random numbers then surf over to the neat-o HotBits site. Some smart guy has wired a net-connected PC to a radioactive decay detector, and is serving-up batches of random numbers to anyone who wants them. This is really nice, at least until CPUs start to ship with random-number generators built-in, but what the site really needs is to be web-service enabled. #
In an ingenious effort to wring more juice out of the “blog thing”, invisiblog.com is offering anonymous weblog publishing. Not much content yet, just a lot of test posts and some stuff in German, but I think the idea has a basic flaw. People read blogs because they feel some connection (trust, emotional, intellectual, whatever) with the blog’s author. You get to know them. If the author is anonymous, the experience lacks the very ingredient that makes blogging interesting. Still, a nice try.