Nothing like a court case to bring out the dirty laundry: Steve Ballmer reportedly tossed a chair and said, "I'll kill Google" and Bill Gates is quoted as saying "China has f****d Microsoft" according to court testimony in the Kai-Fu Lee case. In the case Microsoft wants Lee to be prevented from working before a January trial, arguing it would violate a noncompete agreement. Google says the contract does not prevent him from doing recruiting work in China. Judge Steven Gonzalez is expected to rule next Tuesday.

Google's mission to make the world's information accessible hit a speed bump this week. Publishers objected to the search giant's plans to scan books from major university libraries... and I was looking forward to not having to pay anymore of those 'past due' library fines.

Need help hacking your Roomba vacuum cleaner into a wireless rover? This site includes pinouts , pictures and practical tips such as "Putting any voltage on these lines will let magic smoke out."

Two Harvard Business School professors, Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanel, predict there will be no clear winner between Microsoft and Linux:

"the authors believe, neither side is likely to be forced from the battlefield--Microsoft has too much market share and OSS offers too many benefits for users

Groklaw offers some insight about the article as well.

Someone is poking fun at Google by describing (in perfect Google-ese) a new content blocking feature where only Ad's are displayed. Flame On.

I used to really enjoy the pithy random quotes on the now-defunct ComputerSecurityNow website and I can still get an occasional fix by digging around with the WayBack Machine but does anyone know where that particular collection of quotes can be found? (... as a tab delimited text file would be nice!)

Failing that, just where is the treasury of computer quotes?

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China's largest, plans to replace SCO Unix with Turbolinux 7 DataServer Linux on servers across its network of 20,000 branches. "The biggest Linux deployment yet seen in China", according to an executive involved with the deal.

SCO may not be all that great at deploying operating systems or litigation but it certainly is the best at shooting itself in the foot.

New Scientist reports that the Mars Rover Opportunity has had its solar panels cleaned on at least four seperate occasions and NASA doesn't know how it's happening.

The rovers landed on Mars in January with solar cells capable of providing more than 900 watt-hours of electricity per day. Spirit's output has dropped to about 400 watt-hours, partly because Martian dust has caked its solar panels. Opportunity's output also declined at first - to around 500 watt-hours - but over the past six months it has regained power (New Scientist, 30 October, p 6). Lately, its solar cells have been delivering just over 900 watt-hours.

Rover team leader Jim Erickson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told New Scientist that a process still not understood.

Last year I got interested in news feeds but since a lot of the sites I visited didn't have them yet I wrote some scrapers in php and went merrily on my way... I don't know exactly when they started doing this but today I noticed Good Morning Silicon Valley had added a link to my scraped feed under the title "Add GMSV headlines to your site"... One would think that they would be less than willing to rely on my dubious efforts for their content but perhaps my scraping days are numbered anyway.

[Original GMSV page archived here ]