twofish writes "InfoWorld columnist Peter Wayner recently reviewed six of the most popular "open source" Ajax toolkits. The article sets out to see if they are enterprise ready in comparison to commercial products such Backbase, JackBe, and Tibco's General Interface. The six open source projects covered were selected because each has a high-profile in the developer community and support of one or more stable organizations. "

RobotRunAmok writes "Before there was Outlook, or Evolution, or The Brain, there was Lotus Agenda, a DOS-based Personal Information Manager created by Mitch Kapor. Wired is reporting that Kapor is throwing 5 Million USD at the Open Source Applications Foundation to create an open-source resurrection of this PIM-Of-The-Gods in the form of Chandler, available now as an alpha for Windows, Linux, and Mac. For the Agenda hardcore among us, it's as though Atlantis is rising..."

Josh Fink writes "Space.com has a very interesting article as part their weekly mystery Monday series about a new calculation that shows that the Universe is actually much older than than the 14.3 billion years old that was established in 2003. From the article, "...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide." The calculations were based off of a recalculation of the Hubble Constant which dictates how fast the universe is expanding, and they found it is actually 15% slower than previously thought. The findings will be printed in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal."

Maria Williams writes "KurzweilAI.net says: Tomorrow's biggest danger may be nanoweapons (grey goo and other) created with molecular manufacturing. The Lifeboat Foundation proposes development of detection methods, such as infrared satellite surveillance for nanobot signatures, along with a three-layer defense system, with devices such as an orbiting mirror to focus concentrated sunlight on an ecophagic outbreak."

Accommodate Students writes "The BBC is amongst those reporting that the World Wide web has turned fifteen. However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'. So, is it time to fight this out to declare an official birthday? Or can the Web carry on like the Queen with (at least) two birthdays per year? The BBC also have a Flash Timeline of 15 years of the web."

alien88 writes "Late last week, the Washtenaw County Board approved Wireless Washtenaw Advisory Board's recommendation of 20/20 Communications to cover the entire county with wireless by the end of 2007. This includes Ann Arbor, the home of University of Michigan and future home of Google's Adwords division. The wireless network will be free for speeds up to 85kbps and $35/month for 500kbps. 20/20 Communications estimates it will take around 6,000 radios to cover the county.

This initiative is being funded without taxpayer dollars and is one of the most ambitious wireless deployments in the U.S. Will it succeed or will it fail? Check out the county's wireless website for updates on the project." Of course, the real reason this is worth posting is it's because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Georgia Tech researchers have shrunk an optical device called wavelength demultiplier (WD) by combining into one crystal three unique properties of photonics crystals. This optical discovery opens the way to sophisticated and cheap bio-sensors mounted on 'lab-on-a-chip' devices -- sensors to run blood tests, detect chemicals in water supplies or for drug testing. Their new WD is less than a millimeter in all dimensions rather than the several centimeters of other currently available WDs. And it should not cost more to produce."

Armchair Anarchist writes "Futurismic has just posted the first column from its new monthly contributor, the renowned Jamais Cascio. Cascio is best known as a co-founder of Worldchanging.com, but is also a prolific blogger (at his own site 'Open The Future'), writer, public speaker and pundit on many aspects of futurism and foresight. This new piece sees him discussing the way futurist thinkers tend to focus on gadgets and technology, and advocating the use of more critical approaches."

wayne writes "As reported on CircleID, the nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD. Will the owners of .co and .om follow?"

David Ciccone writes to tell us that he got a first look at Sprint's new USB EVDO card. The new USB wireless card can help users connect their non-PCMCIA equipped devices to the Sprint Power Vision Network. Very few details are available for the card, but David was able to capture a few pictures and the couple of speed tests he ran seem halfway decent.

A followup whitepaper [PDF] to a recent talk at the blackhat security conference has been released outlining the risks associated with web based feeds such as RSS and Atom. From the article: "Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, Auger said. "A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said."

mytrip writes to tell us ABC News is reporting that a supposed amateur video posted to YouTube.com may have actually been designed and posted by a Republican public relations firm called DCI. From the article: "Public relations firms have long used computer technology to create bogus grassroots campaigns, which are called 'Astroturf.' Now these firms are being hired to push illusions on the Internet to create the false impression of real people blogging, e-mailing and making films."

Science Daily is reporting that scientists were able to use satellite data to watch changes in the Earth's surface caused by a massive earthquake. These changes had two major measurable effects on the region. The massive uplift in the seafloor changed GPS measurements, and the density of the rock beneath the seafloor changed which produced a detectable change in gravity.

Warren Ellis has announced on his blog that he has finally been talked into curating a mass webcomics site titled "Rocket Pirates." The submission process is completely open via Warren's gmail account and invites anything as long as it isn't too terribly formal. While Rocket Pirates doesn't pay authors for submissions the site is apparently going to allow each author to post their own advertising via "Google Ads, Amazon Associates ads, ads for their own products, rate cards for prostitution services or any other damn thing on their comic's Rocket Pirates page."

BilZ0r writes "A slight modification of an equation developed by Alan Turing in 1952 has been used to show how the patterns of big cats change from kitten to adult markings. Sy-Sang Liaw of National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and colleagues set out to replicate these patterns using Turing's equations. But they found they had to do more than just tweak the parameters of the reaction-diffusion equation. Instead they had to assume two stages of spot growth with different rules: the first to get the baby cats their spots, and the second to create the final configurations. It took them a year to find a final solution."