New Year's News

Enough time off. It's back to work news hounds! Hope you had a good holiday even if you didn't get that aircraft carrier you wanted. Begin the year with tech predictions. Forbes's editors, Jon Fortt in the San Jose Mercury-News and Charles Arthur from the UK's Independent all make interesting reading. I'll make mine on the radio where no one will remember twelve months hence. Samuel Pepys invented the blog on this day in 1660. Watson was introduced to Holmes in 1881. Röntgen announces his discovery of x-rays in 1896. Nathan Stubblefield makes the first public demonstration of radio in 1902. The ball dropped for the first time in Times Square in 1908. The UNIX epoch begins at midnight in 1970. It will end in 2038. Cigarette ads were banned in 1971. AT&T is split into eight regional Bells in 1984. The last new Far Side comic appeared in 1995. Happy birthday Father Guido Sarducci, he's 61. Bill and Melinda Gates celebrate their 10th anniversary today.

1. We didn't need the usual leap second last night. Seems the Earth's rotation is no longer slowing, so there's no need to adjust the length of the year. As usual, scientists are baffled.
2. That's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you. The creator of the World Wide Web was on the Queen's New Year's Honors List and is now a knight or something.
3. Sun has dumped the Cobalt line, just three years after paying $2 billion for the little blue server company. Kind of a shame, they were great boxes, but apparently most people just built their own. Sun will continue to support current owners for three more years.
4. Jon Johansen, creator of DeCSS, the DVD decryption program, is off the hook. Last week a Norwegian appeals court cleared Johansen of all charges.
5. AOL has released a list of the Top 10 Spam Subject Lines. And the winner is... "Viagra online." Other winners include "Get out of debt," "Get bigger," and the ever popular "As seen on oprah."
6. As long as we're talking lists, Yahoo! has released its top 10 searches of 2003. "Kazaa" is #1, "Harry Potter" #2. Google annual year-end Zeitgeist says "Britney Spears" was #1. The #1 brand search was Ferarri.