Tuesday's Badinage

Time once again for The Screen Savers morning briefing. (If this is too much reading for you, try News-Images.com, all the stories, none of the words.) Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre inventor of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography, was born on this day in 1789. Mickey Mouse debuted in Steamboat Willie in 1928.

The news from Comdex...
1. Microsoft has announced it will launch a music service on MSN to compete with iTunes next year.
2. NVidia announced a new notebook chipset, the GO5700. It suppports DirectX 9. Look for it in laptops from Toshiba and Alienware early next year.
3. Sun says it will start using AMD's 64-bit Opteron in two new servers next year.
4. And HP has announced a line of PCs based on the AMD Athlon 64. The Compaq Presario 8000Z starts at $1200. In other news...
5. Microsoft is publishing the XML schemas for Office 2003. Open source advocates are skeptical, particularly since Microsoft is asserting some patent rights to the schema, making it impossible to use in GPL'd products. Office programs still save into a proprietary binary format by default, but releasing the schema could make it easier for developers to create software that can manipulate files saved in Office XML format.
6. A San Jose Federal court judge has agreed to hear the EFF's arguments in the Diebold case. Diebold attorneys have been sending cease and desist letters to web sites posting or linking to allegedly leaked internal documents exposing flaws with Diebold's electronic voting machines. The company is also going after the sites' ISPs claiming DMCA violations. The EFF likens it to the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
7. Australia's first prosecution for music swapping ends in a suspended sentence for the two defendants. Students cried in the court room and engaged in a group hug. "It felt as if my life was being ripped to bits," claimed one defendant. Oh please. Maybe they should have sent the stolen music back
8. C|Net columnist loses free AOL account, proclaims the imminent collapse of the company. Now that's objective journalism.