August 2004 Archives

Imagine my surprise when I went surfing on msnbc.com today at lunch time and I saw this banner:



I have seen political banners before but this was probably the most blunt one I have seen to date. The banner itself was enticing enough to persuade me to click. And I was immediately ushered to the Democratic party's donation page. No preambles and no information, just a simple donation form waiting for me to enter my credit card information.

To all those frequent flyers out there, you have my sympathy. These days traveling by air is nothing short of a nightmare. This is specially true if your trip calls for a connecting flight. About the only thing these flights don't do is connecting.

One could call it a historic moment. Hewlett-Packard today announced the shipment of one of their notebook lines with a Linux variant known as SuSE. SuSE was acquired by Novell about a year ago. After watching its fortunes disappear into thin air, mainly due to competition from microsoft on the server side, Novell is now trying to muscle in its way into the desktop market but I wonder if laptops are ideal vehicles to go about this.