Microsoft is telling the truth! At 5 cents per PC you really have a lower TCO!

Since this news is brought on a Friday, you can safely assume it’s bad:

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Job creation came close to a standstill in May as the nation’s employers added fewer jobs than they had in almost two years, the Labor Department reported today.

A total of 78,000 jobs were created, less than half of what Wall Street analysts had predicted.

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Planned job cuts soared in May after hitting a five-year low in April, but it’s too early to worry about weakness in the economy, an employment firm said Thursday.

Employers announced 82,283 job cuts in May, compared to 57,861 in April, according to a monthly report issued by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!

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So far the product is not marketed yet, but after intensive laboratory tests we are now conducting field tests to observe where the filter could be improved for users. Users or consumers are defined as most people in the 3rd world, and they will benefit by having the possibility of clean water with this pipe filter. The worlds greatest killer is diarrhoeal diseases from bacteria like typhoid, cholera, e. coli, salmonella etc. With LifeStraw, which lasts for one persons annual needs of clean water, nobody needs to die from these diseases. This design is made with special emphasize on avoiding any moving parts, to disregard spare parts, and to avoid the use of electricity, which does not exist in many areas in the 3rd world. But as you need force to implement the filtering, we have chosen to use the natural source of sucking, that even babies are able to perform. We have managed to produce this product at a price that people in this business find hard to believe, but we have found it essential to be able to present a price to the consumer in the 3rd world that they find affordable. When fully used in the 3rd world this will indeed be a LifeSaver.

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What first meets the water when sucked up is a pre-filter of PE filter textile with a mesh opening of 100 micron, shortly followed by a second textile filter in polyester with a mesh opening of 15 micron. In this way all big articles are filtered out, even clusters of bacteria are removed. Then the water is led into a chamber of iodine impregnated beads, where bacteria, viruses and parasites are killed. The second chamber is a void space, where the iodine being washed off the beads can maintain their killing effect. The last chamber consists of granulated active carbon, which role is to take the main part of the bad smell of iodine, and to take the parasites that have not been taken by the pre-filter or killed by the iodine. The biggest parasites will be taken by the pre-filter, the weakest will be killed by the iodine, and the medium range parasites will be picked up by the active carbon. The main interest to everyone is the killing of bacteria, and here our laboratory reading tells us that we have a log. 7 to log 8 kill of most bacteria. This is better than tap water in many developed countries.

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DEN HAAG – Staatssecretaris Van Gennip (Economische Zaken) is tegen een ongebreidelde patentering van nieuwe software. Ze heeft dat donderdag aan de Tweede Kamer geschreven naar aanleiding van een advies over een omstreden Europees voorstel. Het advies om onderhandelingen over de richtlijn stop te zetten, legt de staatssecretaris naast zich neer.

Grote bedrijven claimen op dit moment van honderden softwarevindingen het octrooi. Veel octrooien leveren geen bijdrage aan de stand van de techniek, beargumenteert een speciale adviescommissie. Van Gennip herkent zich in dat beeld.

Volgende stap: Van Gennip overtuigen dat ook de gebreidelde patentering van software slecht is.

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The number of people in Sudan’s Darfur region who need food has jumped to 3.5 million — more than half of the population — as rural families join refugees in the hunger line, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) will seek an additional $96 million for Darfur, bringing its budget to $563 million for the year, according to Holdbrook Arthur, WFP regional director for East and Central Africa.

Its massive aid operation, hit by a chronic lack of trucks and attacks on its land convoys, will also start flying mobile teams to remote areas to distribute rations, he added.

“We are talking about 3.5 million (people) including the local population who have lost or are dramatically losing their livelihood because of insecurity,” Arthur told a briefing after a two-week trip to Darfur. “A lot of people are going hungry.”

An Iraqi youth looks at a vehicle destroyed by a suicide car bomb attack in the northern town of Tuz Khurmatu, on the highway between Baghdad and the strategic oil city of Kirkuk, June 2, 2005. A suicide bomber ploughed his car into a restaurant where bodyguards of Deputy Prime Minister Rowsch Shways were eating, police said. Doctors said 12 people were killed and 37 wounded.

Volunteers desperately try to save whales beached at Dolphin Bay near Busselton, Australia. One of the false killer whales died in the beaching but the massive public turnout managed to save the others, local wildlife officials said.(AFP/Greg Wood)