ICANN, the non-profit corporation which oversees the backbone of the internet, has a new CEO in the person of Rod Beckstrom, former director of US National Cybersecurity Center. He takes over ICANN in a rather tumultuous time, and during a press conference, he put forth some of his ideas on how ICANN should work. Basic gist: the internet works fine, so there's little need for change.

I guess the tragic death of Michael Jackson put the internet on hold or something, as the amount of news we can find has come to a grinding halt. I did find something interesting, though: HP has made several of its classic calculator models available as iPhone applications or as Windows applications. I'm personally not particularly versed in the world of mathematics (other than statistics), but I do know the love many geeks have for their calculators.

Today, the second version of i3 has been released. It supports floating windows now, which is convenient for many popups, toolbar windows, etc. i3 aims to be an improved tiling window manager, mainly inspired by wmii. Similarily to other tiling window managers, the goal is to increase productivity by not having overlapping windows. In contrast to wmii, i3 was designed to work well with Xinerama and particular attention has been given to producing clean, readable, and hackable code. See the website for goals, downloads and documentation or go directly to the userguide for a quick introduction.

Well, that's a bit of a surprise. Palm posted its quarterly financial results today, and as it turns out, the company is actually doing better than expected. Losses were lower than expected, sales were higher than expected, so from whatever way you look at it, the future is looking a little brighter. The quarter ended May 31, so sales of the Pre are not part of this one yet.

"The magnetic hard disk's tenure as a critical part of the storage technology mosaic is entering its sixth decade, and it shows no sign of ending any time soon. However, certain limitations imposed by rotating media have been coming to the fore lately, and SSDs, which can in theory resolve all these problems, have long been hailed as the eventual successor technology for mass storage. If UK-based startup Dataslide has its way, though, magnetic recording media will get at least one last hurrah, in the form of a new technology called Hard Rectangular Drive."

If the title didn't cause you to spit up your morning/afternoon drink of preference, perhaps this will: the mouse is specially designed to reduce noise pollution by 22.5 dB so that the precious ears of your fellow office workers or the kids running about your house won't be disturbed. Protect your eardrums from the menace to society (the mouse, of course) for only $30 US.

"With Oracle set to acquire Sun and gain stewardship over Java, there are many in the tech world with an opinion on how the database giant should handle its new relationship with the programming language. One of those opinions is being voiced by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who is calling on Oracle to keep Java open. During a conference call yesterday to discuss Red Hat's first-quarter fiscal 2010 results, Whitehurst also took aim at Oracle's operating system business."

After a long wait, Microsoft has finally unveiled the pricing information for the next Windows release, Windows 7, which will arrive at the shops on October 22. Interestingly enough, Europe will get full retail copies for upgrade pricing because of the whole Windows 7 E thing not being tested when it comes to upgrades.

I'm sorry, but I can't get around it any more. Over the weekend, we had a story in the reputable Wall Street Journal that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago in a hospital in Tennessee. This story got all over the Apple media - obviously - and was later confirmed by the hospital in question. All the usual questions arose about privacy, Warren Buffet had a remark about it, and so on. Let's get all these stories out of the way in one go.

Software originally developed for the One Laptop per Child project can now be used on any old PC. Sugar on a stick, as it is known, can be run from a USB drive to give aging PCs a new interface and access to collaborative educational software. The software, designed for use by children, was launched at the LinuxTag conference in Berlin. It has been developed by Sugar Labs, a breakaway organisation from OLPC. " is a great new opportunity to breathe new life into these old machines," Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, told BBC News.

"After considering Apple's motion to lift the automatic stay that put its lawsuit against Mac cloner Psystar on hold, bankruptcy judge Robert Mark has ordered the stay lifted. This will allow the legal process to move forward towards the trial between Apple and Psystar, which is set to begin this November."

We're all pretty much versed in the worlds of GNOME, KDE, and to a lesser degree, Xfce, and while there are lots of alternatives, none of the smaller ones really seem to gain much traction beyond their fans. An exception is LXDE, a small and resource efficient desktop environment.

The Engineering 7 weblog has an item about the improvements made in the ClearType font rendering technology which has been included in Windows since Windows XP. While I won't go too deeply into that post, I did figure it was a good opportunity to talk about font antialiasing in general; which type do you prefer?

IBM has built a new sort of supercomputer that is not only more energy-efficient than supercomputers cooled traditionally with air-conditioning, but the excess heat from the computer can be used afterwards to heat a building. Water siphons off the heat via tubes and small capillaries that take the liquid very near to the chips, cooling it at 60 degrees Celsius. IBM says that the new supercomputer design, which they call "Aquasar," will reduce overall energy consumption by 40 percent as well as 30 tons of carbon dioxide. The heating function of the system will only help reduce heating costs a little, but it has some very promising applications in the future.