... So, I figured it was time to renew my OD and WC subscriptions.   Everything looks great so far! OD is better than ever. The quality of the skins on this site is still great. The only problem I now have is: What on Earth do I pick!   Cleaned up my destop (only 3 icons left), installed all the OD apps I used to love. Ordered some chinese food. Ready to browse all this new stuff. This going to be a long night...

The Netherlands celebrates the birthday of Saint Nicholas on the 5th of December. The legend of Saint Nicholas is very old and very few Dutch people know its actual history. It's a very popular tradition and in recent years it's becoming more popular than ever. In many other countries we have the legend of Santa. Again many don't know its true history. It may or may not surprise you that both are actually the same figure. It seems that Dutch settlers brought the legend of Saint Nicholas to the U...

What do you think companies can come up with when faced with people illegally sharing copyrighted material such as music or movies? One solution would be to encrypt the files and allow only people who have payed for it to play such files (DRM). Another would be to store a reference to a streamed and encrypted file. The latter is known as "content reference". When using files that do not contain the actual data, but just a reference to where the data is to be found one circumvents the problem ...

I know that some Dutch have another opinion, but this mine. In fact I never met any Dutch people sharing the same views. The Dutch are odd people. Normally a lot of us are not in favor of our Royal family. We feel that in a democracy an ancient system like that has no place. Except of course when it is Queensday (the birthday of our Queen). It's a big party for young and old. Celebrations starts the day before and end deep in the night after the day itself. Activities for children are o...

I have just finished watching the 4 DVD LOTR special edition of the Two Towers. It was a great experience and in my opnion it is a must have for fans. The success of the movies is not an accident. Everything of this production has been thought out well. Every little aspect got attention. For me that works and I bought both the original and the special edition versions of both parts I and II and have trouble waiting for part III. I don't have the feeling that it was just a clever packaging of ...

It is alarming that when the unlawfull distribution of intellectual property has been limited that people claim information has been censored. Censorship has nothing to do with getting your daily warez fix and stealing.

Governments are or will be concerned about a new GSM phone that is using AES256, Twofish and 4096-bit Diffie-Hellman key echange with a SHA256 hash function for encryption. According to the website: "Strong, verifiable and trustworthy voice encryption in every mobile smartphone and PDA will be as common as IPSec is today in even the cheapest DSL router boxes. The progress of technology finally provides the individual with the necessary means to take care of its privacy rights. Widespread ...

It looks we can do great things like removing toxic waste by creating a virus from scratch. So "we" now can design a real virus from scratch in a fourtnight. Everyone seems thrilled, but it gives me the creeps if I read about it. In one article I read: "However, the method is not yet suitable to make the artificial chromosome, the team concedes, as the viruses produced were not perfect, it turns out. They had mutations most probably introduced by initial errors in the original oligonucl...

A Japanese research team from NEC and RIKEN has constructed a fundamental building block for a viable quantum computer. The basic building blocks of a quantum computer are quantum bits or qubits using logic gates called CNOT s. Among the startling properties of qubits is that they do not just hold either binary 1 or binary 0, but can hold a superposition of the two states simultaneously. As the number of qubits grows, so does the number of distinct states which can be represented by ...

The US should follow Europe's lead against spam, according to an eagerly awaited report published today by the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG). That's how an article of The Register starts. Will just rules help to actually prevent spam? Why wouldn't spammers escape these rules and why wouldn't they move outside the US and EU to continue the spamming the world? Maybe we should replace the current e-mail standard and look for a secure international or defacto standard that is able...

In the past a PC contained a chip (BIOS: Basic Input/Output System) which allowed an operating system to communicate with the hardware. This could be any operating system, including DOS, Windows, Linux, etc. Now Microsoft and Phoenix have teamed up to create a BIOS targeted to the next generation of Windows. The new BIOS may include Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) and a system which prevents the use of "unauthorized devices". Of course the BIOS will have other features, but these two...

Lugworms from a corner of France may hold the answer to worldwide blood shortages. Bizarrely, the blood of the sea worms bears a close biochemical resemblance to human blood and, if trials are successful, could be mass-produced and used for transfusions.

The Ig Nobel awards, a spoof of the Nobel Awards, have been presented in the US. Among the winners were a University College London team who showed the brains of London taxi drivers were different from average people, because they become enlarged in the zone associated with navigation. The annual awards, for people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced", were presented at a spoof ceremony at Harvard University. They are handed out by the science/humour magazine, Annals ...

On the internet one meets people from all of the world. Sometimes I am interested in the history of a country of the people I meet. A few months ago I stumbled on an internet link about the small role of the Dutch in the time around your Declaration of Independence. I read it with interest. Tonight I was giving some tips to a lady on another website about her possible visit to Amsterdam. Because she was also interested in our history I brought that link back and for first time I noticed there wa...

New research in Britain claims a single daily pill containing a combination of six drugs could eliminate 80% of heart attacks in the over 55s. Trials are set to begin soon on the proposed 'polypill', which could end the need for complex screening for heart problems.