It's Sony vs. Sony in Web battle: TOKYO -- In the global race to market music on the Web, Sony Corp. has had an unusual rival: Sony. As both an electronics company and a top record label, Sony wants to capitalize on any musical revolution online, making the latest in listening gadgets for it -- just as it has done before, with everything from the Walkman to compact disks. But the Japanese giant has also had to referee a potential conflict with its own music label which fears losing out to illegal copying.

Letter 'W' Missing From White House Keyboards: In an apparent prank carried out by departing Clinton administration staffers, Bush aides discovered that dozens of computer keyboards were missing the ``W'' key.

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw Bob Shaw is the author of a significant body of successful science fiction novels and stories and is one of the leading science fiction personalities in the UK. His most famous single story is "Light of Other Days containing his powerfully evocative. if imaginary, invention of "slow glass" to slow the passage of light, later used in several other stories that all together form his book, Other Days, Other Eyes (1972)."

Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It on Its Way The achievement is a landmark feat that, by reining in nature's swiftest and most ethereal form of energy for the first time, could help realize what are now theoretical concepts for vastly increasing the speed of computers and the security of communications.

EO Newsroom: New Images - Aurora from the Space Shuttle Astronauts aboard the STS-97 Space Shuttle mission in December observed and photographed the northern lights after undocking from the International Space Station. This image was taken on December 11, 2000. At the time, the Shuttle was just east of Newfoundland at 49.7N 51.6 W, at an altitude of 362 km. The image view is to the north (Polaris, the North Star, is visible), and shows two separate atmospheric optical phenomena.

Speech recognition apps coming of age In the movies, computers are always good listeners. In real life, they only hear what they want to hear. Much as people would like to speak with their machines, to browse the Internet by voice rather than keystroke, recent strides in speech recognition technology hardly provide the ease and spontaneity of a free-flowing dialogue between humans. Instead, the machines monopolize the discussion.

Talking to the Web The voice-enabled web is a bold technological vision with the backing of a number of major players. Will it get a fair hearing from an impatient public?

Mobile phones: now it's eye cancer Whew! What's next?

Related Stories: BT urges UK not to use mobiles, We've got brain cancer and we want your money, Death by mobile phone, US says mobile phones won't kill you, Finally the truth! Mobiles only kill children, It's official: Mobile phones give you diarrhoea.

Is ‘IT’ a wearable car? What could it be? Respected inventor Dean Kamen of Manchester, N.H., we are told, has come up with a world-moving invention that will be “an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous, and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities.” Has the man reinvented sex?

ABCNEWS.com : Mysterious Invention Puzzles Scientists The proposal says IT will sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking. The proposal quotes Kamen, who has won the National Medal of Technology, as saying the device will be an alternative to products that are “dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities.”

New Year Quiz 2 How much you know will tell you how old you are

IS IT LIGHTS OUT YET? See an online display of how close the California power grid is to overloading.

OVER THE COUNTER DRUG WARNING! The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a public health advisory concerning the risk of hemorrhagic stroke to young women associated with phenylpropanolamine (PPA). It has requested that all drug manufacturers discontinue selling products containing PPA. See the article for details concerning which OTC cold medicines, etc. are affected.

Intel Develops World's Smallest, Fastest CMOS Transistor Intel Corporation researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough by building the world's smallest and fastest CMOS transistor. This breakthrough will allow Intel within the next five to 10 years to build microprocessors containing more than 400 million transistors, running at 10 gigahertz (10 billion cycles per second) and operating at less than one volt.

DaveNet : Desktop Websites In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don't have to share it with anyone, it's yours and yours alone. It would be fast!

ABCNEWS.com : Mysterious Sculpture in Seattle Park Vanishes When workers went to Magnuson Park this morning, they found that the 9-foot steel monolith was gone. Park officials said only some burned candles and a rose were in its place. Parks officials were deciding whether to leave or move the object that resembled the shrieking black marker in Stanley Kubrick’s landmark movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They were concerned it could be tipped over. No one has publicly claimed credit for installing the monolith. The structure reminded Rebecca Sargent of Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan ruins — similar vibe, she said.

Dum Dum Da-Dum: Mysterious Monolith Appears in Seattle Park Many have thought of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey now that the titular year is upon us, but nobody expects to actually stumble across the movie's famous black monolith. Cheryl Hatch/AP Tuesday: A curious spectator touches the surface of a monolith standing on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park in Seattle. Seattle residents were a little surprised when a 9-foot-tall steel monolith mysteriously appeared in a city park on the first day of 2001. Denny Sargent couldn't resist humming the theme to 2001 when he walked up to touch the imposing object, which stands like the movie's enigmatic extraterrestrial guardian on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park. "I feel my intelligence increasing by the moment," he said.

DotComGuy, Gone and Forgotten Geeks across the net are bidding DotComGuy a gleeful and sarcastic goodbye. The silicon shut-in walked out of his front door Monday after spending 365 days inside a house where he was monitored round-the-clock via a couple of dozen webcams that blasted the life and times of DotComGuy over the Internet.

Ananova - Two jailed over e-mail scam which threatened internet providers Two men in Los Angeles have been jailed for two years after they sent 50 million e-mails as part of a SPAM scam which almost brought the largest internet providers to a standstill.

NY TIMES - The Dot-Com Bubble Bursts "The current sense of despair in the dot-com universe may be as overdone as last year's euphoria. The Internet, after all, really is a transforming technology that has revolutionized the way we communicate. What recent months suggest, however, is that it may not be an indiscriminate, magical new means of making money."

Microsoft Train Simulator Six highly-detailed train routes from around the world with over 600 total miles of rail, carefully recreated with accurate elevation and terrain data, to mirror the real-world scenery, industry, and towns along the routes. Routes include both historic and contemporary rail operations(they say it'll ship in "Spring 2001").

www.oreilly.com -- Predictions for 2001 Daylight hours are getting short, and it's time for technology predictions for the year 2001. Most analysts will bore you with pedantic articles about new businesses, consumer spending, investment, groundbreaking products, and connectivity speeds. Not this writer! I write about things we all really care about.

CNET.com - News - E-Business - Big Brother knocked in 2000 For privacy experts, 2000 looked more like 1984. Workplace surveillance was the leading privacy concern in 2000, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Privacy Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit that performs research and educates the public on privacy issues.

Why Iraq's buying up Sony PlayStation 2s Both the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI are investigating the apparent transfer of large numbers of Sony PlayStation 2s to Iraq, according to military intelligence sources.

Disturbing Search Requests Ahhh yes. What do "daycare duct tape", "katie curic", and "Wallpaper Underware" all have in common? Are you sure you really want to know?

Language As A Network Protocol The internet is creating an American version of the British Empire, with the English language playing the role of the Royal Navy. In an information economy the vital protocol is language, written and spoken language.

xmloperator : an XML editor xmloperator is an XML editor. You can read and modify XML documents. xmloperator is a freeware. It can be downloaded freely and used without time limit. xmloperator is writen in Java. It runs (should be able to run) on any machine which supports the Java 2 platform. xmloperator includes an XML parser which has been developped by the Apache Software Fondation.

Scripting News: Dave's - "My Editorial" Dave Winer's take on the recent election circus. He describes it just the way I've been mumbling to myself about it, "While the Democrats mouthed the platitude "All votes must count," the Big Lie of this contest, of course they were working furiously to get Republican votes to not count. They must think we're stupid, or have no minds, or just like to vent or whatever. It worked, up to a point. However, when I heard anyone mouthe that particular homily I made a note. "There's someone who's not using their mind."