Danes come up with a beer for everyman
Vores 01 is the world's first open source beer. It will have its
recipe registered under a "creative common licence" that allows
people to brew and sell it anywhere in the world, providing they
distribute the method and ingredients online. Speaking the
universal language of students, the beer's Danish creators said,
"We all like beer. We think it is interesting to see if our beer
one day becomes the Linux of beers."
Unlike the real Linux, Vores 01 promises more downtime, not
less, and is likely to slow data traffic in any system it is loaded
in.
Virtual Earth airbrushes out the
competition
Microsoft is well known for harbouring a desire to wipe the
competition off the map. Now an eagle-eyed netizen has found the
software behemoth taking the approach a little too literally.
Anyone visiting the headquarters of Microsoft's arch-rival Apple
will enjoy the leafy 11-building campus nestling in Silicon Valley.
But refer to Microsoft's new Virtual Earth website for a bird's-eye
view of Apple's corporate headquarters and you will see only a
grainy overhead photograph of what appears to be a single,
nondescript warehouse and a deserted parking lot. Perhaps the US
government could use Virtual Earth to create a world view more in
line with its foreign policy, rather than deal with the real
planet.
Utility firms Aligned up to dig up a road near
you
How come road users seem to encounter road works-induced traffic
jams on almost every journey? There must be an answer. Build more
roads. Extend the Congestion Charge zone.
Apparently Transport for London is planning to deploy Symphony
Gazetteer software from Aligned Assets to co-ordinate road works to
reduce congestion. We'll seeÉ
Every one a winner with no chance you will
fail
US IT consultants struggling to survive on normal salaries were
delighted to hear of plans to extend daylight-saving time by four
weeks. Plenty of reprogramming work to take account of the changes,
they might think. But no one is predicting a repeat of the chaos
whipped up by the millennium bug. However, one was optimistic. In a
post to a technology website, he wrote, "If there is no real
threat, there is no danger you will fail."
Payroll system just got a little more
expensive
Some people have all the luck. For one health worker, life
certainly looked rosy after a cock-up in a new payroll system put
£700,000 in his monthly pay packet... and no one noticed.
It's true. Not all bugs are bad. The cost of the IT system,
already believed to have been £83m, is expected to rise by a
further £69m - especially if it keeps on paying out massive
salaries by mistake.
Journalists get better IT than astronauts
Nasa is providing a more powerful network to visitors to the
Kennedy Space Center than to the crew of the Discovery. While the
astronauts struggle with the space shuttle's 20-year-old IT
systems, hacks covering the mission from Florida get to use the
Space Center's new wireless network. Rumours that the astronauts
have asked for a copy of Elite for their off-duty hours are
unconfirmed.