There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others.  Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public.  Decades later, we [...]

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With so many creatures facing extinction, it’s heartening to read of the Large Blue butterfly’s resurgence. One of six members of the Maculinea family, it was once found throughout England but had vanished by the early 1970s. That’s when University of Oxford ecologist Jeremy Thomas went to study the island’s last remaining population. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/butterflies/

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After being goaded by the online security community last month to respond faster to software vulnerabilities, Apple on Monday finally fixed a longstanding flaw in the Java code that the company ships with its Mac OS X operating system. http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217801306&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

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Now, thankfully, I can tweet from my Commodore 64 using the adorable app called Breadbox 64 (yes, guys can say “adorable”). Of course, your Commodore needs an Internet connection, but as developer Johan Van den Brande points out, it’s all very doable. In a post on his site, the Belgian engineer gives a step-by-step and [...]

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A faithful source – a former Sun employee who requested anonymity and who still has deep ties with the server maker – said that he was told by a high-ranking Sun exec this morning that the Rock chip was canceled. The New York Times is also running a story that cites two people familiar with [...]

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The Windows 7 Internet Pack will also include Windows Live Essentials, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft who was briefed by Microsoft on its plans. “There’ll be some sort of display at retail,” said Rosoff, who added that retailers would either give away the Pack or charge a nominal fee to cover [...]

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Dell Inc. is offering Microsoft Corp.’s Office products for download, making it the first vendor other than Microsoft to do so. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134367

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Google might be making it easier to adopt Google Voice by letting users bring an existing number. Techcrunch reports that Google plans to bring the concept of number portability to its Google Voice product, allowing you to use an existing cell phone number as your Google Voice number. At the moment, those who sign up [...]

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Safe Calculator is a neat little utility that pretends to be the basic Window calculator when you launch it. In actuality, it’s a safe that can take a single file and encrypt it, disappearing it into the application itself. This tiny, free utility would be useful on the go or when sharing a public computer, [...]

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Adobe Systems on Monday will move its Acrobat.com Web-based productivity and collaboration services out of beta and offer for-fee subscriptions to provide what the company hopes will be a new way for business users to collaborate on document creation. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134359&source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2009-06-15

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