After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form.

CP/M never really went away-it evolved into DOS PLUS, which then morphed into DR DOS, which one-time owner Caldera open-sourced as OpenDOS. Both DR DOS and OpenDOS are still with us.

Apple told it that having Commodore BASIC on the iPhone was too dangerous, which led Manomio to submit a version with BASIC disabled-except you could turn it on again if you knew how.

Wikipedia says that AmigaOS 4.1 was released last year, and that a "quick fix" (read: service pack) came out just last June. All I know for sure is that this version won't run on my Amiga 500-and that I'll shed a silent tear if AmigaOS ever ceases to exist.

A 60-year-old US grandmother, blind for nearly a decade, has recovered her sight after surgeons implanted a tooth in her eye as a base to hold a tiny plastic lens, her doctors said Wednesday.

In the procedure -- which was pioneered in Italy but was a first in the United States -- the medical team extracted Thornton's canine or "eyetooth" and surrounding bone, shaved and sculpted it, and drilled a hole into it to insert an optical cylinder lens.

She was able to recognize objects and faces a few hours later, and 15 days later she was able to read newspapers, the Eye Institute said.

A Microsoft Software Engineer has posted the results of tests the company performed to the upgrade time of Windows 7. Worst case scenario is that it will take a bit over 20 hours.

That's with 650GB of data, 40 applications, on mid-end hardware, and during a 32-bit upgrade. We don't even want to know how long it would take if Microsoft had bothered doing the same test with low-end hardware.

CPCC claims that its brought in over $150 million from the blank CD levy, and handed it out to 97,000 rights holders "most of whom would not be able to continue their careers without this revenue."

At $150 million over ten years for 97,000 rights holders, you're talking about $160 per year on average.

I think it's safe to conclude that "most" of the 97,000 rightsholders aren't relying on CPCC money for any kind of career.

The newest iPhone 3.1 update intentionally removed tethering functionality from all phones operating in networks that are not Apple partners. This is not limited to hacked or jailbroken phones, but also includes expensive "officially supported" factory unlocked phones. To make the problem worse Apple has made it impossible to downgrade back to working 3.0 version for iPhone 3GS phones.

Climatologist Martin Mozny of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and colleagues say that the quality of Saaz hops - the delicate variety used to make pilsner lager - has been decreasing in recent years.

The study found that the concentration of alpha acids in Saaz hops has fallen by 0.06 per cent a year since 1954, and models of hop yields and quality under future global warming scenarios predict bigger decreases.

Apple's Sept. 9 rollout of an iPod Nano equipped with a video camera and a larger screen suggests a larger trend of manufacturers concentrating on multifunctional devices, including tablet PCs.

Of course, by this point, Apple had also released the iPhone, which allows its users to make calls in addition to listen to music, play games and perform other functions.

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures.

"An attack on the nodes with the lowest loads can be a more effective way to destroy the electrical power grid of the western US due to cascading failures," Wang says.

"A determined attacker would not fool around with the electricity inputs or whatever - they need only a bunch of guys with some Semtex to blow up the grid lines near a power station."

The Norton Online Risk Calculator, unveiled within a microsite to coincide with the launch of Norton 2010, calculates your net worth on the black market by asking a few questions about your personal Internet use.

It takes a few minutes to answer the questions, after which you get three results: how much your online assets are worth, how much your online identity would sell for on the black market, and your risk of becoming a victim of identity theft.

Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a browser plug-in to help users keep their information private from prying eyes and from social-network providers as well.

Dubbed FaceCloak, the tool assures its users that sensitive data stays private, Hengartner says. "If you have a particular illness, you might want to allow only your friends to see that," he says. "This leaves it up to the user to decide what information to keep away from Facebook."