Sunday, June 4, 2006

Biotown, USA: The town of Reynolds, Indiana -- population 533 -- is also home to some 150,000 hogs. Some smart state officials have conviced Reynolds to become a showcase "biotown", generating all their electricity from biogas produced by the decomposition of pig manure. Looks like they're planning to power municipal vehicles on ethanol or biodiesel too. [theWatt: Energy News and Discussion] 7:56:49 AM

Key To "An Inconvenient Truth": Apple's "Keynote" is the presentation workhorse behind Al Gore's highly acclaimed documentary on global climate change. Keynote's ability to import, sequence, and transition extremely high resolution images and video clips for display on a 15x45 foot screen is what made it so appealing and useful for this film project. [Apple Hot News via MyAppleMenu] 7:25:51 AM

Microsoft Strips Adobe PDF from Office 2007: Here's a major dustup over the "Portable Document Format" (PDF) invented by Adobe and made freely available to all software vendors that want to use it. Microsoft got into trouble because of their penchant for "embrace and extend" -- they wanted PDF in Office 2007 alongside their own rival "XPS" work-alike product, which in Adobe's view threatened to steal marketshare from PDF. By comparison, for nearly five years PDF has been an integral part of Mac OS X at the operating system level, making "print to PDF" available to all applications, not just a suite subset. Virtually any document on a Mac can easily be made into a PDF that's viewable on any other computer platform. For all computer users, it's simple, elegant, and easy. So why is Microsoft so intent on reinventing this in their own image? [Information Week] 6:52:43 AM

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