Applied Materials held onto the top spot among fab equipment manufacturers last year, despite a 12% drop in revenue. According to Gartner, packaging and test equipment were the big winners last year, while wafer fab equipment grew just 3.6%

(Silicon Strategies article. Free registration required.)

As the most free press ever created, the Internet should be a fantastic medium for dissemination of ideas, and therefore a powerful weapon against oppressive regimes. That hasn't happened, The New Republic reports. The high cost of computers and connectivity makes the Internet less freely accessible than, say, shortwave radio or hand-carried audio cassettes. The Internet infrastructure itself turns out to be surprisingly easy to monitor and filter. (Particularly when US companies sell monitoring equipment to anyone who can pay for it, while the US government restricts the export of strong encryption.) Moreover, government-sized propaganda budgets can build a more sophisticated, and therefore more credible, web presence than struggling opposition groups can afford.

When I bought a new computer last year, I thought long and hard about getting a Linux system. I didn't, because I decided Linux wasn't ready for heavy use by average users yet. But it's getting closer.

Ten years ago this week, Rwanda's genocide began. 100 days later, 800,000 people had been murdered, mostly hacked to death with machetes or beaten to death with farm tools. Neither the US nor the UN cared.