If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan Red Hat tells customers, 'No more freebies!" In an email to Red Hat Network customers, the company has announced today that it "...will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003," that "Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004," and that "Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line." Intel Ships Pentium 4 Extreme Supported by both Dell and Gateway PCs, Intel's new Pentium 4 Processor Extreme Edition packs 2 Mbytes of cache memory. Coke puts prize genie in a bottle COCA-COLA has lifted the lid on what is probably the most hi-tech consumer marketing campaign ever seen in Australia. Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny. Personally I am not so sure that something that is supposed to be secure (such as voting for a Government) should be have its source code available to the puclic at large. MAybe it chould be able to be scrutinised by key industry figures, but not by any dark-nerd who has been diddled out of a welfare payment. Amazon: Look, But Don't Touch Amazon.com's new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales. What? is Matthew Reilly afraid that people won't have to buy his books before they findout they it is tripe? As IBM teams with Microsoft on XBox 2, some see a G5 in the Xbox Microsoft and IBM have jointly announced their agreement to work together on "processor technology" for future Xbox products and services. Hmm. IBM. Microsoft. XBox. Something in this picture doesn't look right. Could it be the fact that the XBox is currently built around x86 technology—something IBM doesn't dabble with? Few were expecting to see an IBM-designed processor in the XBox2, but this announcement is sure to throw some fuel on the speculation fire. Microsoft nixing official Virtual PC support for UNIX, Linux When it was learned that Microsoft was buying Virtual PC technology from Connectix, industry-types were quick to assume that the Redmond giant was after Mac users. After all, they reasoned, Virtual PC was all about running a PC on top of a Mac, right? However, Microsoft's real interest lies in consolidation: provide Virtual PC services on a Windows server, and you can sell Windows servers to IT shops that need to run multiple server instances but don't want to invest in new physical servers. Kiddie beer shock for mum KERRY Beitzel was shocked when her son, 13, arrived home from school swigging from a can of Cooper's beer. Phone database 'abused' THE telecommunications watchdog is investigating abuse of a huge national database containing personal information on every Australian with a phone connection. NASA's O'Keefe Tells Space Agency Denial Must End Eight months after the shuttle Columbia tragedy, some NASA employees have yet to accept that the federal agency must change, space agency administrator Sean O'Keefe said Thursday. Sun on Fire, Unleashes 3 More Major Flares The Sun cut loose with three severe flares in less than 24 hours through Monday morning, bringing to nine the number of major eruptions in less than two weeks. All Screwed Up You'd think we'd have figured out light by now. Kids learn about prisms and lenses in elementary school, people wear Maxwell's equations on T-shirts, and the quantum version of those equations is the most precise theory in science. Yet knotted up within the theory is a phenomenon that physicists are still unraveling: an unexplored property of light. Geochemists Trace the Iceman's Travels Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old "Iceman" mummy discovered in 1991 by two hikers high in the Alps along the Austrian-Italian border. Ötzi has been subjected to waves of scientific tests in an attempt to reconstruct his life and death. Now, according to a report published today in the journal Science, researchers have amassed evidence suggesting that Ötzi, believed to be in his mid-40s when he died, may have spent his whole life in what is now Italy, within about 60 kilometers of where he was found. Volcanoes may have choked Earth, helped dinosaurs Low oxygen levels could have triggered two giant extinctions hundreds of millions of years ago, allowing the dinosaurs to reign supreme over the ancestors of mammals, U.S. researchers said. Military tool helps make classier wines Ground radar gadget tested in California wine country. Grapes and geophysics may go together as smoothly as grilled vegetables and a fine Merlot. As previously blogged by James A.: The desktop trebuchet model (C) Shouting Red Goanna Inc. A wholly subsidiary of Screaming Blue Wombat Inc. / Avenging Green Seahorse Industries