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Mary Jo Foley reports on the rumors that Microsoft is looking to aquire or take a majority interest in EDS.

Today, as bombs fell on Baghdad, Kevin and I began work on his science fair project. The goal– to build a helicopter with rotors powered by model rocket engines. $40 at the hobby shop (balsa wood and glue is expensive) and hardware store later, we were measuring, cutting, and gluing together a strange beast of an airframe based on a 1? by 1/4? backbone and a series of 4 A-frames and two pairs of skids. The result looks like a scale model saw-horse collection. We also built the first rotor from 3? of balsa wing; our initial attempts to build an axle for the rotor from a wooden dowel were aborted when we realized how hard it would be to stabilize and transfer lift to the airframe from it.

Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now–we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.

Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school…..

RealNetworks's “war coverage” has pre-empted the free download page on Real's site. Follow the link to the Free RealOne player, and click the download link on the next page…and it takes you back to the front page again. Hmmmm.

For those who speak code….

While (GeorgeBushIsPresident = true,
++ungood){
document.writeln(“God, we're screwed.”);
// figure out how to insert break here
};

I know that they're busy moving the deck chairs around at Blogger since the acquisition, but I didn't know they were running Blogger on Windows servers…until I got this error message today when I tried to set up the community blog for one of my sites.

Um, guys, time to either (a) reconsider your code base, or (b) buy more Windows seat licenses.

eWeek:Intel Scores with Centrino. I should be getting a system based on Centrino from Gateway shortly; I'll reserve judgement until then.

Hmmm, an interesting wrinkle with OpenOffice–I can't print to my inkjet. The print jobs go into a bit bucket somewhere. I can, however, print to an EPS file or to a PDF, which I can then print from another software package if I'm so inclined. Uh….not good, guys.

UPDATE: Okay, now I can print. An interesting little preferences setting in the “StartOpenOffice” application (Support Direct to Postscript Printing) was set on by default, which meant a bunch of Postscript was getting streamed to…lord only knows. A little un-check of the box, and a restart of OpenOffice, and voila…

Okay, so I went through the brutal 160-plus megabyte download of the OpenOffice Mac OS X Final Beta(previous attempts had failed to complete), and installed it. So far, no surprises–it looks very much like versions of StarOffice I once used on Windows and Linux. Very much like them, as in almost disorientingly so–a Windows-like application interface running on my Aqua desktop.

The file compatibility with my MS Office X documents looks good so far, and the response of the app is snappy on my 450 MHz PowerPC Cube despite the multiple I/O layers now running on it. I'm using Apple's latest X11; I'm not sure if that's what's accounting for the over-scroll response to the scroll wheel on my Logitech USB mouse or if that's an OpenOffice thing (if I don't turn it click-by-click, OpenOffice flies from one end of the doc to the other).

Font display is, well, a little jaggedy despite installation of GhostScript and the other add-ons. Quartz doesn't appear to be applied to the X11 interface.

Other than that…well, I'll be doing an AppleWorks / OpenOffice shootout over the next two weeks, and I'll let you know. But there's already one thing that OO has to its advantage–AutoSave. And for the number of times in recent history that I've had a power-disconnecting event here in my office, that's a feature I can use.

I've gotten over 20 emails in response to my Fighting Spam with Spam column since it was posted to the web last Friday. And that's just the mail directed at my own mail address–the “sound off” link generates mail to the magazine's letters mailbox. This is the most mail I've ever seen on a column–undoubtedly, it's because spam is just one of those subjects that touches everyone.

A personal aside: I don't necessarily think that David Black's idea would make any difference, even if it is technically feasible. It could create as many problems as it solves; it's sort of like trundling out nuclear artillery to deal with a shoplifting problem. Sure, nobody will be shoplifting anymore, but then again, nobody would be able to make money legitimately in the market anymore either once the fallout settles.

I've finally gone and done it. After endless aggrevation, I have removed Microsoft Word X from my digital toolbox. And while I still occasionally use Excel, I have moved almost excusively to AppleWorks 6.2.4 as my daily productivity tool.

Why? Well, it reads and writes to Word and Excel file formats. It's not intrusive. And it doesn't crash with the dramatic regularity that Word does on OS X.

Also, it came bundled on my Macs.

I had considered using OpenOffice…and I still may. But somehow, the idea of installing XWindows on Mac OS X to run a word processor seemed a bit…much.