• WiMAX 4G Coming to New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2010
    The next-next generation U.S. wireless technology is preparing itself for primetime in major metropolitan areas. New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles will each have 4G WiMAX by the end of 2010.
  • Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie To Step Down As Chief Software Architect
    Microsoft has just?announced?that?Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Software Architect is stepping down from this position.
    Ozzie assumed the chief software architect’s role in June 2006. In his role, Ozzie was responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Prior to this role, Ozzie was chief technical officer from April 2005 to June 2006. He assumed that position in April 2005 after Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a next-generation collaboration software company he formed in 1997.
  • Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad
    This is just wild! A group of researchers in Berlin have been?working on “autonomous cars” for a while. The Berlin team has pushed the idea ahead by hooking the car up to an iPad. The iPad’s GPS location is sent out to the car, and then the user can even track the car’s movement and scanner information directly from the iPad.
  • Google Puts the Emphasis on Location in Search
    With a few tweaks and an interface change, Google has placed location and location-based search front-and-center in its search engine.
    The big change, announced earlier today?on Google Blogs, is thatGoogle has moved the user location setting to the left-hand panel of the search engine results page. This feature automatically detects your current location and tailors search results based on that.
    The change rolls out starting today and will be available to users in 40+ languages sometime soon.
  • Apple releases Q4 results: $20.34B revenue, $4.31B profits
    Apple reports earnings of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 a share, in the fiscal fourth quarter, versus $1.82 a share in the year-ago quarter.
    3.89 million Macs, 14.1m iPhones (almost 2x the previous year’s number), 4.19m iPads sold in Q4.
    ANdy Rubin's answer to Steve JobsDuring Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Jobs pointed out that open systems don’t always win.?
    But he also tried to reframe the debate. Open versus closed is a smokescreen,? he argues. Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous.? The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, integrated versus fragmented.
    Android chief Andy Rubin responded with his first tweet. (See image)
  • IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011
    The Number Resource Organization, the coordinating mechanism for the five?Regional Internet Registries or?RIRs, this morning?announced that less than 5% of the world?IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses remain unallocated. The IPv4 pool first dipped below 10% in January 2010, and in the next nine months some 200 million addresses have subsequently been allocated from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the RIRs.
    Follow @IPv4Countdown to keep up to date and meanwhile prepare your systems for IPv6 (it’s about time anyway).

If you need to direct output into the void in your program on a *NIX system you simply pipe or redirect it to the null device /dev/null.
Needing a similar functionality today in a C# .NET project I found the following equivalent:

Stream.Null

Seemed fairly useful to me 😉

Too Cool for IEI just received word that this blog’s CSS doesn’t cope very good with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer webbrowser. As the only Computer I own is a Mac I can neither verify this, nor hack the CSS to display properly on this particular browser.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience and please do consider to upgrade to one of the more modern & secure alternatives available for free.