Honda Motor wants to persuade Americans to trade in their gasoline-fueled cars for diesel.

Over the weekend, Honda unveiled a new diesel engine that it says burns as cleanly as a gasoline one, and with about 25 percent higher mileage. The company said it hoped to start selling cars in the United States with the new engines as early as 2009.

Honda pins U.S. hopes on diesel technology - Business - International Herald Tribune

The Open Graphics Project (OGP) is developing graphics cards with fully published specs and open source drivers.

Wow ... folks finally got so fed up with nvidia that they're building their own card!

Open-Graphics

The OpenDNS team is improving the safety and speed of the Domain Name System, a fundamental building block of the Internet.

OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster DNS

So-called domain tasting is one of the more unpleasant developments in the domain business in the past year. Domain speculators are registering millions of domains without paying for them, in a business model not unlike running a condiment business by visiting every fast food restaurant in town and scooping up all of the ketchup packets.

In Bad Taste

Theo de Raadt is the project leader for OpenBSD, a Unix-like operating system. We spoke with Theo about the upcoming release of OpenBSD, 3.9, the financial state of the project, and about companies that profit from free software without contributing back.

de Raadt can be ... difficult. But I can agree with him on the situation with device drivers.

Interview: Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD

Avie Tevanian, the man who has led Apple Computer's software development efforts for nearly a decade, is leaving the company.

He was one of the principals on Mach at CMU back in the 1980s.

Tevanian to leave Apple

As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

Backward compatibility is the albatross that is strangling Windows.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times

International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces. In addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer usage compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.

Summary of ISO 8601

The FOAF project is based around the use of machine readable Web homepages for people, groups, companies and other kinds of thing. To achieve this we use the "FOAF vocabulary" to provide a collection of basic terms that can be used in these Web pages. At the heart of the FOAF project is a set of definitions designed to serve as a dictionary of terms that can be used to express claims about the world. The initial focus of FOAF has been on the description of people, since people are the things that link together most of the other kinds of things we describe in the Web: they make documents, attend meetings, are depicted in photos, and so on.

Apparently, there's a standard (which LJ, at least supports). I wonder if there's anything interesting that does anything with it yet...

FOAF Vocabulary Specification

Earlier this year we requested your questions on one of ICANN’s most heated discussions—issues involving top-level domains (TLDs)—which we passed on to Vint Cerf, Google’s VP and Chief Internet Evangelist and chairman of the board of ICANN. Despite an understandably heavy schedule, Vint Cerf has taken the time to personally respond to more questions than we had originally anticipated. So with our special thanks, here are his responses.

Vint Cerf even answered 3 of Decius' questions.

Answers from Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains