Basement may end markdown system
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Filene's Basement , the Boston landmark that birthed the bargain, said it will close its original downtown store this year, and it's unclear whether it will retain its famous "automatic markdown" system when it reopens after two years of renovation.
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Company turns over thousands of documents to House panel.
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This lucrative currency strategy may be coming to an end.
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By Jeff Bertolucci Kiplinger's Personal Finance  Until recently, bargain-basement portable PCs were fire-sale closeouts saddled with obsolete software. Not anymore.
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A major upgrade of HTML is in the works but won't emerge for at least two years.
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The printer maker's courtroom setback may mean consumer electronics companies won't try to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an all-purpose competition shield anymore. By Katie Dean.
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A legal campaign against sites that help people share films online appears to have forced a popular site to close.
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Chris Hartjes has a quick post (but complete with code) about moving files around a bit differently than the norm - it's his method for using a HTTP-PUT to push a file out.   A work project is getting close to 0.1 status. Pretty underwhelming, I know. One of the last 'milestones' for 0.1 is taking these wonderful XML documents that my web app creates and sends them to an internal web service. This web service will accept documents via an HTTP PUT [...] so I dug around a bit on the web and put together some code.   The code is a generic "publish" method that opens a stream to the remote server and, in a binary format, pushes the contents of a local file and parses out the response.
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If you own a Dell, Lexmark, or IBM laser printer there is a recall you need to know about. The printers could short-circuit and cause an electric shock.
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MySpace Comic Books, the comics corner of this online social network, and Meltdown Comics, a store in Los Angeles, have teamed up to commemorate the end of âY: The Last Man,â the comic book series created by Brian K. Vaughan, above, and Pia Guerra. The event, âY: The Last Party,â will be held on Friday, Feb. 8, and will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The organization, founded in 1986, is dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comic book business. Of late the defense fund has been involved in the case of Gordon Lee, a comic book retailer in Rome, Ga., who has found himself in court over the distribution of obscene material to a minor. The material in question depicted Picasso in the nude. Mr. Vaughan, who is also a writer on ABCâs âLost,â is a firm believer in the defense fund. âItâs obviously a completely different situation from the writersâ strike, but, similarly, itâs creators taking care of their community, which I always support,â he said in a telephone interview. The $100 V.I.P. tickets have sold out, but a limited number of $25 tickets will be available the day of the event. More information:www.myspace.com/cbldf.
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Sony discontinues CDs that limit copying. Also: SBC unveils plan for three-in-one machine & hellip;. Entertainment companies invest in DVD formats & hellip;. and more.
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The decision by high street electrical chain Dixons to no longer sell the machines could soon mean RIP for the VCR. But VHS (video home system) is just
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A court rules a web-based bankruptcy "expert" is not a clerical tool but is effectively practicing law without a license. Plus: Internet doomed, close browser now. In 27B Stroke 6.
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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Electronic storage will kill high-definition discs, says hard drive king's Bill Watkins. He's got other opinions, too.
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Cutting up old cards could damage your FICO score.
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(InfoWorld) - You might think the steady defeat of bills in several U.S. states to mandate the use of free interoperable file formats might dampen the spirits of IBM, one of the prime supporters ofÂ ODF (OpenDocument Format). Far from it, said IBM's Bob Sutor, who sees the recent news as par for the course in the evolution of any open standard. Last week, California became the latest U.S. state to stall or shelve proposed legislation to require its agencies to adopt open file formats like ODF instead of Microsoft's proprietary Office formats. Similar bills in Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and Oregon have met with the same fate, while Minnesota only passed legislation after it was changed from a mandate to use an open format to a call for the state's IT department to investigate the issue. Massachusetts, the first and so far only, U.S. state with a policy on using open formats, shifted that position somewhat last year to order the adoption of plug-ins to enable Office users to create and save files in ODF. In an interview earlier this week, Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft's rival Office Open XML document standard. IDGNS: What's your take on the defeat of legislation in several U.S. statesÂ that would've mandated the use of open document formats? Is it a setback for the adoption of ODF? Sutor: We've seen this before around open standards. Take the Web itself. It went mainstream in about 1994 to 1995. If you trace it back, the Web was starting in the late 1980s. It takes most technology standards between 5 to 10 years to become established. They start in committees, come into their own, and then commercial interests come in. Web services kicked off in 2000, and we saw SOAÂ in 2004 to 2005. Now, no one doubts that SOA is big business. In the same way, if you look back at ODF, you can go back to 2003 or 2005. It's still very, very early. We wouldn't have thought it possible in 2005 that in 2007 there would even be any legislative considering of ODF. It's great that people are even talking about this in the first place. It's extremely early. Legislative committee talks take time. One year, a member proposes something, they meet that year on it, and the next meeting isn't until the next year. In some states like Texas they only meet every other year. I certainly expect the legislation to come back with a vengeance in the next sessions. Also, government IT policy makers aren't waiting for legislation, they're making active decisions. Changes are under way. Minnesota's bill will give a strong lead to other states. IDGNS: Where do you think ODF is at in terms of your prediction of five to 10 years for a standard to establish itself? Sutor: We're at about year three or four. IDGNS: It seems as though IBM and Microsoft are pitted against each other with ODF versus Microsoft's OpenXML. Sutor: The only one talking about a feud between Microsoft and IBM is Microsoft. On the ODF side, it's not just us, but we're a such a big company, we're going to say something. There's nothing whatsoever about ODF that particularly enables IBM. OpenOffice [an open-source office rival to Microsoft's Office] benefits; that's not our baby, we don't control it. We've put ourselves in a position where [with ODF] there are all the potential benefits of open source. It's interchangeability along with interoperability so if someone doesn't want to use someone's software, they can choose to use something else. I absolutely don't see this as a feud for Microsoft and IBM. We provide chips for the Xbox, we have a large, if not the biggest, services business around .Net. There's no feud. ODF is in the Oasis [standards body]. Microsoft is on the board of directors of Oasis and has steadfastly refused to participate in ODF. We're happy for them to join and would welcome them with open arms. IDGNS: Some potential users would like to see one single standard, a combination of ODF and OpenXML. Could that ever be a possibility? Sutor: It's more a difference in technology. Microsoft XML technology is simply not good XML. Look at the English language. It's a bunch of letters, words, and grammar, and you can use the rules to form sentences. That's similar to XML. You can sit down to write a novel, and so can I. I might write the worst novel, and you write the best. Just using XML doesn't guarantee quality in the same way that using English doesn't guarantee great novels. Microsoft's XML doesn't take into account modern design and steadfastly ignores other XML standards. I have a sneaking suspicion that OpenXML isn't the last format we'll hear from Microsoft. It's totally a personal thing, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a new XML from Microsoft in a few years and one with an architecture a lot like ODF. I could then see a natural convergence which could bring the two together.