Reading on a Jet Plane
The advantage of sitting around in an airport or on a plane is that you can get some reading done.

St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, New York has an online job bidding website, which nurses can use to bid for shift work. According to BusinessWeek, "Nurses scan the available shifts, then post the hourly wage they would be willing to work for. The hospital reviews the bids, taking into consideration each nurse's skills and the number of hours already worked that week. The nurses usually hear back from the hospital within 24 hours."

The Tapwave Zodiac was cited by Stephen H. Wildstorm as an extreme example of the differences between Palm vs. Windows Mobile development. While PalmSource encourages divergence of platforms, leading to significant innovation but at a loss of compatibility (applications for a Tapwave Zodiac may not run on other Palm devices), Windows Mobile devices emphasize application compatibility, which results in a loss of innovation. Wildstorm's conclusion: "Compatibility is a good thing, but it can come at the price of dull conformity. Microsoft's strategy makes a lot of business sense, but I hope that, for the sake of consumer choice, PalmSource and its licensees can keep the experiments coming."

Warner Music Group is leaving the Time Warner fold. (By the way, AOL Time Warner has changed its name to Time Warner. (I really need to read more often.) Back to Warner Music Group: Edgar Bronfman Jr. and a group of investors bought the group for $2.6 billion, which will be privately held and thus not subject to the quarterly pressures that plague public companies. One major challenge will be "bloated artist deals" (Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey deals being cited as examples.) BusinessWeek notes that "Warner Music may soon have to contend with a costly deal...its longstanding partnership with Madonna and her Maverick Records."

According to an InfoWorld column by Ephraim Schwartz, Microsoft is pushing C# and the .Net framework in universities, resulting in graduates who are asking their employers to use those same tools. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the companies would be locked into a Windows environment; Ximian (part of Novell) is working on the Mono Project, "an open source platform for building and deploying .NET applications on Linux and UNIX."

NetMeeting is being retired by Microsoft. The replacement will be Office Live Meeting (formerly known as PlaceWare).