Also: How we hear one voice amid many. Read these stories and more on News.com Extra.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Seeing as our high school network hijinks pretty much led to semi-permanent suspension, our barren hearts were actually warmed by the story of 11-year-old Jon Penn, who has been in charge of his elementary school's 60-machine network since last year. The previous network administrator at the Arkansas school simply up and left, leaving the IT systems in shambles -- and in the hands of Jon's mom, the school librarian. Jon's since scrubbed the aging Windows 98 machines of their accumulated viruses and spyware, and he's installed a firewall and virus / spam filter to keep things clean while he works out a plan to move to Windows 2000 and centralized system management. Right now though, Jon's got his hands busy doing everything from fixing everything from paper jams to revising server configurations, and it sounds like he's having a ball -- he says he's been testing out virtualization products lately, and he's studying up for A+ technician certification this summer. Looks like school's a lot more fun when you're running the show, no?

[Via Switched]

 

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Carnegie Mellon's "Boss," an autonomous Chevy Tahoe, and Stanford's self-driving "Junior" will face off against each other again at the Toyota Grand Prix.

An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm's miniscule and wallet-friendly Centro has managed to reach one million units sold since its launch last September. It got its legs working as Sprint and AT&T's gateway smartphone at that fantastic $99 pricepoint, and now it's making a bid for world domination in major markets in Europe and Asia. The one million sales have it nipping at the heels of recent superstar smartphones, the two million plus HTC Touch and the four million plus iPhone, not bad company in the least.

 

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