An article in EconBrowser tells an interesting and probably worrying story of an employee pension fund for the City of San Diego, USA. In short, a legislation was passed, that used any fund's profit above 8% to increase the final payments to the employees, without any requirement to invest additional money into the scheme. For years it worked quite marvellously, since markets performed exceptionally well and the fund made 8%+ … more »

Looks like Yahoo! follows closely Google - they have now something called SiteExplorer - very similar to what Google provides via Webmasters tools. Most important, they now support sitemaps , which is very convenient. more »

I was deeply disappointed to discover, that .NET framework 2.0 didn't contain XQuery implementation. Apparently, it was included in one of the earlier beta releases, but then was dropped by Microsoft in favour of the forthcoming LINQ project - some sort of blend between C# and Oracle's Pro*C (probably much prettier than the latter). I can't say I buy their explanation on why it was done or their proposition to … more »

A review of the latest budget speech from the small business point of view has been published . A simple Q&A article about the budget is available on BBC. more »

According to LINQ FAQ (see question 5), F# is listed among the target languages for Oscar - the next generation of Visual Studio, together with C# and VB.NET. This is quite encouraging - I am really happy to see the OCaml clone to succeed on .NET platform. This will make .NET even more attractive to me, since it will be possible to do development in a "proper" language and still … more »

A very interesting article in The Guardian tells the story of a nice elderly couple from Ashford, UK, which has built a property empire worth £280 million. It's simply amazing what you can reach, if you start at the right time and in the right place. more »

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 has been released. To be honest, I don't understand why the changes required a whole SP - the list is very short and doesn't look all that important. Maybe the release notes are incomplete? more »