In a win for privacy advocates and a loss for technologists and the RFID industry, Wal-Mart has decided to abort their trial of the controversial technology for inventory control, reports CNet. The company claims that they never finished installing the shelf and never received any RFID products from their partner …

A review from eWeek has now hit the web, and the word on 5.1 is pretty good. 5.1 has some big changes from 5.0, including the support for nearly double the number of processor architectures and a complete revamp of the way the kernel handles SMP (symmetric …

Mobile Burn has an article with pictures of the Sony Ericsson P810, the upcoming successor to the popular P800. Features rumored to be in this version: Much thinner, metal case 1.3 mega-pixel camera

An article from SlashDot is reporting that Guido van Rossum is leaving Zope.com. Guido is the original creator of the Python programming language. The article says that he is going to a startup called 'Elemental Security' that will be creating a security product using Python.

ABC News reports that the Hotel Valencia in San Jose, California, has just finished a significant information systems deployment that has resulted in one of the most technologically advanced hotels in the nation. Among its interesting technologies are: A card-reader-armed doorman who can confirm your reservation, check you in, and …

Gefen has announced a new USB extension product that will allow you to communicate with USB devices that are 1,650 feet away using fiber optic cable. Thanks to a pointer from MacCentral, we were turned on to the latest product in Gefen's extension empire. The company has long been …

It appears that a web-site defacement contest that was organized for this past Sunday passed without the big disruption predicted by some, according to an article from MacCentral. There were a multitude of reports about the upcoming contest last week and some security experts were encouraging extra vigilance going in …

There's an amusing article from BBC News that introduces an award-winning "ink jet" printer that uses spray paint as its ink source. The printer is "small" enough to fit inside of two suitcases, thereby making it a "portable" printer. The device can only print one color at a time (it …

The New York Times has an article that describes a "disorder" shared by many of us who spend too much time online. I'm not sure that I agree with the "diagnosis" that what people are experiencing is an addiction, but there is certainly an allure to having the constant ability …

An article in the New York Times reports on the use of VoIP to get calls in and out of Africa and the response of the local telecommunications companies (which, of course, is to oppose anything that may take their monopoly away). In a typical response of many entrenched governments …

From the "uh, right" files comes a story from the New York Times about a group of researchers in Farnborough, England company called QinetiQ that are working on an airline seat full of sensors. The seat is designed to tell the crew about passengers who haven't moved, and therefore may …

In the "better late than never" category, I just read in a UIUC alumni newsletter that Don Bitzer (famous around the University for his work on PLATO) had won an Emmy Award for his work in developing plasma display technology in the 1960's. There were actually quite a few stories …

I can't say that I'm surprised, based on some of the anecdotal evidence that I've heard from places that offer WiFi services for free in order to attract customers, but Starbucks has now stated that they have benefited from their WiFi partnership with T-Mobile. An article in the Edinburgh Evening …

I wouldn't have thought of this, but apparently in Japan (where picture phones have been available for years), people are walking in to book stores and kiosks and sending photographs of pages or entire magazines to themselves or their friends, all from their cell phones. This article from IOL (a …

Following up on a discussion earlier this week, I wanted to lay out some additional performance comparisons between the IBM PowerPC 970 and the AMD Opteron. Thanks to Dmitry for the pointer to this AnandTech article about the Opteron architecture. Opteron memory philosophyThe design of the Opteron memory and …

CIT Online is reporting that Cesky Telecom and KFC are teaming together to provide internet access at 42 KFC restaurants in the Czech Republic. The free service will last through September, at which time, it may turn pay.

According to an article on CNet, Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, NEC, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, and Toshiba have formed CELF, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum. The group is intended to help steer Linux in a direction compatible with consumer electronics, focussing on issues such as: Extended battery life Real-time responsiveness (for audio …

The Economist has an article this week describing the current state of WiFi hotspots and asking some important questions about the viability of the business model that is causing the WiFi hotspot explosion. As mentioned in another article here today, the number of hotspots appears to be exploding. However, The …

An article from InfoWorld reports that tests by Reasoning (a software inspection firm) have indicated that recent Apache code (2.x version) has about the same number of bugs per thousand lines of code as commercial equivalents. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I do find it an …

A series of announcements in the last few days has indicated a continued expansion of "hotspots" for 802.11 access. Here's a list: Barnes and Noble will be testing WiFi access in stores in Seattle and Atlanta (from SmartMoney.com) SBC is planning to roll out 2,000 WiFi Hotspots …