technology Articles


CNet's review of Apple Music Service lukewarm

If you are interested in CNet's take on the new Apple music service, you can check out the analysis article. I've read it and I agree that the visible changes may be evolutionary, but the packaging, ease-of-use, and DRM changes are rather large. I was amused to see some …

IBM introduces portal speech recognition

IBM has released a set of routines designed to be integrated into portals that will allow for accessing web sites via Cellular (and presumedly other) phones. The code (called the Transcription Applet) is written in Java (of course), and is available as a free trial (along with some interesting documentation …

Intel to read your lips

Intel has an article on their site describing "Audio Visual Speech Recognition" and the technique employed to achieve higher reliability in recognizing human speech. The kicker is that there is open source code available as well. Way to go.

150 days with a TabletPC

A consultant using a TabletPC running Microsoft Windows XP has written about his experiences in the first 150 days for Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine. The long and the short of it is that he likes it, with some quirks. Especially for the kinds of meeting related and document review work …

Satellite Radio on your PC

I'm not thinking this is an appropriate counter story to the Mac users new iTunes services and software, but the folks at XM Radio announced that they will make available their satellite radio service directly on PC desktops using the cryptically named XMPCR.

University uses iTunes/iPod for lectures

Georgia College and State University has come up with an interesting use for Apple's iPod. MacWorld is reporting that the university is running a program where students can load up iPods with audio tracks of lectures given during the semester. The specifics are interesting in terms of why and …

Apple announces Music-related products and upgrades

To almost nobody's surprise, Apple announced a series of new products related to personal music. In the follow on to "Rip, Mix, Burn", Apple is now encouraging people to "Buy, Mix, iPod". Stay tuned for a series of reviews on the music service and the new iPod (ordered today, hopefully …

New Palms said to compete with PocketPCs

An article from InfoWorld reports that the new devices from Palm) may finally start to compete with the latest Microsoft PDA products. At the core of the advances are more memory (64MB), integrated WiFi, and a faster CPU. However, the key feature is the battery life, which is supposed to …

Intel to release 32-bit converter to fight Opteron

In order to fight some of the bad press that Intel is getting about the Itanium processor in comparison to the Opteron processor from AMD, Intel has announced that they will be producing a 32-bit "converter" to allow 32-bit code to run on the 64-bit architecture. The article in Information …

Remote memory access over Ethernet

An article on CommsDesign (part of EETimes) describes the work going on to implement and make available RDMA over Ethernet (Remote Direct Memory Access over Ethernet). This struck me as mildly amusing in the context of the recent IP over FireWire work because FireWire is basically a DMA protocol and …



Online grocers make comeback

In an article that will remind some of the nay-sayers that not all ideas during the "dot- com" boom were bad, BusinessWeek details some of the successful moves by brick-and-mortal grocery stores to provide online grocery delivery services.

Hard Drive backup with... well... hard drives!

An article on Tom's Hardware details the project in Germany to build a 70TB (that's 70,000,000,000,000 bytes) back up system with hard drives. Amusingly, I was just this lunch talking about a "drive robot" that I was suggesting would be a more efficient (speed and cost …

Online marketers push for self regulation before it's too late

Nobody likes spam (except maybe the members of the Monty Python troupe), but a group of online marketers, calling themselves the Email Service Provider Coalition (an initiative of the Network Advertising Initiative) has announced plans to create a system to register, rate and authenticate advertising on the 'net. With growing …



Vonage to get 911 services for their customers

CNet is reporting that the Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone provider Vonage customers will soon be getting a service that most local telephone customers expect to have everywhere these days, 911 routing services. Because of the way that VoIP calls are handled, there is no direct interaction with the local …

2004 Audi A8 may be ultimate geek car

A report from Wired describes some of the geeky features of the 2004 Audio A8 sedan. Audi's flagship vehicle will contain 2 LCD displays and a potpourri of various toys and gadgets, including: solar-powered air conditioning that acts while you are away from the car, heated door locks (to keep …