I'm a little concerned that the Gartner Group wasn't playing fair when they wrote this, but giving them the benefit of the doubt, here[1] is their report republished by ZDNet. All the usual, variety is the enemy of efficiency (now, show me one single Windows house that has the …

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 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 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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

An article[1] 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 …

An article on XtremeTek.com recounts confirmation from AMD that using any form of thermal grease (except Shin Estu G 749) will void the warrant on any AMD CPU.

An article on SlashDot indicates that Microsoft is the new home for a free, downloadable version of The Unix Hater's Handbook. The manuscript is nearly 10 years old, out of print and the author appears to be working for Microsoft...

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.

An article[1] 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 …

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 …

An article from Infoworld details the moves by a Boston company, 321 Studios to sue nine movie companies in order to prevent them from suing them later over potential DMCA violations.

If you are a current DirecTV customer with an account in good standing, the company wants you to beta test new systems. Click here[1] for the information from Beta News. Original link (http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1051091353) no longer available as of 2025-12-22. No reliable archive …

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 …

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 …