Articles


The future of laptop batteries?

According to an article in EE Times UK, Neah Power Systems (of New York) is creating fuel-cell based batteries for laptops that can fit in existing bays. Their current statements predict hitting 150WH by the end of the year, which would be basically 3x the current crop of Li and …

Is Yao a traitor to Mac-dom?

In a stunning revelation this week, the February 17th issue of ESPN Magazine contains a picture of the gigantic basketball player Yao on an airplane playing a heretofore unidentified computer game on a computer that is clearly not a Macintosh.[Picture in full article] Although reportedly a player of some …

Lucent readies new high-speed cellular

According to an article on CNet, much-beleaguered Lucent Technologies is releasing a new cellular phone technology for data that will be ten times as fast as today's fastest cellular network, NTT DoCoMo. According to a Lucent press release, the chip that powers this speed has been developed by the same …

TiVo answers upgrade dilemma

The folks at TiVo, who earlier this year announced their Series 2 product (with more storage and upcoming home-network connectivity features), have answered the pleas of current TiVo users who purchased lifetime TiVo subscriptions by allowing them to upgrade to the new system while preserving their existing membership. This announcement …

German government shuts down gruesome website

Striking another blow for censorship, the German government has closed down a web site, Ogrish.com, because it contained gruesome pictures, according to Cnet.com in an article posted this morning. Although it certainly appears that the site was tasteless and quite possibly illegal under German laws, it is an …

Kentucky mandates broadband for public housing

According to an article on Wired, the state of Kentucky has issued a mandate that all new public housing units that receive funding of 50% or more from the State's housing corporation (the KHC) be wired for high-speed internet access. The KHC has also stated that they're working on a …

IEEE comes out against DMCA

In a recently published article in the IEEE's magazine, The Institute, the organization is calling for congress to take a second look at the DMCA. To quote the article: "Two recent court battles, as well as concerns raised by members, have prompted IEEE-USA?s Intellectual Property Committee to re- …

NASA announces initial MAP results

MAP, NASAs Microwave Anisotropy Probe, has finally given up its first results. If you're interested in topics like the age of the universe (13.7 billion years), this is a good place to get some additional info.


Google, Apple top brands of the year

Contrary to the belief of our fine Ukrainian friend, Coca-Cola is actually NOT as well thought of as Apple. Apple took the number 2 spot behind Google in a poll of international brands. Coca-cola came in third, 2 percentage points behind Apple. If you want to read on, the article …

Portion of Columbia wing found

The Associated Press is reporting that NASA has found a piece of the Shuttle Columbia's left wing, which has played so prominently in recent theories about the shuttle's destruction. A report (not available) on Yahoo states that this part contains about two feet of the carbon-fiber wingtip plus another foot …

Microsoft files .NET patents

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has filed for a number of patents regarding their .NET initiative. An article on CNet is reporting that at least one of these patents is very broad and may well make the entire API to Microsoft's .NET platform a patented product and therefore stymie the efforts of …

Canadian's debate new ID cards for US entry

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) reports in an article today that Canadian legislators are attempting to determine whether to issue biometric ID cards for citizens that are going south or whether to continue pressing for exemption from the USA PATRIOT act.

PDF plugin for MacOS X

I've been using this piece of software for a number of days now, and I need to tell other people about it. The stuff works exactly as it should, very invisibly, great with Safari and Chimera (probably others). The software is free and comes to us from Schubert IT in …



Apple upgrades Xserve and finally adds RAID product

Apple Computer this morning announced a new version of the Xserve 1U server and a new RAID device called (not surprisingly) Xserve RAID. The new Xserve has one or 2 1.33GHz G4 CPUs and uses DDR333 RAM for faster access. It also contains the new FirewWire-800 announced only one …

Sun Java complaints under Solaris

A number of sites have pointers to this internal memo allegedly from Sun Microsystems and posted on InternalMemos.com. The gist of the memo is that more resources need to be committed within Sun to make sure that the development efforts necessary are spent on Java and that it is …


Japan's move toward open source

According to an article on Yahoo, the Japanese government is continuing to invest money in supporting developers who are working on open source solutions for consumer electronics and government desktops.