Drive manufacturer Seagate announced that they will be offering a 5 year warranty for their disk drives sold through retail and distribution channels (not through OEM's, though, those are still the responsibility of the OEM to handle). Let the warranty escalation begin!

According to a report from PCWorld (among others), Real Networks (makers of RealPlayer) has stated that they will support downloading songs from their Rhapsody service to the iPod starting with the 10.5 beta version of their software. The trick basically is to modify their files to be in the …

Peter Gabriel, musician and co-founder of OD2 (recently acquired by Loudeye) is interviewed by CNN on the topic of digital music. He's happy with the movement towards disintermediation and is willing to give Apple a pat on the back for pushing the industry forward.

Thanks to Amanda for forwarding along this article from the National Review which sheds some more light on the situation on NW 327. It appears the band was accompanying Nour Mehan[n]a, a Syrian artist. The remainder of the article goes on to state that he thinks the original …

Many of you may have seen the article by Annie Jacobsen in from Women's Wallstreet wherein she describes a harrowing account of Northwest Airlines flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles. So, is this a prelude to a new terrorist attack, or just a sign of the paranoia created by …

Blackwater USA (a security training firm in the USA) has posted a document (PDF form) that shows X-Ray pictures of one of the cans from Coca- Cola's Unexpected Summer advertising campaign that involves a cell phone and GPS device in a Coke can. You may recall some fervor (courtesy CNN …

The famous 16th-century bridge at Mostar, destroyed during the war in former Yugoslavia, has been rebuilt and opens today. BBC News reports (with pictures) about the reopening and its meaning to a city with a history of multi-ethnic occupation and turmoil. Even with the sordid history, it's good to see …

Will Smith stars in the namesake of Isaac Asimov's classic book of short stories, I, Robot. I say namesake, because even the credits admit that this film is "suggested by" the book. With that said, on its own, the film is ok. I say "ok", because I didn't find the …

An interesting article in VeloNews about failures of technology in the 2004 Tour de France. Of particular interest is the speculation that the large crash in stage 6 may have been caused by a faulty handlebar.

According to an article from the Associated Press (courtesy of Yahoo!), Verizon Wireless, Cingular and Sprint have agreed with Attorneys General of 32 states to provide additional information and flexibility to customers. Among the concessions are: more detailed coverage maps, the ability to return phones within 3 days, and a …

According to an article from CNet, Marybeth Peters, the Registrar of Copyrights, is set to endorse the INDUCE act (written about here in a previous article). In the history of bad technology legislation, this act is set to be rivaled only by the DMCA in terms of its chilling effect …

The big financial news yesterday was Microsoft's announcement that they would be spending billions on a stock buy-back and dividend program. An additional piece of information from CNet this morning indicates that Bill Gates will be donating $3B of his booty to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his charity …

Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic, Chesapeake & Potomac, AT&T, etc.) has announced their intention to provide "FIOS" (their name for fiber to the home) this year. According to an article on ExtremeTech, this will include a rollout that will pass 1 million homes in 7 states and will provide services up …

For those unfamiliar with the term, phishing is using web sites or spam to elicit credit card numbers (or other similarly interesting, mostly financial data) from people. It has been around for a while, but a recent article from InfoWorld does a good job of explaining why this new breed …

An article on InternetNews quotes Andi Gutmans (one of the founders of PHP) as stating that they have no intention of moving their license to the GPL in the wake of a recent dispute over the use of PHP with MySQL. The issue stems from a recent change by the …

Lindows has reportedly received $20M from Microsoft to settle the pending trademark case. Microsoft will receive the Lindows domain names in exchange for their cold hard cash and Lindows (pardon me, "Linspire") will continue to operate, but with the addition of money in the bank and no lawsuit from Microsoft …

For those who have read the Dan Brown novel, TheDaVinci Code, you are familiar with Roslyn Chapel. The chapel, just outside of Edinburgh is the home to one of the final pieces of the 'Grail puzzle in the book and is now seeing a substantial increase in tourist traffic. Although …

After all of this hubbub over the years about turning off your cell phones because they may crash the plane, CNet is reporting that American Airlines and Qualcomm completed on Thursday a test flight involving a mobile base station and a satellite uplink to provide in-flight cellular service to passengers …

Admittedly, it isn't very likely, but John Dvorak (columnist for PC Magazine) has written a column suggesting that Microsoft may shut down after pushing down the stock price, spinning off some subsidiaries, and off-shoring most of the employees.

Boston-based Tech Superpowers has created a highly-mobile digital editing station based on the merger of a Lexus IS300 and a Macintosh G5-based editing station, including an XServe RAID for 2.7TB of storage. To see how it turned out, they held a contest for best editing at the show, in …