The New York Times has reviewed preliminary versions of the Microsoft MSN Messenger product and Apple's iChat AV. The long and the short is that the two programs do similar things in very different ways with different requirements. Apple's product has focused on a high-quality solution and Microsoft's has focused …

A press release from Mirror Image announced that they have been awarded patent number 6,581,090 describing their Internet communication system. It is unclear what effect this will have on the web caching industry, but I'm sure a lot of people are reading the patent today.

The long-awaited, oft-delayed massively-multiplayer online role playing game, Star Wars:Galaxies is now shipping.

Not that anyone wants to read this page-turner in an electronic format, but if you did, then CNet is reporting you could find copies on the internet as people have scanned them (all 850+ pages) and put them into electronic book formats. Industry analysts point out that this isn't yet …

CNet is reporting that a New Jersey man who posted a digital copy of The Hulk to the internet is being charged with copyright infringement and faces up to three years in jail and a $250,000 fine. This one seems pretty blatant. He had no rights to what he …

Google has a new advertising program called AdSense that provides automatically targeted advertising for web sites. The idea is simple, they use their searching technology to decide which ads make sense for your site and inserts them into the page (using the standard graphics advertising practice). If somebody clicks on …

Apple released version 1.0 of Safari, and it is now available for download or via Software Update if you have a beta version installed. The release is a bit larger than the betas, because it also includes Frameworks that allow non-Apple developers to use the Safari renderer in their …

Along with new computers, Apple announced a bunch of new products and software, including some available now. iChatAV, available for download, is probably the most interesting to most users, with the exception of the 1.0 version of Safari. The new iChat will allow for not only IM, but also …

Apple announced on Monday the G5 series of desktop computers. The computers are serious speed daemons, with the ability to access 8GB of RAM, a fast 1GHz processor bus, SATA storage and up to two 2GHz CPU's processing data in 64-bit chunks. Of course, they won't be available until August …

Sony Online Entertainment has announced that EverQuest for the Macintosh is now shipping.

I love it when this happens. About a week after the iTunes Music store came out, I sent them a note asking for a global "Just Added" list. Now, I'm sure they didn't hear my one request, but they did add the feature. Not only does it show what is …

An article from the Washington Post raises a new thread from China's giant Three Gorges Dam project: environmental damage from pollution. Since the Three Gorges Dam will be the largest single hydroelectric facility in the world, generating 18.2 Million Kilowatts of power when it is fully online, you would …

I was quite happy to see a mainstream media outlet (the Washington Post) with a concise, thought-out piece on DVD copy protection and how overboard the motion picture industry is going. Rob Pegoraro does a good job of arguing for restraint among lawmakers at preventing users from fair use of …

Business 2.0 has an article (with a pie graph) about who gets your music dollar when you buy songs online. The gist is that the artists pick up somewhere between 8% and 12% (some a bit higher) and the site gets the largest portion (about 40%). It is unknown …

With Monday's (hopefully) impending announcements from Apple, here are some thoughts on the individual technologies mentioned in the "leak" last week. G5 (aka IBM PowerPC 970) The 970 (which it looks like Apple will be calling the G5), is the first workstation-class chip released from IBM's Power4 architecture of CPUs …

In a phone conversation with my brother yesterday, he said "You guys are mean!" In particular he was describing the manner in which the technical community has a tendency to go out for blood on hypocrisy and bad policy. Although I was unwilling to completely endorse it at the time …

A good techno-political article on Wired about the Iraqi internet service provider and its trials and tribulations through the regime and bringing the internet back on line in the country. Particularly interesting was a quote from the head of the organization who said in an interview last month that the …

We didn't actually count them, but the local Barnes & Noble store in Reston, VA last night had at least a hundred (and possibly twice that many) people in it at about quarter after midnight when we stopped by to see how it was going. As would be expected, there were …

A press release from Metapkg.org announces an alliance between Fink, Gentoo, and OpenDarwin to work together to provide the best opportunity for users of the Macintosh operating system to have access to UNIX and open-source projects. Hopefully, the alignment with "raise the pie higher," as opposed to diluting the …

For those into very serious blue-screen and compositing effects, Apple has announced Shake 3, and upgrade to the compositing package they purchased in February of 2002. The package is pricey ($3900 on the Mac, and $9900 under Linux and IRIX), but it is acknowledged to be the best product in …