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The link to the Audio's QNX-based UI was a Javascript link, filtered out. It can be found here:

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/1,3018,a=46185,00.a sp

Larry Seltzer did a similar job with a review of disposable email address services in
PC Magazine.

Spamgourmet (open source and free to use) was lined up against several commercial offerings, and was rated the lowest. It was clear from the review that he didn't spend much time learning about how spamgourmet works -- he wound up faulting it for perceived problems that were addressed by features that he ignored in the review.

Not to be cynical, but if I were a tech reviewer, I might be afraid of lawsuits resulting from my reviews -- open source projects have no revenue, and therefore can't prove up any damages in court. This might make me more likely to choose the open source alternative to get the shaft. Hopefully that's not what's going on here, but you've got to wonder...

Using an alias, Dinh began prowling around in an online stock-chat forum, until he got the e-mail addresses of some of the traders. Using yet another alias, he then e-mailed these folks the key-logging backdoor, claiming in a long letter that he was beta-testing a new stock-charting software system and wondering whether they could help.

Apparently, one unsuspecting sucker executed the software and wasn't suspicious when it didn't really do anything. Now Dinh had a backdoor and simply key-logged until he found the guy's online brokerage information and password. He could buy and sell from the guy's account.

This assumption - that p2p networks were designed to exempt users from central authority - would only be a safe one if p2p networks did not also exhibit other highly useful benefits. One such benefit is the ability to aggregate and distribute access to an ad hoc collection of data, amortizing transfer costs over as many internet connections as there are users. There are many companies developing p2p as a way to cut down on server and bandwidth costs when distributing their business software. Googling for "p2p distribute business software" reveals quite a lot of activity in this realm. The plain fact is that p2p networks are very good at spreading out distribution costs.

"P2P has legitimate uses" would seem an accurate and powerful statement.

On a related note, Dvorak (love him or hate him) has an recent column piece at PCMag where he rants about the poor quality of business press.

He recommends seeking out non-USA articles as he feels they tend to be more critical.

Read the links. CNet likes Mac stuff. Apple zealots hate CNet because they think CNet hates Mac stuff.

Reminds me of how PC Magazine was so obviously Wintel-biased until they gave Mac OS X 10.3 a five-star review. I guess they "get it" now, even though they previously gave four-star reviews to 10.2 and 10.1.

Read the links. CNet likes Mac stuff. Apple zealots hate CNet because they think CNet hates Mac stuff.

Reminds me of how PC Magazine was so obviously Wintel-biased until they gave Mac OS X 10.3 a five-star review. I guess they "get it" now, even though they previously gave four-star reviews to 10.2 and 10.1.

Yeah, Napster isn't doing too terrible.

They're shipping with the Gateway 510XL computer, they have an exclusive deal with Penn State to give free subscriptions to students and have announced their sales for the first week, here is a snip from the press release:

Los Angeles, CA - November 6, 2003 - Napster, a division of Roxio (Nasdaq: ROXI) today reported its initial progress following the launch of Napster 2.0 on October 29th. Since launch, Napster has sold more than 300,000 songs and thousands of music fans have joined Napster's Premium subscription service. Premium members have downloaded or streamed over 2 million tracks during the first week of the new service, and the Company estimates that it will have in excess of 80,000 Premium subscribers by the end of the year.

Demonstrating the broad appeal of the "all access" nature of its Premium service, Napster and Penn State University today announced that Penn State will purchase access to Napster's Premium service for its students. Napster will add thousands of paid subscribers, and Penn State becomes the first university in the nation to offer their students legal access to the world's largest library of digital music via the Napster Premium service. Penn State plans to roll out access to Napster to its students in January and plans to extend access to the music service to members of its alumni association in the future. Penn State boasts the largest alumni association in the country with nearly 150,000 dues-paying members.

About ten years ago, mobile phones were "only for people that make money by talking with people any time, any place". Eventually (in the U.S.) at least, the pager was replaced by the mobile phone. Now, mobile phones are so cheap and convenient, people are using them to replace their land-lines. With the popularity of the internet, broadband rollout also had to occur so people didn't have to dial-in. That being said, the VoIP business is slowly gaining acceptance. John Dvorak from PC Magazine wrote an article about how his Vonage service manages to find him wherever he is, as long as he takes his Cisco phone adapter to a hotel that has broadband. So, once again, we see a potential market driven by frequent travelers that will weed out less stable companies, while strengthening stronger companies to make a market affordable for casual users.

About ten years ago, mobile phones were "only for people that make money by talking with people any time, any place". Eventually (in the U.S.) at least, the pager was replaced by the mobile phone. Now, mobile phones are so cheap and convenient, people are using them to replace their land-lines. With the popularity of the internet, broadband rollout also had to occur so people didn't have to dial-in. That being said, the VoIP business is slowly gaining acceptance. John Dvorak from PC Magazine wrote an article about how his Vonage service manages to find him wherever he is, as long as he takes his Cisco phone adapter to a hotel that has broadband. So, once again, we see a potential market driven by frequent travelers that will weed out less stable companies, while strengthening stronger companies to make a market affordable for casual users.

The poster must not be a big reader of pc mag.

PC Mag has been giving good reviews to apple products for a long time. Here is a link to a review of 10.1 (4/5 stars).

I also don't understand the surprise. What would a PC user find wrong with a mac? It's similar enough to windows to be usuable. I don't use apples because I don't like the lack of 3rd party hardware and the more limited upgradability. There is nothing wrong with the OS.

My SpeedStream Model SS2614 is way smaller and easier to hook up than an entire whopping machine, and it also serves as a four-port router for only $85. Probably runx Linux or OpenBSD on the inside, but who cares. It just works.

PC Mag likes Napster too. But the user comments (at the bottom of the page) seem to disagree. PC Mag also has reviews of ITunes and MusicMatch.

PC Mag likes Napster too. But the user comments (at the bottom of the page) seem to disagree. PC Mag also has reviews of ITunes and MusicMatch.

PC Mag likes Napster too. But the user comments (at the bottom of the page) seem to disagree. PC Mag also has reviews of ITunes and MusicMatch.

There is a great piece of freeware called InCtrl for Windows systems that will show you just about anything you want to know about what an installer program does to your system when it runs. Clean, kinda customizable, and easy to use.

#1 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Your contact list is probably not copyrightable, and even then, isn't copyrighted. That law doesn't outlaw hacking, it outlaws hacking copyright protections.

#2 "I was wrong about Plaxo's supposed ability to break your Outlook password. Company officials confirm that it doesn't do that. I was misinformed, and I apologize for passing along erroneous information."

No - the article you refer to was corrected the day after it was posted. I quote from here:

"I was wrong about Plaxo's supposed ability to break your Outlook password. Company officials confirm that it doesn't do that. I was misinformed, and I apologize for passing along erroneous information."

I already hate this software. I'm a network admin, and 3 users have installed Plaxo, two of them after I advised them not to.

One person in another part of the company installed it, and it emailed everyone in his contact list without asking, apparently. Two people under me showed me the email and asked about it; I did some research and decided that it sounded not only like a virus, but definitely against company policy as departmental contact info is sent outside the company.

Here is a rather critical article about Plaxo, followed by an update after speaking with the Plaxo people:

PCMag Article by Bill Machrone
Follow-up article that backs off a bit

I don't trust it, and it sounds like it would violate every large company information policy in existence.

The irony is that my company has an LDAP directory that each of these people use everyday, so WTF are they doing with a contact manager?

I already hate this software. I'm a network admin, and 3 users have installed Plaxo, two of them after I advised them not to.

One person in another part of the company installed it, and it emailed everyone in his contact list without asking, apparently. Two people under me showed me the email and asked about it; I did some research and decided that it sounded not only like a virus, but definitely against company policy as departmental contact info is sent outside the company.

Here is a rather critical article about Plaxo, followed by an update after speaking with the Plaxo people:

PCMag Article by Bill Machrone
Follow-up article that backs off a bit

I don't trust it, and it sounds like it would violate every large company information policy in existence.

The irony is that my company has an LDAP directory that each of these people use everyday, so WTF are they doing with a contact manager?

Yeah, finally a company built on Outlook's insecurity. Check out this article in PC Magazine:

"Plaxo contains a hack that mines your Outlook profile password so that it can retrieve your contacts unhindered. Although Plaxo claims that it does nothing with your password once it retrieves your contacts, I don't like this, because it makes child's play out of accessing passwords;"

So not only are they mining your personal data for later resale to the highest bidder, they're compromising your machine while they're at it!

But, really, they respect you and your privacy. Really.

I've got two tablets: a ProGear which I bought for $600 when the SonicBlew decided to clear inventory, and a Toshiba Poretege 3500. I can tell you that, primarily, the biggest problem with these tablets is a cruddy software interface. I assume you remember the first incarnation of Windows CE, and how much of the interface was a lift of the Windows 95 GUI. Tablet XP is the same way. While the underlying components are all there, they are implemented to allow quick transition from XP to XP Tablet. The interface on these devices should be more along the lines of CE's CURRENT design, which presents much more information on a single screen, with a much more streamlined (read specialized) human-computer interface.

I'm developing software for the Toshiba, but have had a chance to use it for classwork (I'm a Senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering at OU), and I can seriously say that for people like me that take a lot of notes (read digital packrats), tablets have lots of potential. I can search my handwriting for specific keywords, or "print" a document to the Journal and mark it up, which is a great feature for professors that provide notes to follow along with in class. While everyone else is scribbling madly to keep up, I just pick the "highlighter" and highlight the notes, and maybe make some of my own in the side margin.

As far as the form factor goes, they're getting smaller, and lighter. Look at Acer's TravelMate, for example.

Also, what some people fail to realize is that there are two distinct types of tablets. All of the ones I've highlighted, with the exception of the ProGear are "convertible" machines. A second (cheaper) form factor is also out there, the "slate" machines. Check out a great overview at TheTabletPC.Net.

As they say with many other things, don't knock it 'til you try it.

Mike Hollinger

I did some of the lab work for the PC Magazine analysis which determined what Gator and other "utilities" did... and, yes, it's spyware. See the article for more.

Hmm...G5 systems with standard ATA hard drives and 128mb of graphics memory being compared to systems with RAID and 256mb of graphics memory? Those quicktime renders and search/replace operations are heavy on the disk access, I wonder why the G5 might possibly lag behind....

If you prefer a more reputable source that actually bothered to configure their systems similarly: PC Magazine

The new Macs are fast enough to even inspire debate, which is a shocking development; if you want to buy a Mac, you no longer have to be ashamed of throwing money away. As for platform bashing...sheesh, aren't people on this site always begging for a reasonable alternative to Wintel? You should all be cheering for Apple....

Anyway, I got to wondering whether or not anyone at Microsoft or anywhere else actually knows how these patches work. Are these fixes just huge blocks of code that replace other huge blocks of code? Are they true patches or are they module replacements? The size tends to be formidable. I have to assume entire chunks of the OS are replaced with recompiled code giving us new anomalies each time. Why is this? The worst part about all this is that the new anomalies always seem to be a form of OS deterioration or XP decay--never improvement. You dread each patch. You never look forward to one. Bad things always happen.

• Sensor Webs at Nasa
• Sensor Web Whitepaper
• PC Magazine article

But I've always been a fan of the CharisMac Firewire Dino.

You might take alook at the Kyocera 7135. It is a phone first, with PDA functionality. MP3 player too. And, unlike the Samsung i500, it has a Secure Digital card slot and speakerphone. Another cool feature is the pager style display on the top of the phone. It runs on Palm OS 4.1 and so far works great for me. Here is a review from PC Magazine.

127.0.0.1 sitefinder.verisign.com

this will screw up the "redirect" system. But SiteFinder can still send you a cookie. So go into the edit-preferences-Privacy & Cookies. Put a checkmark on "Ask me before storing a cookie". And before editing HOSTS file go to http://www.techhtv.com and when the "cookie confirmation" prompt window comes up put a checkmark on "Use my choice for all cookies from this site" and then press DENY. Everybody should do this. Best way to fight back against Verisign for the moment! For IE setup go to http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274644,00.as p

The review begrudgingly acknowledges that the G5 is "generally as fast" as the Dell, but the performance table suggests the G5 is much faster than that. The G5 bests the Dell in 4 out of the 6 tests. While the G5 is more than twice as fast on one test, the Dell wins by an unnoticable 2.5% for one of its wins.

Its not surprising that PCMag is a sore loser because they are afraid of losing subscribers to Mac magazines.

It's the beta version, but anyway... Link

It'd be really nice to have some kind of comparison list for various blog sites out there

It's under PC Magazine utilities. I seem to remember you have to register for an account in order to download the software. You have to pay, however.

They bundle the source, so someone could potentially make it work with Windows XP and post a patch. Redistributing anything other than the patch would be disallowed by their licence, which prohibits any kind of redistribution.

Also, the techniques described in the article could potentially be used to reimplement it without using any of their code if anyone wants to.

I have a copy on a PC Magazine coverdisk, which is nice! :)

The real news is that you won't have to worry about your feet catching that power cord.

"MRAM won't replace DRAM for another 10 to 20 years"

I read the PC Magazine article Build Your Own PC! after building my own and they spell it out very simply. Their step-by-step approach could easily be accomplished by many people. Their home-built high-end system performed better than an equivelent Dell Dimension XPS for less money ($3673 vs. $4488).

I read the PC Magazine article Build Your Own PC! after building my own and they spell it out very simply. Their step-by-step approach could easily be accomplished by many people. Their home-built high-end system performed better than an equivelent Dell Dimension XPS for less money ($3673 vs. $4488).

From the Article

I was initially quite skeptical about these claims, but after talking with several of the principals in the case, I'm not so sure anymore. The history of SCO and Unix is complex.

That's when the copyright controversy emerged. Chris Sontag, a VP at SCO, recently visited PC Magazine's offices with a stack of documents he claims proves SCO's case. Some of these documents are compelling. Sontag explained that SCO owns the copyright to Unix System V. He said that through kernel 2.2, Linux was progressing fine under the GPL. But in the transition to kernel 2.4, code was added that violates SCO's copyrights.

Some of the evidence Sontag showed us is straightforward: Sections of the Linux kernel code relating to the journaling file system and multiprocessor support are identical to the Unix System V code. He offered to show us specific sections of the Unix code, but only under a nondisclosure agreement, which we refused. He said this code was not added to Linux by IBM but by someone else, and that it's a violation of SCO's copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but his argument seems convincing.

PC magazine may not be as relevant as it was a few years ago, but it is still where a lot of people get most of their computer news. I was pretty shocked to read this crap as the first story. I would encourage people to leave some feedback for Mr. Miller.

From the Article

I was initially quite skeptical about these claims, but after talking with several of the principals in the case, I'm not so sure anymore. The history of SCO and Unix is complex.

That's when the copyright controversy emerged. Chris Sontag, a VP at SCO, recently visited PC Magazine's offices with a stack of documents he claims proves SCO's case. Some of these documents are compelling. Sontag explained that SCO owns the copyright to Unix System V. He said that through kernel 2.2, Linux was progressing fine under the GPL. But in the transition to kernel 2.4, code was added that violates SCO's copyrights.

Some of the evidence Sontag showed us is straightforward: Sections of the Linux kernel code relating to the journaling file system and multiprocessor support are identical to the Unix System V code. He offered to show us specific sections of the Unix code, but only under a nondisclosure agreement, which we refused. He said this code was not added to Linux by IBM but by someone else, and that it's a violation of SCO's copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but his argument seems convincing.

PC magazine may not be as relevant as it was a few years ago, but it is still where a lot of people get most of their computer news. I was pretty shocked to read this crap as the first story. I would encourage people to leave some feedback for Mr. Miller.

You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.

The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.

We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here and here are some examples).

Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".

then the company claims that browsers such as Mozillia must also pay royalities?

This could lead to an interesting situation. Let's say Mozilla takes out anything that could be offending and puts it into an extension (like JPEG images). The extensions are only distributed to countries where the patent isn't registered.

It would soon become very apparent how much patents hamper progress. It could even lead to a situation where the majority of users illegally use infinging software.

...Shouldn't we be moving toward a model where phone companies transform into bandwidth providers and voice communication service is provided over the same connection as everything else?...

That is what John Dvorak thinks should happen.. I would think it would relieve the phone companies of a lot of headaches...see this PCMag article for his take on this matter...

I don't understand all this WinME bashing. I've used it for years and it's worked well. no major problems. previous to ME I was running 98se.

You're in the minority. Based on a recent PCMagazine survey, WinME was the worst of the Microsoft OS's. For those interested, WinXP was tops for MS, OS X was tops overall, and Linux didn't get enough info to be included.

Also according to PCMagazine, Windows ME is a bit slower than 98SE. Not surprising, of course, with the System Restore and File Protection services running.

Amazingly enough, that's the only OS reliability survey I could come across. Though it does agree with my experiences in the field as well, so there you have it. Consider yourself lucky.

I don't understand all this WinME bashing. I've used it for years and it's worked well. no major problems. previous to ME I was running 98se.

You're in the minority. Based on a recent PCMagazine survey, WinME was the worst of the Microsoft OS's. For those interested, WinXP was tops for MS, OS X was tops overall, and Linux didn't get enough info to be included.

Also according to PCMagazine, Windows ME is a bit slower than 98SE. Not surprising, of course, with the System Restore and File Protection services running.

Amazingly enough, that's the only OS reliability survey I could come across. Though it does agree with my experiences in the field as well, so there you have it. Consider yourself lucky.

forgive the plug, but if the anonymity of the supply side is a problem, mainly because of the lack of anonymity of the demand side (asymmetrical anonymity!) - enhancing the anonymity of the demand side should help, no?

Use disposable email addresses: spamgourmet (my service), sneakemail, jetable.org.

The trouble is, Ma and Pa aol user don't "get" these services (especially mine -- even tech rag reviewers have a hard time sometimes :)) -- I think the next step is to make them more accessible. We're working to make spamgourmet more easily deployable, including a proposed PHP Nuke front end to go with your own installation...

Thinking out loud -- does any of the legislation cover what website operators are allowed to do with the email addresses they collect? Dangerous territory, I know, because anything like that would greatly increase the cost of operating a small website (compliance/legal costs, for one thing), but I believe analogous legislation is underway in California regarding the personal information collected by banks and related entities.

Links:

PC Mag
Extreme Tech

Requiring a physical medium for electricity to travel on is also prone to failures along the medium. Take the oft discussed recent blackout for example, which for all you know was a result of overloaded circuits....circuits comprised of physical conductors.

Consider wireless electricity, assuming it's a feasible idea: This article seems to think it is. I also recall an earlier /. article about it. Wireless electricity would not only help remove ugly transmission wires, and make it easy to deliver, but may also boost reliability.

And then ofcourse, there's the Electricity over IP RFC which could be adapted to wireless networks.

Yeah, it's $700, but more people like it. PC Mag says yes.

Yeah, it's $700, but more people like it. PC Mag says yes.

Its still free and does 2048-bit encryption from hushmail user to hushmail user. Now that's secure webmail. PC mag review here

The announcement and subsequent article imply that 1/2 of all crashes are not Microsoft's fault. Assuming that Office, Money and other MS apps are written "better" than 3rd party code - we can assume that they cause say, 30% of the MS responsible crashes.

Based on those assumptions 35% of *all* crashes are based on operating system specific code. Based on Dvorak's estimation of crashes/day means 24.5 million crashes per day are due to code withing the operating system. That is not a very good number, esp. considering that this is code that other developers have no access to, and can't work around.

It is the basis of the closed-source model that anything that I can't see works, the black box theory. You tell it to do something, the black box whirs, beeps and spits out a number. If you start to assume that the box will crash then the theory no longer works. The solution, accept the fact that it will crash and make your application tolerant to crashes - save early, save often.

The rewrite of the headline from "Microsoft criticises third party code for Windows crashes" to "Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes" seemed a bit unfair, and typical /. when I first red it. However, after reading the article and running the numbers (with my assumptions) the rewrite not only seems acceptable, but even neccesary to uncover the underlying truth behind the numbers.

-Coach