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..from "decent" sources, and still the submission with a CoolTechZone review makes it to the front page. CoolTechZone sucks, leave it out of here, even if the occasional Microsoft-bashing does go on there..

Google's terms of service for Google Apps has some alarming boilerplate about the company not being responsible for lost data.

I think a lot of organizations will have qualms about sensitive files living on some Google server somewhere.

Less ads:

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,131935 /printable.html

I agree this is more of the same! A couple of weeks ago PC Editor Steve Bass's blog showcased Conan O'Brien comparing TV to streaming to the home. I think this is a big change that will result in more of the same.

At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.

We had local loop unbundling here in the U.S., but then the FCC took it away. Now if you want DSL, it's back to the local phone company -- except for the places where they still have outstanding contracts with independent ISPs (like Speakeasy, etc.), there's no choice.

The FCC's rationale for reneging on the LLU decision was that consumers now had "choice" without it -- between the cable company, and the phone company. The nature of the decision had something to do with classing DSL as a 'data service' as opposed to a 'communications service' or something similarly pedantic, but the upshot was that it didn't require wholesale line leases to competitors, or let them charge more for it, or something.

I can't find a source on it right now, but I distinctly remember reading about it (maybe about a year ago, maybe a bit more).

Finally found some reference to it:
FCC Could Rule on DSL Line Sharing
FCC Halts DSL-Sharing by Telcos
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040303-3487 .html

(Reason I wasn't finding anything is that "LLU" or "Local Loop Unbundling" only seems to be used in the press in the U.K. and Europe; in the 'States they seem to call it 'Line Sharing,' probably to maintain their mandatory 6th-grade reading level.)

This PC World article advances the theory that this is all a sideshow to distract from lackluster adoption of Vista and Office 2007.

Yes, it is unspiked.

Number 1 I totally agree with, though. Apple going after the rumor websites was an abuse of power. And the point about limited selection of Apple models echoes some complaints I've heard around here. But the others? "Overuse of 'iThingie' names," no "Blu-Ray," and "iPod won't play WMA" are pretty nit-picky.

Where were you when france and germany sued Yahoo over content? http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,37524-page,1/art icle.html

Now that this has become the "norm", I'm not surprised to see it spreading to other parts of the computer industry. So much for having a free press - guess that they're not really "free" after all if all you have to do is buy a few ads.

That's what you gotta love about the Internet. Sites with peer reviewing allow real users to post what they think of something. That is, until companies start paying people to flood the boards with good reactions to products. Right now I do believe that the noise ratio is low and better than receiving information from a "rag" as you call it. Oh, btw, has anyone heard? Steve Jobs promised a greener apple. Now that can't be slanted.... No siree.

It's gonna be hard for me to even read a PC World article again without thinking "horseshit" the whole time.

PC World quietly tackled this months ago, and gave the nod to OS X.

The Right Operating System for You

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,105963-page,1/ar ticle.html

http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/webcast.as px?docid=154189

http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/whitepaper .aspx?docid=284783

Sounds like Intel had been planning to scale Itanium to more than one core for a long time.

Do you have some information that says these Itanium 2 chips were never made?

Intel's site seems to say they do exist.

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/itanium2/

I recall hearing about:

"In re Epson Ink Cartridge Cases Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 4347 Los Angeles County Superior Court"

from various places on the web, including: "Have an Epson Printer? File for a $45 Settlement" but being as I have never owned an Epson printer I didn't dig around to see what this was all about. If this was for real and someone knows more about the issue, please post here about it.

Aside from that, related news: "Epson wins initial ruling in ink cartridge suit"

I dunno, I perpetrated a pretty heinous Internet crime the other day, but you need this to detect it.

Since you've never heard of Final Builds (which gives 11 mirrors for Quicktime Alternative), here's some more links for Quicktime Alternative:

• VersionTracker
• CNET Download.com
• PC World
• codecs.com
• VideoHelp.com
• afterdawn.com

I was mostly having problems with WMV files (though also with some MPEG's), hopefully this will make things better (my only Windows machine is for gaming, so I tend to be using it to look at game related info when I'm browsing - which is where a lot of the crappy WMV files come from).

The decision to use WMV is undoubtedly a stupid one borne of ignorance though. From experience, I know there are plenty of ways to do streaming video in a non proprietary way that work fine in WMP, QT and other native video players

the advent of site requiring you to click through several pages to see 20 things
printer friendly

oh wah wah wah. here you go

That's funny. I keep my CueCat on a shelf for giggles. It's one of my favorite pieces of "stupid tech" in my little collection and never fails to get a chuckle from folks after I explain what it was for. I though I was the only one.

I didn't see this in here yet: Print version of the article. I found it ironic that an article about annoying tech had so many annoying ads and clutter alongside.

The AOL CDs have always been one of my personal big annoyances. I still get the freaking things because my in-laws lived here years ago and had AOL for about 12 seconds. Overall, however, I find multi-page articles loaded with ads the biggest frustration in tech. When will they learn that if only the ads weren't annoying, I wouldn't object?

The Cue Cat is included in The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,130638 /printable.html

The top ten "short list" can be seen here.

Less annoying, and you can vote there as well.

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,130638 /printable.html#

About Noscript:

Winner of the "2006 PC World World Class Award"....
(http://www.pcworld.com/)

After all these years Windows is still a big mysterious black box, wherein things happen of which we know little and therefore
have little say in behaviour of or control over.


People say this, and it is so wrong in the context it is used.

#1) MS provides a lot of inside information of what Windows does internally, from the DDK to the SDK to the tech articles to even the blogs from the developers themselves now.

#2) This statement is said like people get a 'choice' in the Linux kernel or the BSD kernel interface when talking about their OSS OS of choice. Unless your name is Linus, or you have spent a couple of years cranking out your own version of BSD, you have NO say or control in these OSes. You get the same dog food they give you and the same dog food you get from X11 and the same dog food you get from GNOME or KDE. (And you can even run GNOME or KDE on Windows if you really don't want the MS interface, truly.)

With regard to the article and people not upgrading to Vista, MS cares less than people on SlashDot apparently does. Even XP didn't have massive upgrade sales, and it was designed to finally get people off the Win9x architecture.

Here is where the real stories are:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130395-pg,1/arti cle.html

"Strong Demand for Windows Vista Reported -
Best Buy and Circuit City both say there is strong interest in the Windows Vista operating system in their retail stores."

Circuit City has even been running out of computers not anticpating Vista sales would be as strong as they have been.

Also note that this is referencing BestBuy and Circuit City which both heavily invested in training their employees and technical staff about Vista before it launched. If your tech and sales team can give real answers to the benefits of Vista, it sells easily in comparison to XP. Again, as long as the machines have 1GB and a Video card that does Glass (cira 2003 or newer).

These polls are always worth a laugh or two. Let's do some math. Last month Microsoft announced that they had sold about 20 million licenses of Windows Vista in the last month. Here's one press report: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130395/article.h tml. I'm sure somebody will say they're lying...well, if they are they'll get sued by shareholders and Microsoft is many things but they have never been accused of funging their financials. Now clearly that 20 million includes businesses and home users and is worldwide, not US only. So let's break down the US numbers a bit. According to IDC the US PC installed base of home PC's is about 90 million. So of 12% of those people upgraded to Windows Vista then that's about 10 million copies in a year. What's the average cost/copy of Windows Vista? I don't really know but I'd guess it's at least $50 (in the US). If that's the case then Microsoft will generate about $500 million in revenue for Windows Vista in the US this year. Not bad. Let's see...what other software companies generate that much revenue in total in a year? I can think of a few...Adobe, Intuit, a few others. There's another way to look at this. Windows Vista sales pretty much follow PC sales. In this article Gartner notes that there will be "No Vista Pop" (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co mmand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9013801&intsrc=ar ticle_more_bot). But they also say that there will be about 225 million PC's sold worldwide this year. Assume that only 75% of those include Windows Vista. That's probably a very low-ball estimate. That means Microsoft will sell about 168 million copies of Windows Vista this year. Poor Microsoft. That'll probably only generate about $15 billion in revenue for the year.

Presumably someone who read the page and clicked on the vote link

Unless you enjoy wading through 11 pages of served ads:

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,130207 /printable.html

the memory footprint on that thing is far, far beyond ridiculous at this point, not to mention noticibly larger than even IE7's memory requirements.

Already here:

"Mobile Phones to get Tactile Touch Screens"

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126228-page,1/ar ticle.html?RSS=RSS

Comet Cursor 2007 soon to be released!

Intel's "Timna" chip had integrated MC/graphics back in 2000:

      http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,18726-page,1/art icle.html

It suffered from the RDRAM bug fiasco, and got killed, since the price of the translation hub for SDRAM negated the cost advantage of the integration. Actual chips were produced, but never sold.

I currently use a PS3 strictly for a BD player and it works quite well. I have the BD remote control that Sony sells and it functions like a normal play would. It even boots up faster than the standalone players. However, the true videophile would say that because the source of the movie is 24fps and the PS3 outputs 60fps that you're not getting the best picture available. I'm not so sure if I'm able to tell the difference myself. Here's an article from that explains a little bit more.

Nice rant, but Firefox does not seem to use more memory than other browsers. See my above posts and the following links:
Radically New IE 7 or Updated Mozilla Firefox 2--Which Browser Is Better?
IE 7 vs IE 6
Firefox 2 - the lean, mean browser

If you can give a set of steps that causes Firefox to use "up to a gig of memory" and does not cause other browsers to use nearly as much memory, let's have it. Then whatever problem you're seeing can be reported and fixed.

Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work

I like the gist of what you're saying, but I think this point is a moot one. Vista has plenty of incompatibilites.

And sadly, it'll wind up being the best selling OS of al time, most likely.

As your assistant, I told you more than once, the ideal drive for this application was the IBM Deathstar 75GXPs.

The $26,000 PC
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/003855.h tml
Thursday, March 08, 2007

Quick--how much did you pay for your last PC? Betcha it was less than the pricetag on a desktop recently assembled by our colleagues at PC World's German edition, PC-Welt. And that prediction holds even if you bought a top-of-the-line Alienware and pulled out all the stops: PC-Welt's computer cost $26,000 to build.

PCWORLD ran a similar article six months ago http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122099-page,2-c, plugins/article.html... can we expect to see pathetic FF extension opinions updated regularly?

not a problem
OneCare doesn't ever find virusses anyways - so this is just a theoretical danger ;-)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129521-c,antivir us/article.html

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/24/HNappled elllead_1.html

http://www.becta.org.uk/satisfactionsurvey/2001/de sktop/summary.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122226-page,1/ar ticle.html

That was a grand total of 2 minute of reasearch and dragging and dropping the URL into here. If I could find this much in 2 minutes, it looks pretty good for Apple in more detailed research.

PC World's posted yesterday iSuppli's market share report for the fourth quarter of 2006; the headline is "HP Beats Dell in PC Sales". It looks to me like HP is responding to what customers are asking for, while Dell is clinging to Microsoft's subsidies. The top 5 vendors look like this:
1. HP - 17.4%
2. Dell - 14.5%
3. Lenovo - 7.1%
4. Acer - 6.6%
5. Toshiba - 3.7%

I thought Google could do no evil!!!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128985-page,1/ar ticle.html/

C'mon you Slashdotters!!! Some more information for you to excuse away!!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120292-page,1/ar ticle.html

From article: "Texas Instruments, a major manufacturer of RFID chips, confirmed that a properly designed cover could block the RFID signal.

'Stitching a metal web into the cover creates a Faraday cage,' says V.C. Kumar, manager for emerging markets at TI. 'It kills the RFID signal.'"

I'm no expert on the things, so defer to others on if the presentation addresses this suggested solution or not.

Your not getting this trailer park. Chances of you understanding the whole picture is slim. Despite hundreds of posts on slash dot of charges made by the RIAA and cases that were thrown out because the charges where false or inflated. You still don't understand the concept of Innocent until proven guilty. Its sad for all those people you will pass judgment on during your lifetime. Y'all pass me some more chewing tobacco and hang that man.

The RIAA tried to sue Gertrude Walton for file sharing 2005. Problem Gertrude had been dead for over a year. I know trailer you can come up with a good scenario of how Gertrude was file sharing from the grave. After all we both know how infallible the US judiciary process is and if the RIAA says Gertrude is guilty then guilty she is.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/05/riaa_sues_ the_dead/

A family in Rome, GA, (one of the 235 defendants) was very surprised when the local newspaper contacted them to ask about the file sharing lawsuit in which they were implicated. Problem they didn't own an Internet connection. I know trailer, guilty for living a building that had file sharing going on. Hey would someone play the banjo and dress my sister up real nice.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060424-6662 .html

The RIAA was offering false amnesty program for a while but discontinued it when they got sued for fraudulent business practices. Wait a second these guys are just a trade association why would they be luring confessions from folks falsly. This must be another lie by yours truly, the person you never met but cast judgment on after his first post. The banjos play in the back ground.

http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001435.php
or
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,112428-page,1/ar ticle.html

RIAA threatens to sue a 12 year old unless the parents pay $2000 dollars. I know trailer park $2000 bucks is a small price to pay to keep your children safe. Those RIAA folks are just misunderstood, they are just trying to give that little girls a lesson she'll keep with her for the rest of her life. Man don't y'all just love those RIAA guys they are just swell. Golly trailer I hope you don't have a inquisitive 12 year old. But hey your a smart guy who can afford a computer and Internet connection I am sure you can afford a measly 2 grand.

http://news.com.com/RIAA+settles+with+12-year-old+ girl/2100-1027_3-5073717.html

Hey did ya notice trailer how the RIAA doesn't use the word stealing in any of its written public documents. It uses a word called copyright infringement. Thats odd don't y'all think that we'd be using the word stealing that means legally something else. I wonder where we got that stealing word from. Thats a lot of thinking us regualr folk shouldn't be to concerned with don't ya'll think.

http://www.riaa.com/issues%5CcleanSlate.asp

Trailer you and the RIAA are just swell folks. I don't know what I was thinking.

You can hold your breath now, I believe someone had already done it. Will I be sued if I google hacking Vista?
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/01/HNvistas peechbug_1.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128115-c,hackers /article.html (okay so this isn't hacking per se, but a crack to make your system more vulnerable. Vista 'prevents' this with it's 'impressive' security)

There has been a "possible price war" for the better part of a year with these two companies. AMD has cut prices a couple times now and Intel has responded similar moves and with new chip technology that proved to be a large, significant advancement. I am not sure what we are looking for to confirm a price war, but as far as I can tell, these companies have been going at it for some time now. With the industry changing every year it seems, it might be difficult to classify this as a price war. Is this simply strong competition in a large market that effects both business and individual consumers?

For those looking for a "price war" you do not need a confirmation. It has been going on for over 7 years now. This article dated Feb 28, 2000 details price cuts by AMD in response to Intel cuts. Then, look who is still at it 6 years later - Price Wars Intensify as Intel Slashes Chip Prices. It is a seesaw game that, hopefully, will not end any time soon. The more they go at it, the more the consumer stands to gain.

Now a related question... Do you think consumer demand or competition with each other is causing the rapid advancement in chip design and architecture.

I wish you were correct: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,109808-page,1/ar ticle.html

> Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?

It's not a claim, it's a statement of fact. You can trivially discover its truth by finding a chart of PC sales over the last 15 years and see. Hundreds of millions of PCs are sold, in addition to ones put together/resurrected from the dead using millions of CPUs, hard drives etc annually.

In case you really are that lazy:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,121858-page,1/ar ticle.html

> almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment.

Irrelevant. The home market isn't very significant.

As part of the deal, Novell stopped funding an open source program to compete with Microsoft's Outlook. So, the public face of this agreement compared to the actual back-room details leave much to be desired.

Put a little differently, would you be upset if your friend was helping you and the neighborhood bully showed up and paid your friend not to help you anymore? You might be upset at your friend if he accepted the neighborhood bully's money and stopped helping you.