Archive for July, 2009
AOL rises again?
AOL, once the world’s largest Internet service provider, was done in by a variety of factors, including the failure to adjust to the rise of broadband. After an upcoming spinoff from its ill-fated merger with Time Warner, AOL will still live but as a different type of company. Saul Hansell writes at the New York [...]
Guides for buying a laptop
It’ll soon be back-to-school time and you may be looking for a laptop for the students in your household. MakeUseOf has a post about 9 sites to obtain reviews of laptops.
Buying a laptop for fall is more complicated this year because Windows 7 is coming out in October. Be sure to find out if a [...]
Low cost laptops
Offerings of low cost laptops are popping up in various places. However, they are in limited supply and soon sell out. For example, CNET reported that Best Buy had a 15″ Acer for $299 with these specs:
An AMD Athlon 64 processor, 15.6-inch WXGA display, 2GB DDR2 memory, DVD-RW drive, 160GB hard disk drive, ATI [...]
Adobe Flash security problem
Adobe just can’t seem to get rid of the security vulnerabilities in its software. Today, it’s Adobe Flash and PDF reader again. US-CERT reports:
The Adobe Flash Player is a player for the Flash media format and enables frame-based animations and multimedia to be viewed within a web browser.
Adobe Flash Player contains a code execution vulnerability. [...]
Chart for hardware lovers
Deviant Art has posted a chart that illustrates many examples of all the common components that a PC might have. It contains pictures of all sorts of sockets, ports, drives and more. A full-size version is available. If you have any interest at all in seeing what various PC components look like, this is a [...]
Will Google be sued as a monopoly?
President Obama’s appointment of Christine Varney to head the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division placed someone in the office who is known for pointing a finger at Google as a potential monopolist. Wired News has an article looking at the possibility that the Obama administration might go after Google.
How the New York Times home page is made
If you are a regular reader of the New York Times Web site and/or the print edition, you may find it interesting to read the New York Observer article, How The Times‘ Home Page Gets Made.
A lot of cellphone Internet users
The Wall Street Journal reports that as of June 30, it was estimated that 338 million Chinese were using the Internet. Of these, 155 million are said to be using mobile phones for their surfing.
This latter figure may not be good news for the Wintel hegemony. As Saul Hansell wrote at the New York Times [...]
Biological computers
Scientists have been constructing the equivalent of simple computer components at the molecular level for some time. For example, a kind of computer using DNA was proposed as far back as 1994. Back in January, I posted:
Caltech scientists have created a kind of computer that exists within living cells. It can be called a “computer” [...]
Congressional pressure suppresses study of dangers of driving and multitasking
Yesterday, I posted about the misconceptions concerning multitasking and the dangers of driving while using a cell phone. Here’s some more on the subject.
The New York Times reports that congressional pressure caused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to suppress a study it was going to do on the dangers of using cell phones [...]
Cloud computing- the future?
A lot of talk goes on about whether the desktop PC as we know it is doomed to be replaced by the “cloud”. There’s a lot of money riding on how this develops. Some even say that something like Google’s Chrome operating system may break Microsoft’s effective monopoly.
Just where cloud computing may or may not [...]
