Between the Lines

According to Windows head Jim Allchin, the first beta of Vista is not suitable for mere mortals. "Beta 1 is not what I would call deeply interesting, unless you are a real bithead.

July 27, 2005 by Dan Farber

2 Comments Vote

Gilles Caprari of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has developed a matchbook-size robot named Insbot. Insbot can secrete reassuring chemicals and has successfully insinuated itself into colonies of cockroaches.

July 27, 2005 by Ed Gottsman

3 Comments Vote

Next year, Japan plans to begin development of what it hopes will be the fastest of all supercomputers--73 times faster (10 petaflops: 1 petaflop is one thousand trillion floating point operations per second)  than IBM's top-ranked Blue Gene, according to an Japan Times story.  It may take up to $1 billion and five years to get there.

July 26, 2005 by Dan Farber

3 Comments Vote

Research by a piracy-prevention consultancy, reports Silicon.com's Sylvia Carr, shows that software ranks second among the most popular categories of counterfeited goods, and that Microsoft is the top IT brand to be pirated.

July 26, 2005 by David Grober

8 Comments Vote

Advertisers spend $200 million annually to place ads in video games--and that figure is supposedly (by what magic do they come up with projections like these?) set to grow five-fold by 2008.

July 25, 2005 by Ed Gottsman

7 Comments Vote

If you read my recent post on how EV-DO saved the day during a recent heat-wave induced blackout in New England, then you'd know that I was accessing my company's corporate network through a virtual private network connection (VPN) that involved my Thinkpad T42 connected via Bluetooth to a Verizon Wireless (EV-DO)-provisioned  PocketPC-based Audiovox XV6600 smartphone.

July 25, 2005 by David Berlind

26 Comments Vote

I am a fan of widgets--simple, small, pleasantly graphical desktop applications that do everything from control the sound on your system and display time around the world to feed headlines and give the weather. Konfabulator started out doing cool widgets for the Mac (it also does Windows now), and then Apple decided it was a good idea and did itself for the Tiger release of the Mac OS.

July 25, 2005 by Dan Farber

6 Comments Vote

Customer Interaction Hubs (CIH) are one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately due to some consulting I've been doing.  If you're not familiar with the term, it's because it fairly far to the left on the Gartner Hype Cycle S-curve.

July 25, 2005 by Phil Windley

3 Comments Vote

Each Monday, I make my morning rounds of the weeklies (Businessweek, Newsweek, etc.) and today as I scrolled to the bottom Newsweek.

July 25, 2005 by David Berlind

Comments Vote

"Is Technology Making Us Safer" was the most entertaining and bleak panel at the AO2005 Summit.

July 22, 2005 by Dan Farber

43 Comments Vote