April 24, 2001
Salon: Time to buy a new computer -- but why?
Scott Rosenberg. This year, though, when the alarm went off, something strange happened: I woke up, took a look around at both my current computer of choice and the possible replacements, hit the snooze alarm and went back to sleep. Maybe next year.
Industry Standard: Faster, Baby, Faster!
So gearheads, being gearheads, started going under the hood, tuning and upgrading and making their machines faster and more powerful and clocking their monster beast machines and posting the results in public. Welcome to the world of Kustom Komputers.
USA Today: Ford sues over profane Web redirect.
Ford also alleges the confusing redirection "tarnishes the goodwill and reputation of Ford" and dilutes Ford's trademark. Ford said those affiliated with 2600 Enterprises are unassociated with the automaker "and have absolutely no right to point their domain name" to Ford's Web site.
InfoWorld: High-grade DSL gains momentum.
SHDSL promises data rates of 2.3Mbps over a single copper pair, as opposed to the 1.5Mbps speeds of conventional DSL lines. Moreover, the new standard can allegedly reach distances 30 percent further than regular DSL and latency for high-bandwidth applications is expected to be very low.
Business Week: Service with a Virtual Smile.
But thanks to a technology developed by San Francisco startup NativeMinds, Bell's phone has been ringing less. Ford uses NativeMinds software to create a vRep, an online version of Ernie that answers the questions most frequently asked by technicians.
News.Com: Commentary: Cell phones pack too many features.
Consumers won't soon suffer any cell phone feature fatigue. That's because with the industry having done a poor job of articulating the value of beyond-voice applications, consumers will likely take a pass on premium-priced products that deliver functions that meet no perceived need.
eWEEK: Still waiting for Bluetooth.
More than two years after the steady din began, Bluetooth continues to dawdle, hampered by disagreements over protocols, high component prices, interference problems and a dearth of real products to promote further testing and development.
EE Times: Design move cuts Wi-Fi radio costs.
Intersil's announcement last week comes at a time when pricing structures for 802.11b radios are facing extreme downward pressure, as traditional suppliers such as Intel and Agere face competition from low-cost, high-volume vendors like D-Link and Linksys.
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