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October 1, 2004
EE Times: Docomo fuel cell targets mobile recharging of phones.
The team designed a cradle with a fuel cell to recharge mobile phones. Initially, the fuel cell would not be used to directly power a phone. "Lithium ion batteries will continue evolving to provide higher performance, and Docomo believes that lithium ion batteries will stay as the mainstream for mobile phones for another five or ten years," said Takeno.
October 2, 2004
InfoWorld: IP telephony: Why wait?
Jon Udell. Ironically, 1994 was the year in which Byte Magazine's computer telephony cover story -- which I wrote -- proclaimed that integrated voice/data applications were right around the corner. Here we are in 2004, and they're still right around the corner. What went wrong?
October 3, 2004
The Economist: Untangling ultrawideband.
UWB has been around for many years in various forms. But in the next few months it will finally make its first appearance in consumer-electronics products. This ought to be cause for rejoicing, for UWB is a low-power technology that supports data-transfer rates measured in hundreds of megabits per second over short distances...
BBC News: DVDs could hold '100 times more'.
DVDs are one of the most successful consumer products in history. Most DVDs have two layers and can hold up to 8.5GB. DVDs are one of the most successful consumer products in history. Most DVDs have two layers and can hold up to 8.5GB.
October 4, 2004
SJ Mercury: Sony Abandons Copy-Control Music CDs.
Sony Corp.'s music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years. Such CDs let users copy their music once for free onto a personal computer, but use the Internet to charge a fee for subsequent copying of the same disk.
InfoWorld: Vendors look to tame DRM standards with Coral.
Six large technology and music companies announced Monday they have banded together in an attempt to bring some interoperability to the DRM systems protecting digital content such as music and movies within the next nine months.
October 5, 2004
Good Experience: Interview with Andre Haddad, eBay.
Q&A with Andre Haddad is the VP of eBay's User Experience & Design. In the Gel conference speech that I gave, I tried to explain that user experience at eBay is a lot more than the actual experience on the eBay.com website. Most of the experience is determined by interactions with other members of the community - interactions that we don't control.
eWEEK: MSN Search Preview Resurfaces.
MSN's latest search preview follows a two-month test that went offline in August. The latest preview incorporates feedback from the earlier alpha test as well as expands the index to more than 5 billion Web documents, said Justin Osmer, an MSN product manager...
October 6, 2004
News.Com: Google borrows a page from Amazon.
The new service, dubbed Google Print, is incorporated into Google search queries. When users search for many book titles, they get "book results," URLs that lead to book excerpts, at the top of the list of ordinary search results.
eWEEK: Microsoft to Muscle Deeper into VOIP?
While Microsoft's Live Communications Server is first and foremost an enterprise instant-messaging server, Microsoft is expected to position its 2005 version as its entrée into the telephony market.
October 7, 2004
Technology Review: Peer-to-Peer Comes Clean.
Simson Garfinkel. But as I wrote a year ago in this space, this technology can be used for good: It has the power to strengthen the Internet against terrorist attack, allow even the smallest publishers to distribute information to the multitudes, and protect controversial information against censorship and suppression.
October 8, 2004
eWEEK: Google Sets Sights on Clustering, Translation.
During a panel discussion of research lab leaders at the Web 2.0 conference here, one of Google's top researchers previewed the search company's work in clustering both entities and words as a way to better glean users' intentions and distill information on the Web.
October 9, 2004
News.Com: Hollywood takes P2P case to Supreme Court.
In a joint petition to the Supreme Court, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America said that letting the lower court rulings stand would badly undermine the value of copyrighted work.
October 10, 2004
NY Times: Phone Line Alchemy: Copper Into Fiber.
The new offering is part of a multibillion-dollar bet by Verizon and the other Bell companies. They are gambling that by going door to door to replace century-old copper wire technology with high-speed fiber optic lines, they can hang onto their most valuable asset: a direct line into the home of each customer.
October 11, 2004
SJ Mercury: New service to give remote access to digital media anywhere.
In a move sure to raise the eyebrows of Hollywood and its partners, a California startup unveiled a new service Monday that allows subscribers to remotely access their digital media files -- even watch live television -- from any gadget with an Internet connection.
Useit.Com: Newsletter Usability: Can a Professional Publisher Do Better?
The Washington Post has a dedicated newsletter called the Weekly Campaign Report that covers many of the same issues as the candidates' newsletters. So, I set out to answer a question: Does a professional publisher do better with its email newsletter than the campaign sites do?
October 12, 2004
Wired News: Music Industry Spurned by Court.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand a lower court decision holding that the recording industry can't force internet service providers to turn over the names of users trading music files online, effectively stopping one of the legal tactics of the music business as it tries to stamp out piracy.
WIRED: Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye.
David Weinberger. But having thousands of photos on a hard disk or DVD-ROM is the equivalent of throwing Bettmann's images into the air and letting them flutter to the ground. Our only hope is that the army of engineers laboring in labs around the world can come up with a better way.
October 13, 2004
IBM DeveloperWorks: To err(or) is human.
One purpose of a detailed description of user actions is to make it easier for developers to reproduce an error. When developers can reliably reproduce an error, the error is a lot easier to debug. If the problem only happens some of the time, say so! If it happens under specific circumstances, include those as part of your report.
October 14, 2004
EE Times: FCC adopts rules for broadband over power lines.
The FCC voted Thursday to modified its rules to open the door to the widespread deployment of broadband access over power lines. The action is designed to both foster broadband penetration and increase competition while enhancing management of the national power grid.
October 15, 2004
eWEEK: Google Delves into the Desktop.
Google, though, is working on expanding support for other formats. Already, it is considering adding PDFs, Lotus Notes e-mail and other IM services, Mayer said. More telling, it also expects to create an API so that application developers themselves can create plug-ins for Google Desktop and make their files searchable.
WIRED: Keep Your Laws Off My Technology.
The part-time tunesmith's worst proposals play out on Capitol Hill, where the Utah lawmaker is known as Hollywood's best buddy. The latest example: the Induce Act, legislation that could criminalize any technology that facilitates copyright infringement - from iPods to email apps.
October 16, 2004
Schneier on Security: Keeping Network Outages Secret.
There's considerable confusion between the concept of secrecy and the concept of security, and it is causing a lot of bad security and some surprising political arguments. Secrecy is not the same as security, and most of the time secrecy contributes to a false feeling of security instead of to real security.
October 17, 2004
Technology Review: Nanotech on Display.
Around the world, television screens are emblems of stodgy domesticity. But this one is in the vanguard of tomorrow’s nanotechnological revolution: it could be the first commercial product that brings nanoscale electronics into the middle-class home.
October 18, 2004
Technology Review: Power on a Chip.
Instead it’s a jet engine shrunk to about the size of a coat button that sits on the corner of his desk. It’s a Lilliputian version of the multiton jet engines that changed air travel, and, he believes, it could be key to powering 21st-century technology.
PC World: Intel Sets Cruise Control on Pentium.
AMD started to emphasize the amount of work its chips do per clock cycle, rather than the actual speed of the chip, as early as 2001. Intel has only recently changed its marketing strategy to accommodate a processor numbering system and increased consumer education about overall performance metrics.
October 19, 2004
Computerworld: HP offers peek at future computer monitors.
HP Labs in Bristol, England, has been working on developing a high-resolution paperlike display technology using plastic instead of glass for applications such as electronic books, magazines and posters, as well as a whole new range of products that might be made possible, such as electronic whiteboards.
October 20, 2004
Adaptive Path: Metadata for the Masses.
Peter Merholz. But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification -- how people classify and categorize the world around them.
PC World: No Go-Ahead Stamp for Microsoft's Passport.
Once a key part of its hosted services strategy, Microsoft has been quiet about Passport in the past few years and has not done any significant development work on the system. Instead, the company has been quietly scaling back several of Passport's components.
Technology Review: Pen Stroke Cuts PDA Web Clutter.
Researchers from Microsoft Research, Microsoft Research Asia, and Tsinghua University in China have devised an interface that goes a step further by allowing a user to zoom in on relevant content and collapse irrelevant content with a single pen stroke.
October 21, 2004
EE Times: 'Gold codes' developer touts wireless security scheme.
The developer of the pseudorandom "Gold codes" used in digital cellular networks and the Global Positioning System has demonstrated a self-synchronized receiver technology for enhancing security in wireless LANs, cellular networks and ultrawideband systems.
October 22, 2004
EE Times: Verizon expands fiber network to six more states.
Customers in parts of Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania will join others already announced in California, Florida and Texas. Business and residential customers on the FTTP network will be able to subscribe to Verizon's FiOS broadband Internet access service for downstream connection speeds of up to 30 Mbits/s...
SJ Mercury: Buoyed by regulatory wins, Bells promise fiber -- again.
For at least a decade, phone companies have been promising to rewire America with fiber-optic cables. Now, with a romp of regulatory victories in hand, the regional Bells say they're free to make good on that ambitious plan to bring lightning-fast Web and TV services to all the nation's homes.
October 23, 2004
InfoWorld: Under Gmail’s hood.
Jon Udell. But this week I decided to take the plunge and try using Gmail not only as a mail search engine, but as a replacement for Outlook (on Windows) and Mail (on OS X). Now I’m ready to join the chorus singing the praises of GMail’s user-interface technology. Its combination of HTML, JavaScript, and the DOM makes the browser do some remarkable tricks.
October 24, 2004
Cooper Interaction Design: Ten Ways to Kill Design.
Over the course of doing hundreds of design projects and teaching our methods to more than a thousand people, we've seen that several reasons for failure keep showing up. A discussion of these reasons follows, along with some solutions to consider.
Schneier on Security: Security Information Management Systems.
Firewalls didn’t keep out network attackers -- in fact, the notion of "perimeter" is severely flawed. Intrusion detection systems didn't keep networks safe, and worms and viruses do considerably damage despite the prevalence of antivirus products.
October 25, 2004
Useit.Com: User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems.
The only real solution is to make security a built-in feature of all computing elements. Yes, it's time to discard the assumptions that computers are only used by noble-minded academics, that the only valuable information stored on the system is drafts of research papers, and that the only other people on the network are university colleagues.
News.Com: Microsoft reworks antispam spec to silence critics.
Among other changes, Microsoft removed language in its pending patents for SenderID that could have included claims to Sender Permitted From, or SPF, a widely used system for e-mail authentication that was merged with Microsoft's CallerID for Email to create Sender ID...
eWEEK: Vendors Address Productivity, Convergence at Wireless Expo.
While executives touted the productivity gains from wireless integration and mobility, most demonstrated streaming video but stressed that applications of such technology should benefit both consumer and business users.
October 26, 2004
NY Times: Intel to Join in a Project to Extend Wireless Use.
The companies are betting that a new wireless technology called WiMax - which is intended to extend the reach of Wi-Fi wireless networks by permitting a single transceiver to connect hundreds or thousands of customers to the Internet over distances of many miles...
PC World: Microsoft Gives a Peek Into Mobile Plans.
Microsoft's director of technology and standards for its Mobility Division discussed some details about Microsoft's future mobile plans, at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2004 conference in San Francisco this week.
October 27, 2004
News.Com: Getting intelligent about the brain.
Q&A with Jeff Hawkins. Current computers just don't understand what is being done, and they don't do a good job. The problem with something like speech recognition is that computers are trying to just recognize speech. They take some pattern and try to match it against some template.
EE Times: Intel, IBM , DoCoMo push mobile device security.
The companies have released the specifications for industry review, and say the 'Trusted Mobile Platform' would make services such as electronic tickets and e-wallets for online purchases more secure and help protect against viruses and other software attacks.
October 28, 2004
WIRED: Sample the Future.
It is, in a sense, a concept album. But unlike Ziggy Stardust or OK Computer, the concept isn't in the music, though the songs are pretty great. It's in the fine print. All the songs come with a license that gives you permission to do more than just listen to them.
News.Com:
October 29, 2004
Wired News: File Sharers Win More Protection.
The RIAA must first obtain an order from a judge to subpoena the internet service providers for the name of the defendant. With Rufe's order, now ISPs in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania must provide a detailed notice to their customer advising them of their rights, before they hand over their customers' names to the music companies' lawyers.
PC World: New Technology Powers Fuel Cells.
Materials and Energy Research Institute Tokyo (Merit) is betting on direct borohydride fuel cell technology, which it sees as cheaper and more compact than the direct methanol fuel cell technology other Japanese companies are developing.
October 30, 2004
eWEEK: Leading ISPs Sue More Spammers.
Each of the lawsuits, filed across four states, allege violations of the federal CAN-SPAM law as well as other state and federal charges. CAN-SPAM took effect in January as way to reduce the amount of unsolicited messages flooding inboxes, though questions remain about its effectiveness.
October 31, 2004
NY Times: A New Rule of Cursor Control: Just Follow Your Nose.
The nouse, as he calls his system, is among the latest in cursor-control methods designed to replace the hand-operated mouse. Most of these systems, which are generally intended for disabled people, track head movements, and often require that the user wear headgear or attach a marker to the face.
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