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January 3, 2005
Useit.Com: Reviving Advanced Hypertext.
The Web really has only one feature: uni-directional plain links that replace the existing page with a new one. Yes, the feature has twists, such as the ability to go back or open the link in a new window, but fundamentally, the Web has no advanced hypertext capabilities.
January 4, 2005
PC World: Linksys Secures Media Streaming.
The Linksys Wireless-G Media Link, to be announced this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is one of a growing number of devices for sending music, video, and photos from a PC to consumer electronics devices around a home.
January 5, 2005
PC World: Giant Consumer Electronics Blowout in Vegas.
Comdex is dead, long live CES: Las Vegas will be packed this week with products ranging from humungous TVs to home entertainment servers, smart cars, portable music and video players, and wireless devices.
Technology Review: Making New Energy Sources An Easier 'Cell'.
But PolyFuel, a Mountain View, California technology company, has approached the fuel cell problem from a different angle. It doesn't aspire to build a better power source, but rather to make current designs work better by refining its central component: the membrane.
January 6, 2005
Wired News: Search Looks at the Big Picture.
The group, which includes the Xerox Research Centre Europe and universities in France, England, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, has developed software that can recognize everyday objects in digital images, according to Christopher Dance, a senior research scientist at Xerox.
Schneier on Security: Easy-to-Remember PINs.
"Keep forgetting your PIN? It's easy to change with chip and PIN. To something more memorable like a birthday or your lucky numbers." Don't the credit card companies have anyone working on security?
eWEEK: Microsoft to Serve Up Monthly Virus Zapper.
Continuing its recent spate of security moves, Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it plans to release a virus detection and removal tool on Jan. 11. The antivirus fighter will be updated on the second Tuesday of every month as part of the company's scheduled software patching cycle.
January 7, 2005
EE Times: Deploy first, says FCC's Powell, ask questions later.
FCC Chairman Michael Powell, in a staged interview with Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro that has become an annual crowd-pleaser at the Consumer Electronics Show, issued his annual reminder to the industry that they're largely on their own.
PC Magazine: Motorola Previews iTunes Phone.
The upcoming phone is the first of many Motorola devices that will support iTunes this year, said Garriques, also president of Motorola's personal devices business. He didn't provide product details for the phone or say when it would be available.
January 8, 2005
Computerworld: New York Times mulls charging Web readers.
According to the upcoming issue of BusinessWeek magazine, whose cover story focuses on The New York Times Co., an internal debate has been raging at the newspaper over whether its online edition, which had about 18.5 million unique monthly visitors as of November, should adopt a subscription fee.
January 10, 2005
Technology Review: Sony Research's Parisian Play Station.
Housed in a classic Parisian building adjacent to the buzzing campuses of the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Ecole Normale Superieure, Sony CSL Paris feels more like an engineering graduate school than a key research arm of a multi-billion dollar consumer technology and media company.
eWEEK: Demand Brings High-Capacity Drives to SMBs.
High capacity and backup once were the mark of enterprise storage. However, as seen on the floor of the International Consumer Electronics Show last week, several vendors aim drive mechanisms holding as much 500GB of data at small businesses and consumers.
January 11, 2005
Wired News: Verizon's E-Mail Embargo Enrages.
Verizon Communications customers expecting e-mail from across the pond may be in for a long wait. The internet service provider has been blocking e-mail originating from Great Britain and other parts of Europe for weeks, and customers are upset about having their communications disrupted without notice.
January 12, 2005
News.Com: Disk drives to stop shrinking.
While consumers have gone bonkers for music players and other sleek devices sporting tiny hard drives, disk drive companies say there's little room, and even less desire, for further reducing the size of the drive platters--the silver disks that spin around and hold data.
January 13, 2005
Technology Review: Keeping Tabs.
How many college students today ever flip through trays of library catalogue cards? Some of them may never have used an actual tabbed file. But the tab as an information technology metaphor is everywhere in use. And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old.
January 14, 2005
IBM developerWorks: Everything's automated!
While some so-called smart features actually are smart (such as inquiring whether the user really does want to empty the trash before it's done), too many features have an unexpected downside: they encourage more user errors, rather than less.
January 17, 2005
Useit.Com: Durability of Usability Guidelines.
Usability guidelines endure because they depend on human behavior, which changes very slowly, if at all. What was difficult for users twenty years ago continues to be difficult today. People can only remember so many things, and we don't get any smarter.
eWEEK: Circuit City's New IT Approach to Customer Service.
"The consumer marketplace today is very much a polarizing place. You have to decide where you want to play, and we are not going to win on price," he said. He reasons that radically improving customer experience is mandatory, especially when selling products that -- for the most part -- are also offered by their largest competitors.
January 18, 2005
First Monday: Sensible design principles for new networks and services.
These issues, as discussed in this paper, are related to our intrinsic behavior and way of thinking. Hence we are inclined to repeat the same errors over and over again, even though the fundamental problems of networks with complex service models are evident for anyone who takes a serious look at the history of communications.
January 19, 2005
Andrew Odlyzko: Finding a voice: Learning from history.
In particular, there is an abiding, widely held, and damaging misconception that clouds people's thinking about communications, and especially broadband. Companies that continue to hold onto this myth risk losing the race to build the connected home.
Technology Review: Unwrapping the Biometric Present.
Signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 17, the legislation also allocates $20 million to the Transportation Security Administration for research and development of an advanced biometric system that has "applications to aviation security, including mass identification technology."
January 20, 2005
CIO: Riding The California Privacy Wave.
The California state legislature has already enacted more than a dozen laws that regulate how businesses, universities and other organizations that collect personal information on California residents must manage private data. And that's just the beginning.
January 21, 2005
InfoWorld: Powell resigns as FCC chairman.
Michael Powell, chairman of the U.S. FCC for the past four years, announced Friday he will resign, effective sometime in March. Powell, a Republican who championed telecommunications deregulation, sent a letter of resignation to U.S. President George Bush on Friday...
PC World: Sony Examines Digital Music Strategy.
Sony formed an internal group called Connect Company that spans several business units. Its goal is to tie together its digital music efforts in the areas of hardware, content, online sales, and software, and to help Sony develop a more user-friendly digital music system.
January 23, 2005
NY Times: Internet News Sites Are Back in Vogue.
Many of the same companies that were badly burned by Internet investments before are aggressively bidding for these sites not just because of the growing online ad business but because, like Dow Jones, they are worried that their current Web sites will not be able to keep up with demand.
InfoWorld: Where was desktop search when we needed it?
Jon Udell. For lots of people I know, any one of these choices will produce a life-changing productivity boost. For me, though, that's no longer true. The Gmail experiment has become a lifestyle choice. I still maintain a local Outlook mail store, and it's indexed several ways, but I rarely need to search it.
NY Times: AT&T Looks Beyond 'Number, Please'.
As chief technology and chief information officer, Mr. Eslambolchi is the technological strategist behind AT&T's ambitious turnaround plan to become a data transmission company selling an array of software products like network security systems - with phone calls being just one of many digital services.
January 24, 2005
USA Today: Net music piracy goes to high court.
The recording industry — preparing for a Supreme Court showdown over online music piracy — today files legal briefs to support its argument that operators of online song-swap networks should be liable for the actions of the people who use them.
January 25, 2005
Wired News: Turning the Tables on Spammers.
The activists, speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said they plan to take their fight out of the inbox to the spammers themselves with technologies that gather evidence they need to sue the bad actors and send them to jail.
InfoWorld: Computer scientists identify future IT challenges.
A grand challenge is a goal recognized one or two decades in advance, achievement of which represents a major milestone in the advance of knowledge or technology, according to a report describing seven grand challenges to inspire and direct IT research, released Tuesday by the British Computer Society.
January 26, 2005
Technology Review: Gunning for iTunes.
Subscription services allow consumers to rent music, as opposed to own it. Introducing portability on top of an already foreign idea will require a significant expenditure of marketing and advertising dollars -- something some services aren't willing to do.
Wired News: Opera, the Forgotten Browser.
And Opera intends to put on a grand performance this year with a fresh version of its browser, new offices in North America and Asia, an expanded public relations campaign and an increasing emphasis on becoming the browser of choice for entertainment and mobile devices.
January 27, 2005
WIRED: Why Wilco Is the Future of Music.
Lawrence Lessig. They (we) demand an end to the war, and the attack on innovation that it represents. Yet there's something hollow about the earnest rage on both sides of this debate. Hollow, as in inauthentic. It is artists who make music, not the industry that markets it or the technologies that take it.
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