April 1, 2005
eWEEK: Google Trademark Suit Could Go to Trial. According to Jocelyn Brittin, a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight LLP in McLean, Va., that first means the case will go through a discovery phase, in which both parties gather and submit evidence and possibly depositions around the suit. If there are then enough facts to support the case, it could go to trial.

April 4, 2005
NY Times: Increasingly, the Bells See Their Future on a Screen. In the coming months, the Bell telephone companies, including SBC and Verizon, will start selling television programming in their most recent effort to crack a market in which they have had almost no presence. The cable industry, meeting here this week for its annual trade show, is already bracing for the assault on its prime turf.

PC World: Hitachi Eyes 1TB Desktop Drives. The company is already testing sample drives based on perpendicular recording and says the technology could allow for 1TB desktop drives or 20GB Microdrives in 2007. Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard drive technology.

April 5, 2005
EE Times: Microsoft touts 'thumb-as-stylus' interface progress. The AppLens interface uses a tabular fish-eye approach to provide integrated access to and notification for nine applications. The second, called LaunchTile, uses pure zooming within a landscape of 36 applications to accomplish the same goals.

April 7, 2005
NY Times: File-Sharing Is the Latest Battleground in the Clash of Technology and Copyright. Hal Varian. This is just the latest installment of a longstanding battle between technology companies and copyright holders. It is useful to look at the history of some of these past innovations in trying to understand what policies may be appropriate today.

April 8, 2005
News.Com: MIT, Quanta cook up devices of tomorrow. Specifically, TParty will try to merge existing hardware designs with new concepts on how to better manage information transfers, device configurations, security and more. Brooks said that the research, which will consist of 30 different projects at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

April 11, 2005
Useit.Com: Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design. In a recent Journal of the American Medical Association paper, Ross Koppel and colleagues reported on a field study of a hospital's order-entry system, which physicians use to specify patient medications. The study identified twenty-two ways in which the system caused patients to get the wrong medicine.

PC World: Wireless USB Devices May Appear This Year. The Wireless USB specification provides for a data transfer speed of 480 megabits per second over distances of about 3 yards, and it will work at lower speeds up to a distance of about 11 yards.

April 12, 2005
Technology Review: The Infinite Library. Once the knowledge now trapped on the printed page moves onto the Web, where people can retrieve it from their homes, offices, and dorm rooms, ­libraries could turn into lonely caverns inhabited mainly by ­preservationists. Checking out a library book could become as anachronistic as using a pay phone, visiting a travel agent to book a flight, or sending a handwritten letter by post.

eWEEK: Browsers Get Ready for Graphics Boost. But upcoming plans from two Web browser makers to natively support the XML-based graphics language could give Scalable Vector Graphics the boost it needs to begin remaking the look and feel of the Web..

April 13, 2005
IBM DeveloperWorks: Bad design can be so taxing. In this month's column, I look at ways in which the Internal Revenue Service (sometimes known as the IRS or the Infernal Revenue Service) has already faced, in whole or in part, many of the serious problems that forms designers face.

April 14, 2005
News.Com: Mitigating identity theft. Bruce Schneier. Proposed fixes tend to concentrate on the first issue--making personal data harder to steal--whereas the real problem is the second. If we're ever going to manage the risks and effects of electronic impersonation, we must concentrate on preventing and detecting fraudulent transactions.

April 15, 2005
EE Times: Toshiba flatbed display allows 3-D viewing without glasses. Toshiba Corp. announced Friday new display technology that allows 3-D images to be viewed on a flatbed display without any need for special glasses. Toshiba has applied the 3-D technology to 24- and 15.4- inch displays with 480 x 300 pixels...

April 18, 2005
EE Times: Sides close to deal on HD disk format. A compromise would allow Hollywood studios to produce a single title in one HD format and compile it later for either platform. Such a move also means consumer electronics manufacturers would have to spend less time developing dual-format software and hardware for new HD DVD players.

April 19, 2005
Scott Berkun: Why smart people defend bad ideas. We all know someone that’s intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic?

CIO: The Big Fix. Now, she had to take a long look in the mirror and fix herself. And in the summer of 2003, that's exactly what she set out to do. This is the story of how Cooper completely upended the structure of Toyota's IS department in six months in a bid to weave IT functions more closely into the daily business operations.

April 20, 2005
eWEEK: Google Gets a Search Memory. Search history is stored once a Google user creates and logs into a Google account, and it can be retrieved from any computer. Within the My Search History interface, users can then query past searches, results and the full text of the Web pages that they have visited...

April 21, 2005
Donald Norman: Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone. The cost is partially monetary, but more and more it is in human-measures: annoyance, irritation, and frustration. It is what makes us wish to throw away the technology even as we embrace it. We are in real danger of a consumer backlash against annoying technologies.

April 22, 2005
News.Com: Graphics patent suit fires back at Microsoft. Austin, Texas-based Forgent, which makes scheduling software, announced Thursday that it filed the suit through its Compression Labs subsidiary. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, comes in response to a suit Microsoft filed last week, asking the courts to find Forgent's patent unenforceable.

April 25, 2005
Useit.Com: Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings. You can maximize user interface quality by conducting many rounds of testing as part of an iterative design process. To move rapidly and conduct the most tests within a given time frame and budget, informal reports are the best option.

April 26, 2005
WIRED: Voice-Over-IP's Unlikely Hero. Lawrence Lessig. When he warned providers everywhere that their violation would incur his wrath, they said the threat was hollow. Powell proved them wrong. There was neither wavering nor further warning. There was simply enforcement of this pro-innovation principle.

InfoWorld: Internet Explorer improvements come to light. Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 7.0, due for beta this summer, will include improved support for two key Web standards -- Cascading Style Sheets and PNG graphics. For years, Web developers have protested that support for both CSS and PNG is buggy or inadequate in IE.

April 27, 2005
PC World: Longhorn Details Emerge at WinHEC 2005. The successor to Windows XP isn't due until late next year, but Microsoft this week treated Windows hardware developers here to tantalizing glimpses of a slick-looking OS with support for all types of connectivity and multimedia, new security capabilities, and a new document format.

April 28, 2005
PC World: Nokia Launches Multimedia Smart Phones. Nokia today launched three new Nseries mobile handsets, hoping users will be seduced by the smart phones' built-in multimedia gadgets, which take print-quality pictures, read e-mail, play music, browse Web sites, and display mobile TV.