John C. Dvorak: The iPhone Is No Desktop

People are willing to make a device that you can drop in the toilet or leave in a taxi cab the next desktop computing platform. Ridiculous.

read more | digg story

See The World's Lightest Cell Phone

The Guinness World Records named the Modu phone as the lightest cell phone in the world. At just 1.5 ounces and 2.8 by 1.4 by 0.3 inches, the Modu is a full ounce lighter than the already miniature Pantech C300. Without a doubt, it's the tiniest cell phone I've seen outside of Zoolander.

read more | digg story

Futuristic Floor Glows With Each Footstep

Now this is cool!! A glowing rug could replace nightlights and keep you from stubbing a toe.

read more | digg story

Microsoft top brass 'burned' by Vista problems

One executive, Mike Nash, complained he was "burned" so badly by compatibility issues he was left with "a $2100 email machine".

read more | digg story

Alt Text: Perils of Joining the iPod Nation

'I feel a little odd about buying anything labeled classic, though. In marketing, classic is a way of making timidity and obstinacy sound cutting-edge. You're on the avant-garde forefront of resisting change! You hated anything new before hating anything new was trendy!'

read more | digg story

Real Electric Car Featured in Star Trek Movie

The Aptera electric car is so futuristic-looking, it's been seen on the set of the new Star Trek movie.

read more | digg story

The Web's best free stuff

Free: It's the magic word for an ever-expanding wealth of downloadable software and online services. Free doesn't necessarily mean good, however, and hunting for freebies can mean sifting through a lot of junk.

read more | digg story

Is the USA Patriot Act haunting Gmail and Google Apps?

Lakehead University in Canada was one of the first to adopt Google's software model of the future. An administrator boasts the move was the right thing, saving the school hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operating costs. But he notes one trade-off: The faculty was told not to transmit any private data over the system, including grades.

read more | digg story

Vista SP1: Threat or Menace?

But given how customers who have upgraded from XP have struggled with driver and application incompatibilities, it's no surprise that many are gun-shy of the latest update.

read more | digg story

SlySoft on Blu-ray BD+ crack: next time it will be easier

Blu-ray's BD+ was supposed to take "10 years" to crack, but it didn't take 10 months. Yet, even though the scheme can be dynamically updated, SlySoft is extremely confident that they'll crack whatever the BDA sends our way. (Updated.)

read more | digg story

Innocent man pinched by RIAA asks SCOTUS for attorney's fees

With US appeals courts giving different answers, a Texas man is taking his case to the Supreme Court to ask why he has a stack of legal bills after the RIAA bailed out.

read more | digg story

Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster

Once upon a time, the four to eight gigabyte footprint of a DVD on your hard drive was prohibitively large. But since the price of a gigabyte has plummeted, ripping your entire DVD collection to your computer is not just possible, it's prudent, and it's easy. Let's take a look at the best ways to back up and play any DVD rip on your home computer

read more | digg story

BitTorrent Plugin Detects ISPs Raping Your Torrents

Azureus actually operates a legit video delivery business using torrent, so they've been among the most vocal opponents to ISPs throttling torrents. To help build their case and create a detailed log of every ISP that scrambles torrents, along with their particular poison—short-circuiting uploads or general bandwidth caps, for instance—they've rele

read more | digg story

Mozilla: Final Version of Firefox 3 Will Ship in June

Mozilla officially announces when Firefox 3 will be out.

read more | digg story

Why Cable And WiMax Shouldn’t Mix

WiMax is going nowhere fast but that is not stopping a consortium of cable and tech companies from considering a plan to invest $3 billion more into a proposed bailout-through-merger of Sprint Nextel’s WiMax business (known as Xohm) and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. ($1 billion),and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire.

read more | digg story

Search with privacy: What a concept.

PrivacyFinder.org is an interesting search project that puts the kind of emphasis on privacy that's been missing, according to this profile by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

read more | digg story

Apple Forbids Windows Users from Installing Safari

As spotted by our Italian friends at setteB.IT, Apple's Safari license says that users are permitted to install the browser on no more than "a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." This means that if you install Safari for Windows on a Windows PC, you're violating the license.

read more | digg story

What Makes a Good Mobile Application Great

"...what makes a good mobile application truly great? There are lots of examples out there, but what can mobile developers learn from them? Here are some common sense guidelines:"

read more | digg story

Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques

Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.

read more | digg story

I’m not against Windows; Unix just works better

I’m biased in favor of Unix and against Windows - everybody knows that except me; my perception is that I like things that work and Unix works better.

read more | digg story

Amazon takes on Apple with copy-protection-free music

Amazon's MP3 store - which sells only songs without copy protection - has quietly become No. 2 in digital sales since opening nearly six months ago.

read more | digg story

Motorola insider tells all about the fall of technology icon

[...]Motorola's current CEO, Greg Brown, is so technologically out of touch he refuses to use a computer for communications, and has all his email correspondences printed by his secretary and replied to by dictation.

read more | digg story

Why doesn't Linux need defragmenting?

. . . That is a question that crops up with regularity on Linux forums when new users are unable to find the defrag tool on their shiny new desktop. Here's a brave at giving a simple, non-technical answer as to why some filesystems suffer more from fragmenting than others

read more | digg story

Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada's traffic throttling

Canadian DSL resellers learned the hard way this week that Bell Canada now runs traffic-shaping hardware even on the lines it resells.

read more | digg story

The Fedora Project releases Fedora 9 Beta

The full release notes are available at: http://fedoraproject.org/f9-beta-relnotes

read more | digg story

AT&T's Spam Filter Gets A Bit Too Aggressive

You can certainly understand why ISPs offer spam filters. It's a service for users who don't want to be totally bombarded with spam. But what I've never understood is that these ISPs rarely give the user a chance to circumvent the spam filter themselves. If most people want to ignore it and assume all spam is spam, then so be it.

read more | digg story

Google: No kids allowed

"Google's terms of service, while ignored by the vast majority of users, contain a pretty shocking clause: Under 18's are not permitted to use any of Google's web properties. Thats right kids - no search, YouTube, Gmail, news, or images."

read more | digg story

Adobe Puts Free Version Of Photoshop Online

Adobe is launching a basic version of popular photo-editing software Photoshop free online. While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a "beta" test version, is easier to learn. User comments will be taken into account for future upgrades.

read more | digg story

The Tip of the Facebook Exploit Iceberg

Remember the Paris Hilton exposure? This describes in great detail the security and privacy issues with Facebook.

read more | digg story

Linux gains new architecture

The 2.6.25 kernel, currently in the final stages of testing, adds support for Marvell's Feroceon micro-architecture and "Orion" SoCs, with Debian support waiting in the wings. Hackers, start your NAS engines!

read more | digg story