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.

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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.

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Futuristic Floor Glows With Each Footstep

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

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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".

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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!'

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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

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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

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Mozilla: Final Version of Firefox 3 Will Ship in June

Mozilla officially announces when Firefox 3 will be out.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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The Fedora Project releases Fedora 9 Beta

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

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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.

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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."

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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.

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The Tip of the Facebook Exploit Iceberg

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

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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!

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Banshee 1.0 Alpha 2 Announced, Includes Video Support!

After just under two weeks of hard work, I hereby present Banshee 1.0 Alpha 2! You might be wondering what we can accomplish in two weeks? How about full video management and playback? That and a host of other improvements bring this one step closer to Banshee 1.0! Media management on your GNOME desktop has never been better.

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Comcast, BitTorrent To Work Together On Network Traffic

Comcast is in talks with BitTorrent on ways to run the file-sharing company's technology more smoothly on its broadband network. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's network, and allow Comcast to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future.

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WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build

"...WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3."

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TorrentSpy Shuts Down

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AMD announces tri-core, tweaked quad-core Phenoms CPUs

AMD has formally unwrapped its three-core Phenom X3 8000 series, along with new versions of its existing quad-core Phenom X4 processors, now known as the 9050 line.Interestingly, the The 8650 is 27 per cent faster than the 6000+ at converting an "HD video file" to a mobile screen-sized MPEG 4 file.

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Free Ways to Synchronize Folders Between Computers

Whether you want work files edited at home to magically appear on your PC at the office, or the family room Mac to have a copy of the latest batch of digital photos downloaded onto the computer in the den, three free applications can help.

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Microsoft prepares 'Albany' to compete with Google Docs

Facing pressure from hosted productivity suites like Google Docs and Google Apps, Microsoft is planning a new package of low-end productivity software and hosted services through a secretive project code-named Albany.

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Protect Your Privacy While Downloading

Earlier this week, a Lifehacker reader caught downloading copyrighted material using BitTorrent told us about the scary warning letter she received from her ISP about a big media company who filed a complaint.

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Swedish ISP Refuses To Block The Pirate Bay

After forcing a single ISP in Denmark to block The Pirate Bay, it now appears that the IFPI has a plan to sue all of the major Swedish ISPs to force them to do the same. Telia Sonera, a large Swedish ISP is refusing to be bullied, stating that such blocking and filtering actions are illegal under EU law.

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How User-Friendly Is Your Site?

The Queen of Screencasts from DemoGirl.com shares valuable information on making your website more user-friendly. She shows the best and worst features of the user interface from her vast experience of evaluating and testing countless startup sites (over 500 screencasts and counting!). This is a valuable resource for all startups and any website.

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Anatomy of an Icon: Inside the Apple IIc

At 7.5 pounds, the Apple IIc portable computer was the MacBook Air of 1984. Ever wonder what makes up a vintage classic? We took one apart to find out.

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New Features OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 (available now)

OpenOffice.org announces the release of version 2.4 with 9 new chart features, 5 PDF export enhancements, text to columns in Calc, rectangular selection in Writer, bug fixes, performance improvements, improvements supporting the growing library of extensions such as 3D OpenGL transitions in Impress, and much more.

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iPhone SDK Beta 2 Now Available

Potential iPhone developers should go and grab the latest release of the SDK, beta 2, and revel in the new Interface Builder. Make your own fancy UIs for your iPhone game, or maybe just make an improved iFartz. We're cool with either.

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Open Source, Social App Server helps Crack Walled gardens.

Ringside Networks came out of stealth mode to launch the first open source "social application server." And what is that exactly? It's the software guts of a social network that you can use behind your own firewall, old school style, to build social networking "stuff" into your own site.

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Navy Has Five-Year Plan to Build Laser Blasters

Long range laser weapons that do more than make little red dots show up on distant objects have long been a dream of science fiction creators and the military alike. Now it looks like a true, long-range laser blasting weapon may be ready for action within the next five years.

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Figure out why an application hangs

Most of these mystery freezes are uncommon and specific to a particular PC configuration, such as the driver for a certain model printer conflicting with a recent Windows security update, causing some functions in Windows Explorer to stop working (an instance described in a recent Microsoft knowledgebase article).

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YouTube: Video Creators Know When and Where Clips Watched

In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos.

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Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Wins in Court

Whilst one site may have closed its doors thanks to the MPAA, after continuous legal pressure, another has prevailed today in court. Torrent.is has won in court over the Association of film rights-holder in Iceland (SMÁÍS)

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Opera releases experimental public build that passes Acid3

Internal build now available for download. They have achieved 100/100 passes on the DOM test and the layout is pixel perfect, but there is still some work performance work to be done for the animation to be smooth, apparently. Congratulations, Opera!

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60% of Photoshop Users are PIRATES!

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me....

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