Archive for July, 2009

After the announcement the other day about how several security experts found a hole in the iPhone’s SMS (text messaging) application, the blogosphere lit up with a ridiculous amount of hate against Apple.  The flaw was demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference, and was shown using an iPhone. The problem is that so many... »

Roughly a year ago, there was a lot of talk about Microsoft buying Yahoo! outright.  It seemed very juvenile in the public eye watching them go back and forth.  Microsoft offered some money, Yahoo! said “No, we want more”.   Microsoft said we’re walking, Yahoo! said fine.  A bit of time went by, Microsoft made... »

There are a number of options out there for time-shifting the shows you like to watch.  In less than 10 years, we’ve gone from TiVo being a niche market oddity to every major digital media company having some variation of their idea.  Here are a few of the most popular choices, in no particular... »

What is DRM, exactly, and why do people care?  DRM stands for Digital Rights Management.  Essentially, it’s a method for companies that sell something digital and ensure that it only goes to the person(s) that paid for it and isn’t then given away for free. Around the time of Napster (the original version), people were... »

Jump drives.  Thumb drives.  Removable drives. These are some of the names given to the popular form of removable media that users connect via USB to their various computers.  The most generic and most correct name would be USB flash drive.  USB for the type of connector and flash for the type of memory used... »

WiFi.  Everyone has heard of it, but not everyone knows exactly what it is.  There is a lot of confusion between WiFi, Bluetooth, WiMax, Cellular and others.  I won’t go into the details of each of these technologies in this article, but hopefully I can at least clear up what WiFi is and what... »

After more than a month of internal debate, I finally decided to buy an Xbox 360.  My brother-in-law got one for Christmas, but since he’s not too technical, he hadn’t performed the Dashboard update and had not subscribed to any online options.  I played a little bit of Madden 09 and that reminded me... »

Going through my daily RSS feeds and what do I find?  Google has officially announced their own Operating System.  Google Chrome OS.  After reading through the announcement, several things pop out at me. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to... »

Apple has released new versions of their OSX Operating System on an almost annual basis since 10.0.  Microsoft, on the other hand, will go 2-4 years between releases, and in the past tried to differentiate completely between Consumer and Business versions (see Windows 2000 and NT).  This has always meant that Windows features were usually added in Service... »

Microsoft’s latest Operating System, dubbed Windows 7, will make it’s full debut on October 22, 2009.  I find it interesting that they have changed up their naming convention once again.  The difference is, I think they got it right this time.  Giving a version a number, as opposed to a year or a fancy... »