News.com has been running hugely cool photo galleries excerpted from sister site TechRepublic--their "Cracking Open" series, where they dissect, gut, and then try to reconstruct your favorite electronics.
Latest entries include the iPod Touch--you won't believe how thin the components are--and the remote-control game, "Shocking Tanks."
Links: Cracking open the iPod touch and Cracking open "Shocking Tanks."
Every few years, some new technology or application comes along that everyone's sure will miraculously conquer every obstacle in its path and, in some ludicrously short time period, make existing technology obsolete. And then, long after all the media hype fades away and investors' checkbooks disappear, well, nothing happens.
So what? Who cares? Why bother talking about our industry's bombs, the next big things that weren't? Well, for one thing, it's interesting to note how hungry we all are for news about new technology. It gets us excited. We complain about media hype, but love the hype.
It's also fascinating how existing technology has this way of hanging on by its fingernails way past the point of its predicted obsolescence. More importantly, we learn more from mistakes than we do from successes. That's part of the scientific method: hypothesis, test, learn, repeat until you get it right.
Lastly, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those are all good enough reasons for me. So here are my top 10 technology flops. But first, some ground rules. I stuck to the last 50 years or so. And I avoided specific company products. We've heard enough about the IBM PCjr, Apple Newton, Microsoft Bob, and OS2 to last 10 lifetimes.… Read more
Updated December 3 to include more information about pricing.
The Silicon Valley PC company that made a splash earlier this year with its tiny, energy-efficient desktop has set its sights on the mobility market.
Zonbu announced Wednesday it will sell a Zonbu Notebook and service beginning in early 2008. Like the Zonbu Mini that came out this past summer, the notebook will run on the Zonbu OS, and is rated highly by the Green Electronics Council for its energy efficiency. The key concept behind Zonbu is its service. "People shouldn't have to be their own IT administrators," … Read more
PALO ALTO, Calif.The great thing about the development of future mobile computers is that no one school of thought has come to dominate the territory. Of course, that's also a problem.
A group of panelists from the world's leading mobile operating system developers, including representatives from Symbian, Microsoft, MontaVista, and newcomer Google, perused a wide number of topics Tuesday afternoon at the Palo Alto Research Center, birthplace of so many technologies that changed the world. The panel, which also included executives from Nokia and Research in Motion, would like to do the same, but the hard and exciting … Read more
Customers who want to try running software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud now can get started.
The leading Linux seller announced Monday that its beta program for the online service is now open to the public. The for-fee program includes email-based support.
Initially, the service will use the latest release of RHEL, version 5.1, but new releases will be issued later, Red Hat said.
The service uses variable pricing, Red Hat said when it announced the service earlier this month. It costs $19 per month plus 21, 53, or 94 cents per hour, … Read more
Want to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a test drive without having to install anything? Today the public beta for RHEL on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud went live. It's not perfect, says Red Hat, but that's part of the plan:
We have certified and tested the released AMIs [Amazon Machine Images] within the Amazon EC2 environment and will be providing email-based support for the public beta. While the software is well-proven, we anticipate modifications to the deployment models and use-cases during the beta period and will refine the delivery of our services throughout the beta period. … Read moreWith Thanksgiving only two days away, people are bringing out their favorite recipes for turkey, gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. How do you keep your recipes from year to year? My father's method was to put his favorite recipes into notebooks that would be brought out every year. But even with laminated pages, eventually his notebooks got pretty messy. My mother used index cards to store recipes, but over time the ingredients would fade, especially if the recipe was popular with the family.
In the search for a better method through software, I discovered some good recipe database programs anyone can use. These handy apps let you store all your favorite Thanksgiving recipes (along with all your other recipes) in a searchable database which you can quickly print out for easy access in the kitchen. You can also catalog things like spices and ingredients on hand, and then search for results using those and other parameters. Some of these apps let you explore other databases online with countless recipe variations and varieties of foods to choose from.… Read more
On Thursday afternoon I was back at the Computer History Museum. The Honda Research Institute was hosting its tenth Technical Horizon Symposium and announcing this year's Honda Initiation Grant awards.
The grants are part of the Institute's efforts to stimulate collaborate research between Honda and the academic community. Since 1997, Honda says it has awarded 75 grants totalling "several million dollars" to universities in the US. This year, Honda received 300 proposals; it chose seven. This year's awards (listed here along with those of past years) cover research in safety, efficiency, emissions control, and user … Read more
Once again, I will be on Computer America tonight at 11p-12a eastern. We will be covering a host of topics including, Blockbuster, Apple, gaming and Google.
Also, I'll be posting a hands-on of the Altec Lansing Orbit this weekend, so keep checking for that.
Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your continued support. We have a ton of great things coming up for you in the near future to make The Digital Home a mainstay in more ways than one...
IBM on Thursday announced an offering called Blue Cloud meant to make it easier to run large-scale applications with massive databases over the Internet.
The computing giant said it has dedicated 200 researchers to the project and will have services available as of the first quarter next year.
The first product will be an IBM BladeCenter with Linux-based servers equipped with a suite of "cloud" software.
That includes grid-computing software, virtualization tools Xen and PowerVM, and the open-source Hadoop parallel workload-scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo. The suite will also include IBM's Tivoli data center management software … Read more
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