chicago

Not prone to building outlandish or highly speculative concepts, Honda showed off a very mundane concept version of its upcoming new Odyssey minivan at the Chicago Auto Show. The real thing is coming out this fall, so the concept is fairly close to production trim.

Honda notes that the new Odyssey will be lower and wider than the current version, improving aerodynamics and fuel economy. Some versions of the car will get 19 mpg city and 28 mpg highway, according to Honda. But it sounds like the powerplant options will remain unchanged, as Honda says the current i-VTEC V-6, with … Read more

In its latest effort at green technology, Ford is introducing an all-electric version of its Transit Connect van.

The automaker announced Tuesday that it will pull the curtain off the new 2011 Transit Connect at the Chicago Auto Show on Wednesday. Designed to be used by fleet operators, the Transit Connect Electric is slated to go into production and into the hands of customers by the end of the year.

The Transit Connect Electric has a top speed of 75 miles per hour, will travel up to 80 mph on a single charge, and can be recharged using 240-volt or … Read more

LOS ANGELES--During Tuesday's keynote speech, Ray Ozzie outlined how Windows Azure works from a software perspective.

Across the Los Angeles Convention Center, though, developers had a chance to see just what Azure is running on. Microsoft uprooted one of its containers from its Washington data center and brought it to the Professional Developers Conference.

The container was one of the more popular attractions on the PDC show floor as attendees had a chance to peek in and even step inside the container.

It is Microsoft's fourth generation of data center design----newer even than the containers used at the … Read more

CHICAGO--On the outside, Microsoft's massive new data center resembles the other buildings in the industrial area.

Even the inside of the building doesn't look like that much. The ground floor looks like a large indoor parking lot filled with a few parked trailers.

It's what's inside those trailers, though, that is the key to Microsoft's cloud-computing efforts. Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based … Read more

I am all about making more and more of the things I used to buy. I never buy bread, I make all our waffles, I try to make a lot of my kids school snacks and so on--but I'm still buying taco shells for our weekly fajita/taco night.

Maybe that'll change if I get these tortilla/taco shell pans. Made of heavy gauge a aluminumized steel, the nonstick pans let you bake your taco shells--so you don't have to deal with grease and extra fat. Cleanup is easy--the nonstick pans are dishwasher safe and won't … Read more

CHICAGO--On most days it takes the right access badge and a biometric scan to make it inside the doors of Microsoft's massive data center. But on Wednesday, the company allowed a group of reporters, customers, and partners to tour the 700,000 square foot facility.

The data center, along with another just-opened facility in Dublin, Ireland and existing centers in San Antonio and Quincy, Wash., serve as the guts behind Microsoft's online ambitions, from Bing to Hotmail to Windows Azure.

But, for all its strategic import, the ground floor of the Chicago plant looks more like a truck … Read more

As the new owners of the Pirate Bay take over they will have to eventually change things and sell out. So Rafe has dubbed them as Cruiseship Bay. We also discuss the pyrrhic victory of RIAA over Usenet.com and Rafe and Natali hate some more on Verizon.

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10276607-93.html

Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8128551.stm

Twitter reworks following lists, adds functionality http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10276568-26.html… Read more

According to the masthead of the Thursday print edition of the Chicago Tribune, the paper's publisher is @twhunter.

No, the publisher's parents weren't playing a funny joke on him. And nor were the parents of the paper's other top executives and editors, all of whom were listed on the Thursday masthead with Twitter IDs instead of their names.

The editor? @GerryKern. The editorial page editor? @BruceDold. The managing editor? @jjhirt. And so on.

So what's going on?

"I've been on Twitter a couple of years, since it first emerged from South by Southwest, … Read more

For years, published examples of security breaches at banks, credit card companies, and on home PCs have put us all on guard for identity theft. Would you be surprised to find out that, despite all this bad news, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are not as secure as they should be? It's true: neither of these devices does what it should to protect your personal information, and the upcoming O'Reilly Forensics Workshop--a meeting that highlights various ways to get data out of either of these popular Apple devices--proves it.

Taking place in Chicago on May 26, … Read more