q&a

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft's got a new Xbox on the way, and according to the company, it's the foundation for the next 10 to 20 years of home gaming and entertainment.

The console, which has not yet been given a price, release date, or live game demos was shown off here on Tuesday and left just about as many questions as it did answers about where Microsoft is taking one of its most popular products.

CNET sat down with Jeff Henshaw, the group program manager for Xbox Incubation, to try to get some of those answers. That includes … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about Spotlight not being able to find files that are known to exist in a user's account, options for adding 16GB of RAM to older MacBook Pro systems, and options for troubleshooting and fixing a broken trackpad in a MacBook. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Spotlight not finding files MacFixIt reader Mike asks:

Mike Mayberry, perhaps more than anyone, is the guy who keeps Moore's Law ticking.

As the vice president who leads Intel's research team, he bears responsibility for making sure his employer can cram ever more electronic circuitry onto computer chips. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore 47 years ago observed the pace at which microchips' transistor count doubled, and Mayberry is in charge of keeping that legacy intact.

A lot rests on Moore's Law, which in a 1975 update to Moore's original 1965 paper predicted that the number of transistors will double every two years. That means a … Read more

Instead of leading 30,000 employees at a beleaguered Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz is now leading just a dozen at his new startup, CareZone

But Schwartz remains the same. True to the provocateur culture that helped keep Sun in the headlines despite a relatively small advertising budget, Schwartz clearly relishes holding forth about the trends that will separate the computing industry's winners and losers.

Among some opinions Schwartz shared in a recent interview: that Macs will once again seriously compete with Windows for PC market share, that Oracle lost a chance to innovate rather than just litigate in the … Read more

"Predicting is hard, especially about the future," quips Vint Cerf -- and he should know.

That's because about 30 years ago, when the now-famous engineer was helping to design the technology that powers the Internet, Cerf decided just how many devices could connect to the network. His answer -- 2 to the 32nd power, or 4.3 billion -- looked awfully big at the time. A few decades later, we now know it's far short.

Accordingly, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the few people at the company who looks natural in a suit … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about the options for performing a clean install of OS X Lion, restoring an iTunes library after formatting and reinstalling the OS, and whether virtual machines will be affected after reinstalling OS X. In addition, some people have wondered about Intuit getting other older PowerPC-based software packages running in Lion, and whether Address Book contacts can be shared among local user accounts. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, then post … Read more

BARCELONA--It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at the standards group.

The W3C oversees the standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), technologies that carry tremendous importance as the Web expands from a medium to publish documents into a foundation for applications that can run on anything from mobile phones and cars to TVs and tablets. These Web standards, combined with the JavaScript programming language and other related technologies, let programmers reach a … Read more

Localmind is an intriguing little mobile app that has big potential.

It's a live Q&A service (see Quora, Answers, the departed Aardvark) about locations (see Foursquare, Facebook). If you want to know how crowded a bar or restaurant is, you pose the question on Localmind. People (but not all of them) who have checked in at that location on Foursquare get an alert and can reply to your query. Hopefully, you get your answer back quickly enough to matter.

The app was launched at SxSW last year, and it's great for arenas like that; a lot … Read more

Welcome to another Yuletide episode from The 404 Podcast! We'll be publishing these podcasts, videos, and rerun episodes all the way up until we return on January 10 for a block of live shows from CES in Las Vegas!

Inspired by Reddit's AMA section, we've asked our listeners to submit their questions to be answered on today's episode. No question is too personal, so tune in for a closer look at the hosts of The 404!… Read more