What I’ve read (111906)

November 20, 2006 1 Comment

Here’s a brief list of the articles on my PDA this past week for the commute and weekend reading. It’s a slow week as many people are taking holidays: a good opportunity to get a few things done and spend quality time with the kids on holiday… you know, working on Cub Scout projects, cooking for the holidays and Star Trek: Legacy for the Xbox 360. 😉 

 


Is Sony eating hundreds of dollars on each PS3? – CNET News.com  The game console might cost you $499, but it’s got $806 worth of parts and manufacturing behind it, a research firm says. By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, November 16, 2006 

 



A yardstick for video-on-demand (NYT/CNET News.com) Nielsen Media Research to announce it will release video-on-demand ratings starting in December. The New York Times 

 



Vista, Antivirus: What If Allchin’s Right? (BetaNews) “Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin… advised Vista users not to use antivirus software. What he did say was that he was so confident in Vista’s new “Defense-in-Depth” architecture and failsafes… 

 



Comparison of New Microsoft Smartphones (Phone Scoop) The Phone Scoop compare page of the Samsung BlackJack (aka SGH-i607) The T-Mobile Dahs (aka HTC Excalibur and S620) and the Motorola Q. 

 



Longhorn Server and Vista SP1 to Ship Together (eWeek) By Peter Galli, Nov 16, 2006 “Microsoft plans to ship Windows Server “Longhorn” and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 at the same time, expected to be in the second half of next year. … (planned is) another Longhorn CTP (Community Technology Preview) 

 



Poll: 20 Percent Will Move to Vista in the Next Year (Application Development Trends)  “Eighty-six percent of IT decision makers say they plan to adopt Windows Vista, and 20 percent say they will move to the new operating system within the next year, according to a new tracking poll sponsored by CDW Corp. 

 


Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo get ready to rumble (Reuters) “The $30 billion video game industry’s own war of the titans reboots this week with the U.S. launch on Friday of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 and Sunday’s debut of Nintendo Co. Ltd.’s Wii. 

 



Gordon Bell: A Head For Detail (Wired) “Gordon Bell feeds every piece of his life into a surrogate brain, and soon the rest of us will be able to do the same. But does perfect memory make you smarter, or just drive you nuts?” By Clive Thompson, Issue 110, November 2006. See also the following related bits:



How To Build Your Own version of Gordon Bell’s “MyLifeBits” (Wired) Wired, Nov 2006. See the complete article “A head for detail.”


Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide  Engadget has a step-by-step tutorial for hacking your Xbox 360’s standard video cable into an HD VGA cable. Naturally, you can buy a VGA cable for your Xbox at about $40 – but if you’re the adventurous sort…

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide by Gina Trapani. “Web pages change. They disappear. They move to new URLs. They get lost or they’re password-protected or they’re only available on private intranets.


Ken Schutte.com: Slogger Slogger is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. It is a very flexible tool for creating a complete log of your browsing history (thus the name: Slogger <=> “browse logger”).

Yahoo! Messenger highest in Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study (JD Power) 11 October 2006 —Yahoo! Messenger ranks highest among primary instant messaging (IM) services, and Dogpile ranks highest among search engines in satisfying residential Internet service subscribers, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2006 report. 

 



Dos and Don’ts for Vista and Office 2007 (eWeek) eWEEK Technology Editor Peter Coffee explains what to do and what not to do when thinking about, evaluating and implementing Vista and Office 2007. Some of this advice will actually surprise you. Nov 15, 2006 

 



D-Link DNS-323: A brand-name NAS worth waiting for. | Tom’s Networking THG reviews this high-performance BYOD dual drive SATA NAS with gigabit Ethernet and many serving options. Pros: High performance, fast Ethernet, supports separate drives, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1. Print, FTP, iTunes, UPnP AV servers. Quiet.

 



Pinnacle HD Pro Stick: Decent Hardware, Terrible Software (DenGuru) Pros: All the hardware you need is included, Can be used with Windows Media Center, Compact, decent remote. Cons: Very poor bundled “media center application.” Doesn’t handle QAM (cable) HD. By Mike Baggaley, Nov 16, 2006 

 



Holiday Buyers’ Guide 2006, Part 3: Components & Peripherals (Tom’s Hardware) The third part of our buyers’ guide deals with cases, power supplies, and storage and consumer devices. By Patrick Schmid, November 9, 2006 

 



Windows Vista on Notebooks: Why and What Hardware? (MobilityGuru) “So it’s really time to start planning your next step. In this article we’ll help motivate you to get going with Vista and guide you through what has become a confusing maze of decisions regarding upgrading your existing hardware or buying new hardware.” 

 


TechNet Summit: Gates on Google, iPod, Zune, bubbles and the future During an interview conducted by Charlie Rose at the TechNet Summit, Bill Gates discussed his philanthropic efforts, his future and Microsoft’s business. Posted by Dan Farber 11.15.06 

 



Microsoft Muscles into Enterprise Management “Microsoft will try to move up from the kids’ table at the enterprise management feast when it launches the private beta of its new Service Desk offering Nov. 14 and announces its participation in the Configuration Management Database Federation Working Group. 

 



Beware The Label Tax: Universal gets $1 per Zune (Forbes.com) “Universal Music (said) that it would share in the hardware revenue from the sale of the new Microsoft Zune and would look to strike similar deals with other hardware manufacturers.

 

Microsoft to link Zune device to Xbox, PCs (Computerworld Singapore) “Microsoft plans to extend the wireless capability of its new Zune devices to PCs and the company’s Xbox 360 game console, (says) Bill Gates…

 

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