Blog archives for January, 2006

IE7 review

PC Magazine reviews the beta of Internet Explorer 7 developer edition. Looks like it incorporates significant changes in navigation, broader RSS support, and anti-phishing mechanism. However, there’s a reason it’s a developer preview, not a release:

The new engine had a lot of glitches, though, and hampered our browsing abilities in some cases. While main pages for most Web sites loaded just fine, you’ll notice that some specialty applications, blogs, and tools might be rendered incorrectly. For instance, the browser had problems when it rendered—or rather didn’t render–the text within our own PCMag.com forums application. The browser lost all our formatting controls and also shrank the text box. And using the quote feature made the posts virtually illegible due to all the raw HTML code filling the window.

IE 7 review

E*Trade open source success story

What happens when a large company with high volume of trades is replacing all of its Sun Solaris-based servers with Linux-based x86 machines? E*Trade VP tells the story of implementing open source within the company and getting the competitive egde. From the article:

On the Solaris stack - a quarter million dollars a box, huge rows of machines - [Keynote measured the transaction] running about 8 to 9 seconds for us. After we were 100 percent on Linux, we were running, I believe, in the 4 to 5 seconds range. This is kind of a flexion point for me, technically.

IT Crowd reality TV show available for download

IT Crowd, a comedy television show by UK’s Channel 4, pre-announced earlier, has released the first episode, available on the official show site in geek-friendly Windows Media format.

What else is available out there as far as technology-related video shows for geeks? Systm is informative and educational, Geek Entertainment is just plain fun, RocketBoom has some entertainment value as well, PC World’s Digital Duo is more useful for the beginner crowd, Nerd TV from Robert Cringely is a good video-series of interviews with technology influentials.

Feds expected to raise the rate again

CBS MarketWatch says Federal Reserve is likely to raise the rate again, which will bring it to 4.50%, assuming the hike will be a traditional 0.25%. Looks like the banks are getting ready for another uptick, with ING Direct running a 4.75% promotional sale on new funds and Emigrant Direct raising their rate to 4.25% and trying to enforce loyalty with the new credit card offer.

Hummer Laptop is here

Itronix HummerPC Magazine reviews Itronix Hummer IX600 notebook PC, a rugged off-road laptop that sustains abuse and rustic conditions.

Future of speech

PC Magazine runs an interview of two of the research leaders in IBM’s speech recognition group, Dr. David Nahamoo, manager of Human Language Technologies, and Dr. Roberto Sicconi, manager of Multimodal Conversational Solutions. They mainly discuss the status quo of speech technologies, which prototypes exist in IBM Labs today, and where the industry is headed.

Good bye, Aibo, hello, Promet

Two news from the robotic world - Sony Aibo is retiring after 7 years of research and development, due to latest Sony restructuring and attempts to cut cost. In related news, the household robots might become much more than entertainment devices with National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science in Japan developing a walking robot that can complete simple household tasks. From the Associated Press article about Promet:

When Hara asks for a bottle of juice, the two demonstrate a more advanced task, one relays the instruction to the other, saying “Please take care of this.” The second robot huddles to a refrigerator, stands in front of it for a while, saying “Confirming the location of the refrigerator.” Then he says “Searching for the juice,” slowly opens the door with a right hand, grabs a bottle of drink with his left hand, shuts the fridge, then walks back to him, squats down at the table and carefully places it on the coffee table.

Yahoo! News also runs a photo slideshow on the robots that were featured in the news lately.

n.ewradio - a digg clone from UK

n.ewradio seems to be a UK-originated digital music news site, replicating much of digg functionality.

AllofMP3.com dodges another lawsuit

I missed the November news of Universal Music Russia launching a lawsuit against AllofMP3.com and Korean Samsung Electronics. Apparently Samsung Russia ran a promotion in conjunction with AllofMP3.com. Universal Music decided to go after Samsung in this case, but the case was dismissed due to the lack of evidence. They’re not terribly descriptive as far as details.

How about a search engine that doesn’t log?

The recent uproar regarding administration subpoena sent to search engines brings up a pretty good business model for someone who’s trying to make it in the search field, like Dogpile or Icerocket - don’t collect any user data.

Yes, it will be extremely hard to sell the idea to advertisers, who are very interested in any metrics you can show them, but that will probably be a competitive point that will sell well - the search engine that explicitly doesn’t log any data, doesn’t keep track of your searches, doesn’t invite you to register and doesn’t even keep your IP address, unless you’ve generated a server error, in which case it’s kept for engineers to look at. If Big.com can make a selling point to the users with one specific feature that no other search engine offers, there might be a space for yet another player in the field.

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