December 30, 2001

20 exciting changes for PCs in 2002
There are definitely exciting things happening in the world of Information Technology. There's a bright light on the horizon. Coming soon to a PC near you will be such technology as organic-light screens, "pixie dust" will deliver 400 GB HDs for the price of an 80 GB HD, a 1-GHz Palmtop, Extensible Markup Language ( XML ), Third-Generation Input/Output Bus. Magnetic RAM will even save all your work without you having to "save". Things are getting interesting again. PC World picked 20 trends and technologies that they feel will have the greatest impact on personal computing for business and home use in the coming new year. Full story Posted by Dan Richards at 11:52 PM

December 28, 2001

Daily Relay Status Update
Apologies for the blog downtime, I completely messed up Moveable Type when trying to upgrade and havent' gotten around to fixing it 'till now. We now resume our normal irregular schedule. Posted by Donald Melanson at 03:46 PM

December 18, 2001

No Maps For These Territories Airs on TV
No Maps For These Territories, the recent documentary about William Gibson, airs on the Independant Film Channel on Wednesday, December 19th at 11:30pm Eastern. I've seen it and it's well worth checking out - look for a proper review in Mindjack soon. Posted by Donald Melanson at 06:12 PM

December 12, 2001

Faint Clicks Across the Atlantic
100 years ago today Guglielmo Marconia transmitted the first radio transmission -- three faint clicks. Little did he know that that would be the basis of modern-everyday communication from cell phones to 802.11 cards. Wired.com has more information in their technology article. Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 11:57 AM

December 11, 2001

20 Years of History
Google annouced that they have expanded their Usenet archive (which was purchased as content from deja.com) to go back 20 years. Just think of all the posts we can dig up. See the small page of info at Google's site. Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 03:06 PM

December 07, 2001

Who's Yahoo?
A great O'Reilly net web log entry about being forced to give up a Yahoo! ID as it conflicted with another user's Yahoo! ID. Marc makes a great point - "If you want or need your online identity, you must maintain it yourself." See Marc Hedlund's web log entry over at The O'Reilly Network. Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 04:18 PM

December 06, 2001

Happy B-Day E-Mail (+/- two months)
It was 30 years ago today (+/- two months) that e-mail was invented by Ray Tomilson at BBN causing profound changes in how people interact with each other -- from a NYT article on it:

David Walden, an engineer who worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) with Mr. Tomlinson in the 1970's, recalled a turning point of sorts for him. "I remember when I realized that I could apologize in writing for a problem and thus make the situation better," he said, "and the person I was working with couldn't see me and thus couldn't read my body language, that I didn't' really feel contrite," he said."

Read the NYT article for more detail. Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 11:14 AM

December 04, 2001

DVR patents galore
SonicBlue (the company that bought out ReplayTV) has been granted a broad patent which covers pretty much anything you can do with a DVR. Makes you kind of wonder what this does to TiVo's patent in the same area. An article from The Register about SonicBlue's new patent, and one about TiVo's. You can also do a quick search through the patent database for Tivo here, and another quick search for ReplayTV here. Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 10:22 AM

December 03, 2001

We finally know what IT is
After months of claimed "no-hype", Dean Kamen finally unveils the IT/Ginger/Segway Human Transporter -- a self balancing, one-person, "body-augmenting", scooter. Using gyroscopes, the transporter keeps itself balanced on its two wheels and allows the pilot to change direction by simply leaning. Kamen seems to be marketing it towards urbanites that need to zip around the city without lugging around 4000 pounds of metal. See much more at http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/12/03/segway.ap/ Posted by Raffi Krikorian at 07:59 AM