Hardware

ATHENS, GREECE -- The Amazon Kindle's "secret sauce" -- the feature that sets it apart from competitor eBook readers like the Sony Reader -- is unlimited, free wireless mobile broadband access, which lets you auto-download books, magazines and newspapers and give you access to the Internet. The catch: It works only in the U.S. Take it abroad, and its advantage goes away. Or does it?

The first installment of a long-term review, in which your author tries out the product and finds that he's willing to put up with some inconveniences for the MBA's surrealistic and luxurious thinness.

See pic of an 11-foot 8-inch bus that tried to go through a 9-foot tunnel because driver's GPS unit told him to.

New project manager takes over administration of the server room where this pilot fish hosts an internal application, so fish figures it's a good time to ask for a few updates.

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Seagate protects its intellectual property portfolio against a flash drive maker. Not to mention how not to fix a leak of personal information...

Virtual machine software and new hardware may be the breakthrough thin client advocates have been waiting for.

Virtualization is heading for cell phones, predicts one vendor.

With apologies to Marc Wilmore, it's IT Blogwatch: in which a Mac clone gets people chattering and puts Apple's lawyers on DEFCON 1. Not to mention a home-built iMac clone...

Arnold Kim broke the story early this morning:

A company called Psystar has started advertising a $399 computer called "OpenMac" which claims to be a Leopard compatible Mac built from standard PC-parts ... marketing this as a cheaper and more expandable alternative to a true Apple Mac ... Leopard compatible with some "minimal patching" but does offer Leopard pre-installed ... accomplished by using parts that are known to be compatible with Mac OS X Leopard, as well as the use of an EFI emulator ...

More broadband is not the answer to better performance of "cloud computing."

Help desk forwards a trouble ticket to this support pilot fish: User has dual screens, but her mouse is stuck in just one screen — it won't move between them.

Green IT initiatives are taking over, but it isn't about altruism. It's about cold, hard business decisions to be more cost efficient by being more energy efficient.

Intel senior fellow Rich Coulson spoke at Storage Networking World this week about huge variances in the performance and longevity of solid state disk as well as an approaching economy of scale that will reduce prices by an order of magnitude.

At the CTIA Wireless 2008 trade show last week in Las Vegas the hottest new phone was, as you might expect, Sprint's Instinct, apparently the closest thing yet to an iPhone. And still the farthest thing from an iPhone? That would beMicrosoft's changes to Windows Mobile 6.1.

Desktops as a service may be the answer to thorny PC management problems.

When I first read this article "Vendor disk failure rates: Myth or metric" by Mary Brandel it got me thinking about my own real world experience with drives. Personally, I've owned about 20 computers in my life. I've built dozens however, and some of the ones we have at work are 12 years old and they're "on" Monday through Friday for 8-10 hours per day to boot.