May 28, 2007
Covering a trade show in Bejing
News.com
Trade shows should be a place where a country shows off its technology. Michael Kanellos found otherwise.
“It took a number of e-mails and phone calls over several weeks to get the appropriate clearance to attend as a member of the press. It wasn’t clear until a day before my flight that I could come to the sessions or even walk the show floor. Even after I got here, I was nervous that I would be kicked out. The organizers wondered where to seat me. They eventually gave me my own table in the back of the auditorium.”
Microsoft angles for vacant Nintendo land
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Land is on Microsoft’s mind, Todd Bishop discovers
“Nintendo of America has long owned a large and rare vacant property in Redmond, between its headquarters and Microsoft’s RedWest satellite campus. The company has been holding the land in reserve for potential expansion. But now, it appears that Microsoft wants to see the site become part of its own expansion plan.”
Red Hat urges caution over patents
iTWire
Sam Varghese interview’s Red Hat’s lawyer on the Novell-Microsoft deal
”Red Hat’s Mark Webbink is not the sort of person to issue threats. He’s somewhat unusual in that he’s a legal counsel who uses clear, concise prose when he speaks. Like all those in the profession, he does speak carefully but thankfully his speech is free of obfuscation.”
May 25, 2007
Lightning detecting cell phone
Information Week
Eric Zeman takes a look at Nokia latest cell phone with some really special feature that would impress even Ben Franklin.
“Well, strike me down! In the spirit of saving lives (because dead cell phone users aren’t very profitable), Nokia has applied to patent the use of FM and GSM technology that will detect potential lightning strikes and warn users to head for the nearest tree, er, shelter. If Benjamin Franklin could only see this!”
Tech Web
Jon Oltsik has had enough of the Interop conference and expo in Las Vegas.
“After three days here–about as much time as any sane person should spend in this town–I bid adieu to Interop. I heard that there were 21,000 people in town for the Interop Conference. Judging by the hoard of people leaving the Mandalay Bay convention center yesterday (and headed for the saloon for a little geek speak), I believe it. My takeaways from the show are as follows: The buzzwords this year were network access control, wide-area network optimization and security. Security is a must-have. NAC is real and will go from concept to strategy in the next 12 months. WAN optimization is also a requirement. Why? Enterprises networks and applications have been designed in isolation and don’t work very well together. WAN optimization adds intelligence to bridge this gap.”
How Would You Write A Computer Lemon Law?
Tech Dirt
Ed Foster has written up a short blurb for Gripeline discussing how complicated It would be to write a lemon law for computers.
“As he notes, it’s not as easy as just replacing the word “automobile” with “computer” in existing car lemon laws. After all, there are many different reasons why a computer would stop working — and not all of it has to do with the hardware.”
