Posted 01/16/2009 at 10:03:03pm

Innovation isn't stimulated by using the court system to stymie competition by fencing off competitor's products with lawsuits based on trivial patents.

Posted 09/28/2008 at 10:21:51pm

The fact is, manufacturers are increasing paving over the antiquated Windows Mobile. Microsoft has had literally years to improve the OS and choosen not to do so, only polishing up a feature or two here and there.

Out of desperation, device manufactures like HTC and Samsung and with the help companies like Google, Opera, etc., have been renovating the UI and included apps from the top down. One day they'll hit bedrock and there'll be little incetiveto keep the core WM OS.

But have to wonder what WM contributes to Microsoft overall strategy. It's a tiny pary of their business and a small slice of the overall mobile phone OS pie. We also know the next major update has been pushed back well into 2009, possibly 2010. Isn't possible that Microsoft will exit the business to concentrate on more important products?

Posted 09/02/2008 at 11:59:19am

The answer is of course no.

SSDs are not inhertently less secure than any other storage medium. For true security, you don't store or physically locate the keys to unencrypt encrypted data with the data itself. Encrypt your important files with a strong encryption algorithm, keep the keys separate, and you have nothing to worry about.

Posted 08/23/2008 at 11:03:09am

Any data service that doesn't allow continous use, caps downloads to 5GB/month, can only be used for email and browsing the Internet, etc., can't be called broadband, though that's exactly what most wireless service providers in the U.S. do.

Think of it as owning a car which can go 100mph for 10 seconds, then must sit for 10 minutes before the next 10 second sprint, and by the way, can be driven only to the gas station and back. No one would buy such a car, but that's what most settle for in a wireless "broadband" connection.

Personally, I much prefer a wireless connection that gives me 3Mbs down/1Mbs up, that could be used continously, with no content restrictions other than it be legal, offered at a rate competative with local DSL and cable offerings, to a so called 100Mbs connection that would be hobled by the TOS common to most carriers at the moment.

Posted 08/04/2008 at 11:00:19am

Anyone who's ever subscribe to the Dish Network service, I did for a number of years, knows that their picture quality can be horrible. When I last was a customer, Dish Network pay-for-view HD movies at 720p looked pretty good but nowhere near the eye-popping quality of their OTA counterparts. The reason? Dish Network significantly compressed the video stream to fit more channels into the relatively limited satellite bandwidth. Is there any reason to believe that Dish will treat 1080p any differently?

If the headline was

Dish Offers Service in loselessly-compressed 1080p

we would have a story!

Posted 07/31/2008 at 01:45:11pm

When you pay for an Internet purchases directly with a credit card, you have a significant degree of protection through the card issuer: you can always dispute the charge. With PayPal and Google Checkout, even when paying with a credit card, you lose your card's protections because the transaction is between you and the payment service, not between you and the merchant. When there's a problem with a purchase and the merchant doesn't take responsibility, both PayPal and Google Checkout force you into an arbitration process with the merchant, which can be both lengthy and time-consuming, and often devolves into a he-said, she-said discourse.

Amazon.com, on the other hand, has always taken a hard line with its online partners. Problems are handled by Amazon.com directly and merchants are strongly encouraged to please the customer. I've never had an issue that wasn't resolved to my satisfaction with purchases from Amazon.com partners. If Amazon.com maintains this level of customer satisfaction with thier payment service, I think they'll have a winner. If they push to make the service available for eBay auctions, something that Google should've done but didn't, then we'll really have somerthing to take about. (You have to wonder. EBay is encroching on Amazon.com turf by forming allianmces with direct merchants like Buy.com. Is Amazon.com pushing back?)

Posted 07/11/2008 at 11:52:14am

Manufacturer's have a history of re-defining measures for marketing purposes. When's the last time you bought 2x4 lumber that actually measured 2"x4"? Remember those 500MB tape drives that had a 250MB physical capacity? An asterisk would lead to the small print and a statement that the capacity assumed a 2-to-1 compression ratio: you're own mileage may vary. 

Disk manufacture's didn't start using the decimal SI system until the capacity of hard disks grew large enough to make the shift in terminology significant. It's sorta like cereal companies that regularly tout lower prices or more servings; in reality talk meant to cover smaller and/or partially empty boxes, less product, and smaller defined portions.

In the case of hard drive capacities, the OS providers, Microsoft, Apple, the Linux community, etc., need to get with the program. Their use of KB, MB, GB and TB is out of step and just doesn't jibe with the Orwellian reality of hard drive capacity new speak.

What's ironic here is that Seagate has had to pass on what is really an excellent marketing opportunity: what in reality is the world's first commercially available consumer 1TB+ hard drive. Assuning they get it to market first!

Posted 07/05/2008 at 01:06:23pm

We've owned a Drobo for about a month now. It holds four 750GB WD "green" drives configured into a 2TB partitition and a second tiny unused partition. Typically the 2TB partition is 70% full. So far the Drobo has been attached to a media server PC using the USB 2.0 connection; We haven't decided if the NAS addon is worth it yet.

The Good:

1. The Drobo was easy to set up and configure and has been running 24/7 without problems since some initial thermal issues. 
2. Though we haven't done this personally, we should be able to replace the current drives with higher capacity drives as needed without having to back up the existing files. Further, if the Drobo itself should fail, the drives can be moved to a new Drobo without losing data. As far as we know, no NAS running raid 5 can do that.
3. The Drobo automatically defrags and monitors disk health. All we do is the occasional AV scan.
4. The Drobo looks sharp and is farily compact, though a little deep.
5. Data Robotics tech support is live and very knowledgeable.

The Bad:

1. When we first setup the Drobo, it was placed inside an AV cabinet with good air flow. After running one or two hours, it would shut down indicating an overtemp condition. After a couple of days of this, the Drobo was moved to the top of the cabinet, where it's been running continuously without incident ever since. Data Robotics analyzed the log which indicated the unit was reaching 52 degrees C before shutting down.
2. The reason we put the Drobo inside the cabinet was the fan; it noisy and runs continuously. We're looking at the expensive NAS add on so that the Drobo can be moved far from our media center.
3. As mentioned in the article, the Drobo is slow. However, for most media streaming it's adequate. However, at least once a day, the data transfer rate drops to zero for a period that can last up to a minute. These breaks correspond to high disk activity inside the Drobo. To insure media files play back without interruption, we copy the file from the Drobo to our media center' PC's hard drive first.
4. The status lights are bright and flashy, but not that informative. A status screen like on the D-link NAS DNS-343 would have been appreciated. The Drobo Dashboard software doesn't include a tool for reading the non-text logs.