CNN have published an insightful article on the rebound of big dot-com Web sites. Although their arguments seem convincing, many will remain skeptical. Scott Kessler is among the skeptics:

I’d hesitate to characterize this is as comparable to what was going on in the late 1990s,” said Scott Kessler, an equity analyst with Standard & Poor’s. “Not every Internet stock is doing well.

Picture from CNN

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…

Google take their satellite maps service one step further:

…trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped…

One wonders if they can acquire full-colour information. Perhaps their 2-D, top-down pictures can be mapped onto 3-D surfaces. We shall wait and see.

In other news, Google Maps have come under fire recently.

Several sites are running an article on the recent statistical figure: laptops sales surpassed desktop sales in the States.

Will it take another 5-10 years until PDA‘s outsell laptops? Hardware is becoming smaller and cheaper; CPU speed increases rather slowly; RAM matters very little at this point where the O/S just doesn’t require it. So, smaller units might be equally good. To get a convenient workspace, one can attach an external monitor and other peripherals to the PDA while having the choice to just pull the PDA out of the pocket.

Where there’s smoke, there must be a fire. The streets of Manchester are full of smoke at the moment so there must be a large-scale wildfire. There was no evidence of a fire while I was walking home for breakfast; only half an hour later (now), the streets are foggy with smoke.

As it occurred around 5-6 in the morning, there is no word yet from the BBC. Google News can indentify no source either.

9 AM update: there is no longer a trace of smoke. Good riddance.

A hardware fault in outdated Palm devices is now forcing PalmOne to pay. An enormous number of people are entitled for a replacement. The wording in Slashdot:

After years of denying the problem with bad backup capacitors, Palm is settling a class action suit. If you have a dead Palm m100, m105, or m125, fill out the paperwork, and send it in, Palm will replace it with a new unit…

You can get all the necessary papers as PDF‘s from this site. Does that open to doors to similar exchange policies? Ones involving other Palm models with other known defects?

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Intel are approaching dangerous territories as they now embed Microsoft-specific functionality (namely DRM) at hardware level. From DIGIT:

It will get worse before it gets better, according to your point of view, because Intel continues behind the scenes to push hard on the trusted computing modules and Microsoft’s future OS is expected to implement these features in full.

This politically-incorrect move gives one more reason to opt for AMD, who are crushing Intel already.