REAL SILLY The following op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is worth some attention involving an initiative called RealDVD* by Real Networks.  Titled the "Movie industry's shortsighted fight", it explains: "Thomas Edison, probably America's best-known and most prominent inventor of all time...

NEEDLES IN HAYSTACKS Well, I've had a couple of days now to play with the new iPhone 3G and the flood of third-party applications now available for it in the Apple App Store, both free and for a fee.  And the good news is that there are some pretty cool applications, especially games that take ...

STOP TO SMELL A ROSE Use something several times a day, everyday for half a decade or more, and you can't but help take it a bit for granted.  I'm talking here about Google Search, which so many of us have become so addicted to in living our daily lives. For that reason alone, it's interesting ...

TRY, TRY AGAIN Some readers may recall an anticipatory post I'd done last May on a new "pen-computer" device by a company called LiveScribe.  Well, the product is finally shipping and David Pogue of the New York Times just reviewed the device.  And the results are not happy for L...

ALMOST THERE Taking video games mainstream has been the holy grail of console the game industry for the last couple of decades.  Now that we may finally be getting there with innovative console platforms like Nintendo's Wii, the industry may have to re-learn how to market to this mainstream aud...

MULTI-TASKING NO NOs ABC News ran a story on a recent silicon valley trend with the titillating title "Going Topless to Office Meetings", wisely adding the sub-title, "Why Silicon Valley employees are going to meetings Laptop-less". Here's the gist: "In the headquarters of D...

NEED FOR SPEED Here's a timely review by Ars Technica doing some performance testing on the MacBook Air with a regular 80 GB hard drive, and one with a solid state drive (aka SSD) 64 GB drive: " The MacBook Air is nice, but as we discovered in our in-depth review, not everything is sunshine and...

DIGITAL DREAMS For lovers of TV and movie fare, Amazon has an enticing list to peruse titled "The Ultimate List of Spendy DVDs".  These are not your average boxed sets of DVDs, but the "Ultimate" sets.  For example, top on this list is "Seinfeld-The Complete Series...

TRUE TO FORM So much for the wireless carriers paying lip-service to being "open".  TechCrunch reports T-mobile apparently has started to block Twitter, the popular messaging application (especially amongst the geek set): "A T-Mobile representative replied to a customer’s servi...

HARD-BALL This LA Times article from Dec. 11th, titled "The Big Picture:  In the strike, the studios are playing to win", is one of the best piece I've seen on the Hollywood writer's strike.  Particularly, because it outlines the longer-term chess game being played by both sides,...