Items tagged with dead
So, wait. The Zune HD isn't dead? Hmm. After hearing that Microsoft was transitioning away from the Zune HD hardware and focusing more on software, it seemed easy to assume that the Zune as a standalone hardware icon was dead. But that may not quite be the case yet. Microsoft made it pretty clear that Windows Phone 7 would be their focal point...
Read more...
If you had read a Bloomberg story that floated across the wires at 4:27 PM yesterday, your heart might have stopped, and you might have rushed to sell your Apple stock. But no, it was all a mistake, and quickly retracted. The retraction was rather terse, though, saying only "An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently...
Read more...
Social music networks are like college. You all meet up there for a while, make friends, maybe a few enemies, share all sorts of things, and then scatter to other places and make new friends. The overriding constant is that nobody has any money in either place. Social.FM, which until recently was known as Mercora, was launched in 2005, and...
Read more...
The trend towards DRM-free music seems to be giving Dell the notion that the market's ready for another digital music player. They tried to sell MP3 players five years ago, but got washed away in the Apple iPod tsunami and gave up in 2006. There's a whiff of "me too" about anybody trying to make portable music players now; Apple's devices...
Read more...
The computer mouse must rank among the most useful things ever invented. Like all great inventions, it's pretty well impossible to even calculate the value that it's brought to society. But many more ways to point at something on a pixellated screen have been developed since the mouse was born back in the sixties. According to an analyst at...
Read more...
We know that Microsoft has set June 30th as the drop-dead date for Windows XP (despite their statements yesterday). Despite the fact that after June 30th, manufacturers such as Dell are not allowed to ship PCs with XP pre-installed, Dell has come up with an "escape clause."Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and...
Read more...
Saturday Microsoft send a letter to the Yahoo! Board of Directors, setting a deadline of three weeks, or April 26th for an agreement to be made. If an agreement has not been reached by then, Microsoft indicated it would be forced to take the matter directly to the shareholders.The software giant threatened to launch a proxy fight to unseat...
Read more...
You have to measure the remarks of the Ericsson CEO about the future of Wi-Fi hotspot computing against the stake he has in the outcome of the race to serve the computing public on the go; but he does seem to be hitting the nail on the head when he predicts that Wi-Fi hotspots are "The telephone boxes of the broadband era." ... there's...
Read more...
Things seemed settled. Blu-ray, the high definition format favored by Sony, finally overcame the competition offered by rival Toshiba, HD DVD, and the next-generation format wars were over. Not so fast, says New Medium Enterprises, who are touting an alternative to Blu-ray they call the versatile multilayer disc. VMD has the one attribute...
Read more...
Gary Gygax, acknowledged by many as the father of the role-playing game, has passed away at 69.Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games. Gygax designed the original D&D game with...
Read more...
The programmer's Pandora's Box has been opened, and boy oh boy is it full of cores. It started out small and manageable with Intel's popular Core 2 and the Athlon 64, but it's getting out of hand quickly with chips with dozens and dozens of cores on the horizon now. The problem is that all that firepower is going to go to waste because nobody...
Read more...
If you're a Sam & Fax fan, rejoice: a new season is en route for this fall. If you're a person who likes gaming in small, affordable doses, then you might also want to rejoice. After several games announced plans for episodes, only a few have delivered. Some, like SiN have outright cancelled plans for episodic gaming. Others are waiting...
Read more...
According to a story on The Inquirer, AMD's upcoming native quad-core processor, codenamed Barcelona, will outperform competitive offerings from Intel. AMD's European technical director, Guiseppe Amato said, "Barcelona is an architecture that must be faster." And that compatibility with existing platforms is assured with a...
Read more...
Got that Xbox 360 Santa dropped down the chimney revved-up on Gears of War? Or perhaps your tennis elbow is acting up again, after years of dormancy, due to a little too much Wii-laxing? It's all about the consoles this year it seems. And if you weren't careful you might dismiss the PC as a solid gaming platform. Au...
Read more...
Sad news tonight, folks. CNET Editor James Kim was just found dead. He and his family were on a holiday trip when their card was stranded in blinding snow. James left his wife and kids in the card while he went on foot for help, but he never made it. More details are available in this story on CNN. "The body of a San Francisco...
Read more...
Variety has a mildly amusing obituary for the Vertical Helical Scan format. After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old. No services are planned. The format had been expected to survive...
Read more...
For all you computer engineers out there, this may come as a shock: Moore's Law is dead according to the man himself. All those years of "the number of transistors on a die will double every 18mo" beaten into your heads is all for naught. Truth be told, the real reason for the death of Moore's Law has to...
Read more...
Everybody has a cell phone. And since everybody has a cell phone, people will drive right past you on a lonely road when your car has broken down, and figure you're just waiting for a lift. And they won't know that your cell phone battery is dead and you have no way to charge it. It's a long walk to the nearest payphone these days....
Read more...
