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From USA Today: Yaffa Balsam was mystified. Why did so many other family therapy websites pop to the top of Google (GOOG) search results listings, while her site was nowhere to be found? It’s a question posed by thousands of small-business owners every day as they seek new customers online rather than through traditional Yellow …
From Forbes: More than 2,700 exhibitors descend on Las Vegas Monday, each ready to show off their latest and greatest tricks at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. But good luck finding many of the gizmos and gadgets on store shelves: Though CES is supposed to give gearheads a peek at the future, it is often …
From the New York Times: In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower. With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of …
From Slate: Of the many responsibilities shouldered by this column, none is more solemn than its mandate to compel Web-based retailers to take phone calls from the public. But suppose you finally get one of these reclusive customer-service reps on the horn and become so flustered that you forget what it is you wanted to …
From Wired News: Flash-memory-aided hard drives and software that harnesses the full power of multi-core CPUs will make PCs speedier and more convenient in 2007. Next-gen computers will boot up and load applications more quickly as speedy flash memory helps alleviate the bottleneck caused by the slower rotations of a traditional hard disk’s components. “You …
From TechRepublic: Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days. The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in …
From the New York Times: While entertaining viewers with tales of galactic voyaging and hostile aliens, the “Star Trek†franchise also preached the virtues of interracial (and interspecies) harmony, endearing it to millions. But according to Guido Ooms, a Dutch product designer, “Star Trek’ also warped the minds of consumers and product designers by portraying …
Another one from DownloadSquad: With a new year comes a new release of Software for Starving Students‘ CD of free (as in beer) software. The 2007.01 edition includes a wide gamut of programs to do everything from editing images and creating web pages to playing media files and video games. In other words, you can …
From CBC.ca: With another year of gadgets, games and gizmos come and gone, it’s only natural to ask: What hath technology wrought? This year’s crop of prominent mainstream techno-goodies revolved around one common theme: Entertainment. Videos, games and music were at the top of consumers’ minds. A roundup of the best and worst of 2006 …
From the New York Times: Jared Seltzer faced more than the usual megabyte headaches recently while shopping for a desktop computer for his office in Takoma Park, Md. As the information technology director of the Center for a New American Dream, a small environmental group, he wanted to buy a computer that would be relatively …