How Technology would have changed 9/11/01

Great article on what technology we have now that we did not have on September 11, 2001 and how it could have changed that tragic day.  Among the many that we did not have: Twitter, Google, Youtube, Cloud computing and Wifi.  The Houston Press article highlights where those technologies were back then and how they would have impacted that day if they had existed as they do today.  Great read.

This firesale really hurts, $206 per unit

HP recently released and then cancelled their HP Touchpad.  It was meant to go head to head against the iPad.  As you may now know, HP went down to a horrid defeat and have cancelled the Touchpad completely.  This past Thursday, HP announced that WebOS and the Touchpad was discontinued and future support for WebOS devices would be eliminated.  Initially HP cut the price by $100 to $399 for the cheapest unit, now by cancelling the device completely, they have dropped the price to $99 for the cheapest unit.  It has been a smashing success, at least for the general public.  They are sold out almost everywhere (to my dismay).  According to TechRepublic, HP is losing $206 on every unit sold.

How's that 8 day delay working for you?...Not good

When it came to watching a rerun of your favorite tv show online, you used to be able to do it the day after the show premiered.  With Fox, not anymore.  In an effort to get you away from watching TV online, Fox started a policy of only posting new shows 8 days after the show premiered.  What this meant is that if you relied on the Internet to watch shows, you would always be 2 weeks behind in viewing your favorite show.  Well, what is a smart Internet user to do about this problem?  According to TorrentFreak, everybody is stepping up and pirating at a staggering rate.  Since the policy went into effect, illegal downloads of shows have increased over 100% over periods prior to the delay.  Hell's Kitchen downloads have increased 114% and Masterchef, 189%.  Seems like the grand plan is backfiring.  Instead of using the Internet to hamper or inconvenience your fans, Fox may be better suited in trying to use the Internet to make them happy or gain new fans.  Read the full story here.

Firesale! HP Touchpads on clearance

Thursday, HP announced that the recently released Touchpad Tablet was being discontinued.  I suppose those poor sales would account for that.  Suddenly a $500 tablet was on sale for $99.  I headed out to my local Best Buy store to find out that a Black Friday line was out this morning and all of them were gone.  I'm still mourning the fact that I missed out on such a good deal, but did I really?  Every review that I came across indicated that the tablet was mediocre in need of some software fixes.  Since HP has discontinued that, maybe I'm the lucky to have missed out.  If you find one, congratulations, if you didn't, well it seems like we didn't miss much.

New "How to" page entries

How to clean your LCD Display correctly and how to clean and disinfect your mouse and keyboard are the newest entries in the how to section to your right of this page.  They are under the Help Desk section of this website.  Happy reading!

Firefox 6 available now

Hard to believe it, but true.  Firefox has just released version 6 today.  Except for being version 6, you probably will not notice much difference between the current version 5 and the new release.  You should be prompted to update automatically over the next couple of days from Firefox.  If you do not want to wait, go here.