Monthly Archives: October 2003

News: Printer Cartridge Clones Get Legal Boost

 One in the eye for the printer manufacturers: IDG reports that a ruling this week from the U.S. Copyright Office could have broad effects on the market for low-cost, third-party printer cartridges.Lexmark is suing manufacturer Static Control Components (SCC) of Sanford, North Carolina, which makes computer chips for third-party ink cartridges. Lexmark says SCC’s chips… Read More »

News: Microsoft Blogger Fired

 Hard times for Bloggers Like Us: MicrosoftWatch reports that a temp worker, Michael Hanscom, has become the first Microsoft employee to lose his job over his blog. But, as with all these cases, it gets murkier the more you look at it. Hanscom doesn’t believe it was the act of blogging, per se, that led… Read More »

News: Scary Future At Singapore Expo

 Here’s an example of RFID — the intelligent radio tag technology — used without people’s permission to do something a tad scary. The Singapore Straits Times reports (no link available as yet) today that a local start up, Tunity Technologies, installed a tracking system using RFID that would pinpoint every delegate’s physical position at the… Read More »

News: Tiny Drives Get Bigger

 Hitachi today is now shipping one-inch diameter drives storing 4 gigabytes with a a data transfer rate that is 70 percent faster than the previous-generation Microdrive. Hitachi reckons it’s the “world’s smallest hard disk drive“, weighing just over a half an ounce and equivalent in size to a matchbook. Hitachi will continue to offer its… Read More »

News: The Death Of The PDA

 Interesting article by Reuters’ Franklin Paul on the death of the PDA (no link available, I’m afraid). “The truth is, the PDA as it was first envisioned – as nothing more than a fancy digital pocket organizer – may be nearly extinct,” he writes. Three years ago, consumers rushed to buy PDAs, but “today, its… Read More »