Archive: March 18, 2007 - March 24, 2007
The FCC Tunes Into HD Radio--And May Turn Off Distant AM
Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission gave a big boost to HD Radio, the digital technology that permits an FM station to broadcast multiple channels and allows AM stations to sound like FM. The FCC ruling (109 kb PDF) leads off by eliminating filing requirements for FM stations that want to...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 23, 2007; 6:37 PM ET | Comments (40)
A (Much) Closer Look At Windows Vista
If you're curious about how some of the advertised features in Windows Vista work under the hood--or you'd just like to see what kind of reading I do for fun on the job--have a look at the first installment of Ars Technica's three-part Vista review. This lengthy piece goes into...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 23, 2007; 11:24 AM ET | Comments (9)
Fishing For News At FOSE
FOSE--the name of the annual government-tech trade show in town--rhymes with "saucy" but is anything but. This convention is geared towards military, homeland-security and other no-fun uses; the brightly lit Best Buy booth cranking out the upbeat sounds of OK Go and Outkast seemed horribly out of place. To anybody...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 22, 2007; 4:29 PM ET | Comments (5)
Pick A Card, Any Card--If You Can Find It
The review I'm working on for tomorrow's paper has reacquainted me with the perplexing variety of flash-memory storage cards available. The only thing more annoying than the proliferation of incompatible card formats (can somebody remind me why xD-Picture Cards need to exist at all?) is the way each of these...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 21, 2007; 11:30 AM ET | Comments (14)
Movie Downloads, Direct To The Living Room
Paid movie downloads to computers have yet to see anything close to the success of music downloads. But that isn't stopping the movie industry from trying. The latest attempts aim to eliminate the need to watch the movie on a computer--not in the most obvious way, which would be to...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 20, 2007; 5:21 PM ET | Comments (18)
A Tweak For Tiger
On Tuesday, Apple released a maintenance upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4, aka Mac OS X Tiger. This 10.4.9 update offers the usual mix of bug fixes, security patches and minor new features, as Apple's release note outlines: The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 19, 2007; 7:00 PM ET | Comments (7)
Best Reader Comments: Tax-Prep Travails
Nobody likes paying taxes, but people dislike paying money to figure out how much tax they owe even more. I've gotten a lot of great e-mail in response to last Thursday's column (in addition to the comments you all have left here). This was one of my favorites: "I can...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 19, 2007; 10:22 AM ET | Comments (4)
