Archive: April 29, 2007 - May 5, 2007
Danes Detail iBook Defects
This is some dogged consumer-protection work: Denmark's Consumer Complaints Board, after receiving numerous reports from buyers of Apple's iBook G4 laptops who found their computers dying after the one-year warranty had elapsed, asked an electronics laboratory to research the problem. That research determined that these problems were due to a...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 4, 2007; 9:19 AM ET | Comments (40)
Patent Progress
I've written about the problems of the patent system on and off for most of this decade, but this morning's column is the first time I've had occasion to sound optimistic about things. The Supreme Court's ruling (PDF) Monday clarified one of the most basic definitions of what's patent-worthy, the...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 3, 2007; 11:26 AM ET | Comments (4)
Vexatious Voice Recognition
One of my colleagues recently sent me a link to this YouTube clip --one programmer's attempt to write a brief segment of computer code using Windows Vista's speech recognition. As you might expect, things don't go well. Vista keeps interpreting his editing commands as text that he wants to "type,"...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 1, 2007; 2:21 PM ET | Comments (7)
Miscellaneous Monday-Morning Updates
Some news about recent topics of this blog: Internet radio royalties: Last week, Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) introduced a bill, the Internet Equality Radio Act (PDF text), that would bring commercial Webcasters under the same simple royalty system as satellite radio--they could pay 7.5 percent of...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 30, 2007; 7:09 AM ET | Comments (7)
