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Crazy Eddie take note!
 
The Friday immediately following Thanksgiving has long been known as “Black Friday” because it represents the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season, or the day when retailers hold massive sales in hopes of steering their (red) losses into (black) profits.

And from what I’ve been reading about holiday shopping this year, gadgets may be one of the few bright spots … 

Among the most heavily discounted electronics items poised to dominate this year’s sales are low cost notebooks, according to sources, who note that Dell plans to offer $299 linux model via its website, while Wal-Mart markets a $299 Compaq and Best Buy a $299 eMachines portable.

And do yo think Apple will be sitting quietly …

… Didn′t think so; so check out AppleInsider.

And thanks to blogs.phillynews.com for the image.

Hopefully, these prices are insane!!!!!

Tags: apple, best buy, black friday, compaq, crazy eddie, dell, emachines, notebooks, wal-mart

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Copyright VoIP &amp Gadgets Blog

Original post by nafiz

It is the black hole of the digital age — the three minutes it can take for your computer to boot up, when there is nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait some more before you can log on and begin doing anything at all.

Now the computer industry says it wants to give back some of those precious seconds. In coming months, the world’s major PC makers plan to introduce a new generation of quick-start computers, spotting a marketing opportunity in society’s short attention span.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people access to basic functions like e-mail and a Web browser in 30 seconds or less.

Now, can you remember back when you’d boot up the PC and then head to make a pot of coffee … 

Asus, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest maker of the circuit boards at the center of every PC, has begun building faster-booting software into its entire product line.

Even Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that “a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.”

Today only 35% of machines running Windows Vista, boot in 30 seconds or less, the blog notes.

Apple Macs tend to boot more quickly than comparable Windows machines, but still feel glacially slow to most users.

Now, if we could just solve global warming …

More at the New York Times.

Tags: apple, dell, hp, lenovo, macintosh, microsoft, quick-start computers, windows vista

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Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Laptops

We knew more Inspiron Minis were in the works, and Dell’s just officially announced the next member of the family, the Inspiron Mini 12. Yep, the same machine we first spotted all the way back in June, and nothing much has changed in the meantime — you’re looking at either a 1.3GHz Atom Z520 or 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor (a step up from the usual 1.6GHz Atom N270), up to an 80GB drive, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth / WiFi, and that 12-inch, 1280 x 800 display, all in a 2.72-pound package less than one inch thick. The bad news? It’s Japan-only for now, but it’ll hit the States late next month with a starting price under $600. That’s a pretty hot price / performance ratio on paper — if this thing performs like it should, it could potentially take away sales from more full-featured ultraportables like the Envy 133 and the MacBook Air. We’ll see how it goes — the netbook market suddenly got interesting again, eh?

Read - Dell announcement
Read - Laptop hands-on
Read - Dell Q+A

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

When Dell started pre-loading digital copies of Iron Man in new systems for $19, we didn′t think that was very enticing, but at least it was a pretty good movie, right? Quite possibly encouraged by thousands of accidental purchases (we kid, sort of), Dell’s announced two new content pre-loading partnerships — Universal Music Group and CinemaNow. The music comes in 50 and 100 song bundles starting at $25, but at least it’s DRM-free, so if you don′t mind a mega mix chosen entirely by Dell it’s not all evil. CinemaNow, though, offers $25 and up bundles including (among other flicks) world-renown classics like The Fast and the Furious and the Matrix sequels. Fear.

Read - Universal Music Group
Read - CinemaNow

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Original post by Samuel Axon

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

When Dell started pre-loading digital copies of Iron Man in new systems for $19, we didn′t think that was very enticing, but at least it was a pretty good movie, right? Quite possibly encouraged by thousands of accidental purchases (we kid, sort of), Dell’s announced two new content pre-loading partnerships — Universal Music Group and CinemaNow. The music comes in 50 and 100 song bundles starting at $25, but at least it’s DRM-free, so if you don′t mind a mega mix chosen entirely by Dell it’s not all evil. CinemaNow, though, offers $25 and up bundles including (among other flicks) world-renown classics like The Fast and the Furious and the Matrix sequels. Fear.

Read - Universal Music Group
Read - CinemaNow

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Original post by Samuel Axon

Filed under: Laptops

We’re no strangers to rebranded netbooks, but we’re a little bufuddled as to why Dell’s rebranding its own Inspiron Mini 9 as the Vostro ᦾ. Sure, we’re digging the stealth looks, but the specs haven’t changed at all, and we don’t think the Vostro brand really has any more cachet than Inspiron — they’re both pretty low end. Even more bizarrely, the ᦾ is apparently Japan-only for now, and it’s priced at an absurd ¥92,830 ($972) — yeah, you can get three Eee 900As for that price with more or less the same specs. Must be one hell of a paint job.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Dell’s Latitude XT is a pretty special piece of equipment, namely because it boasts multi-touch capabilities while being a Tablet PC. Unfortunately, it seems that quite a few users are growing increasingly frustrated with the touch-lovin’ screen, with GottaBeMobile going so far as to call Dell out to remedy the myriad issues with its N-Trig digitizer. Among the problems are “digitizer not found” errors upon restart, a digitizer that won’t work properly without a few reboots and a nice selection of applet loading errors to top things off. It seems the readers of the aforesaid site aren’t faring too well either, with the forums filling up with folks eager and willing to yell “amen!” and “me too!” Are you also experiencing wonky N-Trig problems? Are you fed up with Dell’s public silence on the matter? Or have you figured out a solution that you’ve been keeping all to yourself for the past seven months? Chime in down below.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Laptops

If your Latitude 𐰖 is growing a bit long in the tooth, it sounds like the Latitude E6400 is the perfect replacement. Critics over at NotebookReview had no qualms mentioning the unit’s strengths, from the rugged chassis to the excellent port assortment to the remarkable 19-hour battery life. Of course, it did point the majority of the review at business-minded users, but it’s not like you’re really looking at the Latitude line to run Crysis, anyway. Overall, reviewers couldn’t find any “major reason” to dislike the E6400, though it couldn’t help but mention a smattering of “minor annoyances.” Like, you ask? Frustrating ControlPoint software, a less-than-awesome trackpoint / touchpoint and a general build quality that made the unit “feel less durable than it really [was].” If you can overlook those gripes, however, you could be staring at a winner.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Movable Type 4.0+ has several plugins that utilize Movable Type’s extensible Open ID Login framework to give a customized login experience for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, or Vox users on Movable Type blogs. The logon requirements for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox all support OpenID which makes this possible.

On any blog entry you’ll see the following text near the Comments form:

Sign in to comment using AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox. Or comment anonymously.

Once you click Sign In you’ll see this cool new sign-in screen with multiple Open ID providers.

If I click on Yahoo! for instance, you’ll see this screen:

Some of these plugins do have further requirements to get it to work.

The Yahoo! plugin requirements:

• Movable Type 4.2
• Crypt::SSLeay Perl Module

The AOL/AIM plugn requirements:

• Movable Type version 4.0 or above.
• Digest::SHA1 Perl module. Run mt-check.cgi for information on how to obtain it.

The others probably use the same components.

Additionally, there is a flaw in the onload javascript command with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) when used with MyBlogLog, a cool javascript-based widget that shows your recent readers/visitors to your blog, lets you view web stats, and with the right plugin you can get avatars in your comments.

Whenever I have the MyBlogLog widget enabled, it conflicts with Movable Type’s ” body onload” command. i.e. my blog has this in the HTML code:
<body id=”mt-blog” class=”mt-entry-archive layout-wtt” onload=”mtEntryOnLoad()“>

For some reason MyBlogLog overrides or conflicts with Movable Type’s onload command. Technically, it’s an Internet Explorer 7 bug and not MyBlogLog’s fault. Still, MyBlogLog is used on a lot of Movable Type blogs and they should offer an alternative method. I should point out that FireFox and Opera can see the “Sign in” message just fine. So it’s only IE7. I think IE6 and earlier work but haven’t tested it.

In theory I can change Movable Type’s default mt.js javascript file to use an alternate event, but I really would rather not mess with the MT 4.2 default templates too much. Opens up a whole can of worms. So I’ve disabled MyBlogLog until I can figure out how to fix the problem.

Well, enjoy the new login features. I haven′t tested all of them yet (WordPress &amp Yahoo in particular) so feel free to post a comment to test this.

And if you′re also running MT4 and are interested in enabling comments from AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox users, go download the following MT 4 plugins:

• Yahoo! Login via OpenID
• Wordpress Login via OpenID
• AIM OpenID Login 1.0 for Movable Type

Tags: AIM, AOL, avatars, blog, blogging, body onload, comments, IE7, Internet Explorer 7, LiveJournal, movable type, MT 4, MT 4.2, MyBlogLog, OpenID, Vox, WordPress, Yahoo

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Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Original post by nafiz

Well, after several weeks of planning, I finally upgraded our blog server to Movable Type 4.2, Six Apart’s latest and greatest MT blogging platform. Technically, it’s Movable Type 4.2RC1 (release candidate 1) and still considered a beta, but close enough, I say. I was tired of waiting for MT 4.2 to launch. TMC was using MT 3.33 for the longest time and I really wanted many of the MT 4.0+ features including custom fields, asset management, performance improvements, and some better CMS management.

Everything in the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The biggest help were several MT-Hacks.com plugins developed by MT guru Mark Carey. My favorite of which is TemplateInheritance, a plugin that lets me configure one “master blog” with customized templates and then have all the other templates inherit their templates from this master blog. You can remove inheritance for specific templates, such as a blog roll template that each blogger wants to customize. Overall, this plugin saved me a ton of time. If you use Movable Type for multiple blogs, go buy this plugin and tell Mark I sent you his way.

Other useful plugins I installed include:
Pagination
TemplateExporter
TemplateInstaller
FastSearch
CacheBlock
VisitorStats
Media Manager
MT-Notifier

And a few other miscellaneous plugins. I′m going over to the Movable Type plugin repository now to check out some other cool plugins. I’m debating installing the FCKEditor plugin, which I did try in my pre-production tests. It works great, but the upload function replaces the built-in MT 4.2 asset management. Maybe if I can hack the FCKEditor plugin to work with the asset management tool I’ll install it.

Of course, the bloggers are used to FCKEditor on MT 3.33, so they’re used to the feature-richness of this rich text editor, including smiley faces, spell check, and tons of customizable buttons. So if the bloggers revolt against the built-in MT 4.2 rich text editor I may have to install it.

Well, some odds and ends to clean up on the blogs, but let me know how you like it. Also, you’ll noticed I added a widget that displays recent blog entries from “Around TMCnet Blogs”. Hope you like the new look!

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Copyright VoIP &amp Gadgets Blog

Original post by nafiz

Zemanta notified me to tell me that Zemanta’s Firefox plugin now works with Movable Type. Woohoo! They said, &quot;Just wanted to drop a quick note that we released a new version of Zemanta today that adds support for MT 4.1. Only through extension for now, but plugin will follow in a few weeks.&quot; I was a little peeved that their initial launch included Wordpress and not MT so I actually posted a thread to their forums asking when Zemanta would be available for Movable Type. They promised me support for MT was coming and indeed it has!

What Zemanta does is simply monitor the text in your blog draft and then go out on the web (connecting to Zemanta’s web servers) to find relevant/related images, articles, and tags. I guess you could call Zemanta a blogger’s &quot;cheat sheet&quot; for quickly finding relevant articles, images and tags. Until now, Zemanta only worked on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted Wordpresses from version 2.0 onwards. But as of today, Movable Type 4.1+ is supported. Speaking of Movable Type, the latest version of Movable Type v4.15 was expected to be released 2 days ago (May 19th), but was delayed until May 28th. Bummer. Can′t wait to upgrade, since MT 4.15 has some cool new features and performance enhancements. But I digress…

Below is a screenshot of me testing it on Movable Type 4.1 while pretending to blog about Michael Jordan. Click for full-image where you will see the Zemanta Firefox plugin seamlessly integrating into the Movable Type interface. From the Gallery I was able to hover my mouse over an image to see a description, copyright info, source, etc. and then simply click on the image to have it inserted into my blog post. Same thing with related articles and related tags. As to whether I’ll actually use Zemanta on a regular basis remains to be seen. I prefer uploading my own images to the blog server rather than "hot linking" to outside images. But I’m going to try it for awhile and see how it goes.

Tags: blogging, blogging tool, Firefox, Movable Type, Wordpress, Zemanta

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Laptops, Wireless

It’s not all just cellphones at Mobile World Congress — HP and Qualcomm have just announced plans to ship laptops with Qualcomm’s Gobi dual-3G chipset that supports both EV-DO and HSPA. That means you won′t be locked into a carrier when you buy a laptop with an integrated WWAN modem — and hardcore road warriors with multiple subscriptions will even be able to switch on the fly to the network with better coverage. HP says Gobi (officially the MDM1000 chip, but that’s no fun) will be available on a range of laptops from ultraportables to high-performance models later this year, but there’s no word on pricing just yet — let’s hope it falls into the “might as well” range, eh?

&nbsp;

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Original post by Nilay Patel

An anonymous reader writes “After 32 rounds, the FCC has raised more than $18.8 billion in its 700-MHz auction, well surpassing its own early estimates of attracting between $10-15 billion in offers. That’s undoubtedly good news for the agency. Since the auction began on Jan. 24, both the FCC and wireless experts have expressed ongoing concerns about meeting those estimates. Once the auction was underway, those worries were compounded by a shaky economic forecast and the possibility of a looming recession.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by CmdrTaco

Filed under: Networking

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/world_news/Fourth_undersea_cable_cut_near_UAE_suspicions_rise′; For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable in the Mediterranean Sea has apparently been cut, and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious. Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week — a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).

[Image courtesy of DivingCo]

&nbsp

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Original post by Darren Murph

Open Standard Lover writes “XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) has been getting a lot of attention during the last month and it seems that the protocol is finally taking off as a general purpose glue to build distributed web applications. It has been covered that AOL was experimenting with an XMPP gateway for its instant messaging platform. XMPP has been designed since the beginning as an open technology for generalized XML routing. However, the idea of an XMPP application server is taking shape and getting supporters. A recent example shows that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by CmdrTaco