Dr. Blip's PC-Doctor Blog

Techdirt - Plenty of online shopping sites let customers store their credit card info to make it easier to purchase stuff in the future. And, for most home users, that is a convenient feature -- as it seems unlikely that a third party would access your computer and use your credit cards to order stuff. Except, apparently, a lot of parents forget about their kids being able to do that. A study in the UK found that plenty of kids were buying stuff online without their parents' knowledge or approval, using the stored credit card info on certain web shopping sites. Of course, if parents checked over their credit card statements regularly (or received the packages when delivered), you would think they would notice such activity.

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PCWorld - You've probably had this experience: Your printer tells you it's time to change the cartridge, but you dismiss the message and keep printing. Days or weeks later, you're still using the same cartridge and thinking to yourself that rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Or perhaps your printer simply shuts down when it decides you've gone deep enough into its ink well, refusing to operate until you replace the cartridge, though you suspect there's plenty of ink left.

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PCWorld - Most workers will do some kind of online shopping from their work computer in the coming weeks, according to a recent survey from ISACA, a global, nonprofit association of IT professionals. But while worker attempts to check off a holiday shopping list may pose security risks for the businesses which employee them, most organization still don't have an effective plan to stop the behavior -- or to educate people about the risks.

The research, titled "Shopping on the Job: Online Holiday Shopping and Workplace Internet Safety," suggests four out of 10 Americans ages 18-24 will spend up to five hours shopping online using their work computer this holiday season. The same age group is the least worried about the vulnerability of their work computers, according to ISACA.

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PCWorld - At Microsoft's recent Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, the air crackled with anticipation. On the heels of Vista, arguably the biggest disaster in Microsoft's history, Windows 7 was about to be revealed. A blast of fanfare, and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie took the stage to pull the wraps off the new desktop operating system--which would deliver better performance, an improved user experience, and some nifty media-sharing features. The crowd salivated at the chance to play with Microsoft's latest and greatest.

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techdirt - You may recall that Classmates.com was a website that first showed up in the 90s, and tried to do what Friendster and Facebook were later able to do. The problem was that Classmates.com's business model was to charge users for many of its features, including actually connecting with and contacting your classmates -- things that more recent social networks have always allowed for free. However, if you ever used Classmates.com for anything, you've probably been spammed with emails for years, each one claiming that your classmates are looking for you, or had recently viewed your profile. Nearly every email sent by the company (and they seem to come about once a week) has some enticing subject line that tries to suggest that something is happening with your profile and you're missing out if you don't upgrade to a premium account.

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Engadget - Seattle-based Cray has been wowing us with massive, ridiculously fast supercomputers since the '70s, establishing a position for its machines high on every geek's most wanted list -- despite never publishing a Doom benchmark. In recent years the title of "world's fastest" supercomputer had been lost by the company, ping-ponging from Wako, Japan to Armonk, NY, but is now back in Cray's hands with the implementation of the XT Jaguar. It's comprised of over 45,000 quad-core Opteron processors, 362GBTB of memory, and has a 10PB (petabyte) storage array, able to perform calculations at a massive 1.64 petaflops. That's over one and a half quadrillion operations per second and more than 50 percent faster than IBM's previous heavyweight. Mind you, Cray is quick to point out that this is the fastest machine being used for non-classified research, a caveat that just makes us even more curious about what's keeping the Pentagon's server rooms warm and loud... and apparently orange.

Update: That should be 362 terabytes of memory, not mere gigabytes.

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Engadget - With the holidays at hand, all these improbably-small projectors we've been seeing around for the past year or so are starting to land in force, and 3M's MPro110 is certainly a contender. The little unit shoots a VGA image onto screens as large as 50-inches (though we wouldn't recommend it), with a long lasting LED backlight backing it up. We got an up-close look at the thing last night, and have a few quick notes: the image is about as dim as you'd expect, and looks exponentially better the smaller the area you're trying to project on -- at about 30-inches in a decently lit room the image was insufferably dim, but at around 17 or 18-inches we were getting some pretty good definition brightness. The projector autofocuses plenty fast, which is clutch for a "handheld" projector, but it does get fairly warm despite its LED usage. Overall, we can't fault the projector too much, with a $359 pricetag and a "paperback book" form factor, but the application is certainly limited at the moment, and we're guessing these will be getting a lot better in the future. The MPro110 is now shipping.

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Engadget - UC Berkeley has been working on using cellphones to track traffic for some time now, first under the the decidedly less expansive Mobile Century project, and now under its new Mobile Millennium project, which has the backing of Nokia, NAVTEQ, and others. It actually first kicked off earlier this year, but it looks like it's now about to take another big step forward, with the researchers set to open things up to the general public -- or the general public in Northern California, at least. The idea here is to collect data from folks with GPS-equipped cellphones and combine it with existing traffic data, and then in turn make that information accessible via cellphone to let you plan out the speediest route. According to the researchers, the software will work on both Nokia and non-Nokia phones, but it seems that they've only tested it on the E71 and N95 so far (you can also view real-time traffic data on your computer). More details will apparently be announced when this new stage of the project officially gets underway on November 10th, but those interested in taking part can already register by hitting up the read link below.

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CNBC - Consumers, still smarting from high gasoline prices, may leave the car in the garage a little more this holiday season, and shop online.

All retailers are expecting sales to slow from last year but a new survey shows that online retailers are likely to feel less of a pinch than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

More than half of online retailers surveyed expect their holiday sales to rise at least 15 percent from last year, according to a survey conducted by Shopzilla for Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation. Compare that to the trade group's forecast for retailers overall: a projected 2.2 percent gain from last year.

Last year, 78 percent of all retailers forecast at least 15 percent sales growth. Online sales rose 19 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to Web marketing firm comScore.

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CNBC - Earlier this week we saw Microsoft finally go on the offensive against Apple, [AAPL 98.78 -0.32 (-0.32%) ] trying to co-opt its "I'm a PC" catchphrase and turn Apple's own ads against itself.

This morning, Hewlett-Packard is doing much the same thing against its rival Dell in an effective ad running in papers across the country, including the New York Times. HP is resurrecting the "Dude, You're Gettin' a Dell" campaign, which wasn't the brightest point in Dell's history, and now it's being used against it.

In the splashy ad, HP proclaims, "Dude, your Dell died 5 hours ago." The fine print tells you what HP is talking about: "While Dell was busy working on getting 19 hours of battery life, we were putting the finishing touches on getting up to 24 hours." The ad goes on to compare HP's EliteBook against Dell's Latitude running ultra-capacity batteries.

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