Dr. Blip's PC-Doctor Blog

Wired - How's this for some technological wizardry? Take a $350 netbook and turn it into a $1,500 device without changing anything inside.

That's exactly what Acer, RadioShack and AT&T have done with their latest netbook offer. On Friday, the trio said they will offer a netbook for $100 upfront -- but with a $60 per month, two-year data contract on AT&T. Over the two years of the contract, that adds up to a total of $1,540, or more than four times the list price of the netbook alone.

With the move Acer became the first company to bring a netbook on contract to the U.S. The offer is modeled on how most cellphones are currently sold, and follows similar netbooks-on-contract offers overseas.

"It is interesting move," says Bob O'Donnell, a vice president with research firm IDC, "but it won't make a huge dent in the marketplace right away. "The price points they are available today are way too high for most people."

Read More

Wired - The Huygens probe has captured an image of what may be the first drop of liquid ever observed on an extraterrestrial surface.

The photo is evidence that liquids may exist on the surface of other planets and moons, not just frozen lakes. And liquid is more likely habitat for extraterrestrial life.

Among the pictures snapped by the Huygens probe after landing on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, one appears to show a dewdrop made of methane that briefly formed on the edge of the probe itself (indicated by arrow at bottom of image on right). Scientists think heat from the probe caused humid air to rise and condense on the cold edge of the craft.

Read More

Gizmodo - Sony has plans to unveil its first touchscreen Walkman at CES, coming in both 16GB and 32GB varieties, and the early word has it looking pretty slick: OLED touchscreen, anyone?

Yes, the rumor has it that the new Walkman will feature a 3-inch OLED touchscreen. It sounds like a direct competitor to the iPod Touch, as it supports Wi-Fi and will have a built-in browser, as well as a bunch of other web-based features.

While most of the usual menu structure of the current Walkman series will be retained in this new model, there are several new exciting features included. For example, upon listening to an artist, you may click on the artist name and watch music videos of the artist on YouTube through Wi-Fi (WPA and WEP support included). Additionally, there will be a Youtube icon on the main screen that will allow full access to the website - search, pause, FF/RW included very similar to Youtube access on the iPhone/iTouch. Additionally, this new Walkman will be able to subscribe to audio podcast and Crackle video feeds; this means automatic download of new updates, the ability to delete old feed content, all over Wi-Fi.

Interesting! If this is true, and the OS and touchscreen is usable and responsive, we might have a strong competitor to the Touch. We'll find out soon enough, as CES is less than a month away.

Read More

Gizmodo - Well, the John Bond way that is. Bond, the head of forensics at the Northamptonshire Police in the UK, has devised a way to fingerprint bullets with electricity.

He discovered that the extreme heat that occurs when firing a gun causes salt from a fingerprint to slightly corrode the casing. By zapping it with electricity he can detect these prints years after the shots were fired. In fact, Bond was recently able to identify prints on four shells from a 1999 crime scene in Georgia and his method is now in high demand. The hope is that hundreds if not thousands of cold cases could be re-opened and solved thanks to this technology.


Read More

Gizmodo - The creators of Ecofont want to save you ink by drilling tiny holes in your print. Good idea?

Well, while it's free to download and use, Treehugger's testing found that the Ecofont, though readable, really just prints the text lighter. In our guesstimation, you could probably recreate the ink savings of Ecofont by printing your materials in draft mode instead. Plus, that way you can choose the whichever font you like.

But should you be so bold as to print Ecofont in draft mode? Existence would cease as we know it.


Read More

Time - Here's a compressive list of 2008's Top 10:

Albums
Animal Stories
Awkward Moments
Best Biz Deals
Best Performances
Breakups
Buzzwords
Campaign Gaffes
Campaign Video Moments
Children's Books
Crime Stories
Editorial Cartoons
Election Photos
Fashion Moments
Fashion Faux Pas
Fiction Books
Financial Collapses
Fleeting Celebrities
Food Trends
Gadgets
Green Ideas
iPhone Apps
Late Night Jokes
Magazine Covers
Medical Breakthroughs
Movies
Museum Exhibits
News Stories
Non-fiction Books
Oddball News Stories
Olympic Moments
Open Mic Moments
Outrageous Earmarks
Photos
Plays and Musicals
Political Lines
Quotes
Religion Stories
Scandals
Scientific Discoveries
Songs
Sports Moments
T-shirt Worthy Slogans
TV Ads
TV Episodes
TV Series
Underreported Stories
Video Games
Viral Videos
Worst Biz Deals


Read More

CNNMoney.com - What happens when a business throws out its scheduling and collaboration tools and replaces them with Google's low-cost, online business software? To find out, we at Blumsday migrated our entire shop of roughly a dozen employees and contractors to test out Google Apps.

Six months in, it's clear that Google Apps is remarkably powerful for collaboration in many ways that Microsoft Office is not. But, unfortunately for small businesses looking to stretch their IT dollars in these hard times, Google Apps is far from perfect.

If you have not at least taken a gander at Google Apps, please do yourself a favor and click here: http://www.google.com/a. What you will find is the real deal, a "must know about" revolution in small business productivity software. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) appears to have created a killer collaboration app for small businesses. Among the suite's many, many features: It enables groups to process documents, send and receive e-mails, schedule meetings, chat, and access centralized storage spots for critical company information.

Read More

Fortune - If you visit YouTube.com - where close to half of all online video is seen - the power-to-the-people motto "Broadcast yourself" appears at the top of your browser. Lately, though, it's hard not to wonder if the "you" in YouTube doesn't increasingly refer to "them": the Big Kahuna media companies whose video wares have been gaining more notice both on YouTube and elsewhere on the web.

Just in recent weeks, YouTube has signed deals with CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) and MGM that are noteworthy because both involve airing full-length TV shows like "Star Trek" and films like "Bulletproof Monk" on the site. Clearly these aren't the user-generated clips on which the three-year-old site built its primacy (and got itself acquired by Google (GOOG, Fortune 500)). And even before those deals, YouTube had channels for all sorts of professional clips - everything from the BBC to Discovery Channel to Oprah to the NBA.

Of course, there is still a staggering volume and variety of Diet-Coke-and-Mentos-grade home video being uploaded to YouTube - some 13 hours of it each minute. And putting full-length Hollywood material on the web's top video site is a logical next step. In some respects, YouTube is playing catch-up to compete with the flood of shows available on the web from all the major TV networks, both on their own sites and others like Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Hulu.

Read More

ZDNet - While 2008 has been a tumultuous year in business, there have also been a series of developing trends that are quietly transforming the traditional strategies and the standard operating procedures of IT. Here are the five trends that having the biggest impact.
5. The rise of ultra-cheap PCs

A variety of “Netbooks” from leading PC vendors brought sub-$500 laptops to the masses in 2008. These low-cost, small-form-factor machines — pioneered by the OLPC XO and Asus Eee PC — were originally aimed at emerging markets. However, consumers from the U.S., Europe, and Japan snapped them up in surprisingly large numbers.

Read More

ZDNet - How much extra will people people pay to avoid Vista? Dell has pushed the price of avoiding Vista up to $150.

More and more. In June, Dell (DELL) started charging customers an extra $20 to $50 for a downgrade to Windows XP. By October, Dell’s XP premium was up to $100. We checked in on Dell’s site today, and the retailer is now charging a whopping $150 for what Microsoft (MSFT) says is outdated software.

Read More