Technology Talk

The Nov 2006 issue of Computer Shopper describes the face off between HD DVD and Blu Ray as a successor to the standard DVD. Their conclusion? Wait and see which ends up on top.

Here are the pros and cons of each as I see them: Read the rest

Speaking of laptop problems, Dell is recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries because

“In rare cases, a short-circuit could cause the battery to overheat, causing a risk of smoke and/or fire,” said the spokesman, Ira Williams. “It happens in rare cases, but we opted to take this broad action immediately.

Read the rest

According to Gartner, your laptop has a much greater chance of breaking than your desktop. They estimate that 5% of new desktops will break within 12 months compared with 15% of laptops. Within 4 years, 12% of desktops will break compared with 22% of laptops.

The main cause of broken laptops used to be broken screens but now, the culprit seems to be the motherboard and its integrated parts - and that’s requiring technicians to replace the entire motherboard to fix one component that goes bad. Read the rest

Just when you thought it might be safe to surf the web with the latest web browsers (or at least FireFox), hacker J.D. Moore has decided to publish one bug on his blog each day for the month of July - and no, FireFox and Safari aren’t safe either. Of the 9 bugs posted, 7 are in Internet Explorer, 1 in FireFox and 1 in Safari.

The expert reaction to the Month of Browser Bugs is mixed, with some people thinking that making the bugs public can only put pressure on companies to release security patches faster. Others think that going public with this info will only make it easier for hackers to exploit the bugs. Read the rest

According to hotspot directory service, JiWire, there are now 116,070 hotspots (as of June 20) in 128 countries. So why can it be so hard to find access?

If you’re willing to do some planning ahead of time, there are a number of online directories for hotspots including: Read the rest