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PC World digs in to the DVR scene in that comprehensive way of theirs, comparing and contrasting a number of options including DirecTV DVR with TiVo, a Comcast DVR, Windows Media Center, Moxi, Slingbox, and Orb.

Read more about it at PCworld.com

Sprint and Sirius announced a deal to allow Vision customers to listen to Sirius on their handsets using the Vision network.

Does this mean we’ll be able to listen to Howard Stern on our cellys?

Sprint Corporation announced a new partnership with Sirius Satellite radio
Inc. that will offer some of its customers the possibility of receiving satellite radio over their cell phones.

The deal, which is the first one to have been struck between a wireless corporation and a sattelite radio company, is set to expand Sprint’s wireless entertainment package.

More..

I tried calling my dad tonight using 10-10-220 from my cell phone. No workie

I wish there was a reduced long distance number I could use from the cell phone to give me cheap LD.
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Avalanche, Microsoft’s new codename for their Bittorrent like file sharing engine is in the works of being released here shortly. Cloning many of the features that BitTorrent already possesses Microsoft officials are touting in a research paper that both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: “Despite their enormous potential and popularity, existing end-system co-operative schemes such as BitTorrent, may suffer from a number of inefficiencies.” The coding system used by Avalanche, which is based on network coding, is 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper… *Cough* BS *Cough*.

Read more about it here

Just got word from David Breyer registration for CES 2006 is now open.

I received this email yesterday and promptly registered. This will be my fourth CES conference. I plan to blog everyday from the conference, and maybe, just maybe, do a podcast each day. Of course I will have my camera at the ready. You can see some of last years photos in the gallery. (Note: I recently switched to flickr and don’t have everything loaded yet.)

Last year I had to watch Bill Gate’s speech from a satellite room, hopefully this year I will get in line early enough to be in the real thing. Although I hear they gave most of the seats to press people. But hey, I should be considered press too right?

It appears Yahoo is working on a technology that will allow you to search subscription based websites. So does this mean we’ll now have access to reading content we normally would have to pay for? I wonder if it will index pictures …

The service, called Yahoo Search Subscriptions, allows users to search multiple online subscription content sources and the web from a single search box.

Users can see content from the sites they subscribe to, while nonsubscribers have the option of paying to see it. Content providers, for their part, get access to the vast audience of web search users.

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An enterprising college student built an air conditioner for under $30 with a fan, a garbage can of ice water and some tubing.

How the contraption works: cold ice water flows through coiled tubing attached to the back of a fan which cools the blowing air. The condensation could get messy and you won’t get the same results as a store-bought A/C, but this is a cool (har) DIY project for the broke and sweaty.

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A peer of mine at work Pat Collins sent me this very interesting link today about how with some MAC address spoofing and ICMP tunneling you can hack your way into a wireless network.

To summarize, an HTTP request is sent to to the raw socket which is handled by the linux kernal (Note: can’t do this in windows folks) which is setup to be the the default route to the tunnel which redirects to the ICMP socket (tunnel) and then sent back to the kernal to interpret as an ICMP packet on the real wireless interface. I’ve never seen anything like this. Just another reason to think wireless isn’t as secure as we think it is..

The big “D” Michael Dell has spoken some words lately about absorbing Apple’s OSX into Dell’s mix of OS’s distributed with their systems. I wonder how Microsoft feels knowing that not only is Apple’s future plans to go X86, but the biggest computer distributor in the world [Dell] wants a piece of their competition [Apple]..

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“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers,” Dell wrote in an email. It’s the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple’s software.
More Info..

Yeah I know, everyone’s sick of hearing the media’s BS on the MJ jury decision but these 2 flash parodies are hella funny:

http://www.liquidgeneration.com/poptoons/michaeljackson_smoothcriminal.asp
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/nevercoppedafeel.swf