Forget “Black Friday,” start watching “Cyber Monday”

“Cyber Monday” is apparently the new name for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when workers return to the office and start Christmas shoping online from their work computers. It’s apparently growing in importance, as the traditional “Black Friday” (when stores supposedly “climb into the black,” or start making a profit for their fiscal year) loses ground. …

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“Phoenix hijacks Windows boot with instant-on”

My first computer was a used TI-99/4a, given to me as a gift on my twelfth birthday, just after Texas Instruments abandoned it. It was a wonderful little device, despite the quickly-outgrown 16K of memory. One of the best things about it (besides the hardware speech synthesizer module that I got with it) was that …

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“Buffy mastermind returns with new TV series”

I always got an odd look when I told people that I enjoyed watching the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Something along the lines of “you’d admit to that, voluntarily?” I also really enjoyed the Firefly series, and the Serenity movie that capped it off. So I was interested to read about creator Joss …

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“Japanese “melody roads” play tunes as you drive over them”

When I was a child, one of our family’s vacations required driving through Nashville, Tennessee. That was the first place I encountered grooved pavement; my mother said to be quiet and listen, because the road was singing to us (which earned her about three minutes of golden near-silence from myself and my two sisters). It …

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“Who else is laughing at the music industry?”

“Freelance technology journalist” Don Reisinger has an interesting article here: As music downloading (and dare I say illegal downloading) continues to rise, these music companies bury their heads in the sand and blow policy out the other end. Instead of understanding customers and realizing that what we want is readily available music without DRM, Warner …

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