Toshiba has announced a new lithium-ion battery that will recharge in minutes as detailed in this story. Now there is something I could use. Everything I have takes longer to recharge than discharge, with the possible exception of my Dewalt Power Tool batteries when put to certain uses, like drilling that are start and stop in nature. The initial uses will be industrial and automotive, but I want something like this for my laptop. Come on, Toshiba is making the thing — why not for laptops? My kid has a little car he charges in seconds and it zips around for another five or ten minutes. Micro-remotes I think it they are called. I hope the same concept soon arrives on my laptop’s doorstep.

Our site has been suffering from what appears to be a mild DOS attack over the last few days and that may have caused it to be slow to respond and in some cases not to respond at all for brief periods. We apologize for the problem and we are doing everything we can to rectify the issue in a timely manner.

Today’s news all seems to be about control over the Internet, first we have the UN ITU, who think that they should have more control over tasks normally handled by ICANN, IETF and the WWWC. To me this seems to be the usual anti-US thing, take something that isn’t broken, and shake it up by handing it to an untested and untried body that is outside the current US control.

Next we have the usual Microsoft verses open standards for Web services. The short of this article, is that you either tie yourself entirely to Microsoft and pay them lots of money, or you walk the slightly harder but significantly cheaper (at least in terms of license costs) course of open standards and interoperability.

Lastly, is the ongoing battle between Movie and Music heavyweights and the technologists. The movie and music big wigs were convinced the VCR was the end of their cash cow, in the end it turned out to be a massive money earner for them. They were also wrong about broadcast music and tape recorders killing record sales. In fact it is probably safe to say they have been convincingly wrong about every prediction of their doom at the hands of new technology since the phono player first came out. And these guys now want us to believe them in their current rantings (and litigation) that P2P and other file sharing methods are going to seriously hurt Hollywood and the music industry? I’m guessing that certain types of people just can’t handle and grow with change.

Microsoft and the EC have arrived at a name for the version of Windows to be released without having MediaPlayer embedded in it. The new names are Windows XP Home N, and Windows XP Professional N. The N apparently stands for “No media player”. Microsoft are said to be somewhat unhappy with the name but are complying anyway. My personal feeling is that the N should stand for “Not a big deal” since any supplier using the new Windows would likely be bundling it with alternative media facilities like those found in RealPlayer, assuming the EC can make Microsoft enable all media functions to use the new player software. Actually, that’s probably why Microsoft are not particularly happy about it.

Perl Python and PHP are all Open Source programming languages and there is a ton of free software written in all of those languages available online. Enterprises have until recently stuck with Java, C++, C or C# when it came to application development, but this is a trend that is apparently starting to change. InternetNews has a story about how Enterprise is starting to notice the benefits of using the “P languages” when it comes to fast application development. As a Perl/PHP coder myself, I can’t believe it took them this long to work that out. One interesting statistic that the article lists, is that PHP has proven considerably less secure then Perl or Python when based on the number of exploits found in programs written in each. I suspect that has more to do with newbie’s preferring to learn PHP than anything else, but the PHP developers would do well to introduce something like Perl’s Taint mode.

For web developers, new Internet capable devices are usually a headache as you never know how your site will display or function on a non PC device. To the rescue comes a free Firefox extension that when used will display any site in the layout a smart phone user would see. SSR (Small Screen Rendering) was written by the same guys behind the NVU WYSIWYG HTML editor and is an invaluable tool for web developers looking to extend their audience.

Mobile and smart phone usage is sky-rocketing and will continue to do so as technologies like 3G and WiMax roll out and at some stage in the near future all mobile phones are likely to contain a web browser of some sort. You can get the SSR extension at: disruptive-innovations.com (down the bottom of the page).

(Note, when you click install, a popup warning bar will appear at the top of the browser window, you have to click on the options button and click “allow”, go get the install going).

WindowsBeta.net recently reviewed the new Linspire 5.0 Desktop Linux release and give it a nine out of ten.
The final few lines of the review sum it up nicely.

In general, I would recommend Linspire to users who are interested in testing Linux for the first time.
Linspire has managed to make the best looking, and user friendly Linux distro I have seen so far.

Rating: 9/10

Read the full review yourself and check out the screen shots.