The Verizon Wireless SMT5800 is a sleek and powerful Windows Mobile smartphone for mobile professionals who want to mange their e-mail on the go.

Coal may be winning the political battle that began last fall when the Kansas E.P.A. turned down a permit request to build two more coal-fired electricity generating plants there. Now the Kansas legislature appears to be ready to pass legislation that pleases coal and pays lip-service to the environment. Perhaps we should call it the “No Coal Mine Left Behind Act.” Reaction to the proposed law depends on your politics and your feeling about coal burning and CO2 emissions. There are those who feel coal is the best answer to America’s energy needs because it’s homegrown and plentiful for now. Besides all that hooey about CO2 is just propaganda from whacked-out greens. There are those who say the CO2 emissions…

According to an article on CNN software sales in the united states were up by 15% to $3.3 billion on the back of big releases by Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple. There are a couple of things I thought were interesting about these numbers. One, it’s good to see people still paying for software. As a lot of software moves to the browser I’ve always thought providing a for-pay desktop client would be a great idea. The numbers are a result of a ton of new software products but it seems like people are willing to pay for compelling software in a variety of areas. The other thing was the jump in imaging and graphics software. This was actually one of…

There’s a newly published Microsoft Patent application that - at least the way I read it- seems to both alter and add significant options to the way in which cut-and-paste is performed between various Windows-compatible documents and utilities. That’s not to say you will have to reprogram your brain to c&p from say, Word into a PowerPoint presentation. That’s not going to need to happen. Instead, the concept here seems to be that Microsoft is saying that under-the-hood coding can make cut-and-paste a messy affair- and here are some solutions for these issues. The specific solutions described in this Patent app offer various “trust levels” for objects that can be cut and pasted. Examples would be secured documents that…

The European Union has launched in 2005 its Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project (LAPCAT). Several companies worked on this €7 million EU-funded project. For example, Popular Science reports that Reaction Engines Limited has designed an hydrogen-powered hypersonic airliner simply dubbed A2. This plane would fly at Mach 5 (3,400 mph or 5,500 km/h) on very long distances, such as non-stop flights from Europe to Australia in less than 5 hours. And because it would be hydrogen-powered, it would not release any greenhouse gases over our heads. The A2 plane has been designed to carry about 300 passengers who would pay a price equivalent to current business class tickets. The question is: will this plane ever take off? But…

Wonder how all the power management software that I’m writing about is doing? 1E, which sells an application called NightWatchman and was the subject of this popular blog post last September, apparently has reached its two millionth seat deployed. The company has also opened a U.S. headquarters in New York. 1E’s application lets you manage the power consumption of desktops remotely, even while letting the IT team do their job with patches, updates, backups and so on. Other developers that fall into roughly the same category include BigFixIT (which I wrote about earlier this week) and Verdiem (in tight with Hewlett-Packard and featured in another post this week!). 1E counts among its big corporate clients companies including Dell, ING Investment…

Create the ultimate gaming supercomputer? You’ve overclocked, water cooled, matched DIMMs, added 10k drives and the latest 1 GB video card. But so have all your friends. What now? How about a 10 Gig home network for the ultimate gaming supercomputer? In a pricing breakthrough you can now buy an 8-port 10 Gig switch, 2 PCI-Express 10 Gig adapters and cables for under $1100. It is the fastest network available for the dollar. One word, my friend: Infiniband No, this isn’t 10 Gig Ethernet. An average 10 GigE switch port costs over $2500 today and the overhead of TCP/IP will bog down even hefty systems unless you buy a costly TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine) adapter. No, this is Infiniband, a…

Two Oxford dons have published a paper which claims that engineering and terrorism share a common mindset. (The lead author is Diego Gambetta, right.) Personally I can see a closer relationship between being being an Oxford sociology professor and having your head…but I digress. (Someone needs a lesson in logic.) The real problem is that people who know better are taking this Luddite nonsense seriously. Here’s the lead from an article in the current Foreign Policy (the whole article is behind a paid firewall): Osama bin Laden studied engineering. So did lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Exceptions to the rule? Hardly. Most highprofile Islamist…

Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy — beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares? Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab, says it does. And it’s a lot less touchy-feely than this definition, which is on the Microsoft Open Source Web site: “The Microsoft open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today’s heterogeneous technology world.” I met with Ramji last week when he was passing through New York on his way to Europe, and had a chance to ask him to provide a succinct definition of what Microsoft means when it refers to its own “open-source strategy.” Ramji has been one of…