As I mentioned yesterday, if you follow this blog’s news with a RSS reader or via e-mail it is necessary that you unsubscribe from the previous RSS addresses and subscribe back with the new addresses (that you can find on the sidebar on the right on both this blog and on Silicon Gadget).

Unfortunately I have just made a further change to the RSS feeds’ addresses since yesterday, so even if you have recently subscribed to the (now old) new feeds addresses (basically those available earlier than this very post’s time), you have to unsubscribe from those and re-use the current links.

The old addresses (both the original ones for this blog and those available on Silicon Gadget until few minutes ago) will still work until the end of the week, but to avoid unforeseen bugs at that end they will be totally disabled.

I apologize for the inconvenience, but as the street work panels state: “We are working for you”.

you may wonder why there has not been any news in the last week. Well … I have been busy in two fronts.

First I wasted the first half of the week with an old bad habit I got from from Microsoft Windows, even if I have been using Linux for a year now: clean re-install; I was having some slowdown with the Internet applications, especially Firefox, and World of Warcraft under Wine kept freezing my PC very often; so, instead of taking advantage of the wide configurability of Linux, that is very useful even when there are problems to fix, I decided to take the quick and dirty way to do a tabula rasa and re-install everything from scratch. So far everything is going very well (even if I did not had the time to stress-test WoW to check if it is working well as usual).

After this boring part I spent the second half of the week in a particular project: despite the promise to my self to wait and plan for this, I have impulsively opened a new site for this blog!!! It is now called “Silicon Gadget” and its address is: http://www.silicongadget.com/.

As you can see the overall look is identical to this blog, but I have indeed made some changes.

For example, and it is the aspect that took the most of the time, I re-organized a little bit the categories and the tags; this work has been necessary since I decided to change the URL format from the date-based system used here by WordPress.com to the category-based system I am using there.

The second change, that you cannot see since it is beyond the scenes, is that I activated several plugins that will help me to better manage the blog structure.

There is a very important thing you have to take in mind: if you subscribed to the RSS feed of this blog, either with a RSS reader or via e-mail, you have to unsubscribe from those and subscribe back with the similar links you find on the new site.

From tomorrow I will start to write exclusively on the new blog, but this blog will still stay open as archive and backup.

I want to thank both the WordPress.com staff and the forum’s members for all the help I received for this blog.

See you at the Silicon Gadget!!!

During the these first six months users were able to only vote for content provided by only 400 publishers, but now they will be able to submit further suggestions and if a link gets enough votes, it will appear on the front page of Yahoo.

The concept of Buzz is very similar to Digg, the popular social networking site, as in both cases users can submit links which are then subject to voting, but there are fundamental differences.

For example Yahoo Buzz mixes the users’ votes with the the performing on the search engine in order to generate the ranking. Beside, and as the biggest and most important difference, the links with the highest ranks will appear on the Yahoo home page; sites that participated to the beta, and they benefited of this feature, claimed that they received a very good burst of visits.

Webmasters also have the chance to add a button to their articles so the readers can easily vote for them. Buzz is offering the code for these buttons on a section of the site.

Even during the beta Buzz become quite popular; for example it surpassed Digg in terms of unique users in April.

Links

Yahoo Buzz: http://buzz.yahoo.com/.

BusinessWeek, on its article, is citing a test made by Moe Tanabian, senior principal at IBB Consulting, that noted that the e-mail capabilities of the Android are based exclusively on the Google Gmail platform; and that is raising some uncertainty if the phone will support Microsoft Exchange.

Beside that, the BW article is citing some positive details.

For example that Android will have access to T-Mobile App Store, which will be similar to the Apple’s store, but probably with fewer restrictions for the software developers.

Another curious details is that Google is planning to serve advertisement directly to the phones; while this idea may worrisome at first, the users can rest assured that the option actually require the opt-in, therefore they will not be spammed by ads automatically. The good side of this feature is that many reviewers are speculating that Google may justify the ads delivery with some discount on the phone price and probably also on the plan fees.

The first model will be made by HTC whom received the authorization by the FCC and it will release it on November, 10th on the U.S. market.

Links

Google Android: http://code.google.com/android/.

The targeted Google’s services are AdWords, Blogger, Sites and YouTube as GraphOn claims that they violate its patents number 6,324,538; 6,850,940; 7,028,034; and 7,269,591.

GraphOn already used the courts to protect its patents in several cases; the first major lawsuit was against AutoTrader.com Inc. in November 2005 for two of the patents cited in the Google lawsuit, then against Juniper Networks Inc. in August 2007 on patents that protect network security and firewall technologies, and in March against Classified Ventures, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Match.com, Yahoo, eHarmony.com and CareerBuilder for the same patents cited in its lawsuit outlined Google.

GraphOn Corp. filed the lawsuit in a federal court in Texas and it seeks permanent injunctive relief and unspecified damages.

Links
GraphOn: http://www.graphon.com/;

Google: http://www.google.com/.

According to the images, that you can find here and here, the new Palm Treo 850 will have a full 3.5 mm headset jack for headphones, Wi-Fi, and, the usual touch screen, and a micro-USB jack for data transferring; it will run the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform. As communication technology, the new Palm Treo 850 will use GSM and UMTS.

Palm has not yet announced a release date for the new Palm Treo 850.

Links

Palm: http://www.palm.com/.

The Palm Treo 850 image is copyrighted by Palm, inc.

Previously if the user attempted to apply the 2.0.1 patch while the iPhone was set to “airplane mode”, the phone would not longer connect to the carrier network.

According to a BusinessWeek’s article, the cause of the problem was a faulty chip made by Munich-based Infineon Technologies. Considering the huge sales of the new 3G iPhone, Apple preferred to fix it with a software update rather than making a recall.

BusinessWeek states that, despite the great popularity of the new iPhone, only about 2-3 percent of the iPhone experienced the problem.

Links

Apple: http://www.apple.com/.

The announcement has been made on a recently opened section of the MSDN blog that will be used in the future to contain all the official news about Windows 7.

Microsoft is aiming to provide more open communication about Windows 7 as Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, senior engineering team leaders and authors of the blog, stated that “With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7″.

According to Microsoft, Windows 7 will be released around the start of 2010.

Links

Microsoft’s announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/.

This kind of functionality is definitely useful in today world where the main focus of R&D is toward “green devices”. So far in order to remotely access data, the serving computer is required to be fully operative; while the requirement is legitimate in case of critical business servers, it is actually a waste of power if the the server in question is a personal computer.

The new component Intel is announcing Thursday will let computers automatically return to a normal, full-powered state when a call comes in. The computer can activate its microphone and loudspeaker to alert the user, then connect the call.

On the first four Remote Wake motherboards the feature will only work over Ethernet connection, as Wi-Fi doesn’t work in sleep mode.

According to Joe Van De Water, director of consumer product marketing for Intel, the first batch of Intel motherboards with the Remote Wake functionality will be shipped in the next month.

Links

Intel: http://www.intel.com.

Well … the 2.4 GHz connection speed is definitely the most peculiar feature of this mice since it make it is 300 times quicker than the conventional 27 MHz wireless technology normally used by cordless mices.

Another feature of the Logitech V550 Nano is a dock, attachable to the laptop, that allows users to easily clip the mouse when the laptop is stored away. According to CNET, that conducted a test on this mouse, the dock has the disadvantage to have an adhesive backing that make it attachable only once, therefore the user cannot remove it from the initially chosen location and place to another area or even another laptop.

A couple of other nice features of the Logitech V550 Nano are the application button, placed under the scroll wheel and that allows the user to switch between applications, and the limited power consumption: a pair of AA batterie scan last up to 18 months.

The Logitech V550 Nano is expected to cost about $60.

Links

Logitech: http://www.logitech.com/.