A lot of desktop PCs now come with CD-RW drives, but most notebook PCs do not. Manufacturers are now targeting the portable market with small, stylish external drives....
Guardian Online: Ask Jack

If you are looking for the best football game, David Beckham Soccer isn't it :-)
Guardian Online: Gameswatch

I had to file my last Comdex Fall report without an important piece of information: how many people turned up. My finger in the wind estimate is that the show was about half as busy as in recent years, which would put the number at around 100,000. However, it is impossible to say. Probably some people who normally come for five days only came for two, or whatever. One passing observation that would not make it into print. Bill Gates can no longer walk through the halls without being mobbed, but Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer can.
Guardian Online: Comdex Las Vegas

Another observation, based on spending a week in Las Vegas, is that America has a much stronger case of Harry Potter Fever than the UK. The film opened on in the US on Friday, and if you turned on a TV, you did not have long to wait for the latest Pottermania update. Naturally that interest has been reflected in the size and quality of Potter-oriented Web sites, especially since Warner Bros seems to have stopped attacking unofficial fan sites. But I'm not sure if this is because someone at AOL Time Warner CNN Intergalactic Enterprises had an unexpected flash of intelligence or whether they just couldn't hold back the tide.
Guardian Online: Webwatch

Until recently, the mobile phone business had nothing to do with Comdex Fall, but now, the chief executives of mobile companies make keynote speeches and even NTT DoCoMo had a large stand. Perhaps this has something to do with the mobile phone industry's sudden, and horribly belated, discovery that it is also dealing with data, including phone numbers, addresses, appointments, game code and even ring tones. And if you have data, you need common data standards. The question is: who is going to set those? Nokia is trying to make sure it is Nokia, but I will be surprised if that ploy works.
Computer Weekly: Strategy:Mobile Business

What to do when Windows hangs? With hindsight, I think the shortest reasonable explanation needs at least a thousand words. Unless, that is, you do it in three words: upgrade to XP.
Guardian Online: Ask Jack

Most of us are pretty cynical about computer operating systems, so I was surprised by the enthusiam I found when I talked to teachers, school ICT specialists and the educational computing trade about Microsoft Windows XP, which has been used in pilot projects in some British schools. But the consensus was that finally they have a system that is familiar, easy to use, extremely robust, has a wide range of software, and does not leave them at the mercy of a monopoly hardware supplier such as Apple. The obvious problem is, I'd guess, that most school PCs are too old and feeble to run it.
Educ@tion Guardian: A very good job...?

Home Ludens, and while children have always played games, most are now playing computer games. It is not an area where much real research has been done, but some clearly have educational value. One problem is that games are a form of fiction and therefore do not need to be historically accurate. However, this is a problem that is notoriously true of American movies and, as a young Jane Austen pointed out, is also true of Shakespeare.
Educ@tion Guardian: For gaming, read learning

The qwerty keyboard may be a ubiquitous standard in English-speaking countries, but the arrival of millions of handheld devices -- palmtop computers, mobile phones -- that don't have keyboards has stimulated a new burst of creativity. The "virtual keyboard" is a particularly interesting development. I'm looking forward to the same approach being taken to the "air guitar".
Guardian Unlimited: The future for keyboards

Nokia announced several deals at Comdex, the aim being to get interoperability between different mobile phones. They interoperate with voice, of course, but not always with data. You can understand why Nokia's chairman and chief executive officer, Jorma Ollila, is taking this line. However, the idea that the phone companies can set data standards without involving the computer industry is almost certainly doomed.The computer industry looks more likely to annexe the mobile phone industry.
Guardian Unlimited: Upwardly mobile

At Comdex this week, Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Handspring ranges, declined to comment on Microsoft's Tablet PC. "One of my rules is that you really cannot know what aproduct is like until you've used it," he said. This is even more true when you're looking at prototypes and reference designs, some of them obviously unfinished -- the Senseboard, for example. Still, getting an early look at things like this is a good reason for going to Comdex. At least it gives you a view of some possible futures.
Guardian Online

Kunitake Ando, Sony's president andchief operating officer, gave a futuristic plug for Sony products at Comdex yesterday -- including stars from the Spiderman film and a group from Sony Music. He also announced a broadband deal with AOL Time Warner. Technical details were hidden, because apparently there aren't any. Yet. As a result, it is hard to see this as anything but hype. A couple of years ago at Comdex, Sony sold the press a fabulous story about interconnectivity and the power of home entertainment networks, but it hasn't produced anything to back it up. Just try getting your PlayStation 2 online, or plugging in most USB peripherals. Agreements are worthless if they don't deliver.
Sony at Comdex

Comdex kicked off on Sunday with the traditional Bill Gates keynote speech. As usual, he gave a thoroughly professional performance. But it is a little odd to see a man who compares himself with Harry Potter -- and who dressed up like him in one of his famous "home video" sequences -- playing the elder statesman. Either way, Gates's display offered a remarkable contrast with the keynote given the next morning by John Chambers, the president and chief executive officer of Cisco. Chambers talked 119 to the dozen with some of the fire of a preacher, and his demos were better and funnier than Bill's. You can get something of the flavour of the keynotes from the video clips linked from the Comdex site.
Comdex webcasts
Gates keynote

As you accumulate more copies of more personal data (phone numbers, task lists), you have to think about which is the "master" version and where you keep it. Microsoft's ActiveSync 3.5 now works pretty well as a way of sharing Outlook data between a desktop and a handheld PocketPC.But why can't you use it to synchronise a desktop and a notebook... Or can you?
Ask Jack

Safeweb has been a great way to surf anonymously. Now I'm finding it too slow to use, I'm trying ID Zap. It doesn't do as much as Safeweb but it does what I want in some circumstances: it masks my IP address.
Webwatch

Microsoft and AOL are heading towards the same market -- Web services -- from different directions. Microsoft wants to control the plumbing while AOL Time Warner wants to own the middleware and the content. Who uses which payment system to authenticate users of such services, and collect their money, looks like becoming a key issue.
But which of these companies would you trust?
Computer WeeklyTechnology: Desktop Computing

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