Tech Buzz

Last week's big news was that Apple pushed up its Snow Leopard release by a month to provide a 60-day buffer between it and Microsoft's biggest launch of the decade. Apple can't match either Microsoft's resources or price, but the feat of snagging an unchallenged 60 days during the back-to-school an...

Congratulations, patient cheapskates: You've won the waiting game. Now you can get a well-equipped video game system for a somewhat reasonable price. The two most-advanced consoles on the market have dropped in price over the last few days, just in time for all of that back-to-school homework to get...

President Obama's inability to fill even half of his major political appointments is in the news this week, but the appointments he's already made are causing some in Silicon Valley to question whether they supported the right candidate. The president chose non-Silicon-Valley candidates for the nati...

An unfortunate side effect of a celebrity like Steve Jobs getting sick is that a huge number of us are collecting stories to go into articles and books that would mostly show up after he passed. I ran into two new stories I hadn't heard before last week, and one of them was rather juicy and eventua...

It wasn't all that long ago that the talk about cellphones and driving was all talk. That is, consumers, driving-safety advocates, and lawmakers debated whether using a hands-free device was enough to make talking on a cellphone safe, or whether talking on the newly ubiquitous devices while behind t...

Regardless of what I wrote last week, which focused on Apple's problems coming out of the Red Hat event, Apple is on a roll. It's expected to gain substantial share this quarter because Snow Leopard will make it into the quarter and Windows 7 won't. However, in October, Microsoft is planning to come...

Summer is a time to relax, a time to take a vacation, a time to do things you can't do during the work year. However, I'm not sure any time is a good time to send your brain on vacation, and I'm starting to wonder if the leaders at Google and Apple have done just that. Granted, Steve Jobs has a goo...

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, recently attempted to pressure ECT News Network into killing or drastically revising an article that was not to his liking. In an illuminating series of no fewer than 17 email messages, Wales demanded, threatened, wheedled and implored in a dogged effort to accom...

Boy, just when you think it's safe to sleep in, Microsoft and Yahoo decide to hitch up and slap Google upside the head. I'm guessing that this really screwed up the party in the Google 767 flying palace last week. For Google, which lately seems to have the attention span of a 3-year-old after gettin...

Once again, the CEO of a major American company has met an untimely -- and fake -- demise on the pages of CNN's iReport Web site -- and once again, the mischief-making Web site 4chan is suspected of being behind it all. It's likely that excutive Randall Stephenson was selected as the cybervandalism ...