All year long, I've been biting my tongue while the pundits and pontificators tried to minimize the impacts of an economic downturn, often performing rationalization gymnastics that seemed to follow Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's familiar "Five Stages of Grief." Maybe there was more denial going on than anger or bargaining, but it was funny to watch the market analysts try to deny the depth of a global consumer-led slump. In the first quarter, it was a North American slump that wouldn't touch emerging Asian markets. In the second quarter, with global markets slowing down, we started praising the fact that the U.S. housing market had touched bottom, and maybe consumer spending would bottom out in mid-summer.

Beyond Browser Wars

The release of Google's Chrome has less to do with starting Browser Wars 2.0 with Microsoft and more about a battle over which language will rule for next-gen Web apps, according to one blogger.

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T.J. Rodgers wines

T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, wants to expand his winery in the Bay Area. But environmentalists and some residents are raising hell. Why? The story can be read here. Continue reading "T.J. Rodgers wines"

All in (Intel) family

Here's a sad but true story from the San Jose Mercury News about a family fight over a former Intel director's fortune. The story can be read here. Continue reading "All in (Intel) family"

Wireless Matryoshka

All we've been hearing from those grumpy financial analysts of late is how desperately the RF and optical component worlds need further consolidation. Thus, the announcement by Ericsson Mobile Platforms that it would join the ST-NXP Wireless joint venture seems to fit the tenor of reducing suppliers, without putting any RF/IF or baseband designs out to pasture. Unfortunately, that could be precisely the problem.

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Woz and Sun at IDF

Who woulda thunk it. Five years ago it would have been thought surreal to suggest Steve Wozniak appearing on stage at an Intel Developer Forum where Sun Microsystems stages a significant release of new x86-based systems. Today, it's stranger-than-fiction reality.

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Reality hair game

A new method for accurately capturing the shape and appearance of a person's hairstyle for use in animated films and video games has been achieved.

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Hollywood's colored glasses

If you have spent a hot summer night cooling out at the movies recently you may have noticed an increasing trickle of 3D flicks. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is in pretty wide release and a number of new animated 3D movies are getting pitched in the coming attractions reels.

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Olympic Whack-a-Mole

The funniest line in media coverage of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics went to the New York Times, which described NBC's efforts to stop early web coverage of the ceremonies as a game of "digital whack-a-mole." With every Olympics, the efforts by broadcast media to retain exclusivity for coverage look sillier and more hopeless. Add to the long list of lessons traditional media must learn about the Internet the obvious axiom that event exclusivity simply cannot be enforced, particularly with what we might call the decentralization and democratization of global monitoring.

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Martin and Comcast

I'm not a huge fan of Kevin Martin, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, but he seemed to strike just the right note August 1 in ruling that Comcast Corp. violated federal policy in throttling heavy Internet users on its cable network. Net neutrality is a principle that should remain paramount, but we have to be careful to allow service providers to use enough traffic management to insure Quality of Service if voice, data, and dozens of video channels (either IP or broadcast) are carried in a common pipe.

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