Lance Ulanoff

Last week, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and the effective leader of the open-source movement, made what, I think, is his most heretical statement ever: “DRM [Digital Rights Management] is perfectly ok with Linux!” I say bravo, not because DRM is always good, but because we need a rational discussion of its uses. One […]

2003 has already been productive for the Seattle technology company RealNetworks. With its partners, it launched two new major services: ABC News Live, a 24/7 online news broadcast, and MLB.TV—a venture with Major League Baseball to Webcast live video of the leagues thousands of games. RealNetworks technology also became the de facto delivery mechanism for […]

I remember getting a hand-me-down laptop some years ago. It came to me through the IT department of the company I was working for at the time (not Ziff Davis). As I was setting the system up, I discovered that the network privileges on the machine gave me access to the server-based My Documents folders […]

Its happening: 3.5-inch floppy disk drives are disappearing. Theyre following a well-worn path to the final resting place of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch drives. The demise of the now-ancient standard wont happen all at once, but with Dells recently announced phasing out of 3.5-inch floppy disk drives in the companys popular Dimension desktop line, […]

We live under the watchful eyes of countless video cameras on street corners, in stores, in our offices, in police cars, and elsewhere. Most of the devices capture only images, and virtually all of them are hard wired to central offices where the video is either discarded or recorded to tape. California-based start-up Sequent Technologies […]

DVD authoring remains such a new and fertile area that I cannot resist returning to it again and again in my columns. With so much of our industry burdened by a been-there, done-that, ho-hum attitude, its almost refreshing to see an area where theres little agreement. Nearly every DVD-based drive, software application, and player works […]

I couldnt believe my ears. There I was sitting across from a PR representative for a major peripherals manufacturer when, in response to a standard but important wireless networking ease-of-use question, she told me I could find the answer “in our [companys] 70-page manual.” Unbelievable. I mean, really. Thanks for nothing. I mean….Actually, I should […]

The nascent Media Center Edition PC is about to get some DVD-burning savvy. In an exclusive to PCMag.com, Sonic Solutions, Inc., has announced Sonic PrimeTime for Windows Media Center Edition PCs. The company will officially announce the software at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan 9. The maker of the DVD authoring […]