Stories by Jared Newman

  • Snow Leopard vs. Win 7: Battle Begins August 28

    Apple's latest operating system update, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, should be ready to roll on August 28, and while Apple says the new OS is "refined, not reinvented," it'll become the de facto competitor to Microsoft Windows 7 come October. We love a good argument, so here's your fodder: five innovations for each OS being touted by their respective makers.

  • Microsoft Word Lawsuit: XML Explained

    When a judge halted the sale of Microsoft Word on Tuesday for infringing a patent, many of us wondered about the repercussions of this decision. The patent itself, for the creation of custom XML documents, seemed like an afterthought, and for good reason: The average user never has and never will use Word for this purpose.

  • Report: Your Palm Pre may be spying on you

    Is your Palm Pre spying on you and sending your GPS coordinates and more back to the Palm mothership on a daily basis? According to mobile application developer Joey Hess that's exactly what is happening. He asserts on his personal blog that data on the location and app used on the Palm's Pre smartphone is being sent to Palm.

  • Five netbooks Microsoft has crushed

    Think most netbooks have single-core processors, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive because their manufacturers like conformity? Right. The reality -- never officially acknowledged -- is that Microsoft doesn't cheaply license its operating systems to netbooks with specs that are too good.

  • Top 10 reader iPhone annoyances (and how to fix them)

    Who knew there were so many iPhone annoyances? Last week we listed ten common failings of the iPhone and discussed how to correct them. Maybe it was naïve to restrict the list to ten entries. Reader feedback suggests that iPhone users have no shortage of annoyances they'd like to see solved.

  • Top 9 iPhone annoyances (and how to fix them)

    Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the "Jesus phone" has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user's skin.

  • Pirate Bay sale is sinking

    The Pirate Bay's shot at legitimacy may be over before it even began, as Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory hasn't produced enough money to buy the legendary torrent tracking site.

  • Yahoo Search: RIP

    Yahoo started out in 1994 as a ragtag site called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," named after founders Jerry Yang and David Filo who were at the time students at Stanford University.