Think your IT job is safe? Don't look now, but SaaS is about to replace it and the jobs of just about everyone else you know.

Vista is still slow, it still crashes its own managers, and in general is not quite stable after Service pack 1.

DDH's annual applet contest provides an opportunity for fame and fortune.

The Net Neutrality battle being fought in the FCC and U.S. district courts is nothing less than a battle over freedom of speech. If an oligarchy of cable companies are allowed to decide what their subscribers can access, how is that different from the PRC for instance restricting what its citizens can see on the Internet?

Typically for first releases from Microsoft, Vista really isn't ready for prime time yet. Many people have complained that it is slow, which it is, but that is only the start of it. After four months of using it daily I have compounded a list of problems.

Innovation is the key word of almost every organization today. But what does that really mean? To be really innovative, a company needs to draw on the resources of everyone in the organization, not just a few senior VPs. BrightIdea.com provides a way to do that.

A large, West Coast civil engineering firm saved a bundle by using an appliance from Riverhead.

Lately I have been struggling with a connectivity problem. I dropped and broke the WiFi case for my PDA, leaving me without Internet connectivity on my Palm T3. Of course if Palm had been smart enough in its product design to build WiFi into the T3 I would not have that problem, but that is actually symptomatic of another problem. Palm's product direction clearly does not fit my needs. Palm seems to have moved totally away from PDAs to Treo smart phones. This may work well for many people, who basically want a device to get calls, read emails and perhaps do occasional searches for restaurant locations. What I need is much closer to a computer in my pocket, that I can take notes on in interviews and meetings, write articles in, get every web site, not just ones formatted for tiny Treo screens and that work with the Treo's limited software. And I need a machine that can use the much faster speeds of WiFi networks when that is available, for instance in my home office, as well as the much more pervasive cellular network when WiFi is not available.

Some months ago I wrote a blog about DataViz Technologies' Documents To Go, a Palm-based office suite that uses native Microsoft Office formats. I mostly use Word To Go, and I write many of my first drafts in it. It is slower to write in the Palm with a stylus rather than on the keyboard on my laptop, but that slows me down to a pace at which I put much more thought into what I am writing. The result is that my first drafts are consistently much higher quality that those I produce on the keyboard. Later I usually hot sync the draft over to my laptop for editing, but by then I am usually down to fixing details, which are easier to see on the laptop screen.

In July, I wrote a glowing report on my new video iPod. This is the 80 GB model, which actually has just under 75 GB of available space on its hard drive. The unit is still working perfectly, and frankly I do not understand why people are running out to get the iPhone, which is basically an 8 GB iPod with a built-in cell phone but not a sign of any real extra functionality, when they can buy the 80 GB Video iPod for about $325 and a cheap cell phone for less than $100.

In any case, I did run into a battery issue with my iPod recently., I listen to it all day while I work (except when I am on the phone). As I said in my earlier piece, the battery on this iPod can run for at least two days between charges, but I recharge all my devices every night, and we also use the iPod as an alarm clock and so need to have it on its speakers overnight. As a result, I never fully discharge the battery.

After posting the blog two weeks ago about the OtterBox cases for iPods, PDAs and other stuff I rethought how I was using my 2600 PDA case. I realized that I really do not need the front screen on the case, took it off and found that I really like the case a great deal more without it. In the dozen years I have carried handheld computers, I have never destroyed one by water damage, and I seldom have used one in an environment with flying grit and salt  that can infiltrate an electronic gadget and destroy it, such as the desert or beach. So I decided that I don't need the case to be waterproof, and I don't really trust that gasket in any case, since it keeps letting go of corners on its own.

Psion Teklogix has a long history in the handheld computing arena and always had a good reputation for producing excellent devices. Although I never used a Psion, I have friends who still wish they would bring re-enter the PDA market. However, the company has gone in a different direction, focusing on industrial handheld devices. Recently their PR contacted me asking if I would like to look at their latest product, the Workabout Pro.

Now this is a Windows Mobile device, and I always have some problems reviewing Windows Mobile simply because all my experience is with Palm. If I used a WinMobile PDA I would simply dump my entire PDA image into the device I am trying out and use it for a couple of months. Since I cannot do that, my opportunity to test WinMobile devices is fairly limited.

A few weeks ago my original 20 GB Apple iPod's hard drive died, the victim of 26 months of hard use. I certainly cannot complain about its longevity, but its demise created an emergency in my life. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks and music, all day, primarily over earphones, a habit I developed in the Walkman days. I like the high quality sound reproduction and portability both around the house and outside. Furthermore, because we live in a small house with limited shelf space, we pack away our music once we have copied it into iTunes, making the iPod our only method of access. So I immediately went out and purchased a 74 GB video iPod.

Recently I have been trying out SplashTravel Pro from Splashdata, a travel information package on Palm OS PDAs and smartphones. This is an excellent toolkit for travelers, especially business travelers who are often on the go and who carry a Treo or a Palm PDA (SplashTravel is currently unavailable for Windows Mobile). Its one limit is that getting full use from this package requires a direct Internet connection either through cell phone or WiFi (rather than indirect connectivity through hot-sync). With direct connectivity, this product provides weather information for virtually any location, with the possibility of displaying weather for several locations worldwide in a single screen, which can be useful for a traveler with several destinations.

In recent years odds making, basically betting on future events, has become a popular method of forecasting with a higher degree of accuracy than other analytical methods. The basic method is to pose carefully designed yes/no questions and open the betting to the largest possible population of knowledgeable people. The result is an aggregate of the expectations of that population. This has been used with consistent success for predictingt stock market moves and other economic events, and it is now being applied to predictions in technology.

In the lead-up to Apple's release of its new iPhone on the AT&T cellular network in the United States, BetUS, a sports betting site, has run a line on a set of questions about the iPhone. Here are the questions and the odds generated at the site: