Gadgetory

hi I'm Brian cooling welcome to the buzz reports first the gadget of the week it's the ultra mobile pc or UMPC all the buzz coming out of the just-concluded see bit tech trade show in germany now a umpc is about half the size of a laptop about twice the size of a smartphone so not as useful as the former not as portable as the latter it typically runs the compressed version of Windows dubbed origami on a cpu clocked it around or below a gigahertz hmm sounds like a fun way to kill an afternoon doesn't it the field includes Samsung's q1 ultra the Asus r2h the oqo model to sony ux series but isn't it interesting that Apple the company that has had the most luck getting into the palm of your hand than anyone except for Motorola and Nokia isn't doing one of these now the news Internet Protocol TV or IPTV made a big step forward or at least a big step sideways this week it now has an official industry forum behind it france telecom ericsson Sony Panasonic and several other big names are now the open IPTV forum which is kind of an odd name because membership in said for them is closed but aside from that by September 07 they promised to publish a formal technical spec for IPTV and that should help clear the way for deployment to your home and mine here's my nightmare scenario though what if Sony ends up handling open standards all they do is proprietary and France Telecom ends up doing drm they want Apple iTunes to be open and Ericsson which does cell phones what if they end up with the big screen details don't laugh it could happen the Airbus 380 the a380 is that huge new double-decker jumbo jet and it is in the buzz report this week because of its maiden voyages to the US airlines are all a drool about the 555 passengers this plane can carry but I go the other way how few can we put on board leaving room for the in-flight lounge designers have already mocked up great designs for lounges on a380s look at this guy he's in the bar having a couple re standing up through the whole flight and the Air Marshal isn't even thinking about tasering him I love that and how about here now he's decided to sit down before he falls down and he's got a groovy little workstation to sit at and dispatch belligerent emails while he comes down off his liquor hi it's like never leaving home I love this and finally if you think you have a deleted file horror story I can top it there's a huge database up at the Alaska Department of Revenue it's used to track payment of 38 billion dollars in oil revenues dispersed out to Alaskans in other words it's a lot of money going to a lot of people or should I say it was you see one of their IT guys deleted it no didn't just delete it formatted the drive it was on now even that alone wouldn't cause a seasoned IT pros bowel to turn to water but this would he also clobbered the backup drive no problem restore it from the backup tapes no they were unreadable it was gone now remember this is the record of 38 billion dollars nobody panicked said fun director and really good liar Amy schoo no they started typing and typing and typing reentering 300 file boxes of paper records one keystroke at a time close to a hundred people worked overtime and weekends for six weeks to get it all back in there and you know there are more errors than before now will you please take a look at our editors choice backup hard drives I'm Brian Cooley this has been the buzz report thanks for watching you