Tech journalist Ron Miller (not a relative) wrote a piece titled Apple has a lot in common with The Rolling Stones, based on the song It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It). In the article, Ron writes: "Much like the Rolling Stones, Apple has to get up on stage again and again and figure out a way to blow the audience away – and it’s not always easy." In fact, Apple's latest iPhone announcement seems to have been greeted with a massive "ho hum" instead of the frenzied interest some of their earlier product announcements have created. In today's video, Ron tells us why he thinks this is, and ruminates briefly about the future of Apple and what kinds of products might help people get excited about Apple again.

Crudely_Indecent writes "Not content to own just news stories, Rupert Murdoch is now going after individual words! His BSkyB is fighting a legal battle with Skype, claiming that it owns the 'Sky' in 'Skype.' From the article: 'A spokesman for Sky confirmed that the company has been involved in a "five-year dispute with Skype" over trademark applications filed by the telecomms company. These are, the spokesman added: "including, but not limited to, television-related goods and services."'"

thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog: "We live in a world where we have multiple platforms for gaming: PC, PS3, 360, Wii, etc. Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick’s solution is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own model for pricing — not unlike what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft and Battle.net. Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."

Ten Ton Hammer has posted the transcript from an interview with Dr. Hilarie Cash, co-founder of the "reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program," a relatively new clinic that deals with adults who feel that they are addicted to video games. The interview contains some.. interesting nuggets of wisdom. If you want to avoid addiction, you'd better spend less than two hours per day on online entertainment! The good news is that she doesn't recommend beating people. "When people come, they come for 45 days. It is only for adults; patients must be 18 or older. When they first come, they come for a minimum 2 days to be interviewed and to interview us, because we don't want anyone there who doesn't want to be there. So if they decide they want to be there then they stay for 45 days or longer if they choose. During that time they don't have access to the internet. The idea is that it takes at least 30 days for the brain to make some adjustments it needs to make to get over this addiction, so the brain can begin to rewire back to normal. During that time we are helping them look at why they got addicted, what motivated their addiction and we're assessing to see what skills they are lacking so they can be successful in their adult lives. We try to make a good start at helping to build those skills."

techmage writes "Recently we had an issue at our small company that resulted in the loss of a lot of important data. To prevent it from happening again, we created a company-wide policy that all computers would return to IT to have their contents backed up, and the computers would be formatted and reloaded for the next user. Consistently the owners of the company break this and other policies we set up to prevent data loss, theft, etc. How do I get through to the bosses that when they break with the policies, they are potentially shooting the company in the foot?"

somegeekynick writes "The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"

Nicholas Petreley writes, "Wake up little SUSE, wake up. No, that's not good enough. Wake up SUSE customers, wake up. Novell is jeopardizing the future of Linux for its own short-term rewards. If you want to see Linux flourish, let alone survive, after Novell's five year deal with Microsoft expires, I suggest we make an alternative five-year deal with Microsoft. In this case, our part of the deal is to spend the next five minutes, months, or years migrating away from every shred of Novell/SUSE software in our home, office, or enterprise."