Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablet

With its announcement of the Kindle Fire tablet on Wednesday, Amazon did something worthy of Apple: it invented a niche that it is likely to control, not directly competitive with anything currently on the market. You will see endless discussion about how the Kindle...

The Joy Of Networks, Routers, And VLANs

The request was deceptively simple: Six very small offices want to share a single Internet connection. Each office wants to have a secure network for its own computers, not shared with the other offices. The offices want to share a single big Toshiba eStudio...

RAID Controllers And Hard Drive Trays

When you’re wrestling with your computer and wondering why everything has to be so complicated, maybe it will help to know that you’re not alone. It’s not any better behind the curtains where we pull the levers and pretend to be wizards. Here’s a random story about...

Thin And Light Notebooks Go Mainstream

By the end of the year there will finally be a dozen or more reasonably-priced ultrathin, ultralight notebooks on the market, mostly priced under a thousand dollars. Almost three years ago Apple introduced the MacBook Air, an ultrathin 13” notebook. Even with an...