I’ve been a little slow lately so when Sony introduced its VAIO Pocket mp3 player with a 20GB hard drive in May it slipped under my radar. I admit it, Alice is the gadget freak. When I write a note in my Palm I have to not wash my hand until I’ve done whatever the note says to do. But back to Sony…

This little thingie will hold 26,000 mp3 songs and has an MSRP of $465. Should the price bother you? Not really. I mean, music downloads are $0.99 each. If you have the wherewithall to fill the thing with music, the price of admission can’t be more than change under the cushions. Even if you bought CDs and are transporting the songs over, you paid for the CDs. (Didn’t you?)

Has this silliness gone a little too far?

Really, it’s unfair to compare an AMD Athlon64 3800+ to an Intel 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme. Then again, AMD has been surprisingly reluctant to send me one of its FX-53 CPUs so I guess you gots to go with what you got. In that case, the 3800+ is about 11 percent slower than the 3.2GHz Extreme for the applications I run –video editing. In real life, that means rendering a 43 minute video with the parameters I use takes about 4 minutes longer on the system with the 3800+. Bad deal? Maybe, maybe not. If you do video rendering for a living, you’re losing time, which means you’re losing money. If you’re doing it just for the heck of it (like I am, to record TV shows and NASCAR races), it means saving about $400 on the initial cost of the CPU.

I’d still like to try the FX-53 but I don’t think (the problem with gut feelings) that’s it will dissolve the gap –and that may be why one has never showed up here. It may cut the gap in half, though, and the FX-53 is still less expensive than either of the current two “Extreme” processors.

A California judge has ordered a multimedia chipmaker to stop selling versions of its products that were used in DVD-copying devices.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Monday that it had found chips from ESS Technology, based in Fremont, Calif., inside a device that allowed DVDs to be copied. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis issued an order Friday that blocked the manufacturer from selling its chips to any other device maker producing similar products.

Someone once said that if 2 million people with ground-breaking tools lined up along the eastern border of California, they could chip the state away from the rest of the country and thereby solve 38 percent of all of our problems. Truth is, it would take explosives and heavy machinery as well –and it would only be about 23 percent of the problems.

A software glitch is freezing playback of stored shows on some DirecTV boxes that access TiVo’s digital video recorder service. The glitch apparently is caused by a software upgrade, version 3.1.0c, that was first downloaded by DirecTV TiVo set top (first generation, not Series2) boxes earlier this month, according to postings to a number of TiVo community sites.

TiVo said it is working to resolve the problem with a software upgrade.

From a CNET story, it seems that RFID chips, those little things everybody keeps worrying about because they think they’re going to invade their privacy (and the Justice Department folk will batter down Library walls), may become a source of hacking and lack of security.

According to Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH, new technology could allow thieves to fool merchants by changing the identity of goods. That hadn’t been an issue in the past because RFID programming equipment was expensive and the software was a bit arcane to use. But good ol’ Lukas said things will be easier now with a new software tool that he helped create!

Is this causing paroxysms of laughter in anyone else?

“At present, Bangalore has 1,60,000 professionals working in the technology sector and the number is the largest in one place on the planet.”

This is the actual quote from the story. Do you think we can get some of those professionals over in Bangalore to figure out exactly what that number is? Or does the quote speak for itself?

“The Amber Alert Network was developed in Arizona. This new portal technology moves the current Amber Alert system from its existing forty-year old antiquated radio signal model to the instant messaging/high tech world of the Web. With a single key stroke, Amber Alert enables a law enforcement officer to send relevant information to every stakeholder including government and other law enforcement agencies, broadcasters, Department of Transportation highway signs, Corrections Officers, Probation Officers, Border Patrol and dozens of other alerting organizations and agencies.”

Get serious for a minute. The Amber Alert System has been instrumental in recovering many abducted children. It’s probably one of the best methods anyone’s come up with to keep the information in real time. By moving it over to the Internet (in 15+ states so far) it gets even realer. Better still, you can sign up to the system to receive Amber Alerts via your pager, cell phone, or e-mail. (One small possible flaw: Can child abductors sign on and keep alerted to the police’s information?)

Props go to E2C, in Scottsdale, Arizona, for heading up the development. Let’s get the 35 or so states that are not yet in the loop up and running.

“NEW YORK (AP) — Amanda Cunningham started her daughter on computers at 2 1/2 with “Reader Rabbit” software and Web sites like Sesame Street. Like any parent, she was proud Madeline could master the mouse so young.

But Cunningham soon realized Madeline, now 4, wasn’t really learning anything. She just kept clicking, dragging and playing the same games over and over. Now, she’s in no rush to get her 1-year-old son, Liam, on computers or the Internet.”

Oh huzzah, huzzah!! Finally, a mother who has an understanding of the interaction between young children and the Internet. And let’s carry this a little further. Is it just coincidence that ADD has become such a forefront issue so relatively recently when we seem to have gone 220 or so years without really noticing it? Bad diagnosticians? Or could it be that a child needs to learn how to concentrate and that sitting a kid in front of the flashing, changing screens of the Internet doesn’t allow that to happen?