Some of the best software products are created by brilliant coders who know little about the business side of marketing and selling software. These great products often fail to realize their full potential because they failed to get in front of the right audience. Eric Sink is trying to solve that problem through education with his new book, Eric Sink on the Business of Software. Eric was part of the team that built and sold…

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Some of the best software products are created by brilliant coders who know little about the business side of marketing and selling software. These great products often fail to realize their full potential because they failed to get in front of the right audience. Eric Sink is trying to solve that problem through education with his new book, Eric Sink on the Business of Software. Eric was part of the team that built and sold the code that became Microsoft’s Internet Explorer product. Later he went on to found SourceGear, a company dedicated to building tools for software developers. Chris talked with Eric about the book, about developing a browser at Spyglass, and the state of the software industry during this interview.

Oh boy. I just discovered TMBG has a MySpace page with more free MP3s. I downloaded the ones I could - then proceeded to their Web site to purchase their Venue Songs album in MP3, as well as the double-disc DVD/CD set. Guess I spent over $30 today after “stealing” some music that they put online for free. When is the music industry going to get it!? If you produce fantastic material and let us get to it easily, we'll pay for all of it. At least, the true fans of the music will do so. I support They Might Be Giants, and they've given me so much over the years that paying for their music is the least I can do to support the band. So, I guess I “steal” music - and then I pay for more. What's not to understand here?

Trademark infringement may not be the first thing on your mind when you’re registering a domain name. But there’s a good chance it should be. Issues surrounding Intellectual Property and trademarks as they relate to the online space are confusing to those of us not deeply entrenched in the particulars of legal matters. At the Domain Roundtable, one of the most dynamic speakers of the conference was Intellectual Property Attorney and Loyola Law Professor, David…

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Trademark infringement may not be the first thing on your mind when you’re registering a domain name. But there’s a good chance it should be. Issues surrounding Intellectual Property and trademarks as they relate to the online space are confusing to those of us not deeply entrenched in the particulars of legal matters. At the Domain Roundtable, one of the most dynamic speakers of the conference was Intellectual Property Attorney and Loyola Law Professor, David Steele, who spoke on issues related to domain name trademark infringements and the potential liabilities associated with registering a domain containing someone else’s registered mark. Following the conference, Chris and Jake talked with David about IP issues as they relate to the Internet and domain names in particular.

1. When eBay still used Microsoft's Passport, I registered an account through my Hotmail address. Today, I switched the eBay email address from Hotmail to my Pirillo one.
2. Now I had all this eBay email sitting in my Hotmail account - and I wanted to get it into Outlook with the least amount of fuss. Windows Live Mail was no help (and a performance dog to boot), but you can access your Hotmail account through Outlook Express easily enough.
3. I then tried to export my Hotmail messages through Outlook Express's data export tool - to no avail. It only wants to export items sitting in the default Inbox (not in any subsequent account inboxes, even though they may be selected at the time the feature is invoked). Lame.
4. I tried dragging and dropping a message icon to the desktop, then into Outlook - or directly into Outlook - but it was in an incompatible format.
5. The solution to the problem is simple: select all the messages in Outlook Express that you'd care to import into Outlook, then press CTRL+F to forward them to your email address. When you receive that message in Outlook, you'll see all those messages as separate attachments - ready to drag & drop directly into any Outlook folder of your choosing.

From our very own free FireFox Facts comes an essential powertoy for Web developers: “Ever wanted to edit your CSS files for your Web site while getting a live preview on both Firefox and Internet Explorer? CSSVista is a program that will let you do that all in one application. The only catch is that it is only for Windows XP. I have to say this is one freeware program I won’t be doing without anytime soon.” Great find, Mitch!

Okay, so I was finally set to buy a new computer (still thinking Falcon Northwest)… then Seagate goes and announces… “the introduction of the world's first desktop hard drive to hit the 750GB capacity mark. The monster drive is part of the new Barracuda 7200.10 family built on perpendicular recording technology to meet the growing storage capacity, performance and reliability requirements of desktop computers and low-end servers.” Great. Now I have to wait and see the benchmarks, and then wait for someone to assemble a system with the new Barracuda 7200.10 (likely a 4800+ unless Intel gets their act together before long). I don't want to buy something right now, knowing that a leap like this just happened. It's a huge leap! If I had that much disk space, I could download half the Internet and still have room left over for more videos. Big hard drive: gooooooooooood.

From MySpace to your space comes another perspective. “DJ” weighs in on the matter. I still contend that MySpace has usability issues out the wazoo, but that didn't keep me from creating my MySpace profile. I'm an adult, however - but “DJ” is working with children in the MySpace arena:
I couldn't agree more with you on this topic. But the problem with it is that most of kids who are using MySpace.com rule the computer at home. Their parents didn't grow up with computers and are basically scared of them. This means that the kids are free to do what ever they want with it - and that is where thigns turn scary. MySpace and the Internet have become the NEW “Stranger Danger” lesson that Law Enforcement used to teach. (I know we all had some sort of Stranger Danger lessons in School). One other point that I would like to mention with the MySpace issue is that a lot of these kids are technically in violation of the MySpace user rules for the age requirement.
I am in IT as well as Law Enforcement; I go around trying to educate kids as well as parents on the harms that lurk out there. The latest topic has been MySpace - especially since a lot of the schools have started blocking the site. I have looked at a lot of kids' pages from the demonstrations that I have done and they give way too much information. Unfortunately, there are bad people out there who are monitoring these pages and have ill intentions. I have done demonstrations and had driving directions to a kid's house on-screen in less then a couple of minutes from a couple of pieces of information on their MySpace account that they believed to be innocent.

What, with all the talk of insane gas prices lately, our resident Technobabbler has been looking into his options with Volkswagen TDIs: “I hate the smell of diesel fuel, I hate the clattering sound of diesel engines, I've never owned a Volkswagen, and oh yeah… I'm not really in the market for a new car. Legend has it, the diesel engine was originally designed to run on peanut oil. Mmmmmm, roasting peanuts… surely more aromatic than roasting petrol. These days, commercial biodiesel fuel - like Willie Nelson's BioWillie is made from corn.” Even GasBuddy is no friend these days; gas is just too expensive everywhere. Even so, I don't think our driving habits will change until it hits $5 a gallon. That day will come, my driving friends.

I still can't see the difference. HDTV is HDTV to me. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to enjoy high definition programming over the past few months because I've been so busy. I'm disappointed that I can't get high-def content on demand through Comcast, too - as I forgot to leave our DVR turned on while we were away. I get to play the Xbox 360 for an hour every day during my workout, but that's not on an HDTV screen. I'm tempted to buy a nice small HDTV set for that room, though - and am looking for valid suggestions. I've never met a small LCD HDTV set that I've liked as much as plasma. I'm picky when it comes to image quality, I guess - especially at those price points. Progressive or interlaced, I just need something more than 480 lines. Oh what shall I do with this antequated television?

Turns out, my MSN Direct account is set to autorenew itself unless I cancel the account (which I hardly used, admittedly). Here's the irony: “If you would like to cancel or discuss your account, please contact MSN Customer Support at the number listed below for your subscription type - For all other services, such as Hotmail Plus, Outlook Live, MSN Radio, etc, please call: (866) 672-4551.”
First, there is NO PHONE NUMBER LISTED BELOW. Second, why do I have to call someone to get this done? WTF? Is this 1983 or something? Did someone forget to program the “Cancel” module. Be forewarned, when you sign up for certain Microsoft services, you may have to make a phone call at some point in the future - introducing operator error and trackability nightmares. I thought we were beyond this, folks?

I was in an office store yesterday, picking up supplies for our (duh) home office, when I spotted a new Linksys product. As I've been relatively happy with their home networking hardware (except for the A/G/B router that's flaky as dandruff), I decided to take a closer look. They're selling a high-gain antennas for your wireless routers now. You can unscrew your stubby antennae and fasten better broadcasters in a heartbeat - easiest hardware installation / upgrade ever. They've got two High-Gain Antenna Kits: HGA7S and HGA7T, depending on your router. If you've had signal degredation or other issues with your Linksys wireless network, pick up these badboys: “The High Gain Antennas increase the strength of outgoing signals and the receive sensitivity for incoming signals. This added signal strength and sensitivity not only extends the range of your wireless network, but also improves close-range communications reliability by reducing re-transmissions due to weak signal reception errors.” They say the height of a man's antennae is inversely proportional to his… signal.

As revealed in last night's report, I like My Canon PowerShot SD700. This time, however, I've protected its screen with a WriteRight - even though it seems a speck of something snuck in beneath the skin. Even with that layer of protection, visibility and usability is normal. I'm sure they'll release an SD750 a few months from now - with higher resolution and a few other tweaks. The SD700 is about as close as it comes to perfection in a sub-compact point-and-shoot digital camera: guidelines (for rule of thirds), high-res movies, widescreen photos, A/V output, optical image stabiliztion, 6MP images, 4x optical zoom, ISO 800 speed, etc. Those are the reasons I upgraded to the SD700 yesterday - leaving me to figure out market value for my SD550. Kudos to Canon for making a great product line even better!

A social service organization I work with lost it’s connection to the internet. It was more critical to their operations than they realized. Listen to the show: MP3…

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