According to Forbes, who conducts this and other types of research every year, Seattle has achieved the crown of being the most wired city in the United States in 2009, squeezing ahead and pushing Atlanta into second place. This is probably due to the septillion Starbucks WiFi hotspots, and it probably helps that Amazon.com and Microsoft are situated nearby. Why not check to see if your home town made it on the list of the top thirty? Glory lies in being a thoroughly networked city.

Before the BeOS ever made it to x86, it had already spent some time on PowerPC, but the die-hard fans will know that BeOS was actually written and designed for a very different, short-lived processor: the AT&T Hobbit. While a PowerPC BeBox is already quite rare, the Hobbit BeBox was never sold, and only existed in the form of a number of prototypes. Imagine our surprise when we found out that Cameron Mac Millan, former Be employee, sold one of his two Hobbit BeBoxen on eBay a few days ago.

Sometimes, as you're walking through a crowded street, or as you brush by people, you catch a glimpse of the conversations they're having - a few words, a single sentence at most. Whenever this happens, I can't help but extrapolate the rest of the conversation, the subject, what the people in it are like. It seems like I'm not the only one, as two Dutch film makers have used the accidentally leaked search query records of 2006 as inspiration for a series of short films. Tantalising voyeurism.

The Russian government is planning to build a new operating system (if you are fluent, here's the original), most likely to be derived from Linux, made especially for the country itself as a whole. This is being done to reduce Russia's reliance on foreign license agreements, particularly those of Microsoft it seems. The OS is expected to be open source and distributed at little or no cost, but it's uncertain just how successful this nationwide operating system will be, if indeed it ever comes to fruition. If it's anything like that Chinese Red Flag enforcement fiasco, count me out.

In a possible legal showdown over multitouch patents between Apple and Palm, the Cupertino gadget maker has just looted a decent weapon off the dead body that is the US patent system: a patent on just about all multitouch gestures used in the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as swiping, pinching, and so on. Wielding this weapon, Apple suddenly has a pretty good case against Palm.

One of the reasons Windows 7 runs faster (faster start up, resume, shut down, less churn during user sessions) is due to the re-engineering of how Windows maintains and activates services running in the background. Microsoft's Channel 9 has an interesting video with a Windows kernel developer whose team designed a new trigger-based service controller that enables service developers to mark services as needing to run only when certain conditions are met. This means Windows 7 can more intelligently manage when to make resources avaiable for services that employ this trigger pattern for starting and stopping. Less code that runs at any given time means Windows 7 has more resources available for foreground processes that impact users interacting with the OS. The net effect of this for users is a snappier OS.