A new service called Earth Class Mail might be the new latest technology to hit consumers and businesses alike. You sign up with their service via monthly subscription and select a P.O. box from their 15-20 or so locations throughout the U.S. All your snail mail then goes to their location and they scan the front/back of everything they receive for you. You then login to their website to see the scanned images and then select whether you want them to shred it, forward it to you, or open the contents and scan all pages for you to view online. You receive an alert everytime a new mail piece comes in.  All the unused or discarded paper is recycled and this service is supposed to be done under Department of Defense quality security. This is great for consumers and businesses that spend a considerable amount of time going through mail; junk or legimate, not to mention better for the environment as everything is recycled.

According to Computer World A new service called Jott For Blackberry will allow users to respond to emails via voice instead of punching away on the integrated keypad. Jott is downloadable software for the Blackberry 8800, Curve, and Pearl. Voice recognition software has been maturing over the years. Even more and more cars are coming with this technology but it still has its flaws.

Adobe annouces a web version of Adobe Photoshop called Photoshop Express.  They have integrated a watered down version of Adobe Photoshop to be used within a web browser.  According to Technewsworld.com this service will be offered to the public for free. Apparently this service allows up to 2GB of user uploaded images for editing. Additionally, Adobe will offer an online gallery to share your uploaded and edited images with other users on the internet. I think this is a pretty cool idea considering how expensive the Photoshop software is. Maybe they will offer a more advanced online version of Photoshop for a subscription fee. I can see this taking off for artists, web developers, and marketing departments alike.

Rippling through the tech sites throughout the internet is the news announcement from AMD of their Tri-core processors to the public. In case any of you have missed it, Tomshardware had a first look and benchmarking of these processors last month. I’m sure a follow up review will soon follow as now the processors have been officially announced and motherboard manufacturers have released new BIOS updates supporting these models. Technewsworld.com Has a longer and more detailed write-up of this annoucement.

According to this article over at the Wired blog, Mozilla announces Firefox 3 will be final in June. Beta 4 just recently came out and it’s a solid browser. Check out the article for more info.

This article over at Engadget shows a letter written by Numair Faraz and was sent to the Executives of Motorola. Numair Faraz was the personal advisor for Geoffrey Frost, Geoffrey is the ex-Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Motorola until he passed away in 2005. Numair Faraz states that Ed Zander, the CEO of Motorola, worked Geoffrey to death and Zander was more interested in his golf score than the success of the company. Numair also said in the letter that Geoffrey’s wife, Lynne, also agreed that his death was largely in part from the stress of his work. Lynne commited suicide shortly after her husbands death.

If all or at least most of this story is true, this has progressed a sad fate for Motorola. Hopefully it can be turned around and be competitive again. See the full article and the letter to the Motorola Executives here

According to this Engadget article, the DOJ has approved the XM and Sirius merger. Now it’s awaiting the FCC approval. Hopefully all current subscribers will get combined channels from both companies as part of their subscriptions. Details to follow soon.

The successor to Microsoft Windows Vista, also known as, “Windows 7″ will be a modular based operating system.  Now Windows Vista is already modular, somewhat.  You have different versions of the operating system, Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, each with its own features.  The lower end versions are all upgradable to the higher end versions.  Windows 2008 works in a similar fashion except it has the server manager that allows you to apply different roles to each server.  Each one of these roles can be looked at as a different ‘module’ that installs to the operating system.

What’s really going to bake your noodle is that there’s rumors these “modules” for Windows 7 will be subscription based.  Meaning, you don’t pay for the operating system like you currently do but you pay for each product and module of the that product that you will use.  I’m not sure if this is good or bad for the consumer yet but it will work in Microsoft’s favor to assure a solid revenue stream coming in.  I presume this will also help prevent against piracy.

I don’t know about any of you, but I think I pay for enough subscription based services in my everyday life.  I don’t want to be paying Microsoft on a monthly basis just to use my damn computer.  I’m waiting for someone to author a book titled “The Rise And Fall Of Microsoft”.  Because I think if this platform makes it to consumers, Linux and it’s distributions will take the PC world by storm.  That is assuming it doesn’t do so BEFORE Windows 7 hits store shelves.

I actually had this idea back in 2006 regarding putting wifi access into a vehicle.  Whether is a regular 2 or 4 door daily usage car or on a commercial scale such as vans, small trucks, or tractor rigs.  My original idea was expensive, it included putting in a wifi router with a PCMCIA laptop cellular card.(at the time, I was only familar with sonicwall with such a device).  Anyways, back on subject. Engadget spotted an article over at The Washington Post regarding Chrysler adding in-car web access sometime later this year. The technology will allow users(I hope not drivers, at least not until theyre parked) to browse the internet through the vehicles onboard computer/GPS screen. The article states that it’ll be using cellular networks to communicate with the internet. You will, of course, need to subscribe to a cellular wireless carrier to connect your vehicle to the internet. Just like you would with your laptop(Verizon or Sprint) which is usually around $50/month. Sounds like a cool idea but I think drivers have enough distractions as it is on the road.

Sony initially tested the waters to see customer reactions to a $49.99 fee to remove any trial or preinstalled software with certain Sony Vaio laptop models.  The internet community uproared lashing out against Sony for charging an additional fee for something that should already be included in their more expensive models.  Manufacturers such as Sony, Dell, HP, etc. preinstall a lot of junk and trial software with new computers to help generate additional revenue.  This allows them to sell their machines cheaper but bloats the PC’s and slows them down.  Even though you spent $1,500 on a new PC bloated with junkware it performs slower bogging down all that state-of-the-art hardware. See the Washington Post for the full article.

According to this article over at Torrent Freak Mininova.org has invested quite a bit into R&D. They have a beta version of their BitTorrent Video Streaming project up and running. Quoted from the site: “The popular BitTorrent site Mininova is currently Beta testing BitTorrent powered video streaming. The new streaming feature allows users to watch videos instantly, streamed from .torrent files.”

I feel sorry for you Comcast users being limited from Peer2Peer networks. This can very easily be used for legitimate uses, especially from TV networks.

I want to thank all of you that donated to our family in time of need.  It is being put to good use.  All the donations will be put together to pay off the remaining balance to the funeral home for my grandfathers cremation service this week.

 Thank you!

-Luis & Family

–I APOLOGIZE FOR THE LENGTH–

My grandfather passed away this morning at 5:30am in Saint Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, NJ.  His name is Gus Ferro.  He worked hard all his life in a steel factory until he was diagnosed with emphysema when he was 62 and was forced into early retirement a few years ago.  He had no life insurance, medicaid, 401k, etc. so all funeral arrangements(or lack thereof right now) will all be out of our pockets.  It’s a small family and we too are feeling the effects of the crappy economy right now.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer about 2.5 years ago.  He was started on radiation treatment for it when they inserted the radiation pellets into his prostate.  He was doing good and was in remission but recently has turned for the worst. 

He went to the doctor a few weeks ago and he lost 18lbs.  He’s retired, had arthritis with his legs, and never really left his home so he didn’t really get any exercise.  The weight loss was a big red flag.  Additionally, he had no appetite, had a hard time falling asleep, yet he never complained about pain.  But he would limp around and groan when sitting/standing, etc. whenever asked what’s wrong he would reply with something to the extent of oh nothing just leave me alone.  Just to give a quick time line

Tuesday my grandmother finally convinced him to go to the hospital because he almost collapsed trying to get out of the bedroom.  They sat in the ER for 6 hours, went in at 12pm, and was admitted at around 6pm and they started doing tests on him and noticed he was a bit yellow skinned.  Additionally he had very high blood pressure(182/109) and a fast heart rate.(130+ bpm)  After a couple of days of testing(and medication to try and regulate his blood pressure), they did a CAT scan thursday afternoon and found a mass on his liver.

Thursday night he was doing okay, was sitting up in the bed, poured his own coffee, sugar, milk, etc.  Didn’t like the dinner they brought in except for the macaroni & cheese which he ate.  Visiting hours ended at 10pm so we were going to go back the next day.

Friday morning, got a phone call from the hospital.  They were rushing him to the ICU because he passed out.  After further examination of his CAT scans, they found more masses.  On his lungs, liver, 3 on his brain which were bleeding internally, and his bones.  In other words, it spread everywhere.  The 3 on his brain that were bleeding explained the high blood pressure, his body was trying to compensate.

He pretty much went into a coma at that point and was heavily sedated.  They put him on Fentalyn, which after we googled, wikipedia said its used on cancer patients and is 80 times stronger than morphine.

Since then, we’ve been visiting him non stop all weekend long.  Like I said, no life insurance, 401k, nothing, it’s all up to the family and we’re a small family.  We WOULD like to have an open casket viewing at bare minimum for the funeral service but as of right now we put together enough funds just for the cremation which is about $1000.  The funeral homes pretty much wont do an open casket(obviously) without embalming first.  This plus the 2 hour funeral service & casket renting gets expensive.  Pickup from hospital + embalming + casket rental + 2 hour funeral service + cremation is about $6000.  So far we’ve put together $1000.

I’m posting this in every forum I have an account on and every chat room that I’m a regular in practically begging for any help for us to go through with this.  Believe me when I say it’s hard to swallow.  So PLEASE, any donations will be greatly appreciated, even if it’s just $5, $10, or $20.  My paypal address is compaholic@gmail.com

THANK YOU

Microsoft confirms when Windows Vista’s successor will be released.  It’s been dubbed for a 2010 launch.  Judging by their track record with previous releases, it could be in Janurary of 2010.  I sure hope they learned their lesson(s) from Vista and what a catatrophe that has been.  Oh and hopefully it won’t be more sluggish than Vista.  XP to Vista was such a downgrade in performance.

Source: Softpedia

Although I am a bit late posting this, it’s still substantial news worthy of submission.  AOL bids on Bebo.com for $850 Million in cash.  Bebo has approximately 100 employee’s in their three locations with 40 million members worldwide.  According to Tech Ex Bebo.com is #3 behind Facebook and Myspace. Not bad for a website that’s only been around for 3 years huh?