More on what it takes to get a Hi Def signal over the air for your TV.

Sounds like it's not as easy as it looks.

Wired has an interesting story that tracks down the originator of that hoax email promising big bucks from Bill Gates if you forward it to a friend.

Daniel VanArsdale has compiled an archive of 500 chain letters dating from the turn of the century.

The hoax was ultimately traced to Bryan Mack, who was a student at Iowa State in 1997 when he created the email as a prank to his friends.

ExtremeTech has a review of that new ATI HDTV Wonder card for $199 that lets you get HDTV on your PC. They conclude that it's pretty good, with the cons mostly centering on its limitation as an over-the-air solution only. I'm looking for a video source for my new plasma TV--maybe this is it?

Be sure to check http://www.titantv.com for listings.

Microsoft's early efforts in TV are documented here:
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/papers/mitv/tr-97-18.html

I worked many years in the WebTV/MSTV group, so it's strange that I didn't know many of the people written up in this paper. Of course a few names are familiar, but the overall lesson is that Microsoft, as a big company, can do big things, many of which never see the light of day. There were two main streams of people working on TV at Microsoft: the Tiger people and the WebTV people. The WebTV people eventually overtook the entire effort, as the center of the project moved to Silicon Valley. All the great work done on Tiger eventually simply faded into the rest of Microsoft, in the form of people who no longer work on TV at all.

Interesting business idea:
Zevez Corp., owned by Joe Graziano, an onion distributor in Oregon, helps businesses maximize the rewards they get from credit cards. He's earned 125 first-class plane tickets in the past decade doing this.WSJ.com - How Business Owners Convert Monthly Bills Into Free Plane Tickets

Harvard University runs a web site called the Moral Sense Test, where they ask thousands of volunteers to answer questions about morality, in order to detect similarities and differences across cultures.

The study's authors believe that moral sense is wired into us, and that culture or philosophical/religious reflection does not drive the differences between people.

Look at this newsmap, a real-time graphic visualization of the news currently reported on Google. A similar one, from Stamen, graphically shows the ebb and flow of newsmakers as they get reported on more and less each day.

Um, excuse me? Exactly what's the news in this NY Times The expose on high tech outsourcing? The claim is that Microsoft, gasp, sometimes hires smart people from India instead of just dumb people.

"Offshoring" is just another word for globalization of the work force, and between this and automation, just about every job is a target. If the CEO prefers to work at his home office in Bermuda, does that mean he outsourced the top job? As long as global networks make it easy for people to commute, then the workers will do the job at the most convenient location. What's wrong with that?

Of course it's scary, but it's also an opportunity: all labor is now portable across borders, and the only real sustaining talent you have is your ability to think of new ideas that people want to buy from you.

The New York Times summarizes arguments about why as some people think.

Watch great NASA photos of the 2004 Venus Transit /a>

Wharton professors comment on the power of social networking sites like Friendster and Orkut.

One way they can be monetized is by getting some of the money people are already spending on things like recruiting. Note that 50% of LinkedIn searchers are looking to hire someone.

How to hack a digital camera: Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel Tips and Tricks

Travel from LA to Oregon at Mach 9 on this site. Some guy put a camera on his front bumper and then edited the resulting video down from 10 hours to 6 minutes.

Wired has a story about an effort to force car makers to release codes to their on-board computers.

Also includes references to several sites that help you figure out the codes.

Hey check this out! The beverage industry has a web site with consolidated product reviews from hundreds of beverages.

Here's an interesting site that documents long-forgotten predictions of the future.

Barron's has some notes from the future [subscription required] with these highlights:
1. Explosion of consumer-created content, from cell phones and blogging.
2. HD drives with 2-5 TB of storage by 2009 (Laptops with 1TB).
3. End of the apps industry, with everything going to services.

The participants weren't impressed with
1. grid computing
2. Wi-Fi
3. Longhorn (won't be out till 2009), says Martin Tobias of Ignition.

CableNewser.com is a blog by an 18-year-old who analyzes the cable industry. I wonder what kind of software he uses?

More speculation on the future of hard drives.

Here's an article that speculates on computer power in 2034.