Gamers are going to love the latest product from Dell gaming brand Alienware: a curved monitor that boasts an amazing 2880x900 resolution and a response time that blows most other advanced gaming monitors away. It will go on sale later this year. No word yet on price.
CES 2008: Alienware's Monster Wraparound Gaming Monitor | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

The 100+ inch TV will no longer just be a concept product demonstrated at trade shows. Sharp will be selling a 108" LCD television set this year. That's a 9 foot diagonal length, for those who aren't so good at math. You can be sure that every celebrity will be adding these TV's to their homes so they can show them off on a future episode of Cribs.
Sharp to sell 108-inch LCD TV this year | Technology | Reuters

It seems that the Amazon.com shipping address problem is worse than I previously had realized. As I reported earlier, the problem comes when people add a new address to their account and try to tell Amazon that it's their primary address. When placing an order, Amazon will sometimes switch the address back to the original shipping address.

What's really strange is that addresses can be deleted from the account, but they apparently are not deleted from Amazon's servers and have been known to "come back" at seemingly random times and appear as the account's primary address.

I wonder how many colleges across the country have stockpiles of packages from Amazon.com that were sent to former students who haven't attended the school for years but couldn't get rid of the college address from their account. I'll be reporting more on this situation, and hopefully a response from Amazon, very soon.
Amazon Animosity

Amazon.com has been the internet's leading retailer since the early days of Web 1.0. Their employees are hand-picked from top schools and are considered some of the top programmers and logistics personnel in the world. So why does Amazon.com still have major problems shipping packages to the correct address?

The story has been told before: a customer moves to a new address, adds the address to the Amazon.com shipping profile, and then tries to delete the old shipping address. Everything looks fine at first, and only the new address shows in their account information. The problem comes when they try to place a new order, especially if they use one-click ordering. They will often find that the old address is back in their account, and their order has been shipped to the old address.

This is not the kind of problem that a major online retailer like Amazon.com should still be having. I'm sure it's somehow related to using redundant servers and not propagating account changes across all servers, but I'm not a tech guy, so who knows. What I do know is that Amazon.com NEEDS to fix this problem, because it's causing some serious customer frustrations.
Major Online Retailer Refuses To Admit Major Problems With Shipping Script

When people think of TV newsmen, they tend to think of shallow, ignorant talking heads whose only qualifications are cleaning up well and the ability to read. It turns out some newsmen are also hackers during their free time

Fark.com founder Drew Curtis used his server logs to prove that Darrell Phillips, a media manager at WHBQ Fox12 based in Memphis, tried to install a trojan on Fark servers that would allow him to access the site's source code. On at least one occasion, he or one of his associates were able to access the code.

Why would a TV newsman care about the source code on a social news website? Because he wanted to know how to build his own social news site, of course. Phillips' station recently launched OnMemphis.com, a news aggregator.
Exclusive: Fark founder accuses Fox newsman of hacking - Valleywag

Scientists have nearly reached 43% in energy efficiency with solar cells, a new record. The technology uses various components to split light into high, medium, and low energy light. The components then extract electrons from the photons they have absorbed.
42.8% Efficiency: A New Record for Solar Cells (TreeHugger)

CNN has come up with a list of Web 2.0 companies that might actually be useful, and have a shot at real profitability down the road. I've got to admit that I use very few of these sites right now, but I'm a late adapter to certain web fads (my friends had to fake my MySpace page because I was the only one who didn't have one).
It's a Web, Web, Web 2.0 world - Joost (1) - Business 2.0

Google announced last week that they were bidding on the 700MHz wireless spectrum. Their statement was filled with Googlespeak that is uncommon in the corporate world. Every sentence seemed to have passed through Google's own "do no evil" filter to check for compliance. Google was clearly appealing to its users, not its shareholders. That same strategy has helped Google grow to one of the biggest companies in the world, rewarding early shareholders with 5-fold performance.

AT&T is not happy about Google's bid. Google is trying to gain some control over the distribution of its massive amounts of information. Competitors like AT&T don't want Google to have any of that control. In addition, they want to charge Google more than the market rate for access to its information transmission systems.

AT&T will be appealing to the FCC in an attempt to block Google's bid. Without payments from big corporations like Google, dinosaurs like AT&T would have trouble surviving. You would think AT&T would be happy with that steal of a exclusivity agreement they made with Apple for the iPhone. I still think they drugged Steve Jobs before he signed the contract.

Google wants the 700MHz wireless spectrum, and it wants to open it up, demanding the FCC adhere to the four principles of open access. That's the way the wireless spectrum should be, and the fact that Google wants to play fair with consumers is the reason AT&T is so upset about Google's bid. AT&T is a company built around screwing the consumer. The government even agreed with that point when they ruled that the company needed to be split up because they had an unfair monopoly that was bad for consumers. Now AT&T wants to keep the wireless spectrum closed off to everyone but the top communications companies. Google has the money to get in the door, but Google wants to hold the door open for everyone else. They are the lottery winner that wants to invite the whole trailer park to the country club. That's great news for us (unless you own a communications company, you are part of the trailer park), but bad news for the elitist telecoms who would prefer to price gouge us for eternity.
Google Fear Hits AT&T Square In The Jaw | WebProNews