Whether or not it was fully intentional or official, the Palm Treo Pro made another appearance this morning, this time on TheNewsMarket.com. The source for the story was accredited to Palm, but it has since been pulled. Palm, first you accidentally leak details on your own site, and then through a media organization. What gives?

If you're looking to get in shape, there's no shortage of gadgets you can spend your money on, including a $220 wrist-top computer, a sensor for your shoe, or a Wii Fit.

Austhink Software of Australia has developed an application that it says can help employees not just work smarter, but become smarter. This isn't your typical business intelligence app, but intelligence software that applies "brain mapping" to the goal of better decision making.

Late yesterday, Apple pushed out a second update for the iPhone's firmware. The new version, 2.0.2, offers more of Apple's famous (and nebulous) "bug fixes." I am sad to report, after downloading and installing it, my iPhone's bugs have not been fixed.

As technologists, we're prone to fall in love with the latest new technology. We think we require the most powerful PCs, the fastest networks, and the smartest smartphones to get our jobs done. But The Daily Show reminds us that we can achieve excellence even when our tools are woefully out-of-date.

I like XP, I really do. It's got a lot of life in it, and runs on systems where Vista can't even fit. But Taiwan's announcement of an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's retirement of XP is just crazy.

Kentico Software has announced that it's trying something different with the latest version of its flagship content management system software, Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. It's giving it away.

There was a time when it seemed Microsoft viewed security researchers as the enemy, and a big public relations problem. They were the troublemakers who poked holes in Microsoft's operating systems, browser, and desktop software. And they published exploits that helped to automate attacks. Today, Microsoft announced that it hired one of them.

If you believe Google, white spaces represent the last hope for the future of the mobile Internet. I don't think the issue is as clear-cut as Google would have us believe. As the FCC nears a vote on the issue, Google and other heavy hitters are weighing in.

How often do you hear the old canard that someone's done a great job of talking about a problem but doesn't have a solution? I hate that, too. Matthew Paul Thomas wrote an article about why free software often has lousy usability -- and what to do about it.

We Americans love our corn. The documentary film King Corn shows just how much, by tracking the grain in our pork, beef, bread, soda, chicken, french fries, even spaghetti sauce. Some day, even our pockets may be full of kernals, now that Samsung has developed an "eco-phone" made from a corn-based bio-plastic.

My former boss, who is still a mentor today, had a saying: "Success in life is the elimination of variables." Words to live by and words that the storage community must have heard. The biggest variable they deal with when installing a solution into their environment is the variable of, well, their environment.

Google has been working hard to get a mobile version of YouTube onto as many handsets as possible over the past year or so. If you thought you were going to be able to watch those videos on your phone without having to watch advertisements, think again.

Over the weekend, the Federal Communications Commission approved a new phone from HTC called the Dream. HTC has indicated that Dream will be the name of its Android-powered smartphone. The most interesting part of the FCC documents show that the phone supports T-Mobile's 1,700-MHz AWS 3G network.

There's been a lot of buzz over at No Jitter about the most recent Gartner report in the area of IP telephony/Unified Communications, in which Gartner gave a spot in its coveted Magic Quadrant to Microsoft. What drove the commentary was the fact that Microsoft made the Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony, an area in which most observers have seen Microsoft coming up short, at least relative to the incumbent vendors, in terms of feature/function.

Some people at the Beijing Olympics, including officials, foreign dignitaries, and the guests of major sponsors, are using modified PDAs to help them navigate the crowded streets of Beijing.

Our next president is going to have a big job securing our nation's IT against criminals and foreign enemies. Our data networks are an important part of the national infrastructure -- and therefore tempting military targets -- along with traditional infrastructure such as dams, power plants, factories, and hospitals. Security expert Bruce Schneier has some short, sensible advice for what the next president will need to do.

In technology news, there's plenty of first-day analysis but not so much follow-up. Soon after Microsoft announced Live Search Cashback there was plenty of coverage, including my own. After a couple of months of using the service, I think it's already losing its gloss.

If you think the future of hacking may be things like Web applications, social networks, or even infiltrating "The Cloud," you might want to look in a mirror. Sure, all of those things will be targeted, but one of the next frontiers for exploration will be hacking the mind.

The so-called "DNA evidence" that was supposed to prove the existence of the legendary beast Bigfoot turned out to be mixed with that of a possum, according to researchers who studied the genetic material.

Having spent many an hour agonizing over the minute details of designing and tweaking site maps for various projects, I found Jared M. Spool's recent piece The Site Map: An Information Architecture Cop-Out, particularly interesting.

Remember about five years or so ago when life was simple? We had fast SCSI and Fibre Channel drives for data and we had tape for backup. Seemed perfect. Then came the ATA-based drives, and you were told to move your older data to them and start sending backups to disk. Then powering the data center and storage in particular became a problem; another use for ATA, put them in stand-by mode, spin them down, put them to sleep, and then eventually turn them off. As is usually the case, the hardware is ahead of the software and there's limited automation to leverage all of this, so what's a user to do?

Looking for a CIO job? I just happen to know of one in Austin, Texas, where the CIO recently left for, shall we say, "personal reasons."

Earlier this week, Oracle released an upgrade to the WebLogic application server that the company acquired in its $8.5 billion merger with one-time rival BEA Systems four months ago.

I think we've reached the pinnacle of innovation with this latest service, announced by Buzzd and its partners. Simply go to BuyYourFriendADrink.com and send your friends an alcoholic beverage from wherever you happen to be. I don't know about you, but I think now we can all put our feet up and relax.

I have watched various court cases that involve bitter disputes within the computer industry and wondered how the courts could keep up. Each time it seemed to me that the basic issues had moved beyond the understanding of the court. The cases seemed to come down to who produced the more authoritative expert opinion. Then the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes along and demonstrates a comprehension of open source code.

According to Cisco, the WebEx Meeting Manager client software includes atucfobj.dll, a DLL that allows meeting participants to view Unicode fonts. This library contains a buffer overflow vulnerability that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on your system. Your WebEx provider must patch its servers in order for you to be protected. Read on to find out how to check.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the biggest electrical blackout in North American history. Some 50,000,000 people from Ohio to D.C. to Ontario (Canada, not California) were without power for up to four days. The mainstream media is covering the big picture and lessons the power industry can learn to make the grid more resistant to trees knocking down power lines. I wanted to take the opportunity to address the questions this event raises for IT.

Palm accidentally uploaded a presentation about the Palm Treo 850 -- aka Treo Pro -- to a public Palm Web site, where it was spotted by bloggers and posted just about everywhere. It is probably the best looking Treo ever. But is that really saying all that much?

One thing I didn't talk much about in my recent feature article about the future of Linux was whether consumers will be paying for Linux apps in four years. Truth is, I don't think most of them will -- if even any at all.

During the Olympics, China Netcom (CNC) Beijing, the city's largest fixed-line voice and data communications provider, must ensure that some seven million Olympics customers -- athletes, coaches, officials, staff and spectators -- have reliable voice, broadband, video transmission, and Internet service.

HTC will launch the first commercially available smartphone running the Android platform on T-Mobile USA's network, according to a new report. It will be available by Christmas, and maybe as early as October. This is not a big surprise.

Microsoft's announcement that its Money product will no longer be sold at retail marks another step in the decline and fall of PC-based personal finance software. We shouldn't let this occasion go unnoticed; married geeks everywhere used the "We can use it to balance the checkbook" excuse to justify their first PC.

SpringCM this week announced the addition of records management capabilities to its enterprise content management platform. Adding this to the already-solid foundation of its document management and workflow/process automation capabilities makes SpringCM version 4.4 one of a very few systems offering this level of functionality in a fully hosted, software-as-a-service model.

I don't know about you, but I've frequently been out and about when I remembered something I needed to do later. It could be as mundane as returning a movie or remembering to pick up the dry cleaning, but if I can't write it down, it may be lost in the wind. But the reminder service Kwiry can help you stay on top of your tasks with your cell phone.

In much the same way that hot-rod idling wreaks havoc with your car's fuel economy, running your Ethernet links at full throttle can ruin your data center's energy efficiency -- that's the simple idea behind the Energy Efficient Ethernet initiative.

As many security and technology followers know, three MIT students had planned on presenting their findings on a number of vulnerabilities they found in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's CharlieTicket and CharlieCard payment cards at last week's Defcon conference. That was, until a gag order was put in place to keep them quiet. Today, a federal judge in Boston let the temporary restraining order stand. And so this Saga of Stupidity continues.

Why is Cisco equipment counterfeited? Because, according to an FBI presentation, Cisco has market share.

Here in the summer of $4-a-gallon gas, it's serious business to liken something to a honkin' SUV. Yet that's how we portray service-oriented architectures in the illustration on the cover of InformationWeek magazine this week. We're raising the question about development methods that people are asking about SUVs: Do I need, and can I afford, all that horsepower?

According to the Interwebs, I am not the only person having serious reception issues with my 3G iPhone. Reports are coming in from all around the globe decrying the device's inability to find and hold onto a 3G signal. A new report suggests Apple will be offering a software fix as soon as next month.

This is classic. According to The Boy Genius himself, AT&T has blocked the majority of its employees from viewing the Boy Genius Report Web site. The BGR is a blog that's known to get the inside scoop on lots of mobile devices, especially BlackBerrys. The Boy Genius decided to respond to AT&T in kind. Updated!

Yesterday the open source world got handed a major victory in the courts -- or, rather, given another brick for its growing wall of legal defense. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the use of content under a properly worded open license is still protected by copyright law.