how is a netbook different than a laptop? Why is the price so much lower? Is it about connectivity? it is just a browser with screen and keyboard?

Lighter, smaller, less power. Not just a browser with a screen and keyboard, but very low powered compared to a typical notebook. You can get an aspire with XP Home 120 gig hard drive, 2 meg ram, a 4 hour battery life, and size not much bigger than a paper back book. Includes almost useless web cam, decent wi-fi, and bundled with open source applications. No DVD or CD player, but you can add anything you want via USB port. Not a long battery life, but charges quickly. What you get in return for low power is not just low price, but really compact size and light weight. Lot of competing netbooks. Some are even more underpowered. I have an earlier linux aspire with an 8 gig solid state disk and 512 Meg Ram running on Linux. But it serves all my needs, and the screen is amazing for the size. I used on a business trip. My cellphone went out, and I added headphones, paid 4 bucks for months worth of skype, and used it as the world's biggest cellphone everywhere I had an internet connection, which was both where the conference was held, and at the motel I was staying at.

I should add when I say it served all my needs, it served my needs while traveling. Would not use it as a Desktop machine, or to do a lot of compostion. (Actually, if I needed to compose on it I could add a decent keyboard, mouse and screen. Open office Word really is OK for word processing, even if inferior to MS Word in a lot of ways.)

Well, I just bought a refurbished 15" MacbookPro instead. (One popped up on Apple for $300 less than the ones I was looking at yesterday, so I grabbed it. It doesn't have the LED screen or the latest graphics card, but I think I'll live.)

I may still take the netbook plunge at some point, but right now my priority really is replacing the G5 tower. (Also...my iPhone basically does everything a netbook would already, except copy-paste. If I'm going to spend $250, I'd rather it be on a better phone in about 18 months when my contract runs out. Fingers crossed that by that time the Palm Pre will be on another carrier or there will be some awesome new Android phone with better battery life than the G1.)

Apple invites media to sneak peek of iPhone 3.0 on March 17

Someone brought one to the first F2F in Evanston, I recall....

Yeah, that would have been me. I was an early adopter. But then we had that thing for years. 6 gig seemed enormous at the time, and it still amuses me that it was reassuringly shaped like a cd player. We didn't pay $500 for it, maybe $380? I carried it in a little bag with lots of cables and a set of battery powered speakers.

I read that bit with the two links as the major flaw in the Shuffle was that it required a prosthetic finger. I was momentarily baffled.

I read that bit with the two links as the major flaw in the Shuffle was that it required a prosthetic finger.

Heh.

ioDrive Duo: unbelievably fast solid-state drive ships next month

Behold, the hard drive of the future. Most of today's hard drives are metal boxes with rapidly spinning disks nestled inside, but this Fusio-io ioDrive Duo is all solid-state, has no moving parts, and reads and writes data ten times faster than the quickest conventional hard drives.

For the propellerheads, that's 1.5 gigabytes per second of sustained throughput. Hey, wait a minute — that's even faster than that mind-blowing Samsung 24-drive array we showed you last week. The result will be much faster computing, less heat, lower power consumption, and much tougher durability.

And someday, all this will be reasonably priced. While this 640GB Fusio-io ioDrive Duo will be prohibitively expensive (untold $thousands) when it's available next month, that's just because the tech is so new and economies of scale haven't set in yet. Later this year, Fusio-io, which now has Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on board as Chief Scientist, will release a 1.28-terabyte model. Wow.

Will third-party gear fix the new iPod Shuffle?

Sorta.

Hivemind, I'm trying to unintstall a program in Windows XP and I can't find it in the uninstaller. The program is in program files, but there's nothing with the install date in the uninstaller. Any ideas other than just deleting the file in explorer?

Depends on the program, but try deleting the program folder manually, and then use Windows Installer Cleanup Utility: [link]