LIVEdigitally

When I think of Alaska, I think of cold and rugged. Mt McKinley is the tallest mountain in the USA. While MP3′s don’t come to mind, a player did make the journey to the summit. How’s that for durability testing?

In a sport that requires 60-pound backpacks, climbers need to be highly selective in the gear they take. For Mousseau’s 14-day odyssey last month to the 20,320-foot summit of the mountain, he brought the SanDisk 512-megabyte (MB)* player, which weighs just over 1 ounce, and three AAA batteries. Now, based on reactions from his teammates, the solid-state, flash-based player is likely to become standard equipment for their future climbs.

Who knew that an MP3 player would become standard climbing gear?

Yesterday, at midnight, Harry Potter’s newest adventure was on the shelves, available for the masses. Eleven hours later, Harry Potter’s newest adventure was on BitTorrent, available for the masses.

For the cost of $5-$10 for a legal download of the e-book, I’m pretty confident that the organized pirates who committed this act of pure evil would have skipped the 600 page scanning and piecing together process. But people for some reason resist change and technology. I guess that’s the way the microchip crumbles.

Looks like that new Microsoft operating system that we’ve been talking about for so long(horn), has been named. I was under the impression that we would just keep calling it Longhorn, although I did read that “Longhorn” was just a cover opps prerelease name. Windows Vista is the new Longhorn, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about Vista for a long(horn) time. I mean, I remember upgrading to windows 98 in the year 2000.

(and don’t these guys look excited, this is what happens when geeks drink too much coffee and rename operating systems)