Blatant speculation in this article, about a possible business relationship between three interconnected companies: Apple, Be Inc., and Palm Computing. As it turned out, it didn't work out the way I was hoping for, but it was an interesting case nonetheless. Rather than Palm buying Be, it seems to have worked the other way around, with most of the Be execs taking up their same roles, albeit at Palm.

Kind of a double entendre in the title here. One, there's no denying that ripping copyrighted music from store-bought CDs has become a way of life for most young people in America. At the same time, the recording industry is still looking for ways to make that impossible, ignoring the whole issue of Fair Use rights. And who pays for all that R&D? The consumer, of course. CD prices go up, ripping music becomes more attractive, the recording industry hollars and wails more ... rinse, repeat.

Here's another of my occasional forays into "general science," though still with a computing bent this time. The problem: CERN's new supercollider project is going to generate so much raw data from particle collisions that no computer currently in existence could possibly handle it all. Scientists are turning to grid computing to create the most massive supercomputing facility ever created — but will they be able to do it by the time the first particles are scheduled to smash?

By the first quarter of 2002, it was pretty widely understood that the high-flying days of the dot-com craze were over. So why, then, was PayPal choosing that moment in time to launch its IPO — especially when the outcome of Federal banking regulatory inquiries was still uncertain? It was enough to make you wonder whether anyone in the driver's chair at PayPal was paying attention. The company has since been bought out by EBay, though, so maybe they knew what they were doing better than I gave them credit for.

The P2P market got very interesting in 2002, with lawsuits flying left and right and the MPAA and RIAA looking to close down all the competitors for good. Users became suspicious when Morpheus split from the Kazaa network, and Kazaa itself sold out to an overseas concern. Here I try to decipher what was going on with P2P at this time, and what the future might still hold for these interesting but beleagured technologies.

There's still a lot of confusion over the future of the DVD video format. Not only is the industry looking for new ways to copy-protect movies, but they're also undecided on the best way to fit new, high-definition video streams onto the discs. One camp says better compression, like MPEG-4, is the answer. Another camp thinks a new kind of DVD media is a better solution. With the industry mired in confusion and uncertaintly, as usual, the consumer will probably be the real loser.

This was it! My final column for SFGate. This one is about the technology called Web services, and whether they're going to be as revolutionary as some people hod. You can see how my focus had very much shifted away from technology's direct impact on the layman and consumers, toward the area of trends analysis with the technology manager in mind. Of course, this corresponded exactly with my coming on-staff at New Architect magazine, an event that made it simply too difficult to keep going with a regular consumer technology column for SFGate. Hopefully, you will yet see some more mainstream writing from me in the future, though it won't necessarily be confined strictly to computing.