2008 Technology in Review

Outfitted with 5-point safety harnesses, padded seats, cup holders, foot brakes and fold-out storage containers, the sleek, curved Cloud 9 has every family covered for a ride through the park. But that’s just for starters. There’s a digital handle that tracks temperature, time, distance and speed — just in case energetic parents want to track their split times around the playground. And there’s a slot for an MP3 player, complete with speakers, for some cruising tunes. That’s right: The little red wagon has gone 2.0.

The Feb. 17, 2009 digital only broadcast is around the corner.

The government supplied $40 coupons to subsidize the converter boxes is likely to reach the $1.34 billion limit of its budgetary authority in the first week of January.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes. “It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”

In the third quarter of 2008, notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent compared with the same period of 2007 to reach 38.6 million units. Conversely, desktop PC shipments declined by 1.3 percent for the same period to 38.5 million units.

This blog discusses how the Windows Installer technical support team at Microsoft recommends disabling services with MSConfig to work around setup failures. This is the set of steps that their team typically has customers try when they call in to report failed .NET Framework installations.