I don’t care much for Las Vegas. It’s crowded, phony and designed to take your money as fast as you can dish it out. In spite of my feelings about the city, I spend a lot of time there, because that’s were a number of the major trade shows happen. Earlier in the month I spent a few days at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. PMA is where pro photographers gather to see the latest and greatest in cameras and printers, as well as a wide array of accessories from memory cards to digital picture frames to carrying cases to you-name-it-and-someone-has-it. It was an eye opening experience. As a semi-pro photographer and long-time Epson professional printer user, I was absolutely shocked to see how far both HP and Canon have come in the pro printer market. (Full article ‘Pro Printer Titans Clash in Vegas’)

We at like to think that our coverage of the news and trends shaping the enterprise technology world is the best in the business. But not even (not to mention our competitors) can connect all the dots as they’re forming — the welter of news and the fast pace of events sometimes makes that difficult. That’s why we’ve revisited the sea of dots to make those connections that weren’t evident at first.

Our staff reporters, editors and contributors have taken a hard look at 2007 and come up with a list of 10 stories that you need to know about as we enter what looks to be a challenging, fast-paced new year.

Application development? Java is becoming the new Cobol. Hardware and networking? A new generation of blade servers is moving into the small-to-midsize business market, and end-to-end Ethernet has finally arrived.

(Full article ‘The top 10 underreported technology stories of 2007′)

The market for chip equipment is expected to contract by almost 10 percent in 2008 largely due to lower spending from makers of computer memory, Gartner said Thursday.

The market researcher is forecasting chip equipment spending of $40.3bn (20.3bn) in 2008, down from an estimated $44.8bn this year.

SEMI, an industry association that comprises the world’s leading makers of chip-building machines, earlier this month forecast 2008 spending of $41.05bn.

(Full article ‘Drop in chip-gear spending predicted’)

Like many gearheads, I’ve owned a lot of portable computers over the years — and I’ve wanted to replace every last one with a smaller, sleeker upgrade, from the “luggable” Apple IIc onward. But most of those upgrades have left me disappointed: with the lack of software; with cheap, hard-to-use interfaces; and with “optional” add-ons that were in fact very much necessary to make the machine useful.

And then the Asus Eee came around, leaving a trail of effusive or the $350 I paid for mine on a recent trip to Taiwan?

But I believe in the 80/20 rule: 80% of your time on a computer is spent using 20% of its capabilities. As applied to the Eee, that means users will spend most of their time doing e-mail, working with short documents and surfing the Web.

(Full article ‘Life on the EEEdge: Daily life with Asus’ tiny laptop’)

Could the loss of data from the huge Internal Revenue Service master files cause a financial meltdown in this country? That’s what some experts are pondering as the U.K. mops up the mess left in the wake of the disappearance of two password-protected CDs containing the country’s entire database of child benefit recipients — 25 million people. The breach, which happened when a third-party delivery company lost the discs, affected four out of 10 people in the U.K., the largest relative segment of a country’s population involved in a privacy violation ever publicly disclosed.

The data loss happened in October, but wasn’t widely reported until Nov. 20, and news coverage of the event was overshadowed in the U.S. by Thanksgiving week events.

A loss of that scale could have taken place within the IRS, “and we don’t know about it,” says Gartner Inc.

(Full article ‘Forget the U.K.: What happens here if the IRS loses our data?’)