Expectations were moderated after the king of the keynotes stepped aside for what he admitted yesterday to be health problems. But at a quieter, gentler Macworld, the crowd did get something to take home.

For perhaps any other company than Apple, the expectation of a world-changing product at least twice per year, if not more frequently, might be too much to ask. At what appears to be the final Macworld conference with which Apple will directly participate, Steve Jobs' stand-in, Apple SVP for Marketing Phil Schiller, showed off some software updates -- specifically, to the iWork and iLife software suites -- before premiering a new widescreen edition of the MacBook Pro.

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At this week's Storage Visions 2009 Conference on Tuesday, Samsung announced that it's preparing to ship a 100 GB solid-state drive with fresh green credentials.

The announcement indicates that the Samsung SS805 is expected to ship this quarter. Geared toward data-center servers, the drive has a random-read speed of 25 Krpm and a random-write speed of 6K. The company says that the drive can process as much as 100 times as many input/outputs per second (IOPS) per watt than a comparable HDD-based drive.

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If the venerable desktop PC platform has any real "homebase" of customers left, it's in the enthusiast market where "cool" refers more to looks and performance rather than, say, CPU temperature.

Laying down the gauntlet ahead of CES 2009, whose first official day is tomorrow, HP this morning unveiled a slew of PCs, including a slimmed-down version of the power-packed Blackbird 002 that we profiled in September 2007. The new Firebirds will be available in two configurations, though whereas choice and extensibility were the themes for the Blackbird, the Firebird clearly appears geared toward a more budget-conscious enthusiast who may be just happy enough to be able to enter the "coolness" bracket.

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It's better than having some jerk walk back in with a gun, but it's sure not good: The journalspace.com blog site has shut down after a "disgruntled" former IT employee used his own data-backup choice to obliterate its entire data store.

Techish reader, would you rely on RAID as your sole "backup" structure for a mission-critical SQL server? That's what the now-former keepers of journalspace did. The chosen RAID setup wrote all data to two large drives, so in theory it was a perfectly redundant disk-array (not backup!) system; if one drive blew up, the other would hold everything and life would go on smoothly.

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As regular as tax season itself, phishers pretending to offer information on an IRS "stimulus payment" are targeting thrifty (or is that greedy?) taxpayers.

The latest version of the scam, which is making the e-mail rounds as of Monday morning, travels under the subject line "Stimulus Payment form it's ready for you to submit." The message claims that "After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a Stimulus Payment," and includes a file that looks like a PDF...until you notice the extra ".htm" at the end of the file name.

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The broadband-connected television market will be in full bloom at CES 2009, with Samsung announcing that its newest lineup of HDTVs will sport "Internet@TV", a Yahoo-powered widget interface.

The availability of TV-based widgets traces back to last year's CES, when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the "Canmore" system-on-a-chip in televisions and set top boxes. Later on in the year, at the Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, Yahoo expounded a bit on the concept, adding its JavaScript widget engine to the Canmore architecture. Along with service provider Comcast, the companies discussed the Widget Channel distribution mechanism, and the various web-style applications that users would be able to load onto their televisions.

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In the second "deflation" of a Wall Street Journal story in as many months, an RIAA spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews this morning that the termination of its use of the MediaSentry service had already happened.

Among some of the more controversial aspects of MediaSentry -- a full-service protection system for media formerly used by members of the Recording Industry Association of America -- was its use of spoofing to fool unsuspecting users into visiting Web sites and downloading MP3s without authorization. Last year, a multitude of states reportedly revoked the licenses of MediaSentry to operate in their state, with some law enforcement agencies providing RIAA members with cease and desist notices. As it turns out, for the service to investigate unsuspecting users' computers as it does, it requires a private investigator's license in these states, reportedly including Massachusetts and Michigan.

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Amazon today announced that owners of the formerly Netflix-exclusive Roku set-top box will be able to access Amazon Video On Demand, and LG announced it's building Netflix instant streaming directly into some of its upcoming HDTVs.

Video rental company Netflix is proving to be a genuine gateway to streaming video content. Today, Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service will be hitting Roku players early this year, adding nearly 40,000 more titles to the around 30,000 Netflix delivers to the diminutive box. Titles are pure H.264 streams (no downloading, since the Roku device has no storage) and will play back at 300, 600, 900, or 1200 kbps. Amazon says movies and TV shows will be rentable or buyable.

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At MacWorld today, Apple's FileMaker, Inc. subsidiary will launch a major overhaul of its flagship database for Mac and Windows desktops and servers, a product used by 70 of the world's Fortune 100 corporations.

"This is the biggest change to FileMaker in a decade," said Ryan Rosenberg, vp of marketing and service about FileMaker 10, a largely revamped database for Mac and Windows slated for rollout at Macworld today.

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Addressing the recent announcement that he will not deliver the Macworld keynote this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs released a statement this morning about his mysterious health condition.

Jobs' health has been an issue of considerable interest to the Apple community, and indeed to the tech community at large. Jobs' now gaunt frame causes some level of discourse at each of the CEO's public appearances, and the intensity of the rumors is only aggravated by Apple's secretive nature.

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A phisher or phishers operating over the holiday weekend deluged Twitter users with direct messages luring the unwary to a page designed to steal their sign-in information.

Twitter's official status blog announced the problem Saturday afternoon, but regular users were reporting a welter of suspicious messages throughout the weekend.

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Computer security fuels many excellent conferences. CES is not typically one of them, but the current state of the economy is compelling conference goers to refocus on their core priorities...and security is one of them.

Some readers will argue that if we're talking about the best possible security for end users, we're at the wrong show -- Macworld's a little to the west. But as security researchers proved when they spanked OS X at last spring's CanSecWest conference, the world is moving on from the impenetrable-Apple era.

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Here's a very familiar theme for us every year: Despite not only manufacturers' own best efforts but also certain governments' own regulatory bodies to drive and even enforce industry standards, there's no one way to do digital mobile TV.

Despite the push from manufacturers, mobile carriers and government regulatory agencies, mobile digital television has failed to make an impact on the world like it did in South Korea.

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With the consumer economy changing radically and rapidly, Microsoft and others are experimenting once again with applying the pay-as-you-go model to computing, since it seems to work well enough for other industries.

In an industry where everything old is new again, only sooner, the information technology community took notice of an Ars Technica story last Monday revealing that Microsoft had, yet again, made an effort to obtain an US patent on the concept of doling out metered computing services from a centralized server complex.

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Vendors at CES 2009 will be displaying some interesting new workarounds to the persistent issue of short battery life, ranging from an "ECO On Mode" in MSI's Wind U115 netbook to a solar battery charging gadget from Energizer.

Battery life -- or more precisely, the lack thereof -- continues to be problematic for mobile users. The designs of laptops and other mobile devices are diversifying in individualistic directions, but long battery life is all too rarely one of those distinctive characteristics, even though individuals everywhere continue to request it.

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