Entries for the ‘Tech News’ Category

A Proprietary Web? Blame the W3C

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

FlashSilverlightvsW3C2 A recent post of mine about Firefox and my general view of corporations and organizations caused a bit of a stir. It even caught the attention of Asa Dotzler, a prominent Mozilla employee. In Mr. Dotzler’s rebuff of my post he said something that has really bothered me. He said “It’s really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they’re actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight.” But are they really subverting it? Where exactly is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the web?

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Rhapsody’s New DRM-Free MP3 Store with Full Song Previews

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Today’s big announcement comes from Rhapsody, the online music service previously known for its subscription-based streaming music for a monthly fee. Well, turns out people are more interested in owning their music rather than renting. So now we have another major competitor for iTunes and Amazon MP3.

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Sony: Big News & A Recap of Blunders Just in The Past Year

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Sony has spent the last three years restructuring the company and today releases its big plans for growth. Apparently, the next big thing is electronics products that connect to each other and the Internet and stuff. You know, downloading movies onto a game console or syncing your music with a music player. Wow, I can’t wait for all that kind of technology to come out.

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Firefox 3: Impressions, Issues, and Verdict

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

It’s been nearly a week since I installed Firefox 3. And though the end result is largely positive, the process wasn’t free of complications. As I’ve discussed before, sure enough, my major issues revolved around the Firefox catch-22: extensions.

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The Web 2.0 Has Toll-Booths: Cox, Comcast, and Some Clarity

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

COX_RES_RGB On a recent call to Cox about a billing issue I was having I stumbled across a very interesting finding: Cox is already implementing data transfer caps. The rep on the phone told me about it, and acted like it was no big deal. Intrigued, I looked into this further and found some interesting insights.

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Netflix Eliminating Profiles: Tells Us We Don’t Own Our Data

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Last night Netflix sent out an email (full text below) explaining that it will be getting rid of profiles. For those unfamiliar, the profile feature allows one account to have multiple profiles. For example, you could pay $13.99 to get 2 DVDs at a time sent to your addresss but have one DVD come from your queue of chosen movies while the other DVD comes from another queue of movies.

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Reddit Goes Open Source: What Does That Really Mean?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

My new favorite crowd voting / social bookmarking site Reddit made the announcement today that it’s “open source.” This means the code for the site has been made publicly available, which could lead to crowd sourced improvements to the site as well as new sites developed using the Reddit “engine.”

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PlayStation 3 Getting In-Game Ads Two Years After Xbox 360

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Sony has some big news coming out today: The company will allow “dynamic” ads to be placed in PlayStation 3 games. The Wall Street Journal is calling it “a boost for what could become a significant new revenue source for games companies” while Forbes thinks Sony is “set to ignite the world of advertising in videogames…”

Interesting, since the Xbox 360 has been doing this for nearly two years now. At the time (back in 2006), the gaming industry seemed pretty excited at what looked like a new source of revenue. But not much followed in terms of details of how this was to be a game changer for advertising (lame pun intended).

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