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| Computer Makers Giving In To RIAA Pressure, Disabling Sound Recording? |
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 The story is that a bunch of laptop owners (mainly from Dell) are frustrated after discovering that their laptop soundcard configuration blocks the recording of audio, even though it's possible to enable it with a few tweaks.
In other words, recording has effectively been turned off by the computer manufacturers.
News source Bend Over Dude, You're Getting A Dell
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Posted by netJunke on Wednesday, July 09 @ 00:45:30 CST (5 reads)
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 Apple fans have made much of the fact that the newest figures from Net Applications show that Apple's share of the operating system market has jumped almost 32% in the past year. But they're ignoring a simple fact: Vista's market share during that same time leaped more than 355%. When you add in other Windows versions, Microsoft owns more than 90% of the market.
Net Applications reports that the Mac had 7.94% market share in June, up from 6.03% a year ago. Going from a little more than 6% to just under 8% may be a big gain when measured as a percentage of growth. But when seen in absolute numbers, it's not particularly impressive.
Vista, by way of contrast, showed far more explosive growth. In June, 2007, it had 4.54% market share. In June, 2008, it had reached 16.14%; more than a 355% gain. Those numbers are substantial not just in percentage terms, but in raw terms as well. Apple would sell the first-born children of most of its employees if it could ever get to a 16% market share
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Posted by NB on Tuesday, July 08 @ 11:39:51 CST (5 reads)
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| Will ISPs Survive The Video Onslaught |
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 Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet. That is if Internet service providers can figure out how to keep up with the video-driven bandwidth demand on their networks. Peer-to-peer technology provider BitTorrent says it can help.
Video consumes more network resources than any other media distributed on the Web. Even poor-quality video from YouTube eats up more bandwidth than e-mail, music downloading, and voice over IP services. And when you throw full-length high-definition video into the mix, you're talking about even more bandwidth. Depending on the compression used, a single HD video stream can eat up 20 megabits per second worth of bandwidth.
And as consumers subscribe to faster and faster broadband connections at home and sites like YouTube and Hulu come online offering all kinds of video choices, more people are watching video on the Web. According to ComScore Video Metrix, Americans are currently watching upward of 10 billion videos online a month. By the end of 2007, online viewers averaged more than one video a day.
This is just the beginning. ABI research forecasts the number of viewers who access video via the Web will nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at least 1 billion in 2013. This summer's Olympic Games in Beijing marks the first real test of online video as NBC embarks upon the most ambitious online video project ever.
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Posted by nb on Tuesday, July 08 @ 07:52:37 CST (5 reads)
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| Yahoo's encouraging words for IM standards |
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 For more than a decade, the Internet has suffered from multiple incompatible communication standards for instant messaging. Now it looks like Yahoo, one of the major IM players, is open to breaking the logjam. I'm a power user of IM who struggles to find software that supports chatting with people on the four main IM networks: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Today's situation, for me at least, is like having to own four e-mail programs for different networks or four telephones for incompatible phone systems.
So I was encouraged by words from Scott Dietzen, Yahoo's new head of communications products including Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. That promotion expanded his turf from his previous position at the helm of the Zimbra online e-mail software start-up that Yahoo acquired last year.
Zimbra, like Google and some other non-innbnbent powers in the world of instant messaging, has used the open XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard for instant messaging. It's this standard that Dietzen apparently sees playing a broader role at Yahoo.
"I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners," Dietzen said in an interview.
No doubt one of those partners would be Google. Generally, it's one of Yahoo's biggest rivals, but Google became a major partner in a search-ad deal with Yahoo announced in June. A sidelight to the deal was one line saying the companies would make their IM services interoperable. It's hard to say at this stage, though, how far Yahoo or others might go.
Cont..> Full Story
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Posted by Grin on Monday, July 07 @ 23:31:31 CST (6 reads)
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| Pioneer Develops Ultra-High Capacity Optical Disc |
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 The 16-layer disc has a total capacity of 400 GB, far more than any commercially available optical disc. Pioneer on Monday said it has developed a read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 GB, far more than any disc commercially available today. Pioneer said the disc has 16 layers, each capable of storing 25 GB, which is the maximum of a one-sided Blu-ray disc used to store high-definition video. The company said its technology can be used in building recordable discs and can also be read by Blu-ray players after tweaking the hardware.
In building the disc, Pioneer overcame the difficulty of obtaining clear signals from each layer of a multi-layer disc. Crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss have been the biggest problems. Pioneer said it solved the problems by developing a new optical disc structure that can play back high-quality signals from every layer. The company also developed a "compensator" and a light-receiving element for reading signals when there's a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism, according to Pioneer.
The growing storage needs of business and consumers are expected to drive demand for higher capacity discs. In addition, offering one disc equal to many commercially available discs today will conserve resources, Pioneer said in a statement issued from Japan. "This development has bolstered Pioneer's confidence in the feasibility of a large-capacity optical disc, which is expected to become necessary in the near future," the company said.
Pioneer plans to release the details of its research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage, which is scheduled for July 13 in Hawaii.
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Posted by Grin on Monday, July 07 @ 23:21:11 CST (4 reads)
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| AI beats human poker champions |
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 PORTLAND, Ore. — Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. Poker champs fought the AI system to a draw, then won in the first two of four rounds (each round had Polaris playing 500 hands against two humans, whose points were averaged.) But in the final two rounds of the match, Polaris beat both human teams, two wins out of four, with one loss and one draw.
IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. A year later, the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group began winning hands with early prototypes that eventually became Polaris. A decade later, Polaris 2.0 added poker to the list of machine triumphs. The key to Polaris' poker prowess last weekend was a tactical shift in midstream designed to prevent human's from exploiting perceived weaknesses. Add to that, Polaris learned from experience.
"There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year," said professor Michael Bowling, who supervised graduate students who programmed Polaris. "First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year--its much harder for humans to exploit weaknesses. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter. This complicated the human players ability to compare notes, since Polaris chose a different strategy to use against each of the humans it played," Bowling said.
Cont..> Full Story
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Posted by Grin on Monday, July 07 @ 23:11:27 CST (5 reads)
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| Microsoft-Yahoo on again? |
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 Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer announced plans today for Microsoft to acquire some or all of Yahoo if the current board was ousted in an upcoming election on August 1st. While they didn’t come out and say it was a done deal, it does appear that Microsoft is still interested in either an outright purchase or acquiring Yahoo’s search engine business that competes with Google.
Larry Dignan summarizes the message as follows: “Boot Yahoo’s board at the company’s shareholder meeting on Aug. 1 and Icahn can pull off a deal with Yahoo. And Microsoft is interested.” Other than catching “the one that got away” I’m still at a loss to explain why Microsoft is so interested. Yahoo has already battled with Google in the search space and lost. Microsoft battled and lost. What’s needed is not more of the same; it’s something completely new.
Despite an overwhelmingly dominant position as the “go-to” place for people to find things on the internet, if someone comes up with a better idea that could change pretty quickly. Does anybody remember Alta Vista, which seemed to have searching and machine translation wrapped up in the early days? Imitating Google isn’t going to put you on top. Put those billions to work on research Mr. Ballmer. Encourage entrepreneurship and creativity, and advance the state of the art so that everyone benefits.
News Sourse
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Posted by Grin on Monday, July 07 @ 22:56:42 CST (5 reads)
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| Microsoft Makes November 'Essential' |
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 News Analysis. What is it with Microsoft and the second and third weeks of November? Today, the company announced that Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 would launch on Nov. 12. That's a popular week for Microsoft products. Some November blasts from the past:
* Zune 2, Nov. 12, 2007
* Office 2007 and Windows Vista, Nov. 30, 2006
* Zune, Nov. 13, 2006
* Xbox 360, Nov. 22, 2005
* Halo 2, Nov. 9, 2004
* Tablet PC 2004, Nov. 17, 2003
* Xbox Live, Nov. 15, 2002
* Xbox, Nov. 15, 2001
Is it like tradition for Microsoft to have big November product launches? The consumer products make sense for the holidays and then there was Comdex for business stuff. But the trade show is long gone. So, the reason to launch new server software is November for small and medium businesses that probably won't be looking to deploy over the holidays. "Merry Christmas, honey. It's Small Business Server 2008!"
Cont..> News Article
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Posted by Grin on Monday, July 07 @ 22:50:15 CST (5 reads)
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