Archive by Author
Amazon Prime Members Get Free Streaming
Posted by Joe on February 22, 2011 · Comments Off
Amazon is offering free streaming to Prime members:
We’ve been hearing about additional perks coming to Amazon Prime members for some time, and here it is: the Netflix-style Instant Video service launched on Feb. 22, and gives Amazon Prime members unlimited, commercial-free access to 5,000 (for now) movies and TV shows, at no extra cost.
Unfortunately, members who got Amazon Prime free through the Amazon Mom or Amazon Student offers will need to ‘upgrade’ to a paid membership.
Continue reading on Examiner.com
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Iphone Nano – Rumor Underwhelms
Posted by Joe on February 14, 2011 · Comments Off
Apple’s rumored ‘iPhone Nano’ sounds like a very limited device, according to Cult Of Mac:
The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud.
“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source.
The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com, a streaming service that Apple bought last spring and then shut down.
Presumably, [...]
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Guitar Hero is officially dead
Posted by Joe on February 9, 2011 · Comments Off
The Guitar Hero video game franchise is officially dead:
According to publisher Activision, which will close its music game division and cease development of existing Guitar Hero titles, they’re ending the series in order to refocus efforts online.
“Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011,” the company said in its most recent financial statement. “These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company [...]
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HP TouchPad Tablet Unveiled
Posted by Joe on February 9, 2011 · Comments Off
HP unveiled the TouchPad today, a new WebOS tablet computer:
…the HP Touchpad has a 9.7-inch screen very reminiscent of Apple’s tablet. The device runs on an updated WebOS 2.1 and has a resolution of 1024 x 768. It weighs 1.5 pounds and is 13.7mm thick. Under the hood is a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor with a choice between 16GB and 32GB of internal storage.
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E-Readers Gain Acceptance Among Young Readers
Posted by Joe on February 5, 2011 · Comments Off
The drop in e-reader prices have pushed the devices into younger hands:
In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.
Good trend. I’m trying to convince my daughter to take my old Nook, but so far she prefers dead tree books.
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Google Gets More Than 75,000 Job Applications in One Week
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Google received more than 75,000 job applications worldwide last week, setting a record for the company as it embarks on a hiring spree.
The company is stepping up hiring as it pushes deeper into mobile services, display advertising and Internet applications. Google also faces steeper competition from Silicon Valley rivals Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. for users and engineering talent. The company aims to hire more workers in 2011 than any year in its history, exceeding its 2007 record.
More from Bloomberg
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Internet Officially Runs Out of Addresses
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Via Wikipedia, the IPv4 well has run dry, as expected:
IANA’s primary address pool was exhausted on February 3, 2011 when the last 5 blocks were allocated to the 5 RIRs. Several RIRs are expected to run out of IPv4 addresses before the end of 2011; once the first RIR has run out, the end-to-end routable IPv4 Internet will be officially obsolete.
IPv6 deployment has been slow, but will be ready to meet future addressing needs.
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Nuked Flickr Account Back From The Dead
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
The Flicker account accidentally deleted by an employee of the site has been fully restored:
Flickr accidentally deleted a member’s account–comments, favorites, and thousands of photos–but now has given the photographer a 25-year Pro-level subscription and all his photos back.
And more importantly for others who fear the same might happen to them, Flickr is working to update its system to prevent such a mistake from happening again and to make such draconian moves easier to reverse.
Read more at CNET.
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Google and Twitter Thwart Egypt’s Net Ban
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Egyptians with access to a telephone can tweet via voice message using the new @speak2tweet channel:
As the Mubarak government turned Egypt into Gypt (everything “e” was cut off), Twitter quickly joined hands with SayNow (a Google company, yes,) to work around the ban and created @speak2tweet. This amazing new “channel,” created for the people of Egypt, is a game changer. It allows for anyone with access to a telephone line to leave a voice message –- which is instantly converted to a tweet.
[via AdAge]
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Canada to reverse metered Internet decision
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Canada will quickly reverse the controversial CRTC metered Internet decision, reports the Toronto Star:
A controversial CRTC decision that effectively imposed usage-based Internet billing on small service providers will be reversed, the Toronto Star has learned.
“The CRTC should be under no illusion — the Prime Minister and minister of Industry will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself,” a senior Conservative government official said Wednesday.
“If they don’t reconsider we will reverse their decision.”
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Google Previews Android 3.0 OS, Honeycomb
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Android 3.0 OS (Honeycomb) preview:
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Apple Clamps Down On In-App Purchase Rules
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
Apple never claimed iOS was an open platform, and they’re reminding us of that reality this week.
Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store.
This move could have a big impact on what content is available on the iPad and iPhone, and what it ends up costing. If Amazon has to pay Apple 30% of the price of a book just because it was bought within [...]
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MySpace Up For Sale
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
In an earnings call Wednesday, News Corp. publicly revealed plans to sell struggling social media site MySpace. The site has been re-designed and repositioned over the last year to focus on media promotion rather than social networking. However, the overhaul into an entertainment portal has yet to turn the site into a successful enterprise.
The once popular social media site now struggles in the shadow of the Facebook juggernaut. News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Almost half of MySpace’s employees got pink slips last month.
More from Google News
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page Hacked
Posted by Joe on February 3, 2011 · Comments Off
TechCrunch reports that the following message appeared on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fan page today:
Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011
Facebook has taken down the page — but TechCrunch has a screenshot.
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AT&T Kills Unlimited Data Plans
Posted by Joe on June 2, 2010 · Comments Off
The $29.95 iPhone (and other AT&T smartphone) unlimited data plan is being replaced by two cheaper plans with data limits.
The $15 plan will get you 200 megabytes of data, which AT&T claims is enough to “send/receive 1,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video”. That sounds optimistic to me, but this plan in particular will be a good option for parents who have kids clamoring for an iPhone. And for many users, free WiFi isn’t [...]
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Weekend Movie Watching
Posted by Joe on May 31, 2010 · Comments Off
Thanks to Netflix Watch Instantly, my holiday weekend was a blur of 1980′s nostalgia (with a brief side-trip to 1992). I’d recommend all of these, with the possible exception of Chevy Chase’s ‘Modern Problems’ – go watch Vacation or Fletch instead.
WarGames
1983 – After cracking the security of an Air Force supercomputer, young hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) moves his piece in a seemingly innocent video game and accidentally tells the computer to start preparing a preemptive nuclear strike.
Housesitter
1992 – After building his dream [...]
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Waka Waka Waka
Posted by Joe on May 25, 2010 · Comments Off
According to a study by RescueTime, the playable Pac-Man logo on Google Friday cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a staggering $120,483,800 in lost productivity. Those numbers sound as meaningless as most such statistics, but the logo was definitely a great marketing idea on Google’s part. Here’s a non-googlized version of the classic game for even more wasted time:
Free Online Flash Games
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A New Firefly Fan Film is coming soon
Posted by Joe on May 25, 2010 · Comments Off
Shiny…
Details at Wired.
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$200 Color Ebook Reader Coming Soon
Posted by Joe on May 25, 2010 · Comments Off
The Pandigital Novel ebook reader is set to debut soon for $200. The device will support a number of formats, and will integrate the Barnes & Noble eBookstore (with over a million titles available to buy). The Novel will run the Android os. It will include a 7 inch 600×800 touchscreen, built in wi-fi, web browser, video and music players, and an SD card expansion slot.
The screen resolution is lower than the Apple iPad, and there’s no word yet on performance. However, for $200 it would have to have some pretty major flaws to keep me from buying one.
No word yet on when [...]
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TextOnPhone iPhone App Comes to T-Mobile G1
Posted by Joe on November 30, 2008 · Comments Off
Popular iPhone ebook app TextOnPhone is now available as an Android application in the Marketplace. So far, it’s the best ebook reader available for the T-Mobile G1. There are about 30,000 books that can be downloaded, mostly public domain and Creative Commons titles. You can also upload books to a personal bookshelf on the textonphone.com web site from a computer, and then download them to your phone. I successfully uploaded a short story, but I couldn’t get a full-length novel to upload for some reason.
The TextOnPhone Android application doesn’t support bookmarks, but it [...]
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G1 Gets Ebook Reader
Posted by Joe on October 29, 2008 · 2 Comments
The T-Mobile G1 smart phone now has a functional (more-or-less) ebook reader. FBReaderJ has now been re-compiled to work on the device, and it can indeed open and display certain ebook formats. I converted several books from Microsoft’s LIT format to the FB2 format, and they were recognized and opened without a problem.
There are still bugs, to be sure. Find Text doesn’t work yet, and each orientation change causes the book to re-load and start at the beginning (open the keyboard while reading, and lose your place!). And I haven’t discovered a way to set bookmarks yet, which [...]
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I Get It
Posted by Joe on September 4, 2008 · Comments Off
The new Microsoft ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates has appeared on the web, and a lot of people are criticizing it as being odd and pointless. Well Duh! The quirky ad is obviously meant to set the stage for things to come, and I did find it amusing in a very “Seinfeld” way. If anything, the ad is too reminiscent of the inspired Seinfeld – Superman ‘buddy” commercials for American Express (and no, I’m not saying Bill Gates is Superman).
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Google Chrome – A Brand New Browser
Posted by Joe on September 1, 2008 · Comments Off
Google’s new browser, “Chrome”, will be available tomorrow (Tuesday) for download in 100 countries. Kara Swisher has scans of a promotional comic accidentally mailed out a little early. And Blogoscoped has some screenshots, along with more details. Here’s a taste:
UPDATE: The Google Chrome browser is available for download.
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Dell Can’t Trademark Generic Term After All
Posted by Joe on August 18, 2008 · Comments Off
Dell’s “Cloud Computing” trademark application: denied
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Some End Of Summer Recommendations
Posted by Joe on August 17, 2008 · Comments Off
Book: I just finished reading Small Favor, the latest installment of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. This is actually the tenth novel, and the series is still going strong. Harry Dresden is a modern-day wizard who manages to spend most of every book bruised and battered by a variety of supernatural beings intent upon bringing about the apocalypse or something even worse. The books never take themselves to seriously, but still manage to embrace serious issues revolving around family and friendship. If you like urban fantasy light on romance and heavy on action, this series is for you, and [...]
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