Lo and behold, 2wire's media subscription service is Blockbuster
The beginning of Blockbuster Video's convergence into the service it needs to be to survive in this evolving video market, has finally begun this morning with the announcement of its streaming media system and its player of choice.
Add to your growing list of Questions People Forgot to Ask, the one where DVR and streaming media device manufacturer 2wire is asked who, exactly, it expects to provide streaming media for that device. Two weeks ago, 2wire premiered its MediaPoint device, with the promise of providing "a fully-converged experience of Internet video and local media on the television."
What YouTube's new 16:9 aspect ratio means for users
There are some significant and some insignificant aspects of YouTube's adjusted main screen. The service's "embrace" of widescreen today, we discovered, doesn't change much besides what you see on the surface.
A number of videos with 16:9 widescreen ratio have already been featured on YouTube, and long-time users with widescreen monitors know that YouTube already supported that ratio whenever a video is expanded to full screen mode. Movie trailers are among the content that YouTube has supported in their native aspect ratios.
US government to consider encrypting root zone DNS hosts
The public comments period has officially ended for the NTIA's consideration of requiring domain name servers within the Internet's root zone to, at long last, encrypt their communications. Could there really be any opposition?
For well over a decade, the Internet has had available to it a security measure called DNSSEC, that would enable DNS hosts to request that communications between each other be encrypted, using public key cryptography. That way, all DNS messages could be traced back to a verifiable source, conceivably thwarting any possibility of a cache poisoning nightmare on the order of the one that security research Dan Kaminsky warned about last summer.
Analog messages may be broadcast following the DTV transition
February 17 may not be the absolute end to analog TV transmission in the US, should the House follow the Senate's lead in passing legislation enabling analog broadcasters to continue serving public service messages for one month.
Last Thursday, by unanimous consent, the Senate passed a bill introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D - W.V.), that will allow local television stations to continue a limited form of broadcasting on analog channels for 30 days following the February 17, 2009 transition date.
Apparent IP routing vulnerability affects Vista, not XP
A change in the way the Windows client enables IP routes to be amended manually is the target of a potentially serious exploit for Vista users only, that Microsoft may now have no choice but to address.
Through SecurityFocus.com last Wednesday, a team of researchers at Phion published a proof of concept that demonstrates how Microsoft's Internet Protocol Helper API could be exploited to trigger a stack buffer overflow, potentially leading to the execution of random code. Unusually, this particular exploit can only be recreated, Phion said in its bulletin, on Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate versions, in 32- and 64-bit editions.
What could Microsoft want with a domain that means 'cloud?'
The discovery that Microsoft has not only registered but is currently running servers under the domain name "kumo.com" has people wondering today whether a rebranding of its cloud-based services is in the works.
We've heard some talk in recent days about this "cloud" thing that Microsoft's been playing with. Maybe you've seen or read something having to do with the company's cloud services for business users, as well as its ambitious system for hosting .NET apps on a platform being given the brand Windows Azure.
How is Internet advertising faring in this bad economy?
With many news services, it's the dire predictions that make the boldest headlines; but if the headline happens to be, "Advertising Growth Declines," then suddenly the news looks a little more...measured.
So the news emerging this week from the Internet Advertising Bureau, which collects information submitted by surveys from members who sell advertising over the Internet in the US, is that the rate of growth in the ad industry has essentially flattened. According to IAB statistics, ad revenue among US-based ad dealers who are members (this should account for Google and AOL's Platform-A, among others) grew to $5.865 billion for the calendar third quarter, up 11% annually over the previous year's Q3.
New Adobe Media Player ushers in AIR 1.5
The latest version of Adobe's stand-alone player for Flash media appears only cosmetically different, and we've noticed a few bugs in our tests. But the big changes are under the hood, with Flash 10 and the latest AIR platform.
Now on a par with specialist content delivery services such as Joost, Adobe Media Player began upgrading itself on users' systems today to version 1.5. Besides a change of the shade of AMP's panels to a not so dark grey (about a "3" on a "10" scale rather than a "2"), viewers may not notice much functional difference; though the episode library was already stacking up rather nicely, it's not much larger this week than last week.
The Dell surprise: Higher earnings on lower revenue
Amid all the bad economic news, including a downturn in PC market growth projections for 2009 by nine points, who would have thought the company best suited to weather the storm could be one that just emerged from a storm?
You may not have to look to the end of the tunnel for signs of light today. In a clear demonstration that Mark Hurd is not the only fellow who can shape up a company to emerge from scandal unscathed and healthy enough to tackle a fresh new year of hell, yesterday was the day of Michael Dell.
With the petaflop barrier broken, is it time to change the benchmark?
The Roadrunner supercomputer now runs more than 1.1 thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. But what's an "operation" really? By the time the next Top 500 list comes out, the definition could change.
At a presentation at the SC08 semi-annual supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, an engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee who is an expert on the Linpack benchmark, suggested that the methodology used to determine supercomputer performance using Linmark may be behind the times. Specifically, Jack Dongarra -- the man credited with introducing the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark to the Top 500 program -- suggested that as supercomputers get bigger and can store more data, their lag times increase exponentially. This implies that making existing supercomputers bigger and faster eventually leads to a point of diminishing returns.
Microsoft's IP chief: 'Information wants to be free' is a 'disaster'
Blasting Google as, if not the perpetrator, then certainly the beneficiary of the failure of the online content industry, Microsoft's chief IP attorney called upon British publishers to bring about change they can believe in.
In a clear contrast of his company's position on business models and strategies for content providers against those of Google, Microsoft's chief intellectual property attorney Thomas Rubin this morning, in a speech before the UK Association of Online Publishers transcribed by Microsoft, called on online publishers to find fair prices for their content. This instead of continuing the policy of giving content away for free, in hopes that a fair business model will eventually congeal itself into existence, around advertising or some other subsidiary platform.
Europe's ambitious 'single access point' for cultural media provides porn
In an effort to build national and multi-national pride in the cultural, artistic, and literary products of Europe throughout its vast history, the EC this morning cut the red ribbon around Europeana, its central online library.
Problem is, when you declare something "open," people do tend to come in. As of mid-afternoon GMT (mid-morning on the US East Coast), Europeana's would-be one-stop-shop for the vast collection of literary material considered the collective property of Europe's many peoples, was either completely unresponsive or too slow to be useful, perhaps due to an influx of traffic. Even pings timed out to the site's Netherlands-based IP address.
AMD and Red Hat are chased by Microsoft on VM live migration
It's a feature which could be ubiquitous in more data centers if it could just get out of the labs: the ability to move running virtual machines between platforms with next-to-zero downtime. Now, it's being done cross-platform.
Up to now, the ability for a data center to move a running virtual machine between active processors while giving the user little or no visible downtime, has mainly been possible under a limited set of circumstances: The VM platform needs to be managed by VMware ESX, and the CPUs involved need to come from the same manufacturer.
Novell and Microsoft sanction Silverlight work-alike for Linux
In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight -- a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight -- is expected within days.
Microsoft and Novell made their joint announcement this morning in acknowledging the two-year anniversary of their historic, and still talked-about, partnership agreement. It effectively confirms the timeline put forth by Moonlight's parent organization, the open source Mono Project, which is also responsible for building open source versions of the .NET Framework runtime for Linux, Mac OS X, and yes, for Windows as well.
Desperate for an edge, Yahoo adds a 'Plus' to its 'Open Strategy'
On what could possibly have been the worst possible day for the company to throw a party, yesterday Yahoo lifted the veil on its new suite of open source services designed to work like browser add-ons.
It could actually be a very good idea: Rather than build a competitive suite of Web services that are deployed like pages, or URLs that one "goes to," Yahoo's plan is to develop services that people can figure out how to use more simply and directly, by plugging them into their browsers of choice as though those services were native functionality.
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