All eyes on Minnesota as RIAA trial starts over
The only file-sharing trial ever to go before a jury met with a spectacularly unsympathetic one back in 2007. As Jammie Thomas-Rasset (the former Jammie Thomas) prepares once again to face federal charges that she shared 24 songs over KaZaA back in 2005, keep an eye out for these developments:
• Keep your eye on Kiwi. Thomas-Rasset's new lawyer, Kiwi Alejandro Danao Camara, will celebrate his 25th birthday in the courtroom tomorrow, quite possibly by breathing fire. There doesn't seem to be much else beyond the abilities of the Philippine-born Camara, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law in 2004 (at 19) and has a bachelor's degree in computer science.
Up Front: The price of cloud computing gets clearer
I know summer doesn't officially begin until next week, but free time is over already, the whistle is blowing, and everyone out of the pool. It's time for the big boys to clean up. This morning, two big brand cloud services emerge from beta -- one of them geared toward everyday applications, the other toward building custom sales-driven apps. And this means they're no longer free...despite the name on one of them, which just happens to include the word "Free."
Adobe springs Acrobat.com from beta
Firefox runs 11% faster in XP than Windows 7; IE, Opera run slower
Download Google Chrome for Windows 3.0.187.1 Beta from Fileforum now.
Since we began our periodic check of the relative performance of the rendering and JavaScript engines in Windows-based Web browsers, where we've seen them run about 14% faster on average now in Windows 7 RC than in Vista SP2, we've been asked...what about Windows XP? It certainly seems like the faster and more nimble platform of the three -- certainly all the netbook manufacturers seem to think so.
Bing makes a change, and the videos get G-rated again
Smart Motion Preview, which allows clips to play samples from directly within Bing search results, took immediate fire upon launch of the site for allowing playback of explicit images and content. Microsoft's hoping that's all over now, as it announces two fixes that should ease the search site back down to safe-for-work territory.
In a blog post Friday afternoon, Bing general manager Mike Nichols outlined the changes. First, a separate domain -- explicit.bing.net -- has been set up for randy images and video. This should allow filtering software or humans looking to eliminate those results from search to do so simply.
If they wanted my workplace to be fashionably decorated, they'd call it the fashionplace
This episode of Recovery is brought to you by the Bing "search overload" commercial and the genius at Woot who thought to take a camera to E3 and document all the Woot T-shirts on the show floor: One of them looks like the inside of my head, the other looks like the outside of the rest of me.
So tonight's the night: Facebook vanity URLs for everyone! The digital switchover is upon us. As Tim told us yesterday, about 2.2 million people aren't ready; as you see from the comments on his article, some folks have valid tech reasons for that. Ready or not, you should cruise by YouTube and enjoy the four classic-TV episodes they've put out front for you today.
Earth to Europe: You won. Microsoft complied. Live with it.
A note of full disclosure first, to quell any dispute over which "side" I'm on: I've been a Windows user for 20 years. And today -- but perhaps not tomorrow -- my Web browser is Mozilla Firefox. Do I like Firefox? On days when it doesn't crash, yes. The moment someone else makes a more suitable Web browser than Firefox for my extremely heavy duty purposes, I will switch. I test the competition almost every day now, so I literally do mean the moment that happens.
The tying of Internet Explorer with Windows was a scheme by Microsoft to eliminate Netscape's market presence -- a devious, immoral, illegal, and effective scheme. Today, Netscape is nothing more than a flavor of an AOL Web portal page, a skin. No more damage can be done there. Does any technical reason remain for a Web browser to continue to be tied to, or bundled with, an operating system?
Sen. Hatch rails on the Pirate Bay, Canada
At this week's World Copyright Summit in Washington, DC, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R. - Utah) spoke to the group of more than 500 attendees, and noted the Anti-Piracy Caucus' 2009 Country Watch List, which lists countries with the most intellectual property violations. There, he noted the latest edition of the list contains a familiar neighbor.
"This year, it was particularly disappointing to see that Canada, one of America's closest trading partners, was listed on the Watch List," Sen. Hatch said. "This is another sobering reminder of how pervasive and how close to our borders copyright piracy has become in the global IP community." Canada ranked in the top five problem countries along with China, Russia, Mexico, and Spain.
Europe: Microsoft's IE move gives Windows users no choice
The initial response from the European Commission this morning, to the news that Microsoft has decided to remove Internet Explorer from Windows 7 for European customers, is that it leaves customers no option or choice with regard to which Web browser they should install.
"The development of new online services makes Web browsers an increasingly important tool for businesses and consumers, and a lack of real consumer choice on this market would undermine innovation," reads this morning's statement from Brussels.
Up front: The Microsoft legal battles never end
Miss the '90s? Peace and prosperity and the dot-com bubble and whatnot? The European Union is here to help, dragging on the interminable antitrust suits against Microsoft. (Don't look so shocked; it worked out well for Mississippi, which just got millions of dollars for making a sustained cranky noise. More on that in What's Next.) Meanwhile, the world has moved on -- to open source, to Google (which ought to be taking notes for future reference), to a plethora of browsers and much higher awareness among the general population of how to acquire and use them. At the end of a thrilling week (let's all gasp in unison), it's not all that comforting to see that some things never change.
Microsoft and EU still at odds
The DMCA is endangering American security
I've had the the government's 60-day Cyberspace Policy Review sitting on my desk for many days now, dutifully highlighted and marked up with notes about how this bit could turn out interesting and that section looks a lot like what we've previous heard from DC about cybersecurity and that passage over there appears to have been lifted from the questionable financial-loss statistics one hears from the RIAA and BSA and MPAA and such. And I see one gigantic self-inflicted wound that I fear the current administration will ignore like the last two have -- ignored it since 1998, in fact.
The cybersecurity review says we need to improve academic and industry collaboration on cybersecurity and other technology issues. It also states we should "expand university curricula; and set the conditions to create a competent workforce for the digital age."
iTunes App store's biggest competitor will be WinMo Marketplace
Even though Apple used the graph shown above at WWDC this week to illustrate the iTunes App Store's dominance in the mobile applications space, it was missing a big contender that could make its presence much less commanding.
During the Digital Downtown Mobile Apps Shootout today, Vice President of Strategy and Analysis at Interpret LLC Michael Gartenberg reminded the audience that more than 25,000 applications have been developed for the Windows Mobile platform, a number slightly greater than Microsoft's estimate late last March. This figure stresses the impact Microsoft's mobile app store could have.
Tomorrow's DTV transition counts 2+ million stragglers
As the United States sits on the threshold of the switch to digital television, we get to see the size of the "lowest common denominator" of television viewers who after more than two years of public discussion still have not readied their old TV sets for the new broadcast standard
The National Association of Broadcasters says that as of June 3, nearly 9 out of 10 broadcast-only households were completely ready for the digital switchover. According to Nielsen market research, the total number of US television households for the 2008-2009 season was 114.5 million, but homes that consume only free, over-the-air signals is just a small fragment of that. According to the SRI Home Technology Monitor quindecennial survey (PDF available here) found that in 2004, 18.9% of households were broadcast only. Using those figures, that would mean an estimated 2.16 million households remain unprepared for the digital switch.
Microsoft to release Windows 7 in Europe without Internet Explorer
Saying that the company must abide by the law of the European Union, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner revealed Thursday afternoon that it has made the decision to make a European "E" version of Windows 7 available to customers there, without Internet Explorer 8 bundled.
"We're committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world, but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product," Heiner wrote. "Given the pending legal proceeding, we've decided that instead of including Internet Explorer in Windows 7 in Europe, we will offer it separately and on an easy-to-install basis to both computer manufacturers and users. This means that computer manufacturers and users will be free to install Internet Explorer on Windows 7, or not, as they prefer. Of course, they will also be free, as they are today, to install other Web browsers."
Top 10 Windows 7 features #1: Action Center
It's a sad fact which even Microsoft itself has stopped denying: The success of Windows in recent years has been despite the fact that the operating system isn't exactly embraced by its users. The percentage of Windows users who love Windows may not come anywhere near the percentage of Mac OS users who love Macintosh. Windows is what comes on most people's PCs.
In the past few months, Microsoft's marketing campaign has cleverly (and finally) diverted attention away from Vista, which on a public relations scale has largely failed to win the public's affection. Instead, you'll notice that the selling point of Windows recently is that it enables you to buy a bigger and better PC. Spend $1,500 or less and you're going to get twice the memory, twice the storage, and much better graphics. The word "Vista" doesn't even appear in the company's advertising. It's an effective argument -- what's more, it's accurate, and it's the strongest argument in Microsoft's favor.
The case for smaller, simpler, faster operating systems
Call me a shameless optimist, but I can't shake the feeling that the operating system arms race may finally be over. After countless generations of new-and-improved OSs that consumed every iota of additional performance built into ever-faster hardware, I think we're finally seeing a tiny light at end of a tunnel many of us thought would continue forever.
Newer, but not better
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