Bing vs. Google face-off, round 1
Easily the biggest single change to the way I do business over the past quarter-century -- bigger than the ubiquitousness of e-mail, bigger than the mouse, bigger than push-button piracy -- is the search engine. Google is an invaluable research tool that my colleagues and I might have invested literally thousands in to be able to use, were it available two decades ago; though in all fairness, the search engine that truly blazed the trail in functionality in the early days of the Web was AltaVista.
Even AltaVista has some unique linguistic tricks that, if they could be applied to Google's colossal index, would yield mind-boggling results; so the notion that Google cannot be bested is probably false. But this time it's Microsoft once again that's laying down the gauntlet. This time, its search engine's latest revamp sheds what some had seen as its biggest liability: its brand name's ties to Windows, as if using Windows Live Search had anything to do with using Windows. The choice of Bing as the final title indicates that most of the good dot-com names really have already been taken; but that criticism aside, Bing deserves a fair shake.
Adobe un-Flexes Flash, a surprise DoJ move on copyright, and scary ex-employees
For the love of Pete don't tell Joe Biden, but a brief handed down Friday by the US Justice Department turns its back on movie and TV lobbyists in favor of the reality-based community. That's coming up in What's Next. First, we have snapdragon sightings, some more scary ex-employees, and the press discovers what many of you beta testers already know and love, a Microsoft gift for Firefox users that just keeps on giving.
Adobe releases bevy of dev tools, fixes naming weirdness
Loving the octothorpe; or, why Twitter's hashtags really do reflect reality
This episode of Recovery is brought to you by the Three Wolf Shirt and the newly leaked Palm Pre default ringtone. If one doesn't leave you awash in win, the other will. Both together, however, will probably cause your puny mortal frame to go supernova, so knock that off.
The new social-media doyenne at The New York Times is dutifully twittering away, asking the community to send suggestions about how the paper could better use the resources available. (Unlike the rest of us, the folks at the Times would't do anything so undignified as learning by doing. They also find proper sourcing a bit beneath them, but we'll save that conversation for another day.) She's getting a mixed bag of responses, of course, but one from @rkellett stands out for me: "Get the NYT to standardize, push, create hashtags on breaking news."
On second thought, Microsoft lifts Windows 7's three-app limit for netbooks
If it's a counter that's determining arbitrarily how many applications your limited edition of Windows 7 should be allowed to run, how much precious system resources does that counter consume? And couldn't that memory and space be put to better use, say, running an app? Where and how should netbook manufacturers tell customers they can only run three Windows apps at a time? These were the kinds of questions Microsoft's engineers have been fielding with regard to a limitation in the company's forthcoming Windows 7 Starter Edition, a SKU of the operating system it wants netbook manufacturers to pre-install.
In an indication this afternoon that all this listening to consumers' wishes may be giving Microsoft's people a headache, the company's Win7 evangelist Brandon LeBlanc announced this afternoon the addition to Starter Edition of a kind of feature, if not in fact the subtraction of a feature that nobody wanted: The three-app counter will be gone.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #2: Device Stage
If the strange feeling that Vista was less secure than XP was topmost on critics' gripe lists over the last three years -- regardless of the facts which contra-indicate that feeling -- running a close second was the feeling that very little, if anything, outside of the PC worked with Vista when you plugged it in.
Here, the facts aren't all there to compensate for the feeling. Even in recent months, Palm Centro users complained about the lack of a Vista driver for connecting Centro to the PC outside of a very slow Bluetooth; Minolta scanner users were advised to hack their own .INF files with Notepad in order to get Vista to recognize their brands; and Canon digital camera owners are being told by that company's tech support staff that Microsoft was supposed to make the Vista drivers for their cameras, but didn't.
UK to get Xbox 360 IPTV, again
British Television broadcaster Sky is reportedly working to offer both live and on-demand IPTV programming through Xbox Live in the UK. The BBC reports that it will be similar to Sky Player, a piece of PC/Mac software that allows subscribers to consume Sky IPTV anywhere they have an Internet connection.
But the project sounds much more like one presumed to still be in testing from Sky competitor BT. In 2008, British Telecom announced that its BT Vision service, based upon Microsoft Mediaroom, would bring IPTV to the Xbox 360. However, no completed product has yet been revealed. Exactly one year later at CES 2009, the trials were reported to be ongoing.
Betanews contest: Re-doing Bing, or, 'Name That Search Engine'
Some of us would admit, Bing is a better choice for a big search engine name than "Kumo," which was apparently a serious candidate. But if Microsoft was truly listening to its customers to the degree it has been with Windows 7 of late, would it have come up with an even better brand? Could you Name That Search Engine in four notes or less?
We thought we'd give you a shot at it. Here's your chance to out-ping Bing. The Betanews staff will judge your submissions for a possible better name. But we're going to throw a monkey wrench in the equation: Along with your name, we're challenging you to create a 140-character-or-less tagline, which you would imagine would appear on the front page of the site to replace Windows Live Search, as well as in TV, radio, and Internet display ads.
Don't panic: Verizon will get Palm Pre, too
The pairing of Sprint and Palm for the launch of the Pre was romantic. Don't laugh, you thought it too. Erstwhile smartphone leader Palm put its best hope for survival in the underdog wireless carrier who, without the Pre, has no ultra-competitive exclusive touchphone. Both companies have endured declining market share, and together they could take on the world and get some of it back.
Well that romance is over, and it ended a little more than a week before the Pre even hit consumer availability. Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, yesterday announced that his company will offer the Pre "in the next six months."
How sparse is US rural broadband? FCC admits it doesn't know
With a national plan for broadband Internet deployment due in just nine months, a report published Wednesday by FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps -- still serving as Acting Chairman until the confirmation of Julius Genachowski gets back on track -- admits that the data on just how sparse broadband service is in the nation's rural areas has yet to be compiled. Less than a year before the deadline on action, the government literally doesn't know.
"Our efforts to bring robust and affordable broadband to rural America begin with a simple question: What is the current state of broadband in rural America?" Commissioner Copps writes (PDF available here). "We would like to answer this question definitively, and detail where broadband facilities are deployed, their speeds, and the number of broadband subscribers throughout rural America. Regrettably, we cannot. The Commission and other federal agencies simply have not collected the comprehensive and reliable data needed to answer this question. As the Commission has indicated, more needs to be done to obtain an accurate picture of broadband deployment and usage in America, including its rural areas."
Verizon gets the Pre... Sparring over the cyberczar... The next HDMI spec
With hours (if not minutes) to go before President Obama reveals the results of a comprehensive study of federal cybersecurity, consumer gadgets take the stage on a sleepy Friday to cap off a noisy week. We now know, for instance, just how long Sprint's exclusivity over the Palm Pre will last in the US. Did anyone have dibs on six months? No, not even that.
It's no longer the "Sprint Pre"
Microsoft reports high-risk vulnerability in DirectX
Pre-Vista versions of Windows are vulnerable to a hole in Microsoft DirectX that's currently under limited attack, the company has announced. The vulnerability in quartz.dll could allow an attacker to strike through QuickTime playback plug-ins for any browser using the affected platform.
The problem, according to the security advisory, lies in the QuickTime Movie Parser Filter that DirectShow uses to process files in that format, specifically in the quartz.dll file. It's available for exploitation even if the system doesn't have QuickTime installed. For the moment, there's no patch, but a post on Microsoft's Security Research & Defense blog details the currently recommended workarounds.
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity
It's not unusual to see something emerging from Google's laboratories that folks in the general press fail to understand, and the company's marketing is partly to blame there. The public introduction during this morning's I/O Developers' conference of a Web programming construct called Google Wave generated headlines ranging in scope from a new competitor for Microsoft SharePoint, to a next generation social network, to a series of browser extensions for Chrome to rival the Mozilla Jetpack project, and finally to the company's evil plan to conquer and corrupt HTML 5.
Excluding the latter, it could very well be all of these items. Essentially, Wave is an architecture, and not really a very new one. It's an old solution to a very old problem: that of synchronicity in distributed applications. As database architects know better than anyone, the problem with maintaining a distributed database is that multiple users may make changes that conflict with each other, leading to disparity and multiple versions. Currently, transactional modeling solves that problem, but a more direct and simpler approach from a mathematical standpoint would be simply to translate every operation, or every change a user requests to a database -- every command from client to server -- into a figurative mathematical language so that the terms of the command take into account the changes simultaneously being ordered by all the others.
Hulu makes a desktop client
After Boxee tried to pull studio-encumbered Hulu out of the browser and into a media center application, Hulu has released a desktop application for Windows and Mac.
Today, the beta of Hulu Desktop was released, a Flash 9-based application that allows users to browse and consume the popular streaming TV site's content with a Windows Media Center- or Apple Remote.
Google Chrome 3: Incremental changes along the road to Extensions
Download Google Chrome 3.0.182.2 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.
It has been hard to tell, since Google pulled the "beta" flag from its Chrome browser back in December, where we are in that software's development process. So, clarifying for all the good folks in Fileforum: Welcome to 3.0.182.2, the current version of the browser not to be found in the stable download channel. Remember that Google is the first to say they "don't give to much weight to version numbers," and enjoy the latest rev for what it is: A few fixes, a few tweaks, and a lot of anticipation for Extensions, coming soon to a How-Did-I-Live-Without-This? near you.
Sony Ericsson produces a 12 megapixel monster
Sony Ericsson today officially announced Satio, its new 12 megapixel camera-equipped flagship mobile device that was formerly known as Idou.
All the details of the S60-based device have been revealed. Formerly, it was simply known as a 3.5" 16x9 touchscreen device with the aforementioned high pixel density camera and associated xenon flash that dropped Sony Ericsson's customary M2 memory card in favor of MicroSD.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.