Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:A cake is in order (Score 1) 252

by CaptainArgyle (#30038764) Attached to: Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox

Wait a minute, if you're going to go back that far, I thought at that time (1996 or so) Netscape ruled and IE3 was the up-and-comer in a desperate attempt to catch up?

Netscape was supposed to be free but ended up being free only to educational/nonprofit, and many would contend that IE's being free is the primary reason it took over.

(and, I cannot resist, though it's FFox's 5-year anniversary, it's also 20-years for the Berlin Wall, and I want to announce that I danced on it that very night as a Russian linguist in the USAF!)

Microsoft

+ - Microsoft eyes Apple with virtualization stance->

Submitted by Pisces
Pisces writes "Over the past several days, Microsoft flip-flopped on virtualization in Vista, with one ascribing the change in policy to concerns over DRM. A piece at Ars Technica raises another, more likely possiblity: fear of Apple. Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price. 'All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM. The latter is absolutely crucial; telling users that they need to reboot into their Windows OS isn't nearly as sexy as, say, Coherence in Parallels. If you've never seen Coherence, it's quite amazing. You don't need to run Windows apps in a VM window of Vista. Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away. VMWare also has similar technology, dubbed Unity.' Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?"
Link to Original Source
Media

+ - US based webcasters plan Day of Silence->

Submitted by teh_commodore
teh_commodore writes "Tomorrow, June 26th, thousands of US-based internet radio stations plan to turn off the music, warning listeners that silence is all they will hear after July 15, when 17 months of retroactive royalties are due to SoundExchange. Among the participants; heavyweights such as ike Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora.com will silence their streams along with other Day of Silence participants like KCRW.org, Live365, MTV Online, Radioio, RadioParadise, and AccuRadio."
Link to Original Source
Media

Is the CD Becoming Obsolete? 645

Posted by kdawson
from the fading-into-the-long-tail dept.
mrnomas writes "What's to blame for the declining CD sales? Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians are releasing online? Is it because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country? Or is it just that CDs are becoming obsolete?" Quoting: "Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.""
Media

+ - Internet Radio prepares for Nation-wide shutdown->

Submitted by
Javier Leyva
Javier Leyva writes "EMERGING INTERNET RADIO INDUSTRY PREPARES FOR NATION-WIDE SHUTDOWN.

Thousands of broadcasters will shutdown operations in this country's Internet radio industry.

SAN DIEGO. CA — Jun. 25, 2007 — A who's who of Internet Radio Broadcasters will go silent on June 26, 2007 in protest of the increase in royalty rates paid by on-line radio stations. In an effort led by Yahoo!, Apple, MTV and San Diego's own X1FMRadio.com thousands of U.S. Broadcasters plan to go silent in protest of an increase that they consider not only unfair but as intended to shut-down independent web-casters and prolong the crumbling control of Major Corporations over media-outlets.

"What we are seeing is a clear example of how Independent broadcasters are faced with dim prospects for survival if these royalty fees become law. The result will be a creative vacuum in which only traditional, well-funded companies will be able to utilize new media. This is not only unfair to independent broadcasters like X1FM, but would be extremely detrimental to emerging artists who can not get their music exposed through more traditional mediums" said Kevin Stapleford, Program contributor and Music consultant for X1FM Radio. X1FM is a part of BBCI a San Diego based company established since 1995 that has pioneered the Internet Radio Industry and leads the 'Movement for Freedom of Music' a user supported initiative based right here in San Diego with the intention to promote what Mr. Stapleford calls "fair treatment for independent web-casters" through the Internet Radio Equality Act, a bill that would equal the fees paid by web-casters to those paid by Satellite Radio Broadcasters a fee already higher than those paid by Terrestrial Radio. "The music industry is already being eaten alive by on-line piracy, so it only makes sense that legitimate Web broadcasters are given a fair chance to thrive and help introduce artists to the millions of music fans who no longer listen to terrestrial radio." concluded Mr. Stapleford.

X1FMRadio.com plans to limit the music programming during what others are already calling the 'Day of Silence' and serve as an outlet for information regarding this initiative through its own 'Movement for Freedom of Music.'

X1FM Radio is the first fully interactive Radio Station broadcasting and is a part of Binational Broadcasting Company, Inc and can be reached at (619) 336-4900.

###

Contacts:

Press: Music: Business:

Javier Leyva Raudel Enrique Raul Sanchez

javierleyva@x1fmradio.com raudelenrique@x1fmradio.com raul@x1fmradio.com

Word /PDFVersion: http:///www.x1fmradio.com/press.html"
Link to Original Source
Microsoft

Google Calls For More Limits On Microsoft 270

Posted by kdawson
from the keeping-watch-a-while-longer dept.
teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement." Update: 06/26 17:20 GMT by KD : The judge is unwilling to play along with Google; she said she will likely defer to an agreement on desktop search forged between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the case: i.e. Justice and the states.
Space

+ - We're Not From the Milky Way->

Submitted by
morefiend
morefiend writes "volumes of infrared data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) has revealed that our star once belonged to the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.

"The study published in the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way, so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the bigger Milky Way."
"
Link to Original Source
Software

SourceForge's Hottest Five Apps 141

Posted by kdawson
from the top-of-the-heap dept.
davidmwilliams points us to his story up on IT Wire about the top five most active open source projects on SourceForge. (Sourceforge.net and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge Inc.) He writes, "It explains what they do and why they're useful. Most of these will be new to most people but all are definitely bursting with potential."
The Courts

The Privacy of Email 133

Posted by samzenpus
from the stop-reading-that dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes "A U.S. appeals court in Ohio has ruled that e-mail messages stored on Internet servers are protected by the Constitution as are telephone conversations and that a federal law permitting warrantless secret searches of e-mail violates the Fourth Amendment. 'The Stored Communications Act is very important,' former federal prosecutor and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told United Press International. But the future of the law now hangs in the balance."
The Internet

Will AT&T Start Filtering Your Connection? 213

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the i-sorta-figured-they-already-were dept.
We have another essay from Bennett Haselton for you to peruse. "Last week's coverage of AT&T's newly announced "anti-piracy initiative" mostly downplayed the key part of AT&T's proposal, which is filtering what their end users can access in the first place, not finding pirates or suing them after the fact. Friday's Associated Press article, which was reprinted on many news sites with headlines like "AT&T to Help Hollywood Track Down Internet Pirates" and "AT&T to ID Offshore Web Pirates", actually said only that "the effort is primarily aimed at pirates who set up operations in other countries" -- and since you can't really "aim" at pirates in Russia and China with anything except missiles, the statement suggests not identifying pirates or tracking them down, but pre-emptively blocking people from connecting to their servers. Only the Red Herring nailed it with their article title, "AT&T to Block Pirated Content"." Follow the magical URL to read the rest of Bennett's words on the matter.
Microsoft

Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now 912

Posted by Zonk
from the our-os-is-so-awesomez dept.
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Sun Microsystems

ZFS On Linux - It's Alive! 281

Posted by Zonk
from the insert-mad-science-laugh-here dept.
lymeca writes "LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incarnation in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer."

Fortune favors the lucky.

Close