Slashdot

Ilgaz writes "As Google's Android struggles to make it into concrete products, Nokia has probably dealt it a knockout blow by buying Symbian entirely and helping to take the whole Symbian ecosystem open source.
Nokia has enlisted the support of other Symbian investors and supporters to unite all the disparate elements of the handset OS into one single, open platform under the umbrella of the Symbian Foundation."
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/24/nokia-delivers-knockout-blow

Ponca City, We Love You writes "NASA announced last week that members of the general public will have a chance to suggest a new name for the cutting edge Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, otherwise known as GLAST, before it launches in mid-2008. NASA wants a name that will capture the excitement of GLAST's mission and call attention to gamma-ray and high-energy astronomy. 'We are looking for something memorable to commemorate this spectacular new astronomy mission,' said Alan Stern, associate administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'We hope someone will come up with a name that is catchy, easy to say and will help make the satellite and its mission a topic of dinner table and classroom discussion.' The period for submitting names closes on March 31, 2008. Participants must include a statement of 25 words or less about why their suggestion would be a strong name for the mission."

The Knife writes "Amazon secretly canceled orders for a large jazz CD set after realizing that it had mis-priced the item at $31 instead of its MSRP of $499. At first, inventory shortages caused the online merchant to string customers along for over a month after they placed their orders. But when Amazon realized that the box set was under-priced by $470, it simply erased all records of customers' order in their account history. No emails were sent to customers informing them of the price change or of the order cancellation. Probably because it violates Amazon's highly publicized price guarantee policy. A customer who called to complain and request the CD set at the $31 price was given a $20 discount off of his next Amazon order." A caveat: there is no external confirmation that Amazon did what is claimed here.

The Wall Street Journal and Information Week reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This latest action demonstrates that while the EU has settled the case against Microsoft that ran for almost a decade, it remains as suspicious as ever regarding the software vendor's conduct, notwithstanding Microsoft's less combative stance in recent years. The news can be found in a story reported by Charles Forelle bylined in Brussells this morning. According to the Journal, the investigation will focus on whether Microsoft 'violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard.' The article also says that the regulators are 'stepping up scrutiny of the issue.'

Ilgaz writes "Opera Software announces Opera Mobile 9.5 which will be available on all major platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux, as both a standalone browser and as a SDK. They also provided a Video showing its main features at http://www.opera.com/b2b/solutions/mobile/video/ . Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones."
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2008/02/05/

As announced on Joshua Marinacci's blog, SUN released a 100% Java PDF renderer and viewer. Combined with a PDF generation tool such as iText, Java developers no longer have reasons not to use PDF as the ultimate document format.

The Law of Unexpected Consequences is expected to soon take an ironic twist. As reported in The Guardian, the WTO will issue its long-awaited ruling next week on Antigua's complaint against the US for its law that prohibited banks from allowing money to flow to and from offshore Internet gambling sites.

That law, stuffed at the last minute into an anti-terrorism bill after it failed several times to pass on its own, was widely seen as a sop to Las Vegas and Atlantic City gambling interests who were feeling a pinch from the Internet competition.

Now, if Antigua gets its way, it will be able, as a form of retribution for the losses it suffered, to legally sell pirated music, movies and software to the US market. Meaning that, presumably, as long as they go through servers in Antigua, college kids will be able to resume music file sharing without fear of the big RIAA hammer coming down.

So as a logical consequence, one imagines this headline in the future: "RIAA sues Las Vegas Casinos for uncollectable piracy damages." Oh, wait, that wouldn't work, because the link between the casinos and Congress is well concealed. Maybe the RIAA will try to sue Congress then instead?

Blockbuster and Facebook recently teamed up to bring a whole new level of privacy invasion! Now, when you visit Blockbuster Online, they use cookies to find your facebook account and then post all your rentals in your news and profile... all without your consent!

This happened to me, and when I wrote BBOnline about this, their helpful customer service replied by explaining how they do it.

"When you log in to your BLOCKBUSTER Online account, the site uses "cookies" to determine if you have ever visited Facebook.com.

If cookies detect that you have a Facebook account, regardless of whether or not you have installed the Movie Clique(TM) application, then activities on blockbuster.com such as rating movies or adding movies to your Queue will be sent as notifications to your mini-feed and friends' profiles."

While his store was being robbed, the clerk was worried about what the security camera video would look like on YouTube. So he attacked the robber with a ceramic mug and drove him off, losing only $90 and the police gaining the thief's cap.

nm writes "The Mozilla Corporation's subsidiary in China has signed a deal with Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Baidu is already included as an option in Firefox's Chinese localization, but this deal formalizes the relationship between Mozilla and and the search company. Mozilla has established several other initiatives in China to help increase Firefox adoption, particularly in universities. The article notes that Firefox has seen limited uptake in China; the browser Maxthon is the second most popular after Internet Explorer. Maxthon is thought to have as much as 30 percent of the Chinese browser market."

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

theodp writes "Slate takes a look at the alarming lesson of the iPhone price cut and ponders the long-term effects of a Fire-Sale Nation mentality, especially when companies go all Crazy Eddie slashing prices on products like homes and cars that have active secondary markets. 'High-profile price-chopping tends to occur whenever companies freak out about the vicious combination of a slowing consumer economy and the prospect of getting stuck with big inventories of unsold goods. The tactic often works in the short term. The hype over insanely low prices functions as a form of free advertising, and the lower prices tend to attract buyers. Apple announced on Sept. 10 that it had sold its 1 millionth iPhone.'"

Ilgaz writes "Tom Krazit from CNET reveals that replacing a dead iPhone battery could cost $85 with the added service price and shipping since iPhone batteries are not user-replaceable unlike other cell phones.
Perhaps checking Battery University would be a nice idea."
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9739479-7.html

Mike writes "You might not like Prince, but he's planning on giving away a free CD in a national British newspaper. Harmless publicity, right? The music industry disagrees. Executives are practically going insane over the idea and are threatening to 'retaliate'. 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday,' said Entertainment Retailers Association spokesman Paul Quirk, who also said it would be 'an insult' to record stores. Shouldn't an artist be able to give away his own music if he wants to without fear of industry retaliation?"

TheWoozle writes "Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users. They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users. Neither the content providers nor the end-users have been notified that this is taking place, and I'm sure that they weren't asked for permission either."