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Comment: We LOVE our Boxee (Score 2) 56

by Murrdox (#35323604) Attached to: Boxee Box Matures; Another Look At the Platform
I got a Boxee for Christmas and we've been loving it. I haven't used a Roku or Apple TV, but the Boxee is great. We use it primarily as a media station to watch media on my PC on the TV. It's fast, the quality is wonderful, and we don't have hardly any technical problems with it. I did need to browse a few forums after a firmware update made it unable to see the shared folders on my PC. Other than that, it's great for watching Daily Show and other things whenever we feel like it. The remote control keyboard is great too. The interface could use some work. I find it difficult to mark "Favorites" and then get to them easily again.
Censorship

Google Stops Ads For "Cougar" Sites 319

Posted by samzenpus
from the here's-to-you-mrs-robinson dept.
teh31337one writes "Google is refusing to advertise CougarLife, a dating site for mature women looking for younger men. However, they continue to accept sites for mature men seeking young women. According to the New York Times, CougarLife.com had been paying Google $100,000 a month since October. The Mountain View company has now cancelled the contract, saying that the dating site is 'nonfamily safe.'"
PC Games (Games)

Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375

Posted by Soulskill
from the all-ubisoft-all-the-time dept.
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services. "Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
Privacy

Montana City Requires Workers' Internet Accounts 836

Posted by timothy
from the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been dept.
justinlindh writes "Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.' A portion of the application reads, "Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.' The article goes on to mention, 'There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.'"
Social Networks

The Sims 3 To Mesh With Social Networks 25

Posted by Soulskill
from the linked-sim-book-space dept.
Electronic Arts has released a good bit of information about the online aspects of The Sims 3, which is due for release in early June. The game will have downloadable content available on launch day that includes a second, separate town called Riverview. They'll also be revamping the game's website to allow the sharing of content and integration with social media. In addition, EA mentioned that the game will make use of micro-transactions, which players can use to buy things like furniture, clothing, and other items.
Government

Hungary, Tatarstan Latest To Go FOSS 129

Posted by kdawson
from the on-the-bandwagon dept.
christian.einfeldt writes "It seems as if almost every other week there is news of another government migration toward Free Open Source Software. Two of the most recent such moves come from Hungary and the tiny independent former Russian republic of Tatarstan. On April 2, the Hungarian government announced that it will be modifying its procurement rules to mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology. In Tatarstan, a Republic of 3.8 million inhabitants, the Deputy Minister of Education announced that by the end of this school year, all 2,400 educational institutions in Tatarstan will have completed a transition to GNU/Linux, following a successful pilot program it rolled out in 2008."
Television

+ - A la Carte pricing violates 1st Ammendment

Submitted by Murrdox
Murrdox writes "According to Randolph May, a government mandate of "a la carte" pricing for cable companies violates the 1st Ammendment. "Mandatory a la carte almost certainly will diminish the amount and diversity of programming available to cable subscribers, a result at odds with First Amendment values."

May then offers up a straw-man argument, saying that forcing a la carte pricing for cable companies is similar to forcing The Washington Post sell parts of their paper separately. "readers should not be required to pay for the news section, which, with a war on, contains some "violent" content, or the style section, which contains some content that may be considered "indecent.""

May approaches a la carte from the sole perspective that it is being used as a government censorship tool to keep violent channels out of family homes. What Martin fails to mention is that if cable companies offered a la carte pricing, that does not force them to not include channels, and families can still opt-in to whichever channels they wish.

It also does not necessarily preclude cable companies from continuing to offer bundled channel packages, for those T.V. watchers who want to still have a huge selection of channels."

RAM wasn't built in a day.

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