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Mozilla

Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost 591

Posted by kdawson from the good-press-will-do-that-for-you dept.
Barence writes in with a data point on Firefox 3 adoption: it's been available for 10 days, and already one site is seeing 55% of its Firefox-using visitors on version 3. "Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
Social Networks

Facebook Agrees To User Safety Plan 190

Posted by Soulskill from the i'm-like-totally-18 dept.
Facebook has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia to develop and enhance controls to protect minors from inappropriate content. This follows a similar commitment from MySpace several months ago. The lone holdout in each case was Texas. News.com notes: "In the deal, the social network has agreed to develop age verification technology, send warning messages when an under-18 user may be giving personal information to an unknown adult, restrict the ability for people to change their ages on the site, and keep abreast of inappropriate content and harassment on the site. While the agreement is with U.S. state authorities, Kelly said that the tools deployed will apply to Facebook's international users as well. More than half of the site's 70 million users are outside the U.S."
Cellphones

iPhone's Development Limitations Could Hurt It In the Long Run 452

Posted by Soulskill from the my-way-or-the-iway dept.
ZDOne writes "Apple might have finally come around to allowing third party developers to create applications for the iPhone, but only up to a point. ZDNet UK claims Apple is leaving itself vulnerable to the competition and to a loss of lustre by blocking background tasks on the device. The author notes, 'Perhaps it doesn't trust application designers or users very much. Perhaps it wants the best software for itself, where it can limit what it can do in order not to upset its telco friends. Whatever the reason, it reflects badly on Apple. The iPhone is not an iPod; it's a smartphone connecting to a universe of fast-changing data on behalf of innovation-hungry users. The sooner it stops pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC, the better it will be for everyone.'"
Microsoft

Microsoft Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold 212

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the some-things-never-change dept.
whitehartstag writes to mention that Microsoft has announced their new Hyper-V as feature-complete. Unfortunately the list of supported systems is disappointingly short. "No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That's disappointing. Sure, if you are a Microsoft only shop, Hyper-V will be an option for virtualization. But so will VMware and XenServer. But if you run a mixed shop, Hyper-V won't solve your problems alone — you'll have to also add VMware or Xen to your virtualized data center portfolio. Or just go with VMware and Xen and forego Hyper-V."
Privacy

White House Says Phone Wiretaps Will Resume For Now 262

Posted by Soulskill from the can-we-hear-you-now dept.
austinhook brings us news that the U.S. government has resumed wiretapping with the help of telecommunications companies. The companies are said to have "understandable misgivings" over the unresolved issue of retroactive immunity for their participation in past wiretapping. Spy agencies have claimed that the expiration of the old legislation has caused them to miss important information. The bill that would grant the immunity passed in the Senate, but not in the House.
The Internet

Semantic Web Getting Real 135

Posted by kdawson from the open-it-up-and-give-it-away dept.
BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."
Programming

SPARQL Graduates to W3C Recommendation 111

Posted by Zonk from the mazel-tov dept.
KjetilK writes "The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from other query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are already 14 implementations of the spec available. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are query-able, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia is now query-able at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman's presentations on this topic."
Education

Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google 256

Posted by kdawson from the who-uses-email-anyway dept.
Andy Guess tips us to his article at Inside Higher Ed offering a detailed look at the snowballing trend of colleges outsourcing their email infrastructure, mostly to Google and Microsoft Live. Even outsourcing just email would presage big changes in the work that IT departments do on campus; but more such changes are on the horizon as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits.

Microsoft DRM Code for Netflix Streams Hacked 154

Posted by Zonk from the don't-cross-the-streams-it-would-be-bad dept.
reddburn writes "Macworld has posted a story by IDN News Service about a hacker who posted instructions for saving streaming movies from Netflix, defeating Microsoft's DRM code designed to prevent users from saving the content. From the article: 'A hacker who calls himself Dizzie wrote late last month on the Rorta hacking forum that "Netflix doesn't easily allow you to save the flicks and watch them at your leisure because the films are entrapped in some ... Windows Media DRM wrapper," referring to Microsoft's DRM system. Word of his hack spread more widely this week in various blogs and Web sites...He writes that the process for removing the DRM could take a few attempts, and the process does not remove the time limit imposed by Netflix on viewing the content. The Netflix site was down for maintenance early Thursday, although it was unclear if it was related to the hack. The site was back up later Thursday morning.'"
Television

Will MySpace Disrupt Television? 146

Posted by Zonk from the my-aye-aye dept.
newsblaze writes "In the Media space, the internet has been threatening to be a highly disruptive technology for some time now. So far it has done quite a number on newspapers, who still don't understand the internet. There are a lot of people who like to have the paper in their hands, though, so newspapers are holding on. Television has no such ties to a physical medium. When Murdoch bought Myspace, I wondered how long it would be before he either found something to do with it — or gave up. Now it seems Murdoch has found a way to leverage his position, and put a massive squeeze on television. How far can he take this — and what will be the result?"

Looking Beyond Vista To Fiji and Vienna 600

Posted by CowboyNeal from the better-and-better dept.
Vinit wrote in with an article that describes Microsoft's strategy for future versions of Windows. It begins: "As we all know that Microsoft Vista was originally scheduled to be released in 2003, after two years of Windows XP, but it got delayed by over five years due to various reasons. Definitely, Vista is very very improved OS over the previous versions, but the delayed in the launch has cost Microsoft, billions of dollars. Now the question at the moment is, what exactly after Vista? Microsoft can't afford to wait another five years for an operating system. People are becoming more aware of the choices they have, and Linux is no longer a hobbyist OS, and that day isn't far away when it becomes simple enough to be a viable alternative to Windows. The competition is fierce. That is why, to stay at the top, Microsoft has planned a 'Vista R2', codenamed 'Fiji' which will be released some time in 2008. And after Fiji, there will be Windows 'Vienna'. Windows Fiji, will not be a totally different OS from Vista; but it will be an add-on. Whereas Vienna will be totally different from Vista."

Comment Re:What happend to my clock and battery status ico (Score 1) 182

by KarmaCop (#13057440) Attached to: Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update
This happened to me as well. It was my own fault, however. I'm running Tiger on a ridiculously slow old iBook, so I decided to get rid of any trace of Spotlight. I renamed the /System/CoreServices/Search.bundle folder, which is responsible for the Spotlight icon in the upper right of the screen. Apparently, the 10.4.2 update placed several updated files back in this folder, but not enough to constitute a valid bundle. So, SystemUIServer, the process responsible for the clock and the other things in that corner, choked when trying to read it. I just renamed the new Search.bundle to something else, and all is well.

If this wasn't your problem, you may want to try disabling any third-party MenuExtras, if you're running any.

Good luck.

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