18417746
submission
kdawson writes:
David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'
17956750
submission
kdawson writes:
EasyDNS, a DNS and hosting provider, was mistakenly identified in press accounts as the entity that knocked wikileaks.org off the Net. It wasn't them, it was EveryDNS, a completely separate outfit. EasyDNS suffered a series of online reprisals as the false attribution spread. When WikiLeaks approached them to add to the robustness of their DNS support, EasyDNS said yes.
17722636
submission
kdawson writes:
Software developer and blogger Ben Strong did a little exploring to find out how Google achieves its admirably fast load times. What he discovered is that Google, and to a much greater extent Microsoft, are cheating on the 'slow-start' requirement of RFC-3390. His research indicates that discussion of this practice on the Net is at an early, and somewhat theoretical, stage.Strong concludes with this question: 'What should I do in my app (and what should you do in yours)? Join the arms race or sit on the sidelines and let Google have all the page-load glory?'
17442518
submission
kdawson writes:
Herewith the tale of the instantaneous loss of 19 months of Time Machine backup data, with the possible involvement of a fresh install of Sophos's new
free Mac A-V package. Sophos support has been contacted but has not responded as of this writing.
17041956
submission
7468930
submission
kdawson writes:
A year after voting unanimously to open 'white space' frequencies for unlicensed use, the FCC has now issued a public notice seeking database proposals (PDF). Howard Feld explains in his blog posting: 'At last! We can get moving on this again, and hopefully move forward on the most promising "disruptive" technology currently in the hopper. And move we are, in a very peculiar fashion. Rather than resolve the outstanding questions about how the database provider will collect money, operate the database, or whether the database will be exclusive or non-exclusive, the Public Notice asks would-be database managers to submit proposals that would cover these issues. ... I label this approach "good, but weird."'
