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Submission + - Microsoft Relishes its Role as Accuser in Antitrust Suit Against Google

HughPickens.com writes: Danny Hakim reports at the NYT that as European antitrust regulators formally accuse Google of abusing its dominance, Microsoft is relishing playing a behind-the-scenes role of scold instead of victim. Microsoft has founded or funded a cottage industry of splinter groups to go after Google. The most prominent, the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, or Icomp, has waged a relentless public relations campaign promoting grievances against Google. It conducted a study that suggested changes made by Google to appease regulators were largely window dressing. “Microsoft is doing its best to create problems for Google,” says Manfred Weber, the chairman of the European People’s Party, the center-right party that is the largest voting bloc in the European Parliament. “It’s interesting. Ten years ago Microsoft was a big and strong company. Now they are the underdog.”

According to Hakim, Microsoft and Google are the Cain and Abel of American technology, locked in the kind of struggle that often takes place when a new giant threatens an older one. Microsoft was frustrated after American regulators at the Federal Trade Commission didn’t act on a similar antitrust investigation against Google in 2013, calling it a “missed opportunity.” It has taken the fight to the state level, along with a number of other opponents of Google. Microsoft alleges that Google's anti-competitive practices include stopping Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube; blocking Microsoft Windows smartphones from "operating properly" with YouTube; blocking access to content owned by book publishers; and limiting the flow of ad campaign information back to advertisers, making it more expensive to run ads with rivals. "Over the past year, a growing number of advertisers, publishers, and consumers have expressed to us their concerns about the search market in Europe," says Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel. "They've urged us to share our knowledge of the search market with competition officials."

Comment private tunnel (Score 1) 193

I have used Private tunnel to connect to Hulu and similar services. It is offered by OpenVPN Technologies, the company behind OpenVPN, is quite fast compared to other offerings and the pricing is based on data usage as opposed to monthly plans, so it works out cheaper if you just want to use it occasionally to watch a few shows.

Comment Couple of suggestions (Score 1) 175

A couple of suggestions from someone who has done that over 5 years.
* Do *have* a mailing list. Nothing beats it reach.
* Have a good ticketing system. We used to let people who are online to pick up tickets from any geo and work on it unless it is something that requires hands on , in which case, we used to pass it on to the local contact.
* Use a good text based chatting solution. Video / audio solutions are good, but text is better for a lot of things, like small talk , sharing links or a way to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation that could happen in speaking. I generally prefer IRC for group chat. Setup a proxy server for IRC like https://code.google.com/p/dircproxy/ or have some form of logging and you could let users catch up with whatever happened on the channel while they are away.
* Arrange their timings, such that atleast one person from each geo will have atleast a hours overlap with a person from the geo closest to him. EG:
* Have video meetings r meetings over the phone atleast once a week.
* Get them to put their pictures, phone nos., and responsibilities on a intranet / address book.
* Have weekly meetings in any medium and if you can't have everyone to have their say, let one person from each geo each week talk about any issues they have or something good they did that week.
* Other collaborative software that is good to have : wiki , version control, Calendar (egroupware / google / exchange) , pastebin (share code / error snippets).
News

Submission + - Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives for Android

adeelarshad82 writes: Adobe announced that it has released the final version of Flash Player 10.1 for Google's mobile operating system. The app will be available for download via the Android Market for those users who have Android 2.2 (Froyo) installed on their phones. Devices expected to offer the Android update include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, Droid by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, and Samsung Galaxy S. Flash Player 10.1 was also released to support devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.
Censorship

Submission + - China Restricts Minors from Using Virtual Currency (bloomberg.com)

eldavojohn writes: If you're under eighteen and you play video games in China, things just got a little worse. Not only is gold farming illegal but starting August 1st, game makers are expected to put in safeties that prohibit you from using virtual currencies. Because doing such a thing may promote "unwholesome" behavior and the new regulations explicitly "forbid content advocating pornography, cults, superstitions, gambling and violence in all online games." The business papers are picking it up as a number of stocks from companies like Tancent — who are heavily based in gaming in China — fell about five percent.

Submission + - Court Takes Away Some Of The Public Domain (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In yet another bad court ruling concerning copyright, a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, and said that it's okay for Congress to retroactively take works out of the public domain, even if publishers are already making use of those public domain works. The lower court had said this was a First Amendment violation, but the appeals court felt that if Congress felt taking away from the public domain was in its best interests, then there was no First Amendment violation at all. It effectively said that Congress can violate the First Amendment, so long as it feels it heard from enough people (in this case, RIAA and MPAA execs) to convince it that it needs to do what it's done.

Comment Re:Abused but Necessary (Score 1) 378

I think it has its uses as a replacement for Dynamic fonts. Dynamic fonts was mostly useful for Indic and other complex scripts at a time when Unicode was still nascent and there were still challenges in getting Indic and other scripts rendered properly. Publishing houses (all of them earlier and most of them now) use an ASCII based font and push dynamic fonts to IE users while expecting other browser users to download them. While Unicode should make this moot, slow adaption of Unicode by publishers and users and the fact that by default, most Windows XP installs did not come with Indic pre-configured means there is still market for this hack. Publishers could push either their ASCII hack font or Unicode font to users this way at least until there is more mainstream adoption of Unicode and in the process help non-technical people, especially those not using IE, access to content with less issues.
Medicine

Submission + - The dangers of being really, really tired. (slate.com) 1

Sleepy Dog Millionare writes: Brian Palmer writing for Slate asks Can you die from lack of sleep? and shockingly the answer may very well be yes you can. Palmer points to "ground breaking experiments" in the areas of sleep research. It turns out that sleep deprivation can actually be deadly in rats. The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals. So the next time you think you need to pull multiple all-night hack-a-thon ask yourself if it's worth risking your life for?
Graphics

Submission + - DisplayLink Releases LGPL USB Graphics Code (displaylink.org)

iso writes: "USB graphics should be coming to Linux soon: DisplayLink has released an LGPL library that talks to one of its graphics chips over a USB connection. DisplayLink aren't one of the big guys in graphics, but it's always nice to see a hardware manufacturer go the open source route. Now, when can I get one of these touchscreen MIMOs on my Linux HTPC?"
Movies

Submission + - Sony Pictures CEO Thinks The 'Net Wasn't Worth It (current.com) 2

rossturk writes: "Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period." Why? Because people "feel entitled" to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, "they'll steal it." It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies, but his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man. Is this when we all give up hope that companies like Sony Pictures can adapt? Will we look back on this as one of the defining moments when the industrialized entertainment industry lost touch for good?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Open Source software you have never heard of... 2

As an electronic engineering student, I used to believe that I still required windows for some software. Thankfully, it turns out not. I have discovered a really cool project; PiKdev. An all in one solution for writing code for the Microchip PIC family including a powerful built in programmer. And it works almost flawlessly. My only complaint is that I had to compile it from source(and install KDE3 libraries) - there is no Mandriva 2009 package. When I get

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