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February 21, 2010

OiNK Founder free at last

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/21/2010 02:57 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

A UK court acquitted admin and owner, Alan Ellis on his participation of the OiNK music sharing site. His charge, conspiracy to defraud copyright owners, was struck down unanimously.

This started back in October of 2007 when the IFPI and BPI had the police raid and confiscate his servers. They accused him of making tons of cash off the torrent tracker which was invite only. And even went after some of the higher profile OiNK users.

Ellis stood by the argument that he was no other than a 3rd party search service like Google. And that his service actually led to sales of music, and that some musicians used the service to promote themselves to a broad music audience.



This was the first of its kind case to be heard in the UK, and has set a precedent that will be hard to over come as other cases come to trial. Of course the IFPI and BPI disagree with the verdict and vow to fight on in the name of the artists. Ellis has stated on the domain that he has no plans what so ever to return the site to its former glory.

Tagged as: OiNK, The Man

US Broadband Avg Speed: 3.9 Mbps

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/21/2010 02:09 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Akamai's State of the Internet report restates what is already known. Penetration and Average Connection speeds in the USA are lagging compared to the rest of the world.

Next month the FCC is preparing to announce the first broadband internet policy to encourage adoption of HSI(High Speed Internet) and increase the speeds of existing connections. Akamai has released a report showing why it is so important that this policy succeed.

Read more


Tagged as: Akamai, Internet, US

February 18, 2010

Apple Owns Mobile App Market

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 03:37 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Research firm Gartner claims that apps for mobile devices are big and are only going to get bigger, and that Apple owns almost 100% of the market for apps sold and monies collected on the $4.2 billion spent in 2009. And this will likely continue in 2010.

Read more


Tagged as: Apple, App Store, Gartner, RIM

Apple's intent with the Lala purchase

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 03:08 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

The general consensus behind Apple's buyout of Lala was that they were going to introduce some kind of streaming service to iTunes along with some kind of rental service on the music.

Michael Robertson from TechCruch is claiming that is not Apple's intent with buying the service. They plan on using the tech from the company along with their newly $1 Billion Maiden, NC data center to introduce a iTunes 'anywhere' service.

Basically Apple will link the millions of iPods, Touches, AppleTV, and iPads to a mobile iTunes account allowing you to stream the content that you have purchased via iTunes any where in the world.

For the moment, it is anyone's idea where this might be heading, but they wanted the company for something.

Tagged as: Apple, Lala, streaming

Amazon increases royalities paid to Authors to 70%

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 02:42 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Amazon in face of increased competition from the iPad and such has announced that they will pay a 70% royalty rate to authors. This is a much higher than what is normally paid to authors.

The old system will stay in effect where a $8.99 eBook will net the author $3.15 a title sold, and the new system that will garner the author/publisher $6.25 under the new scheme.

The Catch
There is always a catch and this one has some, but not unfairly. The books must be priced on the Kindle between $2.99 and $9.99, and it must be at least 20% below the lowest list price for a physical book. The price must also be in parity with other book stores, and/or cheaper. The book must also not be restricted by region, and must have all Kindle features like text-to-speech enabled.

This comes from competition from Barnes and Nobles new book reader, Apple's iPad. This will endear Amazon into the hearts of self publishers and small press publishers.

Tagged as: Kindle, eBook

Decembers Worldwide OS Marketshare

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 02:21 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Windows 7 delivered on its promise of a upgrade cycle once it was shipped, and it help stem off its continued fall in market share. It has dropped from 93.66 in January of 2009 to 92.52% in December of last year. A 1.14% drop in the span of 12 months. The winners for 2009 was Mac OS and Linux, with Mac ending at 5.11% for the year up .4% share increase, and Linux up from .90% to 1.02%. This data comes from Net Applications.



Windows is continually losing share, but still has the lion share of the market place at a commanding 92%. This breaks down into the flavors of windows at 5.71% for Windows 7 after just 2 months, 17.87% for Vista, and 67.77% for Windows XP.



Things in Windows 7 favor for its performance is that Microsoft has killed off for the most part Windows XP, and Windows 7 doesn't suck like Vista. Microsoft got it out in time for the holiday season, and was able to generate positive hype for the operating system, which goes back to it doesn't suck angle.

In the coming months we will see Windows XP slowly wither away to be taken over by Windows 7. Vista will stay relatively stable in the next few months, but will probably drop out within the next 12-18 months.

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Tagged as: Windows 7, Market Share

Clay Hydrogel possible replacement for polymers

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 01:50 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

From Nature Jan 2010. A team of Japanese researchers have come up with a new approach of making hydrogels that are stronger, easier to make, and 'green'.

These new hydrogels use Clay as a added ingredient that will allow these mostly water material to be molded, self-healing, and since only 0.4% of it is derived from petroleum, very green.

A little dirt in your life or your hydrogel is never a bad thing it seems.

Read more


Tagged as: Nature, Hydrogel

32 million passwords displayed for the world

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 01:31 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

RockYou offers widgets for Social Networking sites, and all you need is a account on their site with your login credentials to the which ever sites you want to use it with.

RockYou left their password database on a public accessible site in plain text, and to boot the database was susceptible to SQL Injection. 32 million passwords were exposed in the attack.

Security firm iMPERVA got a copy of the passwords and analyzed the them:

* Half were susceptible to dictionary attacks
* ~33% were less than six characters long
* Most common password: 123456
* Second most common: 12345 followed by 123456789 and Password

Obviously access to your Facebook, MySpace sites isn't the most devastating compromise, but when people use these simple passwords, they probably use it on other more gravely sites.

Tagged as: RockYou, Security, iMPERVA

FCC Rule Change Brings HDTV to FiOS

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 12:56 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Cablevision and Verizon have been slugging it out over HDTV access to NY/NJ Professional Sports teams. Cablevision will not allow Verizon to carry the sports teams in HD. This was set forth by "The Cable Act". The FCC has voted four to one to change the rules so that they will favor Verizon in its upcoming hearing.

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Tagged as: Cablevision, FiOS, Verizon, FCC

App Store glitch allows kids to see porn

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 12:21 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Fraser Speirs has brought to light a glitch in the App Store parental controls that will allow youngsters to see porn in the app store.

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Tagged as: App Store, Apple, The Kids

AMD posts profit

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 11:08 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

After 13 quarters, or a little over 3 years, AMD posts a profit, but don't celebrate, this profit comes from their rival, Intel. Their quarterly profit was 1.288 billion, and Intel's settlement with AMD was $1.224 billion. They would have still gotten to the black, but not so dramatically.

Dirk Meyer had this to say:

"We enter 2010 having completed the transition to a fabless business model, reached a historic antitrust settlement, and made significant progress strengthening our balance sheet. Our innovative strategy for designing the world's most vivid digital experiences continues to generate demand."

Tagged as: AMD, ATI, Intel

Google adding HTML5 video playback to YouTube

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/18/2010 10:57 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Google asked its users what they would like to see in the new and improved YouTube, and one of the overwhelming responses was HTML5 video playback. Google added an experimental HTML5 video player to the site, and Vimeo did as well in the following days.

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Tagged as: YouTube, Google, HTML5, Vimeo

February 13, 2010

Microsoft and HP announced a $250 million partnership into cloud computing

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/13/2010 07:14 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Microsoft and HP have announced a $250 million 3 year partnership to simplify the environment for hardware, software, and professional services. They intend to make 'new models for application delivery, hardware architecture, and IT operations.'

They plan on making a integrated IT stack for business applications allowing for better performance, reliability, and availability with an overall lower total cost of ownership. The HP Converged Infrastructure will be optimized for Exchange 2010 and Microsoft's System Center Suite. Microsoft will be buying HP servers.

They hope to accomplish with this partnerships make heterogeneous data center and cloud environments easier to manage. Thus making this applicable computing power cheaper, easier, and more available to the masses.

Resources
Microsoft IT Infrastructure Spotlight Video Gallery
HP and Microsoft Simplify Technology Environments With Solutions Built on New Infrastructure-to-Application Model
HP, Microsoft and the Future of IT

Tagged as: Microsoft, HP, Cloud Computing

SDXC and CFAST no show at CES 2k10

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/13/2010 12:40 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

CES is always full of new stuff. But something absent at this year's CES was flash memory cards of higher capacity. Panasonic was the only vendor at the show displaying SDXC cards. They had 64 GB and 48 GB on display with a timeline posted that would put capacity in the 1-2 TB range sometime in 2011-12.

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Tagged as: CES, CFAST, SDXC, 1080P

February 6, 2010

SSD drives allow older PCs run Windows 7 well

Posted by: rasp1 on: 02/06/2010 05:06 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

SSD drives are notoriously expensive, but their performance is legendary. RunCore demo'ed a new lower cost SSD drive in older laptops like the Eee 900 and a Dell D600 Pentium M laptop. These machines were running Windows 7 and running it quite well.



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Tagged as: RunCore, SSD, Windows 7, CES, Laptops

January 30, 2010

iPad FAQ

Posted by: rasp1 on: 01/30/2010 01:13 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

We have posted up a new FAQ on the iPad: iPad FAQ