Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Clicker Aims to Be the Path to TV Online - MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times
The Web is increasingly filled with television shows, but finding them can be hard. Clicker, a well-financed startup, believes it can help. On Thursday, the company is rolling out its service, Clicker.com, which it calls a “TV Guide for the Web.” “If you created TV Guide in 2009 instead of 1953, you’d create something like this,” said Jim Lanzone, Clicker’s chief executive, who previously served as the chief executive of Ask.com, the No. 4 search engine.
Another Web Video Face-Off: Roku vs. Boxee - BRAD STONE, The New York Times
Boxee draws in a wide variety of video from the Web and presents it in an interface designed for viewing on a TV screen. Roku and Boxee are two radically different companies pursuing the same goal: to bring the wide-ranging world of Internet video to the living room TV. Roku’s set-top box.In the spirit of Bits’s earlier comparison of Netflix’s Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand, let’s juxtapose the two companies and ask: whose technology and recently announced innovations are more appealing?
Microsoft Launches Anti-piracy Twitter Feed - Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek
Microsoft announces that it has launched a dedicated Twitter feed for its anti-piracy enforcement team. Despite attempts by Microsoft and other IT companies to curb piracy, often through aggressive policies, a recent report by McAfee suggests that the rate of file-sharing sites hosting unauthorized content has been rising steadily in the past few months. Friday, November 20, 2009
Switch to Mac Cheat Sheet - Cameron Sturdevant, eWeek
"Switchers" - those who have decided to leave the Windows world for Max OS X - can get up close with Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition as eWEEK Labs Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant takes a few minutes to delve into his review of the product. Sturdevant reviewed the product when it released in August 2009 and has a few tips for IT managers and end users who have decided to take the Mac plunge but who also still need to use one or more "Windows-only" applications.
12 Things to Know About Google's Go Programming Language - Darryl K. Taft, eWeek
Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology's pedigree features programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.
Facebook Case Sets Up Google Latitude as Tempting Legal Tool - Clint Boulton, eWeek
The exoneration of a Brooklyn teenager with the help of a timely Facebook status update has sparked interest in social networking tools as evidence for law enforcement officials and litigators. This could heighten interest in Google Latitude Location History, an opt-in feature that lets users store where they've been. Yet the fact that Google is now storing location history has privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation concerned about what sort of protection Google will offer Latitude users in the case of legal compliance. Thursday, November 19, 2009
Comedy Twitter feed lands TV deal - BBC
The feed began in August after Halpern moved back in with his parents. A Twitter feed featuring pearls of wisdom from a 73-year-old father could become a family comedy on US TV. Justin Halpern, 29, has become an internet star with more than 700,000 followers since he began posting his father's often profane words of wisdom. The comments include: "The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain't spitting it out." According to the Hollywood Reporter, Halpern will co-write the CBS project.
Bing teams up with Wolfram Alpha - BBC
Bing will use Wolfram's algorithms and data sets. Microsoft has teamed up with a web tool once hailed as a rival to Google to provide results for its search engine Bing. Wolfram Alpha aims to answer questions directly, rather than display a list of links like a search engine. The "computational knowledge engine" is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. It will be used to bolster Bing's results in areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics.
The slow death of landline phones - Tom Geoghegan, BBC News
British government workers are getting a two-day taste of life without fixed line phones. But how easily would the rest of us surrender our landline? You pick up the phone on your desk and there is no dialling tone. Your colleague does the same. It's a scenario repeated across the country, in a catastrophic nationwide communications failure caused by a natural disaster or cyber attack. And this week it is happening. At least, it is for civil servants. Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Google: Firms can get rid of Office in a year - Victoria Ho, ZDNet
In a year, most enterprises will have the choice to "get rid of [Microsoft] Office if they chose to", suggests Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division. Girouard, one of the company's four presidents including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia that he expects Google's online document application, Google Docs, to reach a "point of capability" next year that will serve the "vast majority's needs."
Office 2010 public beta leaks to Internet - Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Office 2010's public beta has leaked to the Web, days ahead of its anticipated roll-out next week, searches of file-sharing sites showed today. The 32- and 64-bit versions of the Office 2010 Beta have appeared on several peer-to-peer BitTorrent tracking sites, including Mininova.org, with the first one posted there on Tuesday. As of noon ET, the 32-bit version showed about 300 "seeders" -- the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- and about 150 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent.
As Internet turns 40, barriers threaten growth - Associated Press
Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online. Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web. Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Splitting Up Search - Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review
Searching the Web could become faster for users and much more efficient for search companies if search engines were split up and distributed around the world, according to researchers at Yahoo. Currently, search engines are based on a centralized model, explains Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a researcher at Yahoo's Labs in Barcelona, Spain. This means that a search engine's index--the core database that lists the location and relative importance of information stored across the Web--as well as additional data, such as cached copies of content, are replicated within several data centers at different locations. The tendency among search companies, says Baeza-Yates, has been to operate a relatively small number of very large data centers across the globe.
Breaking the Botnet Code - Robert Lemos, Technology Review
Networks of compromised computers controlled by a central server, better known as botnets, are a Swiss Army knife of tools for online criminals. Hackers can use these co-opted systems to churn out spam, host malicious code, hide their tracks on the Internet, or flood a corporate network to cut off its access to the Web. Whenever a new botnet appears, researchers race to reverse engineer the software it installs on a victim's machine, and to decode the way each bot communicates with the controlling server. Because these communications are often encrypted, such analyses can take weeks or months. Now researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to automatically reverse engineer the communications between compromised computers and their controlling servers.
Searching an Encrypted Cloud - David Talbot, Technology Review
Recent advances in cryptography could mean that future cloud computing services will not only be able to encrypt documents to keep them safe in the cloud--but also make it possible to search and retrieve this information without first decrypting it, researchers say. "This will be a challenging endeavor," says Dawn Song, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has made fundamental research contributions to using encrypted search strings to find encrypted documents. "However, some of these recent advances are very powerful and, if cleverly engineered and deployed, could lead to significant advances," in adding security and privacy to cloud computing over the next few years. Monday, November 16, 2009
Fixing E-Mail - Erica Naone, Technology Review
Wading through e-mail is one of the primary woes of office workers everywhere. Despite many theories on how workers should process their incoming messages, most people still seem to feel buried in the flood. This week at Defrag 2009, a technology conference in Denver focused on tools and technologies for handling online data, experts suggested that the best strategies for fixing e-mail might rely on information and strategies drawn from social Web technologies.
DOE Backs Lithium-Sulfur Batteries - Kevin Bullis, Technology Review
One of the most exciting battery chemistries for electric vehicles is lithium-sulfur--it has the potential to store three times more energy than the lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric cars. Historically, however, it's had a number of problems. Early prototypes could only be recharged a few times, the lithium metal used in one of the electrodes caused short circuits and can react violently with water, creating a safety concern, and the carbon that makes the sulfur electrode conductive takes up too much space, decreasing storage capacity.
Biodegradable Transistors - Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review
Fully biodegradable organic transistors, recently fabricated by researchers at Stanford University, could be used to control temporary medical implants placed in the body during surgery. Biodegradable electronics "open up opportunities for implants in the body," especially if the electronics prove inexpensive, says Robert Langer, institute professor at MIT, who was not involved with the research. Implants might incorporate the organic electronics with biodegradable drug-delivering polymers. Doctors might implant such a device during surgery, then activate it from outside the body with radio frequencies to release antibiotics if needed during recovery. The electronics could also help monitor the healing process from inside the body. After healing is complete, the entire device would dissolve in the body. Sunday, November 15, 2009
6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project - WebWorker Daily
As Google is issuing Wave invites in a steady trickle, those fortunate enough to have an account are trying to figure out how this new tool might fit into their workflow and help them better communicate and collaborate with their teams and clients.While the small number of people who actually have an account right now is probably going to be the first hurdle for many teams who would like to try it out on a live project, I count myself among the lucky ones who got a Google Wave invite early and spread my nominations amongst some colleagues and clients.
Google Mail, Docs & News Adopting Wave Interface - Gordon Kelly, Trusted Reviews
While Google Apps will always have a soft spot in my heart for freeing me from Outlook I'd be the first to admit its UI is getting rather tired. So it appears would Google... Leaked to Engadget today are some seemingly legit screenshots of new interfaces for Gmail, Google News and Google Docs all integrating Google Wave-style layouts. The site's tipster said "the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.)." Certainly makes sense to us, and - as Engadget itself postulates - suggests that Google Wave (despite a somewhat mixed initial reaction) is fundamental to the search giant's future plans. Could it also be combined with the newly launched Google Dashboard to provide a unified experience in the impending Chrome OS? Well it wouldn't hurt.
Google Waves Goodbye to Conference Twittering - Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim
I still have no clue how to use Google Wave. Not that I’m stupid, I’m just not motivated to invest the tremendous effort needed to learn the new interface–especially when not all of my friends have invites yet. Still, it helps to see a real-world use of Google Wave–at a conference no less. Instead of using Twitter–and hashtags–attendees at the recent Ecomm conference were given Google Wave accounts. The resulting collaboration gives me a better feel for at least one practical use of the new service. |
