WORLD REVIEW
MTV's Rhapsody music download service. |
Airports eat notebooks, or so it seems from an study by the US Federal Trade Commission; the study said that more than 10,000 notebooks are lost or stolen every week in the 36 largest US airports, a large percentage while going through security, where travellers lose track of their belongings; the worst airports for theft - although it doesn't matter all that much - include No. 1 Newark, Los Angeles and Seattle. By a huge coincidence, Dell Computer began selling notebooks with security systems that make it possible to track stolen machines, sometimes.
The US Department of Justice opened a preliminary investigation which could lead to a formal probe and even anti-monopoly charges of the Google-Yahoo! advertising agreement; CNET called it "Microhoogle".
Microsoft refused to obey its own restraining order and began sniffing around the Yahoo! search engine yet again; in one scenario, Microsoft wanted to team up with Time Warner and News Corp to buy parts of Yahoo!; Microsoft purchased "natural language" search firm Powerset, which has a tool to search Wikipedia online; it claims it will let you ask questions in ordinary English instead of just using keywords, but so did AskJeeves.com; the idea is that Microsoft won't compete with Google, but leapfrog it.
Microsoft began selling subscriptions to its Office suite, so that instead of owning a copy on your computer for a few thousand baht once, you can pay hundreds of baht a month forever to use it online.
Part of the so-called invisible web you can't see with a search engine is because idio... webmasters make their sites with Adobe Flash - webmasters like Disney.com and the jewellery traffickers Tiffany.com; starting soon, an agreement by Google, Yahoo! and Flash-profiteers Adobe will open up most of the flashy websites to regular indexing, and results will show up in your results, although the actual Flash applications and movies will not. Adobe released a new version of its bloated Acrobat Reader; Version 9 will show Flash movies that idio... programmers and content providers embed into the PDFs, isn't that precious?; and it's only 33.5 Microsoftesque megabytes before installation, too.
HSBC of Hong Kong, which had not reported shafting any customers since it gave away all details of 159,000 accounts last April, gave away the tape it used to tape 25,000 customer calls about credit cards and Internet banking - you know, where they ask your birthdate and ID card number; HSBC bragged it didn't even know for two days it had lost the tape to some criminal or other.
Intel announced that eight processors are a piffle; it warned programmers to be ready to write software for dozens, no thousands of cores; the company specifically recommended that programmers write for "innumerable" processors, not try to scale up from two or eight as most do today.
US TV network NBC proved it was well up to 20th century broadcast standards; it bragged it will put 2,200 hours of Olympics competition online; none will be live, and none of the major events will be on the Internet at all until after NBC shows them on analogue TV - and that will almost always be hours after the fact because of the China-US time difference.
Term of the week: A columnist at the Mercury News of Silicon Valley, California, suggested that today's mobile phone has become a "communitainment transceiver".
First came the world's longest continuous roller-coaster ride, by a Thai; then there was the world's longest banquet table, by Thais; but now, in a shocking development, the Guinness Book of World Records has ratified the equally impressive world record claim by Firefox, that the little red fox was downloaded 8,002,530 times in 24 hours.
The latest spiffy beta-test version of the terrific new Microsoft IE 8 will have a SmartScreen Filter, meaning it will try to block bad phishing web sites when you try to go there in search of, um, exotic photographs, say; in the most contradictory claim in software history, Microsoft says it uses "new heuristic detection capabilities to block known bad sites" (if the bad sites are known, heuristics are time-wasting burdens).
MTV said it would play a Rhapsody, cleverly disguise it, so it's not been heard before, and beat Apple iTunes by doing the whole thing better; kicked-off by a $50 million marketing programme, Rhapsody music service targetted iTunes by going after iPod owners, selling songs at 99, but in MP3 format with no copy protection - and downloaded directly to your computer, your Verizon phone or both; you are also way too foreign to use this service.
California followed Thailand again and banned driving while under the influence of a mobile phone unless it's hands free; California will try to pass Thailand by passing a law against texting while driving as well. Meekly following world pioneer Thailand, Washington state banned driving while holding a mobile phone.
Alert academics at Birmingham University reported that they have detected 1,000 students outsourcing their coursework to bright Indians and Romanians since 2004; the British IT students pay the Indians as little as 5 to write their programming, 330 baht in real money - but 6,500 baht for post-graduate stuff; alarmed computing lecturer Thomas Lancaster noted the practice is spreading and "it is very difficult to detect."
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