Mar 30

Microsoft Co-Founder Takes on Gates in New Book

Posted in: Microsoft, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
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Someone get David Fincher on the phone. A forthcoming memoir from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is making big waves amongst Microsoft employees and alumni, thanks largely to the author’s portrayal of fellow founder, Bill Gates.

The Wall Street Journal got its hands on a manuscript for the book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft, which it describes as “revisionist,” recounting, among other things, how Gates attempted to take control Allen’s shares of the company while the latter was being treated for cancer.
Allen also bemoans a perceived lack of credit for his involvement with the company. The Journal, however, cites people who shoot down Allen’s memories, including a story in which he traveled to California to recruit a key Microsoft programmer. According to the aforementioned sources, it was Gates who tracked down the computer scientist.
Gates, meanwhile, has offered a pretty staid response about the whole thing, “”While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul’s, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft.”
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Mar 29

RealNetworks CEO Steps Down After a Year

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
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No one said Bob Kimball’s job was going to be easy when he took the reigns from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, about a year ago. Kimball had been serving as the company’s attorney for a decade before ascending to Real’s top spot. The past decade hadn’t been particularly kind to the company, but Kimball was reportedly working to rebuild the once ubiquitous streaming media provider.

And then on Monday, he stepped down, opting for a different, unspecified job–and to “spend more time with his family.” Kimball’s year was something of a continuation of the company’s slide, with sales falling 29 percent in the year.
Glaser, not surprisingly, has no interest in stepping back up, but he did say some nice things about Kimball on his exit, “he’s been associated with some of Real’s most important and exciting developments…I’m hightly empathetic to the fact there comes a time when you want to step back and get on a different boat.”
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Mar 29

College Turning Off the Web for a “Week”

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

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Next week is the Week Without the Web at Hofstra University–well, at least part of it is. Actually, the Week Without the Web is only five days–apparently they haven’t gotten to the days of the week part of their curriculum. The annual event is aimed at the University’s School of Communication, but the college is welcoming all of its students and faculty to join in on the shutting off.

The aim of the week is “to give students and faculty the opportunity to explore and discuss the effects of the Internet on their everyday lives.” A number of events are planned to mark the occasion, including speeches, movie screenings, and a “Back in the Day” party, which will involve the Nintendo 64. Remember 1996? Before the Internet was invented?

Also, oddly, the University will be giving away an iPad 2 and domain names. Next year I’d recommend keeping with the theme–perhaps some oxen and a butter churn. You can find more information on the event over at the official blog, which may or may not be up next week.

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Mar 28

New York Times Paywall Launches Today

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

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The widely unpopular New York Times digital subscription service known as the paywall goes live worldwide at 2 p.m today, March 28th. To help easy people into the new subscription service, the Times is offering a discount for the first four weeks; you can get unlimited access for just $0.99.

After the first four weeks, it will go up to $15 for four weeks of access to NYTimes.com and a mobile phone app, $20 for access to NYTimes.com and its iPad app, and $35 for four weeks of access to all of the above. Those who subscribe to the print version of the Times will still be able to access digital content for free.

Those who don’t pay subscribe digitally, will be able to access front page content, home page, as well as all section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds, and 20 articles per month for free. Without paying, you can still access the Top News section on smartphone and tablet apps, and you can read Times’ articles through links from blogs, Facebook,Twitter, and search (limited to five a day), even if you have reached your monthly reading limit.

Since the service went live in Canada on March 17th, there has already been a four line of code hack to get around the paywall. The Times tried to get Twitter to shut down the @FreeNYTimes Twitter account, which will provide links to all New York Times articles, but only succeeded in getting the account to remove the Times‘ logo. It’s also been noted that you can simply clear your browser cache to get around the 20 article monthly limit.

So, will you pay?

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Mar 28

Facebook Looking to Hire Former Obama Press Secretary – Rumor

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
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The tech industry tends to be a pretty incestuous place, when it comes to hiring. Once you get to a certain level, there are really only so many places you can go, which is why there’s a constant parade of stories about executives and lead engineers shifting between Google and Facebook and Twitter and Apple, et al. 

Sometimes, however, you see a left field choice–those are the most fun, naturally. Like this latest rumor that Facebook is courting Robert Gibbs–yep, the same Robert Gibbs who spent the first few years of the Obama administration standing behind a podium in the White House press room, offering up sarcastic retorts about Republicans in Congress.
Gibbs exited his gig as the White House press secretary back in February, having served Obama for two years. After leaving, Gibbs was reportedly seeking a gig in the private sector. Facebook is apparnetly looking to gigs to fill in a top spot, just before the company’s initial public offering hits early next year.
Gibbs and Facebook have both declined to address the issue.
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Mar 27

This Week Best YouTube Videos: Ching Chong Means I Love You, Penguins Fly Free, Bullies Get Beat Down, and More

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, videos, YouTube

Android Dancer

One of the best things about YouTube is that someone can post a video that, by and large, is widely distributed and widely hated, and like a phoenix, rising from the ashes of that video and its responses, can come something really interesting, fun to watch, and actually fun to watch, not to mention brighten our collective spirits. 
So when Jimmy Wong (that’s right, brother of YouTube star Freddie Wong) released his response to the horribly ignorant, racist, and largely reviled rant by Alexandra Wallace (which she quickly pulled from YouTube when people took notice) about the Asian people in the UCLA library, not only did Jimmy’s video become an instant YouTube hit, it racked up over 2 million views, landed his song for sale on iTunes, and put Jimmy on television and radio doing interviews about it. 
That’s just the beginning this week: if Jimmy’s song doesn’t give you a little hope for humanity, how about some penguins on an airplane? Or a kid finally giving his bully what-for? Perhaps a dancing Android will do the trick. Hit the jump to see it all.
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Mar 26

Copyright Group Wins Legal Right to Subpoena Thousands of File Sharers

Posted in: lawsuit, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

Courtroom

If you thought that the era of copyright holders suing individuals for huge sums of money because they shared or downloaded copyrighted material on the Internet were over, think again. The US Copyright Group recently won a court ruling by a federal judge in Washington DC that will allow the group to, on behalf of their clients, subpoena ISPs across the country to turn over the identities of users who have used BitTorrent to trade in copyrighted material at any point in time. 
The federal judge ruled only that the US Copyright Group had the legal right to query ISPs for the information and that the ISPs were legally obligated to turn over the material in compliance with a subpoena. He left plenty of room for individuals who are identified in the process to offer their own defenses, have their cases disjoined from the thousands of other users the Group wants to bundle them in with, or have their cases move to the jurisdiction in which they live. 
Civil liberties and privacy groups like the ACLU have battled the lawsuit for years and are likely to protest the ruling, but for the time being, the ruling stands and there’s little to stand between the group obtaining file sharers’ personal information, mailing them a letter threatening them with legal action and offering an out-of-court settlement for some sum of money, and eventually scaring those users into submission and out of their money. 
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Mar 26

Motorcycle Concept Speeds Into The Future

Posted in: bike, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

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Looking for a little bit of Tron with your motorcycle racing? A group of French design students, in what is sure to go down as the coolest final project in history, has put together a concept bike that has clearly been stolen from the future via time-traveling DeLorean.  The Saline Bird concept bike has a carbon-fiber frame and uses a compressed-air engine to hit speed-record level quickness. As part of the bike’s sleek, smooth style, the body work is just a leather slip fitted over the internal parts. Switching it out just means taking one bit of leather off and putting another on.

The bike is made for the group Les Triplettes de Bonneville, who already hold four world speed records. Judging by their website, the team hits these mind-bending speeds on the Bonneville salt flats, regularly attending the SpeedWeek competitions. So, if you want to catch a glimpse of the closest thing to a light-bike, Nevada is a lot easier to get to than The Grid.

[via DesignBuzz]

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Mar 25

Oracle Chief Misses Earnings Call for Jury Duty

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
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It’s always a touch ominous when a CEO skips out on an earnings call. in Oracle’s case, however, it wasn’t all bad news–Larry Ellison was just doing his civic duty, because not even the highest paid chief executive in the country is above the law. Well, not that particular law, at least.

Ellison had to excuse himself from the company’s recent earnings call, in order to serve on a jury in Northern California. Oracle president (and former embattled CEO) Mark Hurd stepped in for Ellison while he served jury duty in San Mateo’s Superior Court.
One jury member even when to far as to offer a shot of the back of the executive’s head as “proof” in a Posterous post titled “Let’s Play Spot Larry Ellison at San Mateo County Jury Duty.” No word on which case Ellison will be sitting in on (if any), because there are laws against that sort of thing….
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Mar 24

Amazon Reinstates Book Swapping Service Lendle’s API Access

Posted in: amazon, ebooks, kindle, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

Lendle - Down

Just a few days ago, eBook lending service Lendle saw its API access revoked by Amazon, and a discussion kicked off about the future of eBook lending services in general and whether or not Amazon through that lending eBooks to friends – or building a service that supported or leveraged that feature – would eventually lead to lost eBook sales. 
Yesterday, Lendle reported that Amazon had contacted them with instructions on what they had to do in order to get their API access reinstated: specifically to disable the Book Sync tool that synchronizes a user’s Kindle books with their Lendle account. Lendle disabled the feature, and their API access was restored the same day. 
The Book Sync utilities allowed users to post a list of their book collections to their Lendle accounts, so they could see all of the books they owned and other members could see their books as well. Amazon said they don’t allow the kind of access that Lendle used to gather that information. The end-result? Lendle users will have to manually add the books they own to their Lendle accounts going forward, or at least the books they’re willing to lend. Users with massive eBook libraries will feel the most pain here, but at least Lendle is back in business, and its users still have a way to trade and lend eBooks to one another. 
[via MSNBC]
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