breaking news

Why Have EBAY Prices for 2003′s Palm Tungsten E Skyrocketed?

I used to be able to get them for $40-50, plus shipping.

I’ve seen them go for over $100 this month.

Is there some new use for them?

Google Chrome – The evil empire owns your life

Never sign anything that you don’t read. Never agree to an end user license when you don’t know what it says. Watching the google monsters gobble up the internet makes you long for the days when the tech world grew to Bill Gates dreams.

Bill got rich, often with buggy bloated code. But he was a real innovator and the technology he and his guys brought to the world changed the world.

The octopus at Google is based on a whole different philosophy. They are the kings of “Reintermediation”. Their only accomplishment is to get in between searchers and content, between writers and readers. Nothing new is created. Nothing new is contributed. Their only skill is capturing a part of the transaction and information costs for themselves. But this week they outdid themselves. They released a new slick browser. They suggest that it is faster and more efficient than Firefox or Explorer. (we have our doubts, which we’ll discuss on another post) but here’s the catch.

THEY OWN EVERY THING YOU EVER WRITE OR POST OR CREATE USING THEIR BROWSER AND THEY CAN SELL IT TO ANYONE THEY WANT TO AND THEY NEVER OWE YOU A DIME.

amazing. unbelievable.

oh please bring back the old king bill.

Here’s more from Gizmodo:

So, are you enjoying the snappy, clean performance of Google Chrome since downloading yesterday? If so, you might want to take a closer peek at the end user license agreement you didn’t pay any attention to when downloading and installing it. Because according to what you agreed to, Google owns everything you publish and create while using Chrome. Ah-whaaa? Update: It was a copy & paste mistake, apparently, and the offending language is being removed as we speak. Thanks, Googe!

Here are the juicy bits in question:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t have used Chrome to put some posts up yesterday, because I certainly do not have the rights, power or authority to hand over my work from Gawker to the Googe. Oops! You’ll have to pry the rights to my posts from Nick Denton’s cold, dead hands, Google.

In any case, it’s a pretty unnecessary and unreasonable thing to put in the EULA for a browser, of all pieces of software, which makes it pretty questionable. Why in the hell would Google want ownership of every single blog post or email written in its browser? It’s so unreasonable that it borders on the insane. I can’t really imagine Google actually invoking this and suddenly publishing heavily edited entries from your LiveJournal for profit, but I think a lot of people would feel much better about hopping on board with Chrome if this little piece of sketchy legalese was axed.

What say you, Google overlords?

New Blackberry Bold has Unlock Codes

UnlockBlackberryBold.com is already offering unlock codes for your Blackberry Bold. They’ve gone a step further than their competitors with an easy-to-follow video.

If your BlackBerry is “locked” to a specific network they will help you “unlock” it.

All you need to do is purchase the service and send your 15 digit IMEI number and they will send you the code & instructions to instantly unlock your phone.

Cool. We like.

For $54M, Lose My Laptop… PLEASE!

$500 for the hassle is hardly compensation. It takes days just to get old software installed and a laptop configured, let alone trying to restore backups.

BestBuy should be on the hook for damages and penalties related to identity theft linked to the lost laptop. Hard to add that up to $54M, though.

Raelyn Campbell seems to be VERY highly connected and if her contacts — maybe many with unlisted phone numbers — have been compromised, there is more to this story than is covered in the article.

Lost laptop? Sue for millions!

Is your laptop worth $54 million? Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C., is suing Richfield-based Best Buy for that amount after it lost her laptop computer while it was in for repairs.

Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday, filed a negligence lawsuit suit against the company in Washington Superior Court on Nov. 16, seeking fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French said in an e-mail that Campbell “was offered and collected $1,110.35″ as well as “a $500 gift card for her inconvenience.”

According to Campbell’s blog at bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com, Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost.

WordPress News: Automattic secures $29.5 million B round

 Don’t tell me blogging software isn’t mainstream and ready for primetime…

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just secured a $29.5 million B round of financing.

Automattic‘s $1.2 million first round was secured in 2006. In this round, The New York Times joins their investors.

January 23, 2008
Times Company in Group Investing in Blog Publisher
By BRIAN STELTER

 Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company.

WordPress is open-source software used by bloggers to publish posts. Its chief competitors are Blogger (owned by Google) and TypePad (owned by the software company Six Apart).

Automattic received $1.1 million in financing about two years ago. Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures and Radar Partners were joined by the Times Company in the second round of financing.

Toni Schneider, the chief executive of Automattic, said the additional funds would provide the profitable company with a buffer as it invests in other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.

The companies did not disclose the size of each firm’s investment, although the Times Company’s stake is the smallest.

The Times Company had previously maintained a business relationship with Automattic. The About.com guide site, which was purchased by the Times Company in 2005, is published using the WordPress platform. The New York Times has also produced more than 50 blogs using the platform.

Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

“As we’ve adopted blogging and started to treat it as a mainstream publishing platform, there are all sorts of things we might do going forward to improve our approach,” he said.

Citing a potential application of the technology, Mr. Schneider said blog posts from across the Internet could be featured alongside stories on The Times’s Web site.

MSIE8… Will Microsoft’s Browser FINALLY Work?

I hate using MSIE because it renders CSS so poorly. Is the end near? See the article where this lovely quotation comes from:

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

December 20, 2007 (Computerworld) — A Microsoft Web evangelist hinted yesterday that news of Internet Explorer 8′s development progress was disclosed months earlier than planned because Web developers recently stepped up criticism of the company’s support for standards.

The news of IE8′s ability to pass a widely used Web standards test also came just two weeks after Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said he didn’t know why the company’s IE development team was keeping a tight lid on information about the next browser.

IE8, the next upgrade to Microsoft’s browser, passes the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test, according to Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group’s general manager. “On Wednesday, Dec. 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode,” Hachamovitch said in a post to Microsoft’s official IE blog yesterday. “While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards-compatibility that we’re committed to for this release.”

A week before IE8′s first Acid2 exam, Web standards advocate and blogger Molly Holzschlag had asked Gates about the lack of information coming out of the IE8 group. Gates’ answer: “I’ll have to ask [IE General Manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on. I mean, we’re not, there’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.”

In his blog Wednesday, Hachamovitch seemed to take a shot at those who had criticized his team’s silence. “For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations,” said Hachamovitch. “We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. [But] now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.”

Posts placed on the IE blog last month drew disdain from a large number of users, many of whom identified themselves as Web developers frustrated with the lack of information about IE8′s support for standards and angry at the current IE7′s lack of support for those same standards.

Another Microsoft employee, Joshua Allen, essentially said that the timing of the IE8-Acid2 news was prompted by complaints from users and developers. Allen, an evangelist at Microsoft and one of the hosts for MIX Online, echoed Hachamovitch’s news about IE8′s progress, but said the news was intended for March 2008.

“I had hoped that we could keep the news secret until MIX08, but the masses were demanding information,” said Allen, who linked to an earlier Hachamovitch blog post that had attracted more than 580 comments, the majority of them negative.

MIX08 is the Microsoft-sponsored Web developer conference slated to run in Las Vegas March 5-7, 2008.

The comments attached to Hachamovitch’s Tuesday post, however, were generally supportive, although some users remained cautious. “Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted!” said a user going by the name David Lane. “Who would’ve thought. [But] I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago.”

I am not David Lane nor do I play him on TV. But it’s funny to restate his cogent point about their MSIE browser:

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

Read the rest.

Learn about ACID2.

Image above from Turnip Family Secrets.

Movable Type — Now Open Source, Plays Catchup to WordPress

Movable Type has gone open source. It’s the only way they’ll compete with the rapidly-improving WordPress. Yeah, WP is sloppy and freewheeling at times (oy, I’m working with bbPress and it’s far from ready for primetime) but it’s a lot more nimble and there are plugins and capable and helpful users in forums up the wazoo — that’s tech-speak for “there are many competent technicians”.

I’ve been with WordPress since it was b2. I’ve tinkered with Movable Type. I’ve agonized through MT’s compiles. I came to the conclusion about 18 months ago that few new blogs should go the route of MT over WP but that existing installs, especially professional sites, certainly didn’t need to do a tear-down.

WordPress is PHP-based and MT is PERL-based, if that matters to you or your tech staff. Background. I live eat and breathe MySQL databases and HTML and I haven’t needed to manipulate text much since my days doing pattern matching for an art museum back in the late 1980′s, so PHP is my preference.

The wisdom of MT going open-source is good for MT and good for its client base and good for all of us. It means that more people will be contributing plugins, more will be testing, and it will be come a more secure and robust product. Competition is good.

Prediction: 2008 will probably be a banner year for script-kiddies hammering MT political sites. If you’re running MT and you’ve got anything controversial, make sure your webmaster and your web host is up on security measures. If you’ve been running MT and are happy with it, make sure it’s current and there’s no reason to change. If you’re on the fence and need to develop something soon, I’d go with WordPress until the dust settles and the first few waves of script kiddie mischief have been managed by the MT folk.

No doubt, like the early days of the WordPerfect and Microsoft Word wars, there will soon be open source conversion utilities allowing your new site to be morphed into the latest superior open source content management system.

And let’s not kid ourselves… it’s far beyond blogging software now.

Shake it up Baby Now, Twist and Shout – Sansa’s MP3 players will Rock YOU

The first album I ever fell in love with was the Eagle’s 1977 Hotel California. I must have spun that old vinyl 33 a thousand times on my brand new Ward’s Airline Stereo. Pretty cool stuff for a kid. New stereo, new music. new ideas. I just found out last night, that I’ve never actually heard the song.

I’ve never been a hardcore music fan. My college roommate, ran UCLA’s radio station in the mid 80s, and probably owned a bazillion albums. I had maybe 20. So I’m not really the ultimate customer for an IPOD. I like music, but couldn’t see my way to spending 300 bucks on an MP3 player, or a thousand dollars to fill it up. I’m fine with my car stereo and an occasional tune on the stereo system in my office. So I got picked, as the closest thing to a civilian here in our studios, to evaluate and test what’s new in MP3 players and portable music devices.

So let me tell you right off the bat, bang for the buck, the New SANSA Shaker will rock your world. This 30 dollar MP3 player has a purity and clarity of sound that is just amazing. I loaded up a digitally mastered recording of Hotel California, put in the earbuds, gave it a shake and heard the opening 12 string guitar like i’ve never heard it before. The stereo separation is so perfect, you can feel the marracas shaking on your left, the guitar in the center of your soul, the drummer in front and the audience to your right. Stellar, beautiful, clear, rich, rounded sound. Its almost enough to make you understand why people get addicted to their IPOD. I always wondered what stereo was good for. With the Shaker I understand. The first question I had was: Do all little earbud MP3 players sound this good? I loaded up the song on a $90 dollar VIBE from PNY, popped in my earbuds and heard plain old transister radio quality sound. So, no. Great sound is not a done deal, but the Sansa guys got it right. And this is their bottom of the line unit.

Nevertheless, even though I’m inclined to keep the Shaker myself, I’m not the real target demographic. It says right on the packaging: Ages 8 and UP. Thus, before I had a chance to discover great new sound, my two preteen sons have been marching around for the last week constantly rocking to the beat of their own shakers. My 12 year old has been asking for an IPOD for months, and was thrilled when I tossed him the Shaker. Ergonomically, its no IPOD look alike, so its cool to be the only kid in class carrying one. The Shaker is shaped like a little salt shaker, with a twist band top and bottom to control sound and navigation. Just give it a little wrist flick shake and it’ll randomly pick a new song to play.

He tells me its simple to load songs. (even his mom could do it). Plug in the scsi cable to the bottom of the shaker. Then open an explorer window to the list of songs on his PC, open another to the SANSA (because its built around a removable SD card – just like your digital camera- it shows up as just another removable harddrive on your PC) and drag the files you want from one to the other.

The Shaker is a really well designed little package with intuitive controls and nice extra features. Since the music is stored on a removable SD card (Sandisk’s core product) you can easily expand capacity, and in theory have an unlimited supply of songs available to your shaker.
Even better, you can grab a few low capacity SD cards for 10 bucks a piece and use one for each kid, or even one for you to store that new audio book you just downloaded. Best of all for a rugged little player aimed at kids, the Shaker is easy to share. It comes with an external speaker – so everyone can hear it, has enough power to drive a bigger pair of speakers or feed a stereo system, and even comes with Two headset jacks so the kids can listen together and Mom and Dad can still have some peace and quiet.

All in all, at the price, i would call it a sure fire gift for all of family holiday gift exchanges. The only guys who won’t love the shaker are the Zune product managers over at Microsoft. I don’t see how they are ever gonna be number two with Sansa in their way.

Check out SanDisk’s Product page here to learn more.

Global Warming Stats Wrong – Blame Rocket Scientists

Whoops.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

One Laptop Per Child Succumbs to the Law of Unintended Consequences

When the epicenter of spam in Nigeria meets the charitable intentions of One Laptop Per Child and the nature of children to explore where they ought not comes:

Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops

Thu 19 Jul 2007, 15:34 GMT

ABUJA, July 19 (Reuters Life!) – Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.

“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.

Maybe “one laptop per child” got translated into “one lapdance per child”?

We should also have OLPC consider the wisdom of giving the world’s spam capital more tools to perpetuate their scams.