I have way too much in my reading queue. Still, it’s great news that several magazines including one of my old favorites, Fortune, are opening up access to their content:
Folks, here is the good news…. all Business 2.0 archives and new articles are wide open, no subscription necessary! You said…. “bring down those walls….” and we did. Not just Business 2.0, but also Fortune and Money.
Via beSpacific.
Stuff like this certainly leads me to question the technical and service credibility of the folks at google and blogger:
Blogger Network Outage
We are currently down for network maintenence from 12pm (noon) to 2pm PST.
Those of you who support real production network environments will know what I mean. You just don’t schedule maintenance during times when your service or network is going to be used by many people.
Yea, I suppose it is possible, given the wordwide nature of the web, that this is the least busy period of their week and if this is so that suggests that blogspot’s biggest use is in the time zones serving the middle east, China, Japan, The Philipines, etc.
Interesting. And a pain as I was working on a post that has links into the blogspot world. Oh well, it will wait.
This may or may not turn into a good thing (R):
Actor Morgan Freeman and chipmaking giant Intel Corp. are teaming up on a new venture to distribute premium movies to consumers over the Internet before the films become available on DVD.
Freeman and Intel executives announced the new digital entertainment company Wednesday at an annual retreat for chief executives of top media companies in this mountain resort.
….
Hollywood has been reluctant to offer digitized movies directly to consumers over the Internet, fearful of suffering a similar fate as the music industry, which has been hit hard hit by piracy enabled by file-swapping services.
Freeman said his deal with Intel should avoid those pitfalls by giving customers a “simple, easy and attractive” alternative to piracy.
“We’re going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that’s to get ahead of the whole piracy thing,” Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press.
Few other concrete details were provided by Freeman and Intel officials about the company. However, they did say that ClickStar will be led by former Sony Pictures executive Nizar Allibhoy.
The devil will be in those missing concrete details.
They do have an opportunity to get it right and I, for one, look ahead to the day when it will be easy (read: I don’t have to drive to the rental store or wait for the Netflix envelope to arrive) to see a movie when I want. The price will need to be somewhere close to and ultimately less than the rental price and should allow 2-3 viewings. As I will want excellent quality I’ll also want my ISP connection enhanced…my current Comcast connection will not cut it and will need a simple way to deliver it from my hard drive to my future huge wall mounted plasma screen.
Services like this should be doable at similar prices in dense urban areas of the US:
Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) officially launched its 1 Gbps symmetric service for the residential market. Approximately 800,000 households, out of a total of 2.2 million households in Hong Kong, are wired to receive the service. The 1 Gbps symmetric service is priced at US$215 per month.
HKBN noted that its 1 Gbps service is up to 166x faster downstream and 1,950x faster upstream than the advertised bandwidth of the incumbent’s ADSL service.
HKBN Premium bb1000 service is being offered on the same metro Ethernet infrastructure that delivers the company’s Mass Market bb100 (symmetric 100 Mbps for US$34/month) and Entry Point bb10 (symmetric 10 Mbps for US$16/month) services.
Even the low end blows away the crap that has commonly been labeled residential broadband in the US.
If they are allowed to proceed the Verizon and SBC buildouts, while not quite up to the Hong Kong standard, will be a substantial improvement over current US offerings.
I have a few words for this guy:
Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
“The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works,” Tanembaum said.
Mookie, take a used hot poker and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
We can make our own decisions about which cookies or other server generated markers we want to keep on our systems! For a fee I might consider letting you keep a few more markers on my system but you damn well better ask first.
I’m rather perturbed that I now have to spend time learning how to configure Flash Player to kill off the stuff ol’ mookie is trying to spawn and then propogating that accross all the family systems.