Tag: duncan geere
Norwegian Broadcasting Corp starts own bittorrent tracker
Norway’s state broadcaster, NRK, has launched its own bittorrent tracker, following a number of successful tests in 2008. A tracker, if you’re unaware, is the ‘matchmaking’ part of the bittorrent protocol, acting as a signpost to help people who want content find people who’ve got that content.
The tracker, which will operate exactly like the Pirate Bay does, except with legitimate content. NRK is funded by a license fee, much like the BBC, and so they have a mandate to reach as wide an audience as possible with the best possible quality. The DRM-free downloads provided by this service will achieve that wonderfully.
Best of all, the bittorrent protocol gains strength as more people download something. The busier the service is, the faster it is for everyone. So when there’s a million people trying to download the latest episode of the Norwegian equivalent of Eastenders, everyone gets it fast. As long as the government themselves seeds at least one copy of every file on the network, then everyone will be able to get whatever they want.
A win for consumers, a win for the broadcaster, and a win for Norway. I hope you’re taking notice, BBC. The iPlayer is good and all, but a bittorrent tracker would be even better.
(via NRKbeta)
Facebook updating homepage yet again
After the disastrous launch and eventual user acceptance of Facebook’s news feed and profile pages last year, you would have thought that the company wouldn’t mess with the site too much more for a while. But no – it doesn’t want users getting too comfortable, so next Wednesday there’ll be a new homepage.
It looks like Twitter. There’s no two ways about it. With the status box massive and front-and-centre, there’s a definite homage going on. The feed below is now real-time too, so you can see stories appear as they happen. That feature’s been around for a while but previously it wasn’t the default option.
But one feature that Facebook’s adding to the mix is filters. If you’ve got friend groups set up then you can choose to view the updates from just one group or another. That could definitely prove useful for power users, or those with very distinct friendship circles. You can also view feeds from your friends in specific Facebook groups that you’re a member of, which is quite nifty.
This is a definite improvement to the site, and should help it compete against the attention draw from Twitter, especially as Facebook’s biggest asset is that almost everyone you know is on it – something not true of its media-darling competitor.
It’s a bit of a blatant copy and should probably have been rolled into the previous update, but I suspect that many mainstream users will hardly notice the change and as a result, there won’t be the mass user revolts that have characterized previous changes to the world’s favourite social network.
(via Business Insider)
Ballmer: We could be working faster on Windows Mobile
At a conference in Microsoft’s hometown, Redmond, CEO Steve Ballmer admitted yesterday that the company could be working faster on Windows Mobile.
Responding to a question from an audience member who complained that his employees were bringing in iPhones and Android Phones that were tricky to support, and wanted Microsoft to up its game significantly so that he didn’t have to deal with that situation as much, Ballmer responded: “There’s opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area, and we’ve done a lot of work to really make sure we have a team that’s going to be able to accelerate.” Here’s the full Q&A:
Spotify gets hacked
Revolutionary digital music streaming service Spotify has revealed a serious security breach that affected its servers before December 19th last year. The company thought that it had managed to fix it before any damage was done, but last week Spotify found out that “a group” of some sort had managed to gain access to information necessary to guess passwords.
Although security breaches are par for the course at most internet startups, so far Spotify had managed to avoid them. It’s almost a rite of passage for new companies. The company is recommending that anyone who hasn’t changed their password since December 19th to change it immediately, and is emailing all its users to that effect.
Official Spotify Blog
Spinvox teams up with Skype
Spinvox, the voice-to-text service, has been quietly gaining plaudits for a number of years, and they’ve just announced a deal with VoIP service Skype whereby you can get your voicemails as texts.
You’ll be charged 17p per message, plus any SMS charge you’ve got, but depending on how much you’re charged to listen to voicemails and how annoying you find listening to them, you might think it’s worth it.
Space Phallus – the best 8-bit game you've never played
Space Phallus Trailer @ Yahoo! Video
Space Phallus. Just from the name you already know what to expect. It’s an 8-bit shoot-em-up game featuring many, many cocks. You control the disembodied head of a dog, and you’ve got to make your way through space while waves of evil space penises assault you.
It’s available as downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and it weighs in at about 10MB (well, the Windows version does, anyway). Download. Unzip. Cocks. The arrows move your ship around, z shoots, x shoots missiles, and c activates ‘fire breath’.
The best thing? It’s not only completely ridiculous, it’s actually an incredibly fun game, too. Kudos to creator Charlie of Charlie’s Games.
Space Phallus (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
Amazon launches e-book buying and reading app for iPhones
Today, Amazon plans to release an application for the iPhone that’ll allow users to buy and download eBooks, outside of its homegrown Kindle ecosystem. The application will be able to be downloaded free of charge, and will also keep track of your page across both a Kindle and an iPhone, so no more wondering where you left off.
There’s competition in the market, from the likes of Indigo Books and Shortcovers, and Google recently launched a free mobile product too. When asked about whether the app might cannibalise Kindle sales, Amazon VP Ian Freed says he’s “not at all concerned”, saying that it’s actually likely to help, presumably because the Kindle offers a better eBook expeirnece.
Unfortunately for the moment, the application isn’t available outside the US, presumably for licensing reasons. We’ll keep a close eye and let you know when you can get it on these shores.
(via Wall St Journal)
Asus unleashes ultra-thin U and UX series of laptops
We’ve just been dropped word of some new laptops from Asus, the U and UX series. I normally strip out press release fluff, but there’s an amazing bit here that I’ll quote to you:
“Each of them a masterpiece so immensely desirable, the U and UX Series takes modern day computing to the streets, bringing delight to the users’ senses and allowing them to work or play in style.”
Hilarious. That’s not the only ridiculous section, it’s all insane. Go read it here. If you’re more into hard specs, though, then here’s the skinny. Both models have backlit keyboards, and the U series has a 15.6″ display, Core 2 Duo processor, 500GB hard drive, 512MB of GeForce G105M graphics, illuminated trackpad and Altec Lansing speakers.
The UX, on the other hand, we don’t have any info about beyond the fact that it has a slot-in optical drive and a combination of matte and gloss finishes. Let’s hope we get a bit more info soon, as well as a video of that illuminated trackpad on the U series. Pricing and availability info TBC.
Asus Press Release
Skype gives away its SILK speech codec for free
Skype has just announced that it’s giving away its SILK speech codec, which is the bit of software that processes your voice into a small enough stream of data for you to be able to communicate over a slow internet connection. A codec is basically a balancing act between file size and audio quality.
The SILK codec has been in development for three years at Skype and was finally bundled with the most recent release of the software – Skype 4. It’s a major step forward in audio quality and scales depending on the bandwidth available.
So if it’s so great, then why is Skype giving it away royalty-free to its competitors? Good question. My best guess is that Skype has the VoIP market so firmly tied up that it wants some competition to help grow the whole market. Then, I suppose, it’s confident enough that those users will switch to Skype thanks to its fantastic software.
It might also be a sign that Skype’s considering offering an API. Opening up the service, which is famously closed, would mean that other programs could be able to make Skype calls natively, without people having to open and install Skype itself. It could mean that you’ll just be able to highlight phone numbers on websites and right-click to call them from the browser.
More information’s available on the SILK website, and TechCrunch has an interesting take too.
Google CEO calls Twitter a "Poor Man's Email System"
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked what he thought of Twitter, at a technology conference hosted by Morgan Stanley yesterday, he came out with the following gem: “Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems”.
Ouch. Now that’s the sound of a man hurting. Hurting because his company didn’t see the microblogging revolution coming? Hurting because they did, and backed the wrong horse – buying up Jaiku rather than Twitter? Maybe he’s just hurting because people are hacking Google to display Twitter results.
He went on:
“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”
“I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using. Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”
He also gave a quick mention of Google’s new Twitter account, but got a little confused by the character limit, claiming @google is somewhere to “go ahead and listen to our ruminations as to where we are and what we’re doing in 160 characters or less”. Actually Eric, it’s 140.
(via Business Insider)
