Walter Mossberg, a columnist and editor writer for the Wall Street Journal, has leveled his sites on the American wireless phone industry, and he’s not pulling any punches. Mossberg has dubbed the Wireless Telcos “Soviet ministries” and shed a little light onto just how stifling the mobile industry is.
And…he’s right too. Sad as it is, most American’s don’t seem to know how confined our mobiles are.
And you thought Macs were proprietary!
No, I don’t have a second source for this one, but it’s just so out there that I’m going to run with it anyway.
The Associated Press is reporting that J.K. Rowling told a packed Carnegie Hall that “Dumbledore is gay.”
Rowling then went on to laugh, “Oh, my god, the fan fiction.”
Yes…that’s exactly what we were thinking.
On a trip to the middle east this past weekend, Secretary of State Condie Rice visited with both Israeli leaders and then, a day later, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Following the meetings, Abbas said that certain Israeli demands had already been met, but the Palestinian President failed to state which ones.
For the United State’s part, it seems that the future Palestinian state must be a democratic one.
Source: CNN
Looks like the “Children of the Mao” are once again up to their old tricks. The net-saviest amongst the billion plus in China knew for years that RSS feeds* were the key to getting around the “Great Firewall of China”. Sadly, it looks like China has now severed access to all incoming feeds.
*RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. subter has feeds for both Shots and the monthly issue.
According to the folks over at ArsTechnica - certain feed providers (such as FeedBurner) as well as blogs hosted by BlogSpot (Google) and Wordpress are now being blocked. Also, URLs that contain the words “feeds”, “rss”, and “blog” have been blocked.
Looks like Big Brother is at it again.
As many of you may or may not know, the once rockin’ band Metallica led the charge that took down Napster and in many ways opened the door for Itunes. It was a victory for record labels everywhere, since it meant the law was on their side in helping them create new ways to take your hard-earned money, all for the right to possess a song that has no mass, no taste, no smell, no physicality whatsoever: an MP3. Metallica’s victory over Napster shut down the company briefly, but after a restructure is back and as present as ever. In effect, they forced one company to do a processing overhaul and opened the floodgates for lawsuits against the very fanbase that supports the Music.
As evidence of this, the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America has begun to launch a full-on assault against the beaches of so-called pirates. They claimed a victim, Jammie Thomas, who was found guilty by a jury of peers on 24 counts of copyright infringement for downloading 24 seperate songs illegally. Thomas is 30, a single mother, and is an environmental coordinator working with Native Americans in Minnesota. This jury of peers fined her nearly $10,000 for each of the 24 counts levelled against her. This figure reaching nearly a quarter million dollars by multimillion dollar label Capital Records is roughly five times her annual salary. Justice is a dish best served cold…
For details about the case, go to these links:
Times Online
ars technica or simply google Jammie Thomas.
A Three Step Process
1. Buy the album.
2. Listen to it.
3. Thank me later.
Lord knows I’m not a Zune fan. But, with the news release of what’s being called the Zune 2 yesterday, Microsoft seems to be doing a bit better at catching up with near-ubiquitous iPod.
Some features of the new Zune include new sizes, a touch sensitive pad, and glass screens which promote rather impressive viewing experiences.
The three new Zune models come in flash-based 4gb and 8gb models, and a harddisk based 80gb model which offers more than double the space of the Zune 1 while maintaining a slimmer form factor.
The WiFi actually seems to be a viable means of communication in this new Zune, allowing the user to sync without wires, and it seems, without having to do anything. The new Zune WiFi is said to automatically download podcasts, interact with a Zune Social Network (imaginatively titled The Social) and be able to display television recorded on XP and
And in what seems to be a nice one-up to Apple, the new features on the Zune are being sent via a firmware update to the First Gen Zunes. That means the 1.2 million people who have already purchased the device will not need to do so again.
Today, President Bush vetoed legislation that would vastly increase government health insurance to children, stating concerns over this proposed plan too closely resembled federal health care.
In other news, President Bush was responsible for trapping subter’s editor in the local mall today. His motorcade path prompted local police to close all exits from the Park City Mall in
Ironically, the President’s trip to address the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce ended up hurting local business as customers were unable to reach said commerce locations.
President Bush also, apparently, spoke about the dangers of a nuclear Iran.
In the coming months, we’re going to be barrelling down the road to mass consumerism. It’s barely October and already the first Christmas displays are going up at some stores. More and more people are going to be flooding the malls and the shopping cathedrals of our great country. I would just like to suggest to everyone, for the benefit of the world while in these stores, pay the fuck attention to where you’re standing and your fucking surroundings. Do not pause to converse with friends or relatives at key junctions. Do not linger overly long in the one area in the store where I need to be, and can’t because you can’t read your wife’s handwriting on the shopping list. Do not stand too close behind me! Do not cut me off! Would you behave like this in your car? Just because you’re not going fifty miles an hour does not mean a collision with me won’t cause you bodily harm. Get shopper’s insurance people. I will run your ass over. I’m not taking any damn prisoners! No mercy! No remorse!
The most-hyped (if not anticipated) mobile phone in the history of mobile phones has recently published the first firmware update. For those not hip to the techno lingo - firmware is the “programming” that runs the actual hardware that runs a device.
Ordinarily a firmware update would not be newsworthy, but this is a special case. Since it was released, the iPhone was locked into a very proprietary scheme (par for the course with Apple products) that didn’t allow the user to easily make use of third party applications nor allow the user to take their rather expensive gadget to another network. Certain industrious individuals had managed to unlock the iPhone and get the most out of the hundreds of dollars spent.
Apple’s recent firmware update undoes all of that hard work. For phones that have been unlocked, the phone has been rendered into what is commonly called a “brick” – that is, an unusable state. Topping that off, many (some say all) third party applications have been rendered unusable.
Here are some headlines:
Gizmondo downgrades the iPhone from “Wait” to “Don’t Buy”
Ars Technica has a list of what works, and what doesn’t, after the upgrade.
PhoneNews.com questions the legality of iPhone bricking.
And remember, the Gphone is rumored to be arriving next month.
As for this me, I’m quite happy with my BlackBerry.
