The Contemplation » tech

02-10-2012 :: 10 Things in Tech You Need To Know

tech — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:47:57 +0000

Today’s News is brought to you by Business Insider

Here’s what happened at the Apple protest in San Francisco yesterday.

Craig Silverstein, Google’s number three employee, left for Khan Academy today.

Hackers have been robbing iTunes customers since 2010.

Here’s why Google’s foray into hardware will be a disaster.

This Kickstarter project raised nearly $1 million in a single day.

Groupon has found a new executive to handle Andrew Mason.

LinkedIn’s stock takes off after crushing earnings expectations.

Facebook has signed a mysterious deal with a mobile payment company.

Apple is now worth more than Google and Microsoft combined.

Sean Parker’s next big thing is Chatroulette for Facebook.

Bits and Bytes

The Hollywood Reporter reports that members of the iconic disco-era musical group Sister Sledge have filed a major class action lawsuit against Warner Music Group claiming that the music giant’s method for calculating digital music purchases as ‘sales’ rather than ‘licenses’ has cheated them out of millions of dollars from digital music sales. Songwriters typically make much less money when an album is ‘sold’ than they do when their music is ‘licensed’ (the rationale derives from the costs that used to be associated with the physical production of records) but record labels have taken the position that music sold via such digital stores as iTunes should be counted as ‘sales’ rather than licenses. The difference in revenue can be significant as Sister Sledge claim their record deal promises 25 percent of revenue from licenses but only 5-1/2% to 6-1/2% of net from sales. Eminem’s publisher brought a nearly identical claim against Universal Music Group and won an important decision at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 when the 9th Circuit ruled that iTunes’ contract unambiguously provided that the music was licensed. The lawsuit argued that record companies’ arrangements with digital retailers resembled a license more than it did a sale of a CD or record because, among other reasons, the labels furnished the seller with a single master recording that it then duplicated for customers. ‘Unlike physical sales, where the record company manufactures each disc and has incremental costs, when they license to iTunes, all they do is turn over one master,’ says attorney Richard S. Busch. ‘It’s only fair that the artist should receive 50 percent of the receipts.

Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, will leave the search giant for Khan Academy, an online education portal based in Mountain View, Calif. Silverstein had been with Google shortly after it first launched in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, a friend of both Page and Brin, in September 1998. He had helped Brin and Page develop infrastructure when Google was just a Stanford grad school project, but when he officially joined the company, Silverstein became its technology director. The Khan Academy, where Silverstein is heading next, is a not-for-profit organization that aspires to change the education industry by providing free ‘world-class education to anyone anywhere.’ Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an enormous fan of the service, telling CNN that he uses it with his kids.

NASA is looking for technology that could offer green rocket fuel alternatives to the highly toxic fuel hydrazine used to fire up most rockets today. According to NASA: ‘Hydrazine is an efficient and ubiquitous propellant that can be stored for long periods of time, but is also highly corrosive and toxic.’ It is used extensively on commercial and defense department satellites as well as for NASA science and exploration missions.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password ’12345′ (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course).

Intel Corporation and the New York Attorney General have agreed to terminate the lawsuit alleging violation of U.S. and state antitrust laws that was filed by the New York Attorney General in November 2009. Intel did not have to admit any violation of law (if there ever was any) nor did it have to admit or deny that the allegations in the complaint are true. Most importantly, the settlement does not require any changes to how the company does business. The settlement includes a $6.5 million payment that is “intended only to cover some of the costs incurred by the New York Attorney General in the litigation.” Here’s the full settlement, and Intel’s official press release.

Protests against Apple and Foxconn due to furor over reports about working conditions have gone digital. A group known as SwaggSec has successfully hacked computers at Foxconn, and posted the stolen data to The Pirate Bay website. News of the hack comes as protesters paid a visit today to Apple stores around the world to deliver petitions demanding the improvement of working conditions at factories run by Apple suppliers in China and other countries. In response to the attack, Foxconn reportedly took down a website that explains the services it offers to some of its partners, including Apple, Cisco and Acer.

A story from UK’s Guardian reports on a study of ice levels from the Himalayas area, and finds that no significant melting has occurred, despite earlier predictions of losses of up to 50 billion tons of ice. ‘The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,’ said Professor Jonathan Bamber, who also warns that 8 years simply isn’t enough time to draw conclusions. ‘It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,’ he said.

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Yesterday’s Price: $127.99
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Amazon’s Gold Box Price: $70.49 (70% off)

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Netflix Instant Picks :: Lilyhammer

tech — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:58:00 +0000

Lilyhammer

Lilyhammer,” a gripping fish-out-of-water story set in Norway and starring “The Sopranos” mainstay and E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, is a new Original Series premiering on Netflix in the USA, Canada and Latin America.

“Lilyhammer,” follows New York mobster Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano as he enters the federal witness protection program after ratting on his boss. A sports fan, Frank wants to make his new life in Lillehammer, the Norwegian town that hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics – or as he calls it “Lilyhammer.” Frank has visions of a paradise of “clean air, fresh white snow and gorgeous broads” far away from the temptations of the Big Apple and from mob hit men. Reality, of course, turns out to be spectacularly different.

All eight first season episodes of “Lilyhammer” are available for Netflix members to instantly watch by streaming over the Internet to connected TVs, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.

“Lilyhammer” was developed by Rubicon TV AS (creator, Anne Bjornstad & Eilif Skodvin). The Writers on the Show include Anne Bjornstad, Eilif Skodvin and Steven Van Zandt. Producers include Trond Berg Nilsen and Agnete Thuland. Executive Producers include Lasse Hallberg & Steven Van Zandt. The series is a production by Rubicon TV AS.

Lilyhammer on Netflix

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02-08-2012 :: 10 Things in Tech You Need To Know

tech — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:01:13 +0000

Today’s News is brought to you by Business Insider

Demand to short Groupon is rumored to be high.

Apple says it’s time to rewrite European patent laws.

Amazon just made a deal with Viacom that could crush Netflix.

Unbelievably cheap Amazon cloud service just got cheaper.

Pinterest is the fastest growing site ever.

HP accidentally leaked details about a new product launch.

Here’s the strangest thing about Yahoo’s board member departure.

Google invited some big thinkers to a resort to talk about the future.

Path just made a huge privacy blunder.

Is health tracking the next big thing?

Bits and Bytes

A Colorado woman that was ordered by a federal judge to decrypt her laptop hard-drive for police last month, appears to have forgotten her password. If she does not remember the password by month’s end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. It appears that bad memory is now a federal offense.” The article clarifies that her lawyer stated she may have forgotten the password; they haven’t offered that as a defense in court yet.

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn’t want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don’t want, according to French campaign group No More Racketware.

Apple hasn’t released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year.

An announcement on the Kubuntu-devel mailing list tells the sad story: Canonical is pulling funding for in-house developers to work on the KDE-based Kubuntu flavor. Canonical now seems committed to its single vision of a GNOME-based Unity as a desktop and other Ubuntu flavors will now have to rely on community support and some infrastructure from Canonical.

H.R. 3674, the Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act (PRECISE Act), would allow the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require improved security practices from those businesses managing systems whose disruption could prove detrimental to critical life-sustaining or national-security initiatives.” As the article points out, this is just “one of 30 or so such bills currently percolating on the Hill.

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Netflix Instant Picks :: The Pirates of Penzance

tech — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:41:14 +0000

The Pirates of Penzance (1980)

Total Cheese Fest!

The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. The opera’s official premiere was at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City on 31 December 1879, where the show was well received by both audiences and critics.[1] Its London debut was on 3 April 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for a very successful 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.

The story concerns Frederic, who, having completed his 21st year, is released from his apprenticeship to a band of tender-hearted pirates. He meets Mabel, the daughter of Major-General Stanley, and the two young people fall instantly in love. Frederic finds out, however, that he was born on 29 February, and so, technically, he only has a birthday each leap year. His apprenticeship indentures state that he remains apprenticed to the pirates until his 21st birthday, and so he must serve for another 63 years.[2] Bound by his own sense of duty, Frederic’s only solace is that Mabel agrees to wait for him faithfully.

Pirates was the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration and introduced the much-parodied Major-General’s Song. The opera was performed for a century by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in Britain and many other opera companies and repertory companies worldwide.

It has received several modernised productions, including Joseph Papp’s 1981 production on Broadway, which ran for 787 performances, winning the Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, and spawned many imitations. Pirates remains popular today, taking its place along with The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore as one of the most frequently played Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

In 1980, Joseph Papp and the Public Theater of New York City brought a new production of Pirates, directed by Wilford Leach and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, to the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, one of the series of annual Shakespeare in the Park summer events. The show played for 10 previews and 35 performances. It then transferred to Broadway, opening on 8 January 1981 for a run of 20 previews and 787 performances at the Uris and Minskoff Theatres. This take on Pirates earned enthusiastic reviews[72] and several Tony Awards, including a Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical.

This is the live taping of a live performance at the Delacorte Theatre in New York’s Central Park. Staring Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline.

The Pirates of Penzance on Netflix

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Netflix Instant Picks :: Leading Ladies

tech — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:25:33 +0000

Leading Ladies

Once a star, Sheri Campari is now a struggling yet controlling stage mom who lives vicariously through her daughter Tasi, the perfectionist darling of the amateur ballroom circuit. Wallflower older sister Toni, the backbone of the family, helps Tasi maintain a sense of humor in the face of Sheri’s overblown expectations. And then there’s Cedric—Tasi’s flamboyant dance partner, Toni’s best friend and the only person with the confidence to stand up to Sheri.

This nutty family’s world gets turned upside down when Tasi confronts an unwanted pregnancy in the midst of rehearsals for the big ballroom competition—and Toni meets Mona, who becomes her leading lady both on and off the dance floor, encouraging her to take the lead and fall in love. As Tasi prepares to becomes the mother she wished she’d had, Toni and Mona’s relationship blooms, and the members of this unconventional family learn to let love lead them as they accept the starring roles in their own lives.

A little bit Strictly Ballroom, a little bit Hairspray—yet and a delightfully surreal musical number set in a supermarket.

Awards

Leading Ladies on Netflix

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