Hey there all, hopefully you’ve had a good week so far. I know those students who are off this week have likely enjoyed it more than the rest of us (and envy them accordingly). For those who aren’t into the swing of things yet, every Friday we like to post a “just for smiles” blog post as our last one before the weekend. Y’know, there are only two hours left of the working week, might as well kill five minutes of them with a look at some silliness.
The above is by a Japanese band called Sour. I don’t know the whole back story to it, just that I like the video a lot and it always cheers me up. It’s well worth a watch. It’s a solid Friday pick-me-up.
The confirmation earlier in the week that internet pirates in the UK could face disconnection from the internet as a response to repeat offences has raised some issues with ISPs, who have threatened legal action.
TorrentFreak is reporting that, while there had been some how that it wouldn’t be supported, the disconnection of repeat offenders is set to go ahead as planned. The most interesting response hasn’t been from copyright groups, which are, unsurprisingly, quite supportive of an action with such a strong disincentive for copyright infringement.
Asus has announced that it is to launch an Andoid-based netbook early in 2010, despite the fact that the company seemed to have cooled on Android in recent months.
We're more excited for this than we probably should be...
For now, details are relatively thin on the ground, but Asus’ upcoming Android offering is to run a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a fact that’s led to the device being called a “smartbook” rather than a netbook (according to the folks at Engadget, the only qualifier for being a smartbook is to be a netbook running an ARM processor). Unfortunately we don’t know very much else about it; Asus has been tight lipped on the internal drive,
Nintendo has seen its interim net profit decline by a little more than half, seeing profits of ¥69.4 billion (around €515 million) so far this year.
Declining sales of the runaway success that is the Nintendo Wii have been blamed for the drop in profits, but that whole business can’t be brought to Nintendo’s door. It’s important to remember that the face of the console market has changed a lot over the past few months, with Microsoft and Sony both offering significant price reductions, putting the Xbox 360 at the same price as the Wii. Similarly, the PlayStation 3 now sits at just €299, not as much more expensive than Nintendo’s offering as once it was, and with both angling for motion control, you can imagine things looking bleak for the little console that could.
Apple has released a new update to its iTunes media player, adding colour options to its “grid view” and better “additional accessibility support.” The real news though, is that it blocks Palm again.
Not so fast, Palm
For those who didn’t catch it the first time around, Palm’s smartphone, the Pre, had been considered by many to be one of the few devices capable of wresting Apple’s iPhone dominance from it. Of course, when Apple realised that one of the big draws for the Pre was its iTunes support, things got a bit dicey, and Apple stepped up with an iTunes update to block Palm devices.
Intel has been forced to pull a firmware update for its line of solid state drives (SSDs) because of reports coming in from users that the firmware update responded badly to Windows 7, causing corruption of data stored on the drive.
This is the second time that drivers for the X25-M SSD line have interacted poorly with operating systems (though last time it wasn’t Windows 7), causing corruption and eventually being pulled. Xbit Labs has an awful lot more detail on just what Windows 7 users could have expected from the latest firmware, including potential 40% speed increase over previous. Instead, they’ve been left hanging for a second time, with many likely taking a “twice shy” approach and opting to wait and see how the firmware is received when it’s next released.
Facebook has announced that it’s to make some changes to its privacy policy, making it more obvious to users just what Facebook can and can’t do in easier to understand day-to-day language.
Facebook has, in the interests of full disclosure, posted up both the old and new privacy policies so that you can have a read over them yourself. Unfortunately, the old privacy policy is almost incomprehensible, so while we can read the new one fairly handily, it doesn’t tell us an awful lot about changes.
Sony has opted to voluntarily issue a recall of some of its AC adaptors, which have been found to be posing a danger of shocking users.
Anyone with a notebook in the past few years might well remember Sony’s last recall debacle, when batteries manufactured by the Japanese giant were recalled en masse due to the risk of explosion. Back then the losses incurred by a mass recall were considered to be so very high that Sony could very well have been put into a financial situation that would cause it to go out of business.
It’s come to light that Apple is currently involved in court proceedings brought by St Clair Intellectual Property consultants over its use of digital camera equipment.
Of course, as with so very many patent cases, the whole thing seems to hang fairly tenuously. TG Daily is reporting that the patent Apple is said to have infringed relates to “Electronic Still Video Camera with Direct Personal Computer Digital Format Output.” Strangely enough, it seems that there’s no reason why the vagueness might mean anything good for Apple. The same company has apparently got a long history of winning court cases.
Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz has come out and said what a lot of people have been thinking about Yahoo for a while now; Yahoo has somehow managed to become a pretty stale name.
According to a Cnet report, Bartz was open and frank about the company’s position at the moment, saying that, “Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren’t so shiny anymore.” It’s no real surprise that Yahoo is being so honest, given its recent push to rebrand itself as a kind of universal homepage rather than a search engine.
