Flickr Hit Hard By Yahoo Layoffs
Flickr was spared from cuts for a long time but in recent months has been slowly trimming its staff. Frankly, cutting Flickr team is a bit of a head scratcher: that group is one of the few pockets of future-thinking tinkerers at Yahoo, especially when it comes to building new media experiences around “social objects” such as photos.
Linux : Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 Hands-on.
In episode 6 of our podcast we asked the question, “should netbook manufacturers standardise on a single distro?” Well, as netbook manufactuers continue to find ever more obscure distros to fit onto their systems, Canonical has stepped into the fray wielding a mighty cluestick: Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).
Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early
Swedish Pirate Party Heading for EU Parliament
How Your Search Queries Can Predict the Future?
The Sewing Machine War
lousyd writes “Volokh has hosted a paper by George Mason University law professor Adam Mossoff on the patent fracas a century and a half ago surrounding the sewing machine. A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket challenges assumptions by courts and scholars today about the alleged efficiency-choking complexities of the modern patent system. Mossoff says that complementary inventions, extensive patent litigation, so-called ‘patent trolls,’ patent thickets, and privately formed patent pools have long been features of the American patent system reaching back to the antebellum era.”
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Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year
JacobSteelsmith writes “A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research, reports the Web has reached a critical point. For many reasons, Internet usage continues to rise (imagine that), and bandwidth usage is increasing due to traffic heavy sites such as YouTube. The article goes on to describe the perils Internet users will face including ‘brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,’ and constant network ‘traffic jams,’ similar to ‘how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.’ … ‘Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. … While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts — a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'”
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Google Planning To Serve "High Quality News" Passively
krou writes “The Wrap has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt on Google’s new plan for news. Google is apparently planning on rolling out ‘high-quality news’ to users who are not actively searching for news. It’s expected to launch in approximately six months’ time, and the first two news organizations to be involved will be The New York Times and The Washington Post. ‘Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google’s page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering — based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues — to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they’re looking for it. And on this basis, Google believes it will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.’ Although Schmidt said that companies like the New York Times won’t get any of this ad revenue, he commented that it will push stories to users who want them, drive up traffic to those stories, and in turn bring higher advertising rates for those stories.” As VentureBeat points out, Google hasn’t officially confirmed any of this, and with no ad revenue going to the other companies, it only partially addresses complaints that Google is profiting unfairly from the work of news publications.
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Intel Faces $1.3B Fine In Europe
Hugh Pickens writes “European antitrust regulators, who have been aggressively pursuing what they see as anticompetitive practices among technology companies, could impose their largest fine ever in a market-dominance case against Intel. The commission began investigating Intel in 2000 after Advanced Micro Devices, its arch-rival, filed a complaint. In two sets of charges, in 2007 and 2008, the commission accused Intel of abusing its dominant position in chips by giving large rebates to computer makers, by paying computer makers to delay or cancel product lines, and by offering chips for server computers at prices below actual cost. Some legal experts speculate that Intel’s fine could reach about a billion euros, or .3B. ‘I’d be surprised if the fine isn’t as high or higher than in the Microsoft case,’ said an antitrust and competition lawyer in London. In 2004 Microsoft paid a fine of €497M, or 3M at current exchange rates, after being accused of abusing its dominance; the EU imposed another .3B fine in Feb. 2008.”
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