Cody Taylor

neurone333 sends along the cause célèbre of the moment in France: a Web executive working for TF1, Europe’s largest TV network, sends an email to his Member of Parliament opposing the government’s “three strikes and you’re out” proposal, known as Hadopi. His MP forwards the email to the minister backing Hadopi, who forwards it to TF1. The author of the email, Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, is called into his boss’s office and shown an exact copy of his email. Soon he receives a letter saying he is fired for “strong differences with the [company’s] strategy” — in a private email sent from a private (gmail) address. French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar. Hit the link below for some background on the ties between TF1 and the Sarkozy government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mikesd81 writes “Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times’ website on Wednesday.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

” Browser makers Mozilla and Opera accused Microsoft yesterday of force feeding Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to users with Windows Update and silently changing the default browser on PCs.” … I say they shouldn’t be able to force any web browser as the default that’s not FULLY CERTIFIED as being W3C.org Open Web Standards Compliant.

There are many designers and artists at deviantART who choose to display their beautiful creations to the rest of the community. In this collection, you’ll find some of the best web design layouts created by deviantARTists.

As instantaneous as the Web can be, most search engines–Google included–suffer from a bit of a time lag. Where Google leaves off, the new search engine, Scoopler looks to pick up. Scoopler is a search engine that indexes the content of a number of popular social-networking sites, and delivers real time search results:

Even before it’s officially adopted, France’s controversial anti-piracy law has already claimed its first victim. Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, head of web innovation at one of the largest TV-networks in France was fired recently because he criticized the law in a letter to his MP.

fm6 writes “When the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems was announced, it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun’s software technology, and would sell or discontinue all its hardware businesses. Larry Ellison, in an interview (PDF) just posted on the Oracle web site, says that’s not what’s going to happen. In particular, SPARC isn’t going anywhere: ‘Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These days, a 2-megapixel camera may not seem like much. But add Web access, a pocket-size Mac, and third-party apps to the mix, and presto! That humble camera is now a personal assistant and digital artist in one. Here are just a few of the ways you can extend your camera.

After sending a private note to his MP opposing the proposed “three strikes” law currently being debated in France, Bourreau-Guggenheim found himself hauled into his boss’ office. He was shown a copy of his e-mail, and he was fired for “strategic differences” with his employer.

bigmammoth writes “Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the Theora codec over the past year, with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update: ‘Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling ahead of h.264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It’s important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it’s clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.’ Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impending launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top-4 web site. It’s looking like free video codecs may pose a serious threat to the h.264 bait-and-switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.