Facebook Allows Parents And Gamers To Debate Violence For The First Time
C’mon, Couric.
Is it 1993? Because on a recent episode of Katie Couric’s talk show, the once mighty journalist made a baffling, one-sided argument tying violent crime to video games. I fully expected a Mortal Kombat or Doom reference to pop up. No, it’s 2013 and these times allow concerned parents, who are naive about the operation of video games and probably still need three more friends to help them out in FarmVille, to discuss the issue in the same forum as agitated video game players who are frustrated that media like this still exists. It’s weird and amazing.
Apple App Store Nears 50 Billion Downloads, Wants to Give You $10,000
All those awesome apps and a lot of crappy ones too!
It feels like it was yesterday I printed off this poster marking what I thought was a crazy amount of apps: 10,000! That number is well over 800,000 now and they’ve been downloaded almost 50 billion times. Almost. Read the rest of this article…
Ten Years Ago, iTunes Changed My Life
Before it made things complicated, iTunes made things simple.
Don’t you remember owning music? Not in the legal sense, as Record Industry v. America proved, but in the Pokemon-ish “collect them all” style of ownership. Buying CDs and recording tracks off the radio to your cassette player, that’s what I’m getting at. The first piece of music I ever owned – “owned” being a poor word for it, more like “acquired” – was a bad rip of John Williams’ “Duel of the Fates” from The Phantom Menace that I spent forty-five minutes downloading over a dial-up connection. A year later, the first CD I ever bought was Moby’s Play, probably his last listenable album. Between Napster and the occasional CD purchase, building a local collection of music was pretty great until, y’know, your hard drive failed.
Why Would A Gaming League Steal Your Computer’s Power For Bitcoins?
Bitcoin mining is an expensive proposition, unless you’re using someone else’s equipment to do it.
If you want a slice of the Bitcoin pie, you’ll either have to shell out cash or invest a lot of electricity into your computer’s number-crunching capabilities to mine them from the digital ether. As Kelly explained on a recent PRO SHO, the result of his 24-hour, 100% CPU/100% GPU blast was a whopping seven cents, a fraction of the amount needed to power his computer for that long. So what happens when you’ve got access to 14,000 high-powered gaming computers? Well, you can do a lot more than that, about $3,300 worth.
Installing Firefox? Watch Out, It Might Be Government Spyware
Don’t be messin with Firefox!
A UK-based company, Gamma International, is using the Firefox brand to disguise its FinFisher IT Intrusion software, all the way down to the copyright attribution. This not only allows the government to spy on the unsuspecting user who installed it, but also snoop out their encrypted data and remotely deploy software. Read the rest of this article…
HTC Employee Apologizes For The Thunderbolt, But Is It Enough?
Or maybe not so quietly
It’s been all over the internet the last couple of days that an employee of HTC, the Taiwanese company responsible for a vast assortment of smartphones over the few years, stepped up and informally apologized for the Thunderbolt: the first phone to release with 4G LTE and the biggest hunk of crap which ever hit the shelves. (You can’t even argue it, it’s not even close.) But, is simply apologizing enough?
As a former Thunderbolt Blunderbolt owner, I don’t think so.
Why Have An Android Phone When You Can Have A Windows Phone, Says New Microsoft App
It’s handy, but only a little bit.
What was once the primary phone of my dreams is now the secondary phone of my dreams, but I have to hand it to Microsoft for trying, even as I separate further and further from their ecosystem. I’d heard about this app for a week now, but when I was able to finally dig it out on the Play Store – it’s not the first app listed under “Switch Windows Phone” – I had to give it a shot, just to see.
The World Wide Web Turns 20 Today, Why Does It Matter?
Triple-dub, yo.
Twenty years ago today, the very first web page went up on the internet. Created by Tim Berners-Lee while under the employ of particle-smasher CERN, he wanted a way to create a web of documents that could be hyperlinked together and accessed without needing another individual on the other side of the line to pick up. There’s a lot of things the World Wide Web is, but a lot it’s not. For example, the world wide web is not “the internet”, but a single way of transferring information across it. The creation of the WWW (or W3) changed the face of not just the internet, but mankind as we know it.
Here’s That Google Glass Instructional Video You Asked For
Pretty clever building the trackpad like that.
Don’t you remember getting that new toy/game/whatever as a kid and ripping out the instruction manual, filling up on all its details, and memorizing the whole thing end to end? Yep, I remember that very well. Well, since I don’t have Google Glass and you probably don’t either, let’s just go ahead and watch this introductory video as if we were wearing them right now.
Spotify Adds Discover Feature To Recommend Music, Finally
There’s no way any civilization could drive electricity from felines.
I need new music. I always need new music, but my tastes are pretty peculiar – maybe everyone’s are – so even a dedicated recommendation engine like Pandora can get it wrong too often. Others are useless. Spotify was in that well too, but they’ve righted it by finally including a new tool to bring you new music ideas. It brings some clever components to the table, but is Discover a worthy of a recommend of its own, yet?
