Month: September 2007

Yep… Yahoo is phasing out it’s podcast directory. Not that it has been very good.

Yahoo to Stop Podcasts, Unlimited Music’s Future in Doubt

“In a banner along the top of its Web page, Yahoo notified users of its podcast service today that it will be shutting down that service on October 31. This as TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington discovered the company has scheduled a priority meeting of its senior executives, including CEO Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker, for tomorrow morning. This afternoon, Yahoo felt the need to prepare customers – and perhaps investors – for tomorrow’s news, by giving it the best spin possible early on. ‘Today we’re planning some changes that also have our user and customer experiences in mind,’ reads a message on Yahoo’s corporate blog from entertainment and video head Vince Broady, entitled, ‘Finding Focus in Hollywood.’ ‘We are streamlining the structure of one portion of our Santa Monica presence – our entertainment division – with a vision of offering a more integrated entertainment experience. That means we’ll be creating more synergies between our music, games, movies, TV, and omg! properties, making them more personal and engaging for entertainment hounds.'”

Is Vista catching on? Apparently not! Microsoft has been pressured into continuing to sell Windows XP!

Five More Months Tacked Onto XP Availability Roadmap

“Apparently bending to pressure from partner OEMs who continue to report customers continuing to demand Windows XP, Microsoft decided this morning to extend the availability of the older operating system series to the retail channel and to partners from January to June 2008, as it maintains availability to system builders clear through to January 2009. The move comes several months after Dell reported it would continue offering Windows XP as an option for its systems as long as it could. However, another possible contributing factor could be the company’s plan for XP Service Pack 3. A check of the company’s service pack roadmap today shows the company has only tentative faith in its ability to produce SP3 by as late as next June.”

The smiley face “emoticon” is twenty five years old. Wow! Does everything have a “birthday” these days?

The Smiley Turns 25

“Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman who says he was the first to use three keystrokes. ‘Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.'”

As you know, Freespire is my favorite Linux DESKTOP distro (followed closely by Kubutu.) My favorite SERVER distro is CentOS Linux. Anyway, a new version of Freespire is out! Check it out!

Freespire Linux Web Site

Changes:

Config files updated:
sources.list (commented out ubuntu repository sources resolving apt-get upgrade issues)

Packages upgraded:
cnr-client (new and improved CNR plugin version 0.1.2600)
flash9-plugin (updated to 9.0 r60 – version 9.0.60)
knetworkconf
knetworkmanager
kplayer (updated from version 0.5.3 to 0.6.3)
kuser
sun-java6-bin
sun-java6-jre
sun-java6-plugin

Packages removed:
nvu

It is interesting that they removed Nvu… maybe Komposer is taking over it’s “market share!”