Month: December 2007

Everyone likes to play “predict the future” and with tech it seems even more fun! So, the Techpodcasts crew was polled for predictions, and these are the results!

Techpodcasts Tech Predictions 2008

“‘Don’t Tase me, Bro.’ is being heralded as the top quote of 2007. Who would have guessed that? Well, some tried to in early 2007. Predicting the future is not just a psychics’ job. Then again, we are not predicting – we are analyzing – Seeing trends in the last year to determine what is coming out next year. I went through some of the predictions of 2007. Some were dead on. Social Networking and Apple devices seemed to top the list in this subject. Other predictions – well, not so much. Now we are fast approaching 2008. There is a lot of technology that was debuted in 2007 and since they are still in their infant stages, we will see them ramp into tools that change the way we compute. 2007 was also a year of rethinking. Going Green is one of the ways we rethought things. We definitely had some good progress and will continue the trend. So what is in store for 2008? I paneled my fellow techies at www.techpodcasts.com and we came up with some items to think about for this New Year.”

(Read the article at the link above for the list!)

Wow! I remember way back in the “olden” days of the web… when Netscape was king! Now, as 2007 closes… AOL (which acquired Netscape) is killing it off!

The end of an era as AOL officially retires Netscape

“As we bid adieu to 2007 and prepare to enter the new year, AOL is also saying goodbye to memories: the company has finally killed off the Netscape Web browser – or what was left of it, anyway. March 31, 2008 will mark 10 years since the Netscape development team opened up the source code to the browser that ushered in the Internet era. With its acquisition of Netscape in 1999, AOL continued that effort and helped launch the Mozilla Foundation into an organization that has taken on Microsoft and shaped the Web as we know it today. But Netscape’s time has long since passed due to the arrival of Firefox and AOL’s struggles to stay relevant in an increasingly broadband-connected decade. Netscape 6, the first browser based upon the Mozilla source code, debuted in 2000 and was succeeded two years later by Netscape 7, also a rebranded version of Mozilla. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer quickly took over Windows desktops and Netscape’s market share dwindled to single digits. The demise of Netscape wasn’t a big surprise to most. When the Internet bubble burst, there was little money to fund development of a product that could compete with something Microsoft gave away for free. Even the Mozilla foundation barely limped along with help from AOL until Google laid its golden egg: advertising in search results.”

Yay! They lost their Nasdaq listing!

Embattled vendor SCO Group dumped by NASDAQ

“A lost legal struggle with Linux distributor Novell, an apparently truncated fight with IBM, a bankruptcy filing in September…and now, a NASDAQ delisting. Is there any hope at all left for floundering PC Unix vendor SCO? The long embattled PC Unix vendor SCO has finally gotten the heave-ho from NASDAQ, some two months after filing for bankruptcy and three months after losing a crucial legal copyright struggle with Novell, a company that’s morphed over the years into a major distributor of Linux, a competing breed of Unix software that also runs on PCs.”

Ya-ha-ha! (Gloating ensues.)

Dewd! This is cool! Scientists have found a galaxy that is blasting it’s neighboring galaxy with death rays! Rock on!

“Death Star” Galaxy Found Blasting Smaller Neighbor

“The supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting a smaller neighbor with a violent energy jet—earning it the moniker the “Death Star” galaxy—scientists announced today. The jet has probably fried the atmospheres of any planets in the way, researchers added. But the never-before-seen display may also one day lead to a new burst of star and planet formation. And it may help unravel the many mysteries about how such jets form, how they work, and how they evolve, experts said. ‘The origin, propagation, and energy dissipation of jets are among the most important unsolved problems in modern astrophysics,’ said lead study author Daniel Evans of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Dewd! 10 years since the term “blogging” was coined… and now, we use it all the time! (OK, well, I do!)

Blogging celebrates its tenth birthday

“Happy blog-a-versary! Today is the tenth anniversary of the coining of the term that makes some of us giddy and others recoil in horror: blogging. If you subscribe to the view that says the term was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997, today’s the day. It was on that day that he combined the word “web” and “log” to describe his personal journal online, according to blogging lore. Back then, the number of blogs on the web varied, with some citing numbers in the mere double digits. The trend has exploded since then, with new blogs coming online every day.”

Can Microsoft be any lamer? Their “amazing, new” Vista operating system has been widely dissed by users, many of whom have opted to go back to Windows XP… now M$ is coming out with Vista Service Pack 1, which has over 300 fixes… and requires an arduous process involving three reboots! Funny, you can upgrade Ubuntu with only one or two mouse clicks!

Windows Vista SP1 Includes More Than 300 Hot Fixes

“Microsoft has released a detailed roster of the contents of its forthcoming service pack for Windows Vista, and the list includes more than 300 hot fixes covering everything from data protection to video performance. The list, recently posted on Microsoft’s Web site, can be downloaded as a 47-page document that the company says is not exhaustive. Microsoft plans to add more fixes and patches to Windows Vista SP1 before a final version is released to the public early next year. For now, Vista users can entertain themselves by poring over the hundreds of updates that Microsoft says will be part of SP1. Among them: a fix for a problem in which optical disks turn blank after being formatted with Vista’s Live File System; a patch for a glitch that generates an error message when large files are copied from one Vista-based computer to another over a network; and an update designed to improve Vista’s speed when its operating on a computer linked to a virtual private network. Other updates are meant to improve Internet Explorer’s streaming video performance and prevent data loss in USB devices connected to Vista PCs. There’s also a fix that adds a Venezuelan time zone. Microsoft said some of the fixes detailed in the list are already available to the public as individual downloads, while others will only be released as part of the final version of Vista SP1. Unfortunately for some Vista users — especially those running custom business apps — the service pack will not fix some application compatibility problems that affect the current version of Vista.”