Month: January 2008

I told you that IPTV was coming… and it is getting hotter and hotter! Now a service is competing with Apple TV for viewers.

Vudu drops its price to compete with Apple TV

“High-definition on-demand service Vudu has announced it is slashing its price for its console by 25 percent, perhaps in response to Apple TV’s having replenished its own value proposition. In the short few months it has been available, Vudu has tried numerous offers in an effort to eke out a measurable stake in the video on-demand market: First, it offered $50 of free movies with purchase, then it announced a tie-in with Sharp’s Aquos HDTV line. Now, it’s taking a cue from HD DVD by instituting a severe price drop. By pulling the unit down to a $295 price point and offering $100 movie credit to those who purchased it within the last 30 days, Vudu is now on par price-wise with competing service Apple TV, which retails for $229 for its 40 GB model. Many are predicting that the high-def disc format war will end when streaming HD becomes affordable enough to be adopted by the majority. A price war between Vudu and Apple TV may be the first step away from the seemingly interminable Blu-ray vs. HD DVD fight.”

Weird. Imagine your PC being taken over so that you can’t do anything… until you call a number and pay a $30.00 extortion fee to have you PC unlocked! This is why we don’t read attachments EVER! Sigh.

Trojan delivers pay-by-phone extortion

Check out the screen shots in the article… this is a weird one!

Again, check it!

Especially check out the wireless-“borrow”-a-CD from another system!

You GOTTA see this video! Dewd!!!!! Check this out!

You WILL NOT believe it!

Wow! MySQL is free to download and use… but Sun is paying for the company BIG TIME!

Sun to spend $1B to acquire MySQL, will compete with Oracle, Microsoft

“One of the principal products in the LAMP open source arsenal will become a Sun Microsystems product, possibly by the end of this quarter. When discussing enterprise database installations worldwide, as of today, it will be impossible not to consider Sun Microsystems along with Microsoft and Oracle. This morning, Sun announced it has reached an agreement with MySQL — which by some accounts may have become the producer of the most widely installed database, under everyone’s noses — in a deal expected to be closed as soon as this March. ‘Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet,’ Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote for this blog this morning. ‘No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that: positioned Sun at the center of the Web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the Web economy.'”