Month: October 2010

I have Vudu on my Visio Blu-Ray Player at home. It is pretty cool! In fact, my Player came with $15.00 in free rentals, which I have to use before the end of this month! So, I had better get busy this weekend and watch some stuff! Anyway, the Boxee Box looks cool… but, I am leaning toward the Roku box… more on that when I finally get one, or the other! The bottom line is, the future is Streaming Video on the Internet (IPTV!) You have heard it here on the Doctor’s Blog for years!

Right Place, Right Time: Vudu streaming movie service hits Boxee

“Streaming video on demand service Vudu will be available on all forms of Boxee in November, the company announced Thursday. This partnership will put a Vudu client on both the D-Link Boxee Box and the Boxee media center software for PC and Mac.

The service offers 480p, 720p, and 1080p HD movie rentals, and gets many movies in conjunction with their DVD launch. Though the service first launched as a standalone set top box back in 2007, it eventually became a video solution embedded in TVs and connected Blu-ray players.

Vudu’s shift to being an embedded service looks to have been timed perfectly, and it is now available on products from LG, Mitsubishi, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba and Vizio. In early 2010, Vudu was acquired by Wal-Mart, cementing its place in the burgeoning for-pay video streaming market alongside Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Blockbuster.

Now, with a place in the Boxee Box, Vudu finds itself again in the right place at the right time. Set top boxes that stream content ‘over the top’ (OTT) of an internet connection are hot items right now, and Boxee will be competing with Google TV and the Logitech Revue set top box, Apple’s newly redesigned AppleTV, and Roku’s streaming media player, now sold in retail through Netgear.”

So, there has long been a “fuss” among Linux wonks about “KDE?” or “Gnome?” Well, Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) say, “Unity!” The new Unity interface is built on Gnome, but it is different! Interesting choice, Canonical!

Ubuntu drops GNOME in favor of homegrown Unity UI

“The ‘Unity’ user interface that debuted in Ubuntu 10.10’s Netbook Edition will be standard on the next version of the Ubuntu Desktop Edition as well. Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will replace the Linux distribution’s default GNOME desktop environment in favor of the multitouch-enabled Unity interface, says Ubuntu sponsor Canonical.

Making the announcement at a keynote Oct. 25 at Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will swap out the GNOME user interface in favor of the Unity interface that is now available on the Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE).
‘We conceived some work a time ago focused on netbooks that we want to bring to desktops,’ Shuttleworth said.

Canonical introduced Unity, the multitouch interface, this month with Ubuntu 10.10 (‘Maverick Meerkat’) UNE. Unity gives users 3D graphics support and better touchscreen enablement. The desktop/laptop version of Ubuntu 10.10 still has the long-standing GNOME 2.2 interface by default.”

I have finished an “upfit,” and “re-branding,” of the Dr. Bill.TV web site! It is the new “go to” place for Dr. Bill -The Computer Curmudgeon videos! It would be REALLY great if you would consider subscribing to this feed for the new, re-launched show! If you go to the site, you will see lot’s of ways to subscribe at the bottom of the main page. Enjoy the geekiness!

Dr. Bill.TV Web Site

More stuff coming soon on the next Netcast! Stay tuned!

Also, feel free to “spam” your friends with email about how strange, silly, and high tech weird the Dr. Bill Show is!

Limewire has been shutdown. And, I must admit, I am not disturbed by that. I have cleaned up tons o’ PCs of my friends that, after using Limewire, became severely infected from bogus crapware that came through Limewire! After a four-year legal battle… they have been ordered to close up shop.

Limewire shut down after four-year patent infringement battle

“After an arduous four years in and out of the courtroom, battling the RIAA over copyright infringement accusations, peer to peer file sharing service Limewire has finally been shut down. The RIAA’s suit against Limewire was part of a sweeping initiative to curb the trade of copyrighted materials on peer-to-peer networks. In 2005, the group sent cease and desist letters to the owners of major p2p services including Kazaa, WinMX, i2Hub, eDonkey, BearShare, and LimeWire. The orders demanded the services ‘immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings,’ but gave the services the option to discuss ‘pre-litigation resolutions.’ Most services complied, such as Kazaa, which offered a $115 million settlement. The RIAA eventually had to haul Limewire into court. ‘Despite numerous efforts to engage LimeWire, the site’s corporate owners have shown insufficient interest in developing a legal business model that adequately respects copyrights,’ the RIAA said at the time. After a protracted court battle, US District Court Judge Kimba Wood handed down her summary judgement in favor of the RIAA last May. As it turned out, the RIAA’s legal team presented Limewire’s ‘smoking gun’ in court back in 2008: e-mail communications that showed the service was built with the illegality of file sharing taken fully into account. Today, the service was shut down.”

This sounds like it will be a cool, new technology when we have it in our hands! Cool!

“Wi-Fi Direct certification has begun. The Wi-Fi Alliance announced today that products from Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, and Cisco will be the first Certified Wi-Fi Direct hardware in the test bed for the new wireless networking standard.

The key feature of the new Wi-Fi Direct standard is that it lets devices with 802.11 wireless radios communicate directly with one another without the need of a wireless router between them. Wi-Fi Direct devices near one another can transfer content at speeds 25 times faster than they could with Bluetooth 2.0. As a result, the standard has been referred to as a Bluetooth Killer in IEEE meetings.

‘We designed Wi-Fi Direct to unleash a wide variety of applications which require device connections, but do not need the internet or even a traditional network,’ said Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance. ‘Wi-Fi Direct empowers users to connect devices – when, where and how they want to, and our certification program delivers products that work well together, regardless of the brand.'”