Join Dr. Bill as he examines the wild and wacky world of the web, computers, and all things geeky! Hot Tech Tips, Tech News, and Geek Culture are examined… with plenty of good humor as well!
I know not everyone does part-time, volunteer work for an Internet Radio Station, but, hey! You may want to add a player to your own web site! So, here’s the best player I’ve found! It will use HTML5, or Flash, if it is not supported. And, it is free and Open Source!
The Verge – By: Lizzie Plaugic – “Tomorrow, March 14th, is Pi Day. While some will celebrate by eating lots of pie, or waking up at exactly 9:26:53 AM, Microsoft is paying homage to the mathematical constant with a deal that doubles as a play on the pi digits. For 24 hours tomorrow, you’ll be able to buy a 12-month pass to Xbox Music for just $31.41.
A year-long pass for the service usually costs $99, which means the Pi Day price will save you almost $70. The offer is good for new subscriptions and renewals of existing subscriptions.
Microsoft started charging for the music streaming service at the end of last year, so if you gave up once the free ride was over, now might be a good time to reconsider.”
c|net – By: Dara Kerr – “Austin, Texas — It’s still unclear if the consumer version of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — special goggles that let users view simulated 3D worlds — is going to hit stores in 2015. But that doesn’t mean something is awry.
‘Nothing is going horribly wrong,’ said Oculus founder Palmer Luckey on Friday. ‘Everything is going horribly right.’
Luckey was speaking during an ‘Ask Anything’ panel discussion at the South by Southwest festival here, which brings together technorati, filmmakers and musicians. The festival also has a massive presence from the video game industry, with hundreds of developers showing off their products at the so-called SXSW Gaming Expo.
It’s been rumored that the Oculus goggles would be hitting stores this year, but the company has repeatedly declined to comment on specific dates.
Just a couple of years ago, the idea of virtual-reality headsets seemed like a pipe dream, but now several companies are planning to bring these special goggles to the public. Facebook spent $2 billion to buy Oculus last year, and in just the past 12 months, others including HTC, Valve and Sony have unveiled competing devices as well.
Oculus Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell, who was also speaking on the panel at SXSW, said the company wants everything to be perfect before Oculus finally lands on store shelves.
‘We’ve been determined to release our own consumer virtual reality for some time,’ Mitchell said. ‘We want to launch this thing as soon as we possibly can, but with absolutely no compromises.'”
Yahoo! Tech – By: Daniel Howley – “Exactly 30 years ago, on Sunday, March 15, 1985, a computer company in Massachusetts registered the world’s first dot-com domain: Symbolics.com. And with that, the dot-com era officially began.
By the end of 1985, Symbolics.com was still one of just a small number of registered domains. Today, of course, there are hundreds of millions of domains floating around the Internet.
The domain system is a key foundation of the World Wide Web, which was born in 1991, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the father of that idea, but it wouldn’t have gone far without a universal address network like the domain system.
The dot-com’s 30th birthday got us thinking about the Internet’s past. And that got us thinking about all of the dot-coms that came online in the past 30 years. And some that went.”
And, it is still up, but not owned by the same folks, the site says:
“Symbolics.com is owned by a small investor group in Dallas, Texas. This site offers unique and interesting facts pertaining to business and Internet history.
Symbolics.com also offers a few unique advertising opportunities for select companies. Contact us if you have interest.
— Symbolics.com History —
So. How did I come to own the first domain name registered on the Internet? Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. I was 5 years old. I like to tell everyone that I had incredible foresight as a toddler. But that’s not the case.
Let me tell you a bit about the Symbolics Computer Corporation. These are the people who registered the name in 1985, and they were a company way ahead of its time.
The original Symbolics company pioneered computer development. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available ‘workstation’ (although that word had not yet been coined). Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s. **
Enter me, in 2009. I had always known (well, since the late 90s) that Symbolics.com was the first domain name registered on the Internet. It was a goal of mine to acquire one of the first few names ever registered. I know that others before me had reached out to Symbolics, and inquired about the purchase price of the domain name. For whatever reason, my timing was perfect (thank you Lord) and I contacted Symbolics right about the time they actually started considering selling the asset.
Today, Symbolics.com remains the first, and oldest, registered domain name out of approximately 275,000,000 domain names in existence. Of these 275 million domain names, approximately 120 million are of the .com extension. VeriSign reports that between 25 million and 30 million new domains are registered each year. There is a 72% – 75% renewal rate among .com domains – so approximately 3/4 of new registrations are renewed the following year. VeriSign reports that 87% of .com domains resolve to an active website (13% are inactive).
For me, personally, I am excited (and honored) to hold the first .com ever registered. Since domain names are my business, I am happy to be the owner of this fantastic piece of Internet history.
Mashable – By: Elif Koc – “Mattel’s new ‘Hello Barbie’ has more tricks up her sleeve than just saying hello.
With the press of a button, Barbie’s embedded microphone turns on and records the voice of the child playing with her. The recordings are then uploaded to a cloud server, where voice detection technology helps the doll make sense of the data. The result? An inquisitive Barbie who remembers your dog’s name and brings up your favorite hobbies in your next chitchat.
The doll, which made her debut at the 2015 American International Toy Fair, has privacy activists demanding its removal.
‘Kids using Hello Barbie aren’t only talking to a doll,’ said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. ‘They are talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose only interest in them is financial.’
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has launched a petition against Mattel, worries that the toy leaves children entirely vulnerable to sneaky advertorial efforts from the giant toy company.
‘In Mattel’s demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family,’ Angela Campbell, a faculty adviser at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, said. ‘This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children.’
Despite bringing in $7.1 billion in 2013 toy sales, Mattel’s profits have been on the decline, and the company faces growing competition with digital games and toys.
Mattel partnered with ToyTalk, a San-Francisco based start-up, to give Hello Barbie her voice. ToyTalk, which has created iPad games where children can converse with digital animals, describes itself as ‘an award-winning, family entertainment company that creates conversational characters.’
ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob insists that the toy will not use the audio recordings for marketing purposes. ‘The data is never used for anything to do with marketing or publicity or any of that stuff. Not at all,’ he told the Washington Post.
Yet beyond the scope of a mega-corporation having a portal to a child’s inner thoughts, the voice-recognizing toy brings up a host of concerns for privacy advocates, especially because parents can get weekly e-mails with audio files of the child’s conversations with Hello Barbie.
While Jacob explained that feature was to ensure that ‘parents are in control of their family’s data at all times,’ that extra layer of transparency is ‘troubling,’ to Linn.
‘Children confide in their dolls,’ she said. ‘When children have conversations with dolls and stuffed animals, they’re playing, and they reveal a lot about themselves.’
As voice recognition technology has become increasingly reliable, we’ve grown comfortable with seeing it in our devices, from affable mobile assistants like Siri to Amazon’s new smart-home gadget Amazon Echo.
But there’s a difference between an adult knowingly giving their information to a company and a child unknowingly playing with a data-collecting toy.
Golan Levin, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies new modes of interactive expression, is also concerned with the doll’s data collection. ‘This is actually downright creepy,’ he told Mashable. ‘The difference between Siri and this toy is that I’m an adult. I’ve consented to give my information to Apple.’
Mattel told the Post that they are ‘committed to safety and security, and Hello Barbie conforms to applicable government standards.’
But with the recent high-profile threats to online data, not everyone’s convinced.
‘They’re toy makers, not a cyber security company,’ Levin said. ‘Why don’t they talk to Sony about cyber security vulnerabilities?’
Keep an eye (and ear) out for Hello Barbie, who plans to hit shelves this fall at $74.99.”
c|net – By: Matt Elliott – “I sometimes catch myself attempting to swipe or tap on the screen of my MacBook. When I’m driving, I’ve caught myself reaching for the radio to skip back 15 seconds as if I had somehow DVR’d NPR. With the abundance of technology in our lives, it can be difficult to keep track of what can do what.
If you have grown accustomed to mobile apps like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter that let you pull down to refresh your feed, you’ll enjoy the latest build of Chrome for Android. It lets you pull down to reload the current page you are viewing. Once you have swiped down to get to the top of the page, you can swipe down again to refresh.
The new version of Chrome — build 41 — is still making its way to the Play Store. If you are the impatient type, you can sideload the APK of Chrome 41 here. Or you can install the Chrome Beta app (interestingly, it’s build 42) from the Play store.”
Search Engine Watch – By: Yuyu Chen – “Microsoft is working on an advanced version of Cortana to rival the likes of Apple’s Siri and Google Now, according to a Reuters’ interview with Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft research.
The new version of Cortana is based on research from Microsoft’s artificial intelligence project called ‘Einstein.’ It will be built into Windows 10 this fall, and further be available on both iOS and Android devices.
‘This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame,’ said Horvitz.
Supported by Cortana’s search, speech recognition, and machine learning capabilities, Microsoft aims to this advanced version into the first intelligent digital assistant that can predict users’ needs.
But whether Cortana will become the cream of the crop remains to be seen, as Google and Apple are pushing boundaries as well.
In its latest mobile app, Google has leveraged its billions of searches to predict what a user is doing and what they are interested in, and send them relevant information accordingly. At the same time, Apple has integrated Siri (which uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine) into its CarPlay software to allow drivers to reply to incoming messages without taking their eyes off the road. The company has also placed Siri on its HomeKit system and Apple Watch.”
VLC Player to support Chromecast, Oracle’s Java now infects Macs with Crapware, FREAK exploit DOES effect Windows, Sony sells 20.2 million Playstation 4’s since 2013, GSotW: The Free Kindle Reading App, a personal tribute to Leonard Nimoy, Robots in film
VLC Player to support Chromecast, Oracle’s Java now infects Macs with Crapware, FREAK exploit DOES effect Windows, Sony sells 20.2 million Playstation 4’s since 2013, GSotW: The Free Kindle Reading App, a personal tribute to Leonard Nimoy, Robots in film
Oculus Rift is going to be so cool!
