Author: Dr. Bill

Well THAT didn’t last long!

Netflix kills Qwikster after customers bash spinoff of DVD service

“Three weeks ago, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said his company would split its DVD-by-mail service into a new site called Qwikster while keeping video streaming at Netflix.com. The change seemed needlessly drastic and complicated for many users, forcing customers to be billed twice and to search for DVD and streaming content on separate websites. But now, Netflix customers will never have to hear the word Qwikster again.

Customers complained about the confusing changes and Hastings apparently received the message. Hasting announced in a new blog post titled ‘DVDs will be staying at netflix.com’ that Qwikster will now simply go away. ‘It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,’ Hastings wrote. ‘This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.’

Hastings had argued last month that DVDs by mail and streaming are such different businesses that they must ‘grow and operate independently.’ But curiously, the same post touting the benefits of separation also detailed the problems that would lead to extensive customer criticism.

‘A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated,’ Hastings said at the time. ‘So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.’

That, in a nutshell, is why customers didn’t like the idea of Qwikster. Coming on the heels of pricing changes, the attempt to separate DVDs and streaming had Netflix dealing with a PR nightmare. The new, higher pricing for the combined DVD and streaming service is still in effect, but if you type Qwikster.com into your URL bar today, you’ll be redirected to Netflix.”

This is the official statement from Apple:

“October 5, 2011

Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that
enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.”

This is very sad news. I was not really an Apple customer, but I admired their hardware, and have always wanted a MacBook Pro. Steve was definitely a visionary that greatly impacted the computer world, and has a hugely prominent place in computer history. May he rest in peace.

My favorite Office Suite is one year old!

LibreOffice, TDF Mark First Anniversary of Office Productivity Suite

“The Document Foundation marks the first anniversary of the day developers broke away from Oracle-controlled OpenOffice.org to launch the LibreOffice office productivity suite.

A year after forking the OpenOffice.org project to create a community-driven office productivity suite, The Document Foundation estimated that LibreOffice has 25 million users worldwide.

The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice marked their first anniversary on Sept. 28.

OpenOffice.org developers originally created LibreOffice to break the software away from Oracle’s control after it appeared that the database giant was not interested in working with the open-source community. The Document Foundation was founded to make the project truly vendor-neutral. Google was among the first companies to support the new project.

Oracle responded to the split by forcing TDF members who were also participating on the OpenOffice community council to step down. Despite not having Oracle support, LibreOffice has thrived in the past year, with more than 25,000 code ‘commits’ submitted by 330 contributors. Code commits reflect major changes to code, the addition of new features and bug fixes.

‘The Document Foundation has attracted more developers with commits in the first year than the OpenOffice.org project in the first decade,’ said Norbert Thiebaud, a member of TDF Engineering Steering Committee.

LibreOffice has been downloaded about 7.5 million times since the first stable launch in January, TDF estimated. However, another 10 million users have installed the code via USB stick or CD burned by one of these downloads. Most Linux users get LibreOffice directly from their distribution’s software repositories.

As expected, a bulk of LibreOffice’s popularity comes from Linux users, primarily because major Linux distributions favor LibreOffice over OpenOffice.org. Approximately 60 percent of the installed base use Linux, 36 percent use Windows and the remaining 4 percent use Mac OS X, according to statistics collected by TDF.

The developer community is ‘well balanced’ between company-sponsored contributors and independent volunteers, Italo Vignoli, a member of the TDF Steering Committee, wrote on The Document Foundation blog. SuSE and Red Hat are major contributors to the project, and organizations such as Canonical have dedicated LibreOffice developers on staff.”

Oops! M$ may have had a Freudian slip of sorts! It seems that a Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus update identifies good ol’ Google Chrome as a virus and removes it!

Faulty Microsoft AV update nukes Chrome browser

Summary: Microsoft has confirmed that its security tools erroneously removed the Google Chrome browser from Windows machines, marking it as a variant of the notorious Zeus (Zbot) malware family.

UPDATE: Microsoft has confirmed that this was caused by a faulty anti-virus definition update that affected about 3,000 Windows users.

Here’s Microsoft’s statement:

‘On September 30th, 2011, an incorrect detection for PWS:Win32/Zbot was identified and as a result, Google Chrome was inadvertently blocked and in some cases removed from customers PCs. We have already fixed the issue — we released an updated signature (1.113.672.0) at 9:57 am PDT — but approximately 3,000 customers were impacted.’

A Microsoft spokesperson says affected users should manually update Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) with the latest signatures.

‘To do this, simply launch MSE, go to the update tab and click the Update button, and then reinstall Google Chrome. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers,’ the spokesperson said.

Yeah, right!

I pretty much buy all my computer’y stuff from TigerDirect! A few exceptions… but they always have good prices and great service! So, I was pleased when I had the chance to ad them as an advertiser on the Blog and Netcast… very cool! Click on the ad at the right and save beau coups on laptops! Dewd! Brand new laptops from $259.99? Awesome! Anyway, I am stoked that they are here… click away!

What is your favorite, “I use it everyday” computer utility? One of mine is DropBox! If you have never downloaded it and set it up, click this abbreviated link: https://db.tt/TXuyPie

Dewd! It is awesome! Storage “in the Cloud!” Once you start using it on all your PCs… you will never want to go back from a time when your most used files aren’t always available at your fingertips!