Linux News: Tech Blog

Video Game Spinoffs: A New Music Revolution?

Thursday - June 12, 2008

"Rock Band." "Guitar Hero." "SingStar." These music-oriented video games have become fixtures in popular culture, appearing in movies and on television, and sparking a new musical movement. Younger players are not only gaining exposure to a wider variety of genres and artists, but also getting a basic music education. Although no one will argue that these games truly emulate playing a real guitar or a real bass, they certainly nurture musical imaginations. [More...]

For a Ninja, Itagaki Makes a Pretty Noisy Exit

Thursday - June 5, 2008

Tomonobu Itagaki, renowned producer of the "Ninja Gaiden" series and head of Tecmo's Team Ninja, has resigned effective July 1, 2008 -- obviously timing his announcement to coincide with the release of "Ninja Gaiden 2," Team Ninja's latest contribution to the action/adventure genre of the video game industry. [More...]

Is Facebook Ready to Show Us What's Under the Hood?

Tuesday - May 27, 2008

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. [More...]

YouTube to Lieberman: Censor This

Tuesday - May 20, 2008

I remember being at the 2000 Democratic National Convention and watching Joe Lieberman give his speech accepting the nomination as Al Gore's running mate. Contrasted with the opposing lines of bandana-faced protesters and riot-geared officers, his speech left me hopeful and uplifted. I've got a whole different view of Joe Lieberman these days. [More...]

Here's Why Facebook Has Trouble Making Friends

Monday - May 19, 2008

It's heartening to see that Mark Zuckerberg is following my advice and seeking a sit-down with Google to hammer out their differences over this Friend Connect thing. It would be heartening as well to see Facebook coming to the defense of my private data as forcefully as it has been -- if only it actually were about my private data. [More...]

HBO Swings iTunes Deal With Some Premium Pricing

Tuesday - May 13, 2008

Leave it to the network that brought us Tony Soprano to break Apple's iTunes video pricing model. The Time Warner subsidiary and Apple on Tuesday announced that some HBO programming is now available at the online store, with a few shows priced at $2.99 per episode. Apple is selling episodes of "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome" for $2.99 each. [More...]

Breaches Make a Mockery of PCI Security Standards

Tuesday - May 13, 2008

The restaurant-slash-arcade-slash-bar Dave & Buster's is the latest U.S. outlet to suffer a breach of its credit card processing system. Hackers based in Ukraine and Estonia -- assisted by a guy in Miami -- installed packet sniffer malware at the point of sale systems in several D&B outlets. [More...]

Social Net Data Portability: Too Much Information?

Monday - May 12, 2008

It seems as though everyone wants to be both social and portable these days. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace all have recently trumpeted their latest efforts at openness. Are they really the same? In some cases -- Yahoo and Google, primarily -- the OpenSocial framework is providing a set of standards to ensure interoperability among the applications themselves. [More...]

P2P and P4P: The Tangled Web We Weave

Wednesday - May 7, 2008

It was Monday morning, and Haiyong Xie was running late. His flight to Los Angeles had been delayed, and then he had to face LA's beastly morning traffic. Xie, of Yale University, was on his way to the P2P Media Summit at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel to take part in a panel discussion about the P4P Working Group. [More...]

CinemaNow: The Phone Is the Box Office, Not the Theater

Tuesday - April 29, 2008

The online delivery of movies and TV content is encumbered by a tangle of digital rights management, copyright and technological issues. The cell phone's proper place in the whole landscape is one of many difficult questions the industry's trying to sort out. With its new offering, CinemaNow proposes that the cell phone work as a sort of portable box office. [More...]

The Foul Flavor of Force-Fed Vista

Friday - April 25, 2008

Costco and Sam's Club are rationing rice. Friday's reported incident in the Persian Gulf probably has more than a few paranoid individuals stocking up on gasoline. And to top it all off, Microsoft's cutoff date for Windows XP is coming in two months, a decision that's left over 165,000 fans of the OS so upset that they were willing to devote a full three seconds of their lives to sign an online petition to save XP. [More...]

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