New Media News Every Morning
The two biggest complaints about the PS3 have been its ridiculous size and ridiculous price. Both are going down with the new $300 PS3 Slim. This little baby packs all the features of the similarly-priced 80GB clunker version, but with a bigger 120GB hard drive. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 19, 2009 @ 10:45 pm
Google Insights for Search, the tool that lets you analyze one or more keywords or phrases to see how it changes in search popularity over time, has just been given some new features.
Firstly, it’s now available in 39 languages, which is great news if you’re not an English speaker or you’re checking out trends in another language. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 19, 2009 @ 5:52 am
After the debacle around the by Microsoft sponsored internet browser security survey the Redmond company continues the smug and now publicly doubts the download numbers for the open source Firefox browser.
Senior Executive Any Barzdukas went as far as saying that the celebrated 1billion downloads “interesting maths” were. Barzdukas, who surprisingly is General Manager at MSFT in charge of the much loathed Internet Explorer, did not detail her claim but let some vague Marketing smug lose:
“As with any marketing statement, I’d encourage people to be somewhat sceptical about large number claims,” she said.
“It’s an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area.”
The Executive further announced that the company will continue to support its Achilles heel, Internet Explorer 6 because users apparently are satisfied with the browser or not aware of the availability if newer versions for the browser.
“The reason that a consumer would still be on IE6 at this point is a lack of awareness or the ‘good enough’ problem,” she said. “If you’re satisfied with what you’re doing and you’re not particularly curious about new technology and don’t really care, upgrading sounds like a hassle. Part of our communication needs to be making clear that there are significant advantages to upgrading to a modern browser.”
Personally I would say that the main reason users still use the security flawed IE6 browser the, just as security flawed ActiveX script, applications are which are used on many internet and intranet websites which require IE6. Not the fact that users can not be bothered to upload. Many a system administrator MUST continue to block updates because companies will not make resources to upgrade large intranets, relying on since IE7 deprecated code.
Not so surprisingly, Firefox has since long surpassed the popularity of IE6 and continues to grow in popularity.
[Via]
Originally posted on August 17, 2009 @ 9:42 am
Microsoft has decided that there’s enough interest in high definition videos online now and has released what it claims is the first consumer webcam with a 720p sensor on board.
I know we don’t usually cover hardware at 901, but this is more about Microsoft’s attitude towards HD video online than it is about the webcam itself.
Microsoft Hardware systems engineer Stuart Milton said that Microsoft was “motivated by the fact that … top social networking sites were allowing widescreen video,” and that the new webcam would allow “uploading widescreen videos with amazing quality to social networking sites and soon chatting live with friends and family in widescreen format”. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 20, 2009 @ 10:48 am
The latest not-really-that-important web statistics show that Google’s GMail web mail service is now the third largest in the US.
What’s more surprising is that it had to overtake AOL to get there.
AOL? Why do so many people still use AOL?
The top two webmail providers are Hotmail, with 47m unique users, and Yahoo! Mail, with a whopping 106m. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 17, 2009 @ 11:23 am