Yes, even the President has an app for that: >

Today, we’re excited to announce the new White House App available for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The White House App delivers dynamic content from WhiteHouse.gov to the palm of your hand.

One feature that stands out is live video streaming. Now anyone with this app can watch the President’s public events at the White House, frequent web chats with Administration officials, and other events like key speeches and press briefings in real time.

CES 2010 keynote. Streaming via MS Silverlight. They go to demo their own upcoming product, Halo Reach and guess what? They block it for intellectual property rights reasons. They block their own demo!

haha. brilliant.

What’s with these idiotic companies whose management says “Hey, people like our mice, let’s put up a cyber monday deal. Let’s tell everyone ahead of time. Let’s only sell 300 items for $1. Let’s tell them it starts at 12am EST. Let’s run this deal on our $9/month web server. Let’s do this deal on our $9/month server that has 5 Flash movies on the home page.”

Oh look. 11:38pm on Sunday night and the server is smoked. Dead. Server not responding.

Now I don’t know what their server actually costs per month, but really Razer, before you think about these kinds of deals again, make sure you can handle the load. Now all you’ve got is a bunch of pissed off, cheap customers.

BING! Another spammer passes their filter! BING! There is another one!

“Microsoft works to fix a bug, discovered earlier this week by Webroot researchers, that let spammers piggyback onto Bing redirects and get through spam filters”

Apparently, search results could take you to spam sites that look like the real site. Fun!

I’ll stick with Google.

Story

As reported by slashdot Verizon CEO Dick Lynch has said that ‘We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable’

This kind of thinking is unacceptable, so I wrote them a letter and I’ll share it with you.

If you feel strongly about this, let Verizon know how you’ll spend your future dollars as well.

Hello. This is a letter for corporate. I recently read about your CEO’s comments on metered internet access. Please inform him that I am a Verizon FIOS fan, but I cannot currently use your product because I live in Vancouver, WA, I did use your product while living in Oregon and I champion your product to all of my friends in other cities/states. However, if he keeps this diatribe up about metered bandwidth and how it is “inevitable,” I will have to inform my friends that their dollars are helping to ruin the internet and that they might want to consider a different product.

Unlimited bandwidth is a necessity for the internet market. If you start metering the internet, you will need all new OS features, for every TCP/IP device that exists. If someone wants to rent a movie from Amazon, for example, they’ll have to be informed that it will cost them another $5 from Verizon to download that content! Or lord knows what other nightmares this will cause.

This is a silly idea and your CEO needs to be smarter and find a better way to make Verizon profitable. If there is a very small % of people using a lot of the bandwidth, then the company can put reduced bandwidth for those that go over some large cap, but you cannot and should not put metered pricing tiers in place; It’ll never work. The network wants to be free and it’ll find a way around your limitations, ultimately hurting your company.

And remember, we consumers know that you sell not just internet access, but also cellular service, television and phone service. We can avoid those products as well.

Sincerely,

Steve

hehe MS is trying so hard to copy everyone, and still they fail. I tried searching for “easiest computer to use”

Bing:

Notice the dell and hp ads, with the only sponsored ad being a “Fix Windows Now” ad. Then it takes us to a link whose page is no longer available, something about hacking NETBIOS and yet another windows fixit tool.

Rofl.

Let’s see what Google came up with:

Hmm, a couple ads for target and some seniors, the sponsored ads are from Consumer Reports (nice) and BizRate.

Then top hit is an epinions article talking about the mac, a techmo forum post and a shopping.com/epinion MacBook review.

This news story claims that while eBay did pay 2.6 billion for Skype, it didn’t include core technology.

Rather, eBay licensed it hoping they could replace it on their own. Which may not happen.

Brilliant.

We’ve received some of the iChat logs between two higher ups at eBay, that may explain how this fiasco came about:

Brilliant eBay Person A: “Whoa, check it out, these guys are auctioning off skype on OUR site, totally bid man!”

Brilliant eBay Person B: “Are we sure the box comes with everything? It says ‘Includes 1 of 20 possible licenses’”

Brilliant eBay Person A:“I dunno, we’d never let people put up shady auctions, just bid! There are like 2 minutes left, look! see! some dude ‘developersdevelopersdevelopers1976′ just bid a billion, c’mon!”

OMG this looks freaking fantastic!

Be sure to watch the HD version if your computer can handle it.

TRON Legacy

This is a very cool idea to replace our normal two outlet fixtures.

Now all we need are plugs that have 90 degree rotated prongs.

You can barely see my bald head, John is in the middle and this great guy we met, Carlos, is on the left, while the author is checking out something on his iPhone.

How I spent my WWDC

Even though the name is lousy, the new Microsoft search engine “Bing” has some nice maps.

Go to Bing Maps and enter an address, then click the “Bird’s eye” button on the top of the map. You can even rotate the bird’s eye.

Bing maps, however, place the marker for our house two doors south, whereas google maps gets it right. I cannot move the bing maps marker yet, either.

So we see an ad on TV for DexKnows.com (the phone book) “Dex knows!” the ads say. Alright, I’m up for trying out new things, so I go to dexknows.com and search for “indian” near my zip code.

It suggests a lovely indian restaurant.

In Eugene, Oregon.

127 miles away.

Until Digg stops forcing people to use their Digg Bar¹ and stops redirecting all hits (via 200′s) to their own site, I have stopped reading Digg and have stopped sending them any traffic.

Speaking up against sitejacking is important. Facebook and StumbleUpon wrap sites, but they at least send 301 codes, which redirects properly to the destination URL. Digg doesn’t do this and is merely wrapping a poor attempt to hijack hits wrapped in a trojan horse called the Digg Bar.

I have not verified the site redirects myself, but I trust those who have reported on this. I’ll be happy to re-subscribe once Digg fixes and/or eliminates the Digg bar entirely.

1. the only way to not use it is to have a digg account, to opt-out and then be logged in every time you use a digg shortened url. Yeah, that’s going to happen alot

As John Gruber so eloquently put it, the new DiggBar is crap. It violates the notion that the url you see in your address bar is the page you are viewing.

Not only that, it also changes the title to read whatever Digg has stored for your URL.

Thus, I have installed the Digg Bar blocking plugin, Diggbarred.

The only downside is that the plugin seems to continually block the URL even once the Digg bar is closed.

Thanks for trying to abuse the internet and waste more of my time, Digg.

John Gruber reported on the music service from Spiral Frog shutting down. He predicted it was a dud back in 2006, and I wrote:

Nice! So they use the Windows DRM, and use the Apple-doesn’t-license-fairplay excuse to not play on iPods, but they don’t even work on Zunes! And if Spiral Frog is indeed backed by UMG, UMG is getting a buck from every Zune sold! ROFL.

It appears they only work with Plays For Sure, which as many of you know, is not Zune compatible.

…

All I can say is, I’m sticking with my nice, clean, easy to use iTunes Music Store

Yep.

Last summer we bought an LF Front Loading washer which we absolutely love. The only downside was some vibrations through the house when it got into the top spin cycle, around 3100rpm.

It was fairly loud but still, it did such a great job at washing, we didn’t care.

A few weeks ago I googled around and came across some foot pads designed to reduce vibrations from GVI Inc called Good Vibrations.

Let me tell you – These things work amazingly well. The machine is currently in full spin and while we can hear it, there is very little thumping going on. The vibrations are dampened at least 50%, if not more. The first time I ran a rinse to test was so quiet with guests over I didn’t even realize it was done.

The other advantage to these feet is that they raise the machine about an inch off the floor, which makes getting a drip pan underneath much easier when we clean the trap.

Installation was easy; One person tilted the machine forward while I slid the feet into place. Once they were in the proper spot, then we tilted it back for the front feet. 5 minutes to install.

Check this product out if you have a second floor washing machine. They also donate a portion of the proceeds to the Lukemia and Lymphoma Society.

I downloaded the Windows 7 beta (32 bit) in about 12 minutes today and installed onto VMWare 2.0.1 (choosing Windows Server 2008).

The install took around 15 minutes and went smoothly. The OS is zippy I must say. Chrome launches about as fast as you could expect, well under 1 second.

Some games crash the VMWare video driver, which is to be expected, VMWare knows nothing of Windows 7.

The security dialogs are nice and fairly understandable. When I launched Chrome, a dialog had a checkbox labeled “Do this for all software and games,” which struck me as odd. Aren’t games also software?

I am told there is no Aero support under vmware, so I am not getting the full Windows 7 experience.

The music icon looks a lot like iTunes.

The painting application opens quickly and is fairly featured for being free. Apple needs to bring back MacPaint.

The games section has about 12 games, which is nice. Apple could improve here as well.

In a quick 30 minutes of usage, it seems as though Apple will finally have some competition in the OS space. Speed is where Apple could really improve upon and if the reports of Snow Leopard only being 20% faster, that won’t cut it.

Microsoft seems to have done a nice job. Time will tell how well Windows 7 machines are running one month after installation. Does the registry corrupt? Are people still easily getting malware and viruses? We’ll find out!

Apple TVs and TiVos that stream Netflix movies are putting the stress on wireless networks. Wireless is fine for most things, but when it comes to low latency streaming, even at 802.11n speeds, things can get a little rough.

While perusing the TivoCommunity.com website I discovered a cool little device: The Motorola NIM100.

These babies allow you to send ethernet packets over your existing cable tv wiring.

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