Archive for: November 11, 2009
November 11, 2009
Microsoft on Wednesday started rolling out its Bing Video site, a relaunch of MSN Video that pulls content from sites Hulu, MSN, and YouTube. The company also added the Dim the Lights feature that's currently available on Hulu, which darkens the area surrounding a particular video, as well as a Share option.
The main site features short clips from news and entertainment shows, along with links to full-length TV shows, news, sports, music, comedy, and movies. The Movies section does not appear to offer entire movies, but clips, trailers, and interviews about the films.
The main site, for example, currently includes clips of Susan Boyle on "Stars," a video of a girl who got a surprise visit from her deployed dad, the trailer from the "Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," and a video about colonizing Mars.
The TV section has a "most watched" section, which currently includes episodes of "FlashForward," "Glee," "NCIS," "The Office," and "Survivor: Samoa." Another section splits up the content by network, while a third features clips from cable channels like National Geographic, Bravo, and A&E.
The site is rolling out now and should be fully available by mid-November, Microsoft said.
"With over 900+ T.V. shows in Bing Videos, I can't wait to catch up on my favorite shows, discover new favorites and watch right from my laptop," Bing's Kristin Meldahl wrote in a blog post. "We've gone deeper with organization, making it easy to find your favorite episode, even from last season."
    
 Google's dominated search, online document collaboration, e-mail, telephony, and more, so why not programming, too? The tech giant has announced its own open-source, object-oriented programming language, called Go. The Google Open Source Blog says that "Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++." (If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.) "Typical builds," the blog continues, "feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C." Go supports multiprocessing, as well as true closures and reflection.
The Go Web site (golang.org) explains
the rationale behind creating Go, mostly citing the change of the
computer landscape that's occurred over the past decade or so that's
seen very few (if any) major systems languages spring up: more powerful
PCs, many of which use multicore processors; increased dependency
management in software that's not reflected in the "header files" of
C-based languages; the growing desire for dynamically typed languages
(such as Python and JavaScript) instead of type systems such as Java
and C++); and the poor support for concepts such as garbage collection
and parallel computation. Google says that Go takes full
advantage of modern, multicore hardware; that it simplifies dependency
analysis and avoids the overhead present in C-style languages (such as
files and libraries); that Go's type system has no hierarchy, which
saves the programmer from having to define relationships between types;
and that Go is fully garbage-collected and naturally supports
concurrent execution and communication. If you're interested in
getting started with Go, or you just want to learn more about its inner
workings, Golang.org is loaded with tutorials, manuals, FAQs, ...
Thanks to Latitude, Google knows where you are at all times--and now, thanks to a brand-new feature, it also knows where you've been. Google today announced the addition of Location History and Location Alerts for Latitude users.
The new Locations History feature lets you view and manage past Google Latitude locations. You can also delete locations or your entire location history, in case you've gone anywhere you don't really care to remember. Those locations stored by the feature will be available only to you. What your friends don't know about your location history can't hurt them.
Location Alerts let you know when a friend is nearby, popping up a text message when your Location History is enabled. The Location History enables alerts when you're away from common locations such as home and work, where you're bound to run into plenty of people you know.
Users can enable both features now via the Google Latitude Apps page.
 
Twitter users are a fickle bunch. Roll out a new feature and they'll complain and complain--at least until they get used to the damn thing. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has no doubt been flooded with "suggestions" since rolling out the Retweet function to a larger user base this week. Last night Williams responded with a long post on his personal blog titled, "Why Retweet Works the Way it Does."
"I'm making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial," writes Williams. "People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that's gone into it. I've been a big proponent of this particular design internally at Twitter, because, while it won't serve every use case, I think it offers something new and powerful."
The primary purpose of the feature is, apparently, to cut down on Twitter's "noise," i.e. a constant flood of Retweets in your Twitter stream. Writes Williams, "If five people you follow retweet the same thing, you get five copies, which can be useful but is a lot of noise. This comes up even more in search. Popular users can get retweeted enough to saturate a search query."
And as for the inability to editorialize that so irked Lance? Williams chalks it up to "simplicity," writing, "We left it out of this first version mostly for simplicity. It's especially tricky when you consider transports like SMS where adding a lot of structure or additional content is hard. But we have some ideas there, and it's possible we'll build that in at a later date."
...
 It's not exactly high-definition video streaming, but it's a start. Universal Studios Home Entertainment has unveiled pocket BLU, a free mobile app that lets iPhone and iPod touch users control networked Blu-ray devices over Wi-Fi. The app offers users a remote control that operates on-disc features, a graphical timeline in landscape mode for jumping to any point in the movie, and a content listing of available Blu-ray titles that lets you stream certain bonus content to the iPhone for viewing later on. In addition, the app offers a pop-up keyboard for on-disc data entry. For the app to connect, the Blu-ray disc in question needs to be "pocket BLU" enabled--so get ready to look for yet another logo. Needless to say, this app would have been a lot more interesting if it actually let you watch Blu-ray movies you already owned on the iPhone. But that probably got nixed in the design stage faster than you can say, "lawyers gone wild." The app is a free download, and is available now in Apple's App Store.
 
 After a serious game of ping-pong between developer Manomio and Apple's App Store approval process, the iPhone Commodore 64 emulator is back in the App Store. The app originally contained five games--Dragons Den, Le Mans, Arctic Shipwreck, Jack Attack and Jupiter Lander--along with a way to call up the C64's BASIC interpreter. Apple rejected it for that reason the first time. Manomio submitted a revised version that hid the interpreter, but once a few folks discovered how to hack into it anyway, Apple rejected the app a second time. The final approved version features 30 percent faster performance and three additional games: International Basketball, International Baseball, and International Tennis. Grab it now for $4.99 in Apple's App Store. (via Joystiq)
 
 Everyone knows what it's like to have two documents in front of you with the same name, likely edited and modified by different people--and the arduous task of reconciling the differences between the docs is left up to you. So you open both documents in some kind of tiled or arranged view in Word or another word-processing app and scan the document line by line to see if you can track down the changes that each editor made. Thankfully, now there's Compare My Docs: This Web service lets you upload your documents and highlights the differences for you. If one editor added some text, you can see the added text in a hovering box. If another removed or changed the original, you can see that as well. You can even upload multiple documents so you can see how they've all changed from an original copy.
Compare My Docs is especially useful in office situations where "collaboration" really means send a Word doc around for everyone to look at and provide their feedback to. A lot of companies invest in feature-rich collaboration and document management systems, but in the end most people still just turn on Track Changes and send a document around to their team to review.  Track Changes is great, but it gets the job done only when you have people review the document one at a time and then send it on to the next reviewer. Compare My Docs gives you the freedom to send the same document ...
Twitter executives may have shot down the idea of a Twitter TV show, but that doesn't mean its members aren't ready for prime-time.
CBS has reportedly snapped up the rights to "Shit My Dad Says," a Twitter feed that catalogs the commentary of Justin Halpern's 73-year-old father. Halpern, 29, moved back in with his father earlier this year and started posting his amusing outbursts to the micro-blogging site in August.
The feed soon amassed 700,000 followers, and Halpern landed a book deal with Harper Collins. Now, "Will & Grace" creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick will serve as executive producers of a new family comedy based on the Tweets, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Halpern will serve as a writer on the show.
Some outtakes from Halpern's dad after the jump.
"The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain't spitting it out."
"You're being fucking dramatic. You own a TV and an air mattress. That's not exactly what I'd call "a lot to lose."
"You touched that god damned biscuit. Bullshit, I saw you touch it....I don't give a shit about your evidence, this isn't a court of law."
"Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn't stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down."
 
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