nuohejiaoyu.com

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

In future versions of the app I’d love to see a search tool and, when Apple pulls the trigger on the notifications service, a way to get notifications when a keyword or product you bookmarked goes on sale. You can do this with a customized Google alert and some special e-mail handling rules, but it would be great to get it in a package like this.

While something like this would have probably been a better idea pre-economic downturn, one thing it excels at is weeding out the old deals from the new. The sites are refreshed every couple of minutes, and in turn each deal is given a time stamp and a rating from “fresh” to “freshest.” The newer a deal the better a chance you have at nabbing it before it expires or the retailer runs out of stock.

There’s currently no way to bookmark deals you like, or search any of these sites based on product or keyword, however you can send any item you’re interested in as an e-mail–either to yourself, or someone who you think would find it useful. There’s also an integrated browser, so you can look at the details of each deal without leaving the app.

FreshDeals lets you see the latest deals on more than a dozen popular deal-finding sites.

If you’re a regular reader you know I’m a sucker for deals sites. Enterprising
iPhone developer Joseph Kiok is too–enough of one to write an app called FreshDeals that keeps tabs on 15 different deals sites to help you find and track the latest bargains.

FreshDeals is 99 cents and can be found in the app store (iTunes link)

That may be true, but of this year’s 26 Oscar contenders, which were announced on Thursday, 24 are available online in DVD quality, Baio wrote on his site, Waxy.org. According to Baio, this was the highest percentage of Oscar contenders to appear online since he began tracking them.

He says it took longer on average than in years past for pirated copies to be made from the screeners and then make their way online: six days.

Baio also determined through his research that members of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote on the Academy Awards, received viewing copies of 20 of the 26 nominated films. These copies are called screeners.

She suggested that camcorded copies are often of inferior viewing quality than those copied from DVDs.

Hollywood has gotten better at delaying pirates from posting illegal copies of Oscar-nominated films on the Internet. The bad news is that eventually a higher percentage of nominated films end up on the Web.

Andy Baio, an independent journalist and programmer, says he has tracked how quickly pirated copies of Oscar-nominated films appear on the Web for the past six years. He logs whether the copies were recorded with handheld cameras or copied from DVDs.

A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the trade representing the largest film studios declined to comment directly on Baio’s research. She did say that typically 90 percent of pirated movies that appear online come from camcorders.

(Credit: CC AEU 04117)

So if doctor and patient can agree that the patient will not write anything nasty online then, at some point, a fairer system of rating doctors–perhaps along the lines of the J.D. Power and Associates model–might become a trustworthy reference for the good, the bad and the ogle-prone.

This bone seems to make my blood pressure twitter a little. Isn’t one of the reasons why review sites have risen like the alien from a routine tummy tuck that the solutions recommended by Medical Justice don’t seem to deliver what some might describe as medical justice?

One thing Medical Justice does in its march against frivolity is help doctors get patients to sign “Mutual Privacy Agreements.” These appear to be documents in which the patient promises never to post anything negative about the doctor on review sites or blogs. (2,000 doctors are already using these agreements.)

Dr. Jeffrey Segal has an interesting business. Called Medical Justice, it proclaims on its home page that it is “relentlessly protecting physicians from frivolous lawsuits.”

I thought I scoured the site more thoroughly than I scour my pans after a spaghetti bolognese, but I couldn’t discover what these protections might be. In fact, I can’t even imagine what they might be, as I assume doctors are supposed to be utterly silent about every wart, wrinkle, and third nipple they discover on your person.

I cannot confirm that this doctor has spotted an unfair review around the next corner.

In essence, Medical Justice thinks there’s a lot of utter twaddle written about doctors on review sites such as Yelp or RateMDs.com. Some of it is malicious. Some may possibly be written by scorned lovers, mad people in pink tights or, who knows, rival intoxicated physicians, rather than by real patients. (Medical Justice also helps doctors monitor comments on review sites)

Like Medical Justice, I am all for a little sophistication when it comes to touching the truth. But isn’t the problem of the medical profession that far more sophistication has been used to conceal the facts rather than reveal them?

There are many, many words on the Medical Justice site. And I tried to pay attention to them all. So if this review doesn’t encompass all of the site’s nuances, then I hope no one believes I have any malicious intentions to the profession that has saved me from many a peculiar affliction.

As I understand these words–and I am not a doctor and have never even played one on TV–if you promise not to go online with your unhappiness, the doctor will give you “additional privacy protections.”

Medical Justice does toss unhappy patients a somewhat sterilized bone: “Patients remain entirely free to communicate about their treatment with friends, family, other health professionals, hospitals, licensing boards, attorneys, civil court, and more.”

My eyebrows are beginning to ache. I think I’ll take I’ll reach into my medical cabernet for a cure.

Here’s the part that eludes me like the melody line of every TV On The Radio track. The site states: “‘Mutual privacy’ means that patients are granted additional privacy protections by the doctor above and beyond those mandated by law.”

Continuing to stick with its own chips, operating system, and hardware while the rest of the world moved to commodity x86 boxes.
The adoption of Intel’s Itanium chip, which remains a depressing joke of a product. A myopic view that the core market in high-end servers wasn’t being decimated by the rise of Solaris and Linux

When I first started working at Bell Labs in 1995, most of the servers we used were from SGI. People liked the stability of Irix and the fact that the machines looked cool (ask anyone what they remember about SGI, and they will tell you the gear was cool.)

Sun has some good stuff. Solaris is great, the hardware is fine, if a bit expensive, and the company has good cash flow and products in better market segments than SGI did.

The other interesting aspect here is that Microsoft has proven to be the smartest of all, having realized that the decoupling of the operating system, hardware, and applications would eventually give it the ability to dominate multiple markets by owning the user platform.

In 1996 or so, I started seeing mass quantities of Sun Microsystems’ machines coming into Lucent, and by 1998, much of the company’s operations ran on Solaris machines. Sun commoditized SGI much in the same way that cheap x86 Linux boxes have subsequently commoditized Sun.

But Sun also has a lot of junk. There is a vast array of Sun software that costs a lot to maintain but doesn’t deliver much revenue. This is arguably the area in which Sun’s strategy has been so off the mark. With the exception of MySQL, there aren’t many Sun software products that generate significant revenue. If software is crappy, and people don’t want to use it, then it doesn’t matter if it’s open source or proprietary.

It sounds like a simple argument to suggest that x86 Linux killed SGI and is killing Sun, but the truth of the matter is that both companies could have made things significantly better for themselves by embracing Linux early on, instead of fighting the tide and waiting until their market position had been vanquished.

So what killed SGI? In addition to the rise of Nvidia and makers of other graphics chips that ran on cheaper hardware, it was bad choices:

The fact that SGI was acquired by Rackable Systems for the sad sum of $25 million was big news on Wednesday only because most people had forgotten that the company, formerly better known as Silicon Graphics, still existed.

Can Sun avoid the SGI trap? Maybe, but probably only if the company gets broken up into different business units that separate out the OS, software and hardware.

By April 1, Charter plans to file for its reorganization bankruptcy, which is designed to provide $3 billion in new capital, a debt reduction of approximately $8 billion, and leave the company with $800 million in cash and short-term securities.

The cable operator also noted that as part of the agreement, Charter’s two subsidiaries will make approximately $74 million in interest payments to certain outstanding senior note holders, within the grace period of when its January 15 senior notes were due.

Charter CEO Neil Smit said in a statement:

We are committed to continuing to provide our 5.5 million customers with quality cable, Internet and phone service, and through this agreement, we will be even better positioned to deliver the products and services our customers demand now and in the future.

The announcement runs counter to the success its largest investor and Chairman Paul Allen received when he co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. Since that time, however, Allen has run into bumps along the way with his other investments.

Charter, which announced its plans to file for Chapter 11 while the markets were open, ended the day down a whopping 48.1 percent to close at nearly 3.5 cents a share.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

We are pleased to have reached an agreement with such a significant portion of our bondholders on a long-term solution to improve our capital structure.

Charter Communications announced Thursday it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as part of an agreement reached with its debt holders.

Charter announced its plans to file for Chapter 11 while the markets were open. Its stock ended the day down 48 percent to close at nearly 3.5 cents a share.

The Wii is sending you to the ER?

Sorry, folks, but I just don’t think we can blame the Wii when we tear an ACL playing Wii Fit

But that’s not all. The British Society for Surgery of the Hand said it has also witnessed an increase in the number of injuries after gamers have spent too much time with the
Wii.

(Credit: Nintendo)

Maybe injuries are on the rise, and I’m sure some (a very small number, most likely) can be attributed to the Wii, but in the end, I simply don’t believe that the Wii should be implicated in the injuries of gamers. In fact, I think we should blame it on the fact that people don’t exercise and get way too excited when playing Wii Tennis.

The Wii offers a new way for people to enjoy video games and does a fine job of it. But to say that because it makes people more active, it contributes to an increase in health issues strikes me as more than a little ridiculous.

Honestly, I think the Wii does more harm to an HDTV when a Wiimote gets tossed into the display than to the human body. It’s not the Wii’s fault some players get too excited and hurt themselves while playing.

I’m not saying that people don’t get injured playing with the Wii. But I do think it’s unfortunate that the Wii is being used as a scapegoat when the real blame should be placed on the relative inactivity of those individuals who overexert themselves while playing. Or for those who are active and hurt themselves while playing the Wii, maybe that “injury” should be considered a clue that they’re taking the game just a little too seriously.

How did we get to this point? When did people start feeling it was fine to blame the Wii for their injuries instead of looking in the mirror and wondering if it’s really necessary to swing as hard as they can when playing Super Mario Sluggers with their 8-year old?

Where are all these people who have experienced such pain and anguish from playing a video game? These kinds of reports have been floating around ever since the Wii was released, and so far, I’ve yet to meet one person who was forced to rush to their local emergency room to seek help. I’ve heard about sore muscles, but all these “injuries” have somehow escaped my grasp. Wii knee? What a joke.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

The Wii doesn’t hurt people; people hurt people.

“We treated a patient this week who had injured herself using a Wii,” Richard Milner of the BSSH told The Daily Telegraph. “She was playing tennis with a partner and fractured one of the bones in her finger when he hit the back of her hand with the control.”

According to researchers at Leeds Teaching Hospital in the United Kingdom, a new injury called “Wii knee” has been identified, which is most often seen in parents hurting themselves while trying to do too much when playing a game with their kids.

I’m sensitive to the fact that because the Wii requires more activity than its competition, there’s a higher probability that people would hurt themselves playing that than any other console. But to say that Nintendo’s hardware should be blamed for hand injuries is like saying we should blame a treadmill whenever someone pulls a hamstring while running.

In 2002, Hewlett-Packard threatened to sue researchers who had publicized a vulnerability in the company’s Tru64 Unix operating system. The case was notable in that it was the first time the Digital Millennium Copyright Act had been invoked to stifle research related to computer security.

There has historically been a clash between security researchers who find security flaws in software products and the companies that make those products.

“What he and others he took into his confidence did over the last few months was not only responsible but extraordinary,” my colleague Robert Vamosi wrote in a column about Kaminsky’s unprecedented disclosure restraint.

Most of the researcher-vendor conflict comes down to a matter of timing. Vendors tend to want researchers to keep mum until a fix is ready. And researchers want to go public sooner rather than later so that people relying on those products will know they are at risk. Also, going public can serve to motivate a vendor who might be dragging their feet on acknowledging and fixing the problem.

These threats and legal actions are unnecessary. Kaminsky, Hansen, and Grossman have shown that there can be compromise. That’s a good lesson for three MIT students who pulled a talk at Defcon this summer on hacking the Massachusetts subway system, and for the transit officials who hauled them into court.

This week, security researchers Robert “RSnake” Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman agreed to withdraw their presentation on a new Web attack they dubbed “Clickjacking” from an upcoming OWASP USA security conference in New York at Adobe Systems’ request. Now, Adobe can create a patch for one of its applications before they release proof-of-concept code for the vulnerability, which would allow an attacker to take over the microphone, Webcam, and audio on a computer, according to a report on the Dark Reading site on Tuesday. (Oddly, the vulnerability is actually due to an architectural issue in Internet Explorer, the researchers say.)

Leading by example was Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive, who warned security software vendors about a fatal flaw in the DNS (Domain Name System) months before going public so vendors could release patches.

Previously, the DMCA had been used to prosecute or threaten researchers who had discovered ways to break copyright protections. For instance, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov went to jail in 2001 after Adobe convinced the Justice Department that he had violated the DMCA by breaking e-book protections, but he was later released. And Princeton University professor Edward Felten and his students withdrew a paper on how to break e-music protections after being threatened by the recording industry.

“I’ve always had this philosophy. If you find a mediocre to bad vulnerability, it’s better to just talk about it, get it out in the open, and let the world see it,” RSnake wrote in a first-person account of the situation on Dark Reading. “However, I’ve always told myself if I found something like a complete remote desktop compromise or something equally bad, that I’d let the vendors know. The last thing I want to do is spawn a botnet army based on my research. There’s a big difference between educating the community about a problem and empowering bad guys.”

But two recent examples of cooperation between researchers and vendors show hope for future truces.

In 2005, Cisco Systems filed a lawsuit against security researcher Michael Lynn just hours after he gave a presentation at Defcon about how attackers could take over Cisco routers. That case was ultimately settled.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Earlier this year artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley teamed up with Google to create what might be the oddest thing caught on Street View, Google Maps’ virtual man-on-the-street service. Hewlett and Kinsley managed to get a large group of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, locals together to participate in a variety of activities on-camera, including organized jogging, a sword fight, and a parade–complete with band instruments and uniforms. All the while Google’s Street View
car captured every moment.

What will remain far more interesting to most are all the unintentionally peculiar things caught in Street View’s cameras, which continued to be chronicled by eagle-eyed individuals. On that front, worth checking out is StreetViewGallery, which has a Reddit-like system for promoting funny found Street View shots to the top.

The result is a few square blocks of the zaniness that will be forever preserved for others to see–that is, until Google updates the imagery with newer shots. Hewlett and Kinsley have documented the entire project on their site, along with a “making of” documentary that captures the scope of how many people were involved:

Regardless of whether Cisco partners with Alfresco, buys OpenText, or takes a different road, it needs to plug the hole in its collaboration strategy. By buying PostPath, a Microsoft Exchange clone, Cisco has sent a signal that it intends to play hard with Microsoft et al. But without a central ECM strategy, its bigger strategy is a bit hollow.

I wrote previously about Cisco potentially becoming “the great open-source consolidator,” and I continue to believe that Cisco has much to gain from open source.

On Monday, IBM launched the beta of its “Bluehouse” product, designed to be a Cisco WebEx killer. IBM already has e-mail, instant messaging, content management (internally developed and through its FileNet acquisition), and more.

And then there’s Microsoft, which continues to see rampant growth with SharePoint while simultaneously building out (and integrating) its Unified Communications Suite.

But in looking through its collaboration offerings today, it’s clear that Cisco needs to quickly fill a big hole in its product portfolio, open source or not: content management.

Acquiring a company like Jive Software, while a great strategic move in some respects, would provide another way to chat about content but no clear way to store/manage/audit/etc. Or Cisco could acquire one of the last few remaining independent ECM vendors like OpenText, but its architecture and code are old, making integration painful.

Cisco may view it as a competitive advantage to come at collaboration from the communications angle, and this is certainly a way of building from its traditional strength on the networking side. However, even after the relatively recent acquisitions of Jabber, WebEx, IronPort, Securent, and PostPath, Cisco is still missing in action on the core element to all of this collaboration: content.

Perhaps the most interesting play would be a move for Alfresco. Alfresco will do less than $100 million in sales this year, so it’s not going to give Cisco a sales bounce. But at $39 billion in sales in 2008, very few companies are going to move the needle on Cisco’s sales. What Alfresco brings to the table is leadership on emerging standards as well as a track record of being an OEM’s choice for ECM.

Ultimately, enterprises collaborate around documents, and Cisco appears to have little to no strategy on managing that content. It has lots of ways to talk about it but seemingly lacks a central repository for storing, managing, auditing, and building workflows around that critical content.

Oracle recently launched Beehive, an “open-standards based platform which aims to integrate team workspaces, calendar, instant messaging, and e-mail. All these utilities come with tightly tracked date stamped logging.”

Why? Because Cisco is playing the collaboration game against companies that are rich in content management and seem to be getting the communications part down.

Glue also taps into existing social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to add friends, or to “follow” other people. The Glue Navigator allows users to browse the network of people and things, and what friends have identified as a “like” and what they have to say about objects. Glue can display all the music that a friend has viewed and drill down, offering contextual shortcuts to find out more, such as reviews and shopping links, about things on the Web. Glue remembers only the last 20 last things visited, and the things “liked” or commented upon.

The people surfaced in the Glue bar could have seen the object, such as a movie title, on a variety of sites. “People look at movies at different times and places, but the core semantic technology can understand the same thing and correlate it. As a movie fan, you just want to know what your friends think. It doesn’t matter when or where the user visits things; Glue automatically connects them. There is no Glue destination site–the network is the user’s context across the Web,” Iskold said.

“Glue works as a contextual filter,” said Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue. “We show relevant information from friends about the things they visit. They don’t have to sift through lengthy lifestreams. For example, if you have 100 friends in FriendFeed, you are a human filter trying to sift through it and the information is completely out of context. The idea is to get the useful information ‘chunked’ contextually on the pages you visit. We are not asking people to change their habits.”

Glue allows users in its social network to discover what friends share interests with them without going to a central site.

Rather than just connect things to related data and services, it also connects things to people and people to people and their things. For example, when a Glue user visits a site with things the software recognizes, such as a movie, artist, wine book, restaurant, or stock quote, a bar appears at the top of the screen with a list of friends and other people in the Glue network who looked at that object. Users can leave brief comments to share an opinion with others.

For the last few years AdaptiveBlue has offered a semantically rich Web application that understands things such as books, movies, and music. Clicking on text, such as a company or movie name, brings up a context-sensitive menu of related links. The company is taking its technology a step further, adding a social dimension and renaming the product, “Glue.” Along with Radar Networks’ Twine and Powerset’s Wikipedia search engine (acquired by Microsoft), Glue offers a compelling glimpse into how the Semantic Web will add a new, powerful level of intelligence to the Internet.

Glue impressed investors at RRE Ventures and Union Square Ventures (Series A Lead) enough to fund a $4.5 million series B round recently. The company has a good chance of making it through the meltdown.

Each user has a profile page that shows likes and the number of followers and who the user is following. “It’s a way of cross-pollinating interests. You can see what I am interested in and perhaps it is the same books or wine with which you have an interest,” Iskold said. “Glue also allows you to claim pages that represent you, such as a blog, FriendFeed, or Twitter. It’s an outlet where people know where to find and connect with you. For example, other Glue users could see what you are up to recently on your personal blog.”

Glue allows users to add comments and indicate a "like" or favorite.