Culture

The New York Times on my desktop

3
2 years ago
by frankps in ,

I have been a frequent user of The New York Times on my iPhone, and my anticipations for their similar application, Times Reader 2.0, for the computer desktop were high. I must admit that I am impressed, this is a brilliant way of reading news and a killer application based on Adobe Air (available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows). Times Reader 2.0 shows the power of Flash for enabling rich media, interactivity, and a more engaging overall experience. It also means that The New York Times has switched from Silverlight to Flash!

New York Times Reader

For accessibility you can scale the text between Small – Medium – Large. Pictures are shown in a small gallery with the indication 1 of X and with the possibility to turn “pages”. There is also a small set of settings that can set, and the most important one is Account log in. This enables access to paid content. The service costs $14.95 a month, the equalent paper service about $40 a month in New York, a considerable cost savings. And think about the environmental side of it!

Times Reader 2.0

CrunchGear had a bigger newsupdate on Times Reader 2.0 worth reading.

Season 3 of IT-Crowd is out on DVD

0
2 years ago
by frankps in ,

IT-Crowd Season 3I am a great fan of the IT-Crowd and also have the two first seasons on DVD. Today I bought the 3rd season over at Play.com. The emmy award winning IT Crowd is back!

Whilst Reynholm Industries boss, Douglas, is spending the pension fund on gold flakes in the water supply, the dysfunctional IT department – Moss, Roy and Jen – build up the courage to face the frightening world of people who somehow communicate without using a keyboard.

As well as the usual bickering, time wasting and incompetence, the co-dependent trio become the victims of sexual harassment, create a fundraising nude erotic calendar, confront the builders from hell and join a social networking site.

Episodes Comprise:

  1. From Hell
  2. Are We Not Men?
  3. Tramps Like Us
  4. Speech
  5. Friendface
  6. Calendar Geeks

Amazon with a brilliant move

0
2 years ago
by frankps in ,

The big news yesterday was that Amazon acquired Lexcycle, a market leading company when it comes to the open ebook format ePub.

I love Lexcycles Stanza applications for Windows and Macs, that can convert documents to more or less any ebook format and read the very same formats.  I am also a frequent user of Stanza for iPhone, one of the most downloaded applications for that platform.

I am sure that Amazon will combine the knowledge it has from Mobipocket and Stanza to create market leading solutions for eBooks, both for Kindle and other reading devices.

Teleread speculates that Amazon might be fodder for an acquisition by Adobe or Google.

MIT with OpenAccess

0
2 years ago
by frankps in ,

From the Tech Online Edition:

Faculty voted unanimously this week to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. MIT plans to create a repository to make these articles available online.

The resolution, effective immediately after it was passed on Wednesday, makes MIT the first university to commit to making its faculty’s research papers publicly available. Though the School of Education at Stanford and several departments at Harvard have already adopted these policies, MIT is the first entire university to make this pledge.

The open-access rule will only apply to articles published since Wednesday. Researchers who wish to opt-out do so by sending a letter notifying the Office of the Provost.

The ad hoc committee’s explanatory document states that the ability to opt out may be especially important for junior faculty “who do not want to jeopardize their ability to work with certain publishers.”

“Initially opt out will get used a fair amount,” said Harold Abelson, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the ad hoc faculty committee that proposed the resolution.

Links:

Thank you for all the fish, and …

0
2 years ago
by frankps in , ,

I am for now a happy Spotify user.  Thuesday 24 March Last.fm announced that listening to Last.fm Radio will require a subscription of €3.00 per month. My first thought was fair enough, they have to earn money to pay the license fee. But then hang on a minute, what else did they write in this blog entry?  In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change. Yes, that means that the service stays for free for users from these three countries. That is not something I can or will tolerate. They have defined their users in to two groups: First class users and second class users. First class users get a free ride, that the second class users have to pay. As I live in Norway, I’m defined as a second class user. I guess that the leaders of Last.fm must have been smoking their socks, if they think that they will get away with this. Let darwinsm deal with them (read: finance crise), they have already sent of several of their employees. Now they can close their company.

spotify

Besides this, a post in one of the Last.fm forums adds a couple of things:

  1. The old API to stream music will disappear in a few weeks. Unless I’m missing something, that implies that all clients (official and third party) will stop working, and upgrading them is required to continue using the service.
  2. Streaming music to mobile phones will not be permitted (a comment in the same thread explains that this restriction applies only to phones, so Nokia tablets are not affected).

I am saving my account for now, but I am inches away from deleting all my data on Last.fm and close my account. I guess there are many users that will do that. I have never seen more comments being made on Last.fm’s blog.

Also a friend of me blogged about this in Italian and another in Hungarian.

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