2018 Wholesale Gold-Plated Jewelry blogs

Earlier this year, Yahoo and Google announced a search deal, but that was later called off. The whole debacle was widely considered to have cost Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang his job.

Ivory Investment Management, a hedge fund based in Los Angeles that owns 1.5 percent of Yahoo, is expected to release a letter Wednesday outlining its plan, which could result in as much as $15 billion from Microsoft, CNBC said.

A major Yahoo shareholder is reportedly pushing for the company to renew discussion with Microsoft for a deal over its search business, CNBC reported Wednesday.

The Microsoft-Yahoo saga has been a long one. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer finally said that the company was “done with all acquisition discussions with Yahoo,” though rumors of a search deal continued.

Officials from Ivory could not immediately be reached for comment.

On Tuesday, blog commenting add-on tool Disqus is launching version 2.0 of its free service. Many of the biggest changes are on the back end, but the user-facing elements have been given many small tweaks that should make it a faster, more approachable solution for the mass market.

These are just some of the improvements with the updated platform. Disqus comments are now SEO-friendly systemwide, so your blog posts will be indexed both by content and discussion. The administrative area of Disqus has also been tweaked slightly to be simpler to manage across multiple blogs, although there’s still no way to mass delete messages via search query, or select multiple messages from a list like you can in some blogging tools’ stock comment systems. After having used Disqus to power our Webware 100 2008 award pages, the lack of mass edits and deletes was one of the only weaknesses that really bugged me. Luckily it’s something Ha says is working in testing and will be coming soon in another update.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

View the discussion thread.blog comments powered by Disqus

Disqus is currently in use with about 30,000 blogs and competes with tools like SezWho, IntenseDebate, and JS-Kit to enhance the built-in functionality found in mass-market blogging platforms. To play around with the new system I’ve embedded it below. You can also check it out by visiting one of our Webware 100 2008 winner profile pages.

I chatted with co-founder Daniel Ha about it on Monday, and he says one of the biggest changes blog owners are going to notice is the plug-in support. The plug-in with the most improvement is WordPress, which can now be moderated from inside of WordPress’ admin area instead of on Disqus alone. (Download WordPress from CNET Download.com.) All comments are also synced up both locally and to Disqus’ servers, so if Disqus goes down your comments won’t. Likewise, you’ll be able to copy over Disqus comments to your existing system if you decide to ditch it later on down the line.

Disqus' new comment admin area lets you quickly remove, restore, and jump user comments from one blog or several at once.

For commenters, the experience has also been improved. Gone is the up and down voting system, which has been replaced with a simple up button to give a good comment a nod, and smarter tools to flag offensive or otherwise spammy comments. Commenters who write a veritable opus can now turn that nine-paragraph work into its own standalone blog post that lives right on Disqus’ servers, where other users can comment and interact with it. Ha says he’s not trying to take away from existing platforms, but give these really good, in-depth comments their own place to start another conversation without completely thread-jacking the conversation that’s going on there. Think of it kind of like FriendFeed, but using the same engine people are used to.

(Source: iLounge via Engadget)

Getting chippy: Some bloggers think that the iPod Shuffle's accessory situation is a nightmare scenario for iPod fans.

The question, of course, is whether Apple has gone too far in requiring you to use only its headphones–or some sort of Apple-approved adapter or headphones for the device. (You can plug third-party headphones into the new Shuffle, and it will play music, but you can’t control the volume or navigate songs).

What do you guys think? If the report is correct, is Apple going too far, or is this just a smart business move?

Update: Gizmodo’s posted a story going back and forth on whether the chip is an “authentication” chip or a “control” chip that’s required for approval as part of Apple’s “made for iPod program.” It appears “control” is the correct description, but that hasn’t been confirmed by Apple.

iLounge is calling it a “nightmare scenario” for longtime iPod fans. “Are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase, from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to repurchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality?” iLounge Editor in Chief Jeremy Horwitz asks in his review of the new iPod Shuffle. “It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight.”

Meanwhile, over at Engadget, Nilay Patel is calling Apple’s attempts to “lock down headphones” a sad new low that “makes the lack of physical controls on the Shuffle seem even more ridiculous.”

(Credit:
CNET)

This doesn’t come as any great surprise to us because exacting licensing revenue from
iPod accessory makers has become a brilliant way for Apple to add to the company’s bottom line. But that “Apple tax,” so to speak, does get passed on to consumers, and iLounge and others are now assuming that Apple headphone adapters will cost a minimum of $19 and possibly as much as $29. The handful of VoiceOver-compatible headphones that have been announced carry a starting price of $49.99.

In not-so-shocking news, iLounge is reporting that third-party headphones and headphone adapters for the new buttonless iPod Shuffle will require an Apple-licensed authentication chip.

This, in turn, has fueled speculation that Nvidia will get out of the chipset business. “I can see where some people would think that in the longer term, especially with the (i7)” said Dean McCarron, principal and founder of Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research.

Despite all the chest thumping at its gaming conference this week, the high drama of Nvision reached its denouement with a waving of the white flag. The world’s largest graphics chip supplier announced support for high-end gaming graphics using Intel silicon. This has raised doubts about its clout in the gaming PC industry, based on the reaction at many hardware enthusiast Web sites and at least one PC maker.

But McCarron thinks Nvidia will stay in the business in the near term. And this is borne out by Nvidia’s indication this week about an impending announcement of a new integrated graphics chipset for Intel’s current Core 2 architecture–not the i7.

All of this can be traced back to an earlier issue centered on whether Nvidia would make chipsets based on Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology to work with the i7. The company has indicated that it will not. “When we go to Bloomfield (i7 processor) we’ve already announced that we have no intention of building a QPI-based chipset. Because of that, we’ve offered only nForce 200,” Peterson said.

Update at 6:45 .p.m. with additional information about QPI licensing.

Nvidia’s last-minute conference announcement has turned into a bit of shocker.

One PC maker agrees with this sentiment. “When they were top dog they could have gotten away with this,” a representative said, alluding to the Nvidia nForce 200 chip that, until the about-face Thursday, was required to enable high-end Nvidia graphics on future Intel Core i7 systems.

And this reaction is echoed at Anandtech and other hardware Web sites. “We heard from the very start that most motherboard manufacturers weren’t going to use the nForce 200 + Intel X58 combination,” according to Anandtech, referring to the i7’s supporting silicon, the Intel X58 chipset.

At issue is Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, a critical technology for game enthusiasts who want to use more than one Nvidia graphics board to power the most demanding PC games like Crysis. Nvidia had been saying that the only one way to get to high-end game nirvana was by using its own supporting silicon.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the representative said Nvidia was quickly getting boxed out by AMD’s ATI graphics unit at his company. Though there are also performance reasons for this newfound preference for ATI graphics over Nvidia, in this specific case PC makers, and users alike, don’t want to add a special Nvidia chip to enable graphics on high-end gaming systems, he said.

But the Thursday announcement changed all that. Now users can configure SLI systems for Intel’s upcoming Core i7 processors “natively” as Nvidia puts it. That is, without the Nvidia nForce 200 chip. “That’s (the nForce 200) been the only solution. And that’s been a very, very high-end solution,” said Tom Peterson, director of Technical Marketing for MCP production at Nvidia.

Representative of the shock expressed after the announcement, a headline at AnandTech said: “Hell Freezes Over: Nvidia Announces Native SLI Support for the Intel X58 Chipset.” Translation: Nvidia must use Intel supporting silicon to get its technology into future gaming systems–not its own.

(Correction: Nvidia maintains that it has a QPI license but has elected not to make a QPI chipset.)

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Today’s stories:

Another brutal day on Wall Street

Republican party operatives in Missouri report the theft of a laptop containing privileged information. The laptop contained “information you’d expect the coordinator for a GOP national campaign to have,” such as information on areas to target for support, said Tina Hervey, communications director for the Missouri Republican party.

Delta to filter porn on planes

Taking on Twitter with open-source software

In the aftermath of another vicious sell-off on Wall Street, CNET’s Kara Tsuboi sits down with reporter Ina Fried to discuss what the tech sector is up against.

Suit against magazine-sharing site settled

Google Spreadsheets gets software-inspired face lift

Listen now:

SAP shares free-fall on third quarter warning

Also in this podcast, Delta allows for in-cabin Web surfing. But some passengers have been browsing to sites where, um, the subject matter’s a bit more racy than Delta expected.

30 percent of iPhone 3G buyers dump existing carriers

Netflix still has a long way to go before its instant viewing library can compare with its DVD rental library (of 132 movies in my personal Netflix queue, only 21 are available for instant viewing). The relatively small number of videos available for streaming have limited the “Watch now” feature’s usefulness for some time (not to mention that of the Roku player). But the added titles and forthcoming Mac compatibility does bring Netflix one step closer to being truly competitive with the iTunes Store for video rentals.

A little tidbit tucked away at the bottom of a blog entry posted in the wee hours of the morning proclaims that the movie rental company will make its “Watch now” service work on Macs by the end of this year.

With little fanfare, Netflix previewed a feature many
Mac users have wanted to see for quite some time.

Now to get a few more deals made, and the streaming service working with
Firefox.

Separately, the company announced that it has forged a deal with Starz that adds 2,500 movies and TV shows to its streaming library.

Yet another report that Google’s Android software is about to make its debut surfaced Friday.

In any event, it will still be nice to actually have an Android handset out in the market, almost a year after Google confirmed its mobile phone project. Google will be competing against other operating system licensers such as Symbian and Microsoft for design wins around the world, and evaluating its chances against those entrenched players will get easier after reviewers get a chance to handle the merchandise.

Silicon Alley Insider says they’ve talked to someone who has actually played with the HTC Android phone, and who deems it “technically powerful but not as elegant as Apple’s
iPhone and OS X.” That’s not all that unexpected, really; Google’s stated mission has always been to offer carriers and phone makers a basic set of software for getting phones onto the Internet, not a high-end integrated smartphone like the iPhone.

The New York Times echoed a report earlier in the week from TmoNews in suggesting that the first phone to run the Android software will be announced by handset maker HTC on T-Mobile’s network next month and could begin shipping in October. It’s long been expected that T-Mobile and HTC would be among the first Android partners to actually ship a product, but the timing had been unclear.

Courtney Holt

(Credit:
MySpace Music)

Holt was executive vice president of Digital Music for the MTV Networks.

As first reported by CNET News on Friday, MySpace Music has hired Courtney Holt, an MTV exec and a longtime digital music veteran as president of the digital music service, the company said Tuesday.

“Courtney understands how to successfully blend technology with music and the resulting new business opportunities born from such a combination,” said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace CEO.

Holt is expected to start work on January 5, the company said in a statement. MySpace Music went through a long process to hire a chief, with at least one candidate backing out at the last minute.

MySpace Music, the digital music service for the News Corp’s social network, has finally named a leader.

Instead of simply using an off-the-shelf DAC chip in the QBD76, Chord designed its own using Xilinx field programmable gate arrays. That gambit affords Chord engineers a staggering 1,250,000 logic gates in its DAC, compared with 30,000 logic gates found in mass-market and even some high-end DACs. As a result, Chord claims the QBD76 is capable of resolving 40 decibels more data than competitors using the best standard chips.

Thing is, the quality of the conversion has everything to do with the sound quality you hear. That’s why audiophiles pay big bucks for the best ones, and Chord Electronics, a British high-end stalwart has just released the QBD76, which contains a real contender for world’s best digital-to-analog converter (DAC) chip.

That means you should hear a lot more detail and sonic information with the QBD76 in your system–think of it as high-resolution for your ears. The QBD76 has two coax, two AES, and two optical digital inputs, plus one USB, and one Bluetooth A2DP input.

To hear digital audio it has to be converted to analog. The chip that does that is called a digital-to-analog converter, and there’s one in your
iPod, computer, and CD, DVD, and Blu-ray players.

QBD76

Chord Electronics are used in top studios, including Skywalker Sound, Abbey Road, Sony, Quad, Dolby Labs, Decca Records, EMI Japan, Ray Charles Productions, and many others.

U.S. retail is $6,495 with an introductory special price of $5,995 until November 30. The QBD76’s U.S. importer is Bluebird Music.

(Credit:
Chord Electronics)

But there’s a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company “genuinely radical,” but doesn’t appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don’t count the chickens before they hatch, even if we’re talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” on a piano.

VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company’s search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf’s board of directors.

Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that’s been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.

Let’s face it: Video search blows. It’s easy to use YouTube’s search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.