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Weekly Knowledge Dump: Tech News for 8.19.11
It was a busy week in the tech world, with Google buying Motorola and HP killing WebOS after dismal sales. This is your five minute guide to the big tech stories of the week.
Weekly Knowledge Dump: Tech News for 7.15.11
Facebook gets their own vending machines, Google adds music and books to the Android Market, Spotify finally makes it Stateside and Netflix wants to charge you more for less.
Weekly Knowledge Dump: Tech News for 9.9.11
The Weekly Knowledge Dump is the weekly tech column that gives you the biggest news in the tech world for the past week, plus a guide to all of the interesting but non-news stories from the past week. It’s like backing up a dump truck of knowledge to your brain.
Google Buys Zagat
This week Google bought restaurant rating guide Zagat for a reported $60 million. The purchase is part of Google’s efforts to boost their local information. Google has a handful of products, such as Maps and Places, that have a massive database of places and they want to use that to fill in the gaps. Google can easily integrate the information Zagat has about local hotspots into their Maps and Places databases. They’ll even get a chance to integrate Zagat’s rating into their search results.
Carol Bartz Gets Fired as Yahoo! CEO, Tells Everyone That She was “Fucked Over”
After getting fired via a phone call by the Yahoo! board of directors, she sent out an email to all employees via her iPad telling them what happened. If that’s not odd enough, the next day she gave an interview to Fourtune magazine and told everyone that she got “fucked over” by the “doofuses” on the Yahoo! board. Apparently this is banned by a non-disparagement clause in Bartz contract, which means that she is not allowed to say anything bad about the company. Because of this, she will most likely lose out on the $10 million severance package she was supposedly entitled to. At least this time she fucked herself over instead of getting fucked over by the Yahoo! board.
ICANN Opens Up Registration for .xxx Domains
As of this week, ICANN is accepting applications for .xxx domain names. This means that you can now register a website that ends in .xxx instead of .com. This has been in the works for quite some time and was met with stiff opposition from many of ICANN’s members. At one point, it was even thought that the .xxx domain would not pass, since many people feared it would create a “red light district” for the internet…as if the internet wasn’t already one giant red light district.
What Do You Mean the MPAA Just Makes Up Statistics?
The MPAA, an organization known for its irrational ratings system for movies as much as it is for its penchant for making up statistics, is at it again. Over the past few days, they have been circulating an infographic that claims that piracy costs them more than $58 billion a year. The problem with that is that the movie industry only makes about $30 billion a year. According to their statistics, they are losing out on 2/3 of their industry. Seems a bit absurd. If that was true, it would mean that the average consumer was willing to purchase 50 new DVDs a year but instead just downloaded them illegally. How many people do you know who go out an buy a new DVD almost every week of the year?
1) Re: ZAGATS deal
No real opinion on this one way or the other
2) This woman has no class. She was paid a huge salary to act professionally and use her supposed CEO smarts to help out the company. Apparently she did nothing to right the ship at YAHOO!, and then on her way out the door she throws a fit… over what? That they actually fired her for doing a bad job? That’s how it works in the real world. Only in the stratified world of the elites do people expect to fail upwards, and resign with their honor intact. I hope others take note and she’s not allowed to just sail on over to the next corporate gig. With her public outburst, she’s the one who just fucked over YAHOO!, not the other way around. What company in the world would want to expose themselves to a nutcase likely to fly off the handles in the event she’s ever terminated for poor performance?
Oh, and complaining about being “fired” when in fact you’re gliding off into the sunset on a golden parachute? Outright offensive to oppressed serfs everywhere in this economy
3) I really fail to see the point of .xxx. It’s not that I’m against it on some sort of silly puritanical moral grounds, it’s just that it seems like useless clutter, another domain suffix to keep track of. Who needs it?
4) The MPAA is absurd. The sooner at-home-3D/holography/neural link tech makes theatrical film exhibition a thing of the past, the better. The internet will allow us to download and stream 3D films without ever having to worry about what they’re “rated”. This chart just helps illustrate the deeply ingrained dishonesty that governs every facet of their operation. They’re a bunch of crooks and cads, and need to be tossed out!!