Top Items:
Matt Cutts:
UI fun: Remove result — One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. Here's what you'd see.
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Matt Marshall / SiliconBeat:
Friday's essentials from Silicon Valley — Lot of developments to report, so here's a smorgasbord: —Socialtext wins SAP's backing: SocialText, the Palo Alto wiki and social software company, has finally scored more backing, this time from software giant SAP — more on this later.
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Edward W. Felten / Freedom to Tinker:
Google Print, Damages and Incentives — There's been lots of discussion online of this week's lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books' contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books' contents.
Discussion:
Infothought
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William Patry / The Patry Copyright Blog:
Google Revisited — On Tuesday, The Authors Guild filed suit against Google over its Print Library project. Here's a press release issued by the Guild, a Reuters/Washington Post story, and the complaint. In a comment on to my posting last Thursday about the project …
Discussion:
Tom Raftery's I.T. views
Robert A. Guth / Wall Street Journal:
Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software — Delay in New Windows Version — Drove Giant to Develop — Simpler, Flexible Product — Engineers Get Trip to 'Bug Jail' — REDMOND, Wash. — Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office …
Dan / PSP Sony PlayStation Portable:
2.0 Overflow Found and Working — We have received an email from someone named 'foo bar' with a file made by unknown, which allows a buffer overflow to be run via the photos menu in Sony PSP firmware v2.0. Although it is not currently possible to run homebrew code with this exploit, the door is wide open for the future.
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Ryan Block / Engadget:
Buy a TiVo starting September 6, get a service contract — We know how much people hate paying for service on their gadgets—let alone being under service contracts for said service. But damned if TiVo didn't just totally stick it to their user base by instituting a $150 "service commitment" …
Discussion:
Techdirt
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Tom Evslin / Fractals of Change:
eBay Overbid — That happens sometimes in auctions but Skype would have been overpriced for eBay at half the price. (Full disclosure: I envy and admire the Skype team). Skype did manage to create a huge amount of value in a short amount of time. Meg Whitman is usually both strategically …
Charles Arthur / The Register:
iPod Nano owners in screen scratch trauma — Front panel scratches 'insanely easily' — People slavering to get Apple's "impossibly small" iPod Nano into their sticky hands may want to pause a moment: those ahead of them in the queue have discovered that it's also unbelievably easy to scratch the screen …
Discussion:
Neowin.net
Who da'Punk / Mini-Microsoft:
Microsoft Company Meeting 2005 — (Updated: reposted with Post-Company Meeting immediate reactions.) — Pre Company Meeting — So I'm getting ready for the Microsoft Company Meeting, ready to get to campus early and jump on a bus and get my morning box lunch, feeling deep sympathy …
Discussion:
Microsoft Weblog
Gizmodo, The Gadget blog:
Step Right Up For Gizmodo Comments — One of the best things about Gizmodo is that it is self-correcting. In those extremely rare instances when I get something wrong, say eight times per day, a smarter and often more foul-mouthed reader sends a tip to set the record straight.
tbray.org:
New England Town Meeting — On the 16th of this month, the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council hosted a meeting at which Eric Kriss, the state's Secretary for Administration and Finance, and Peter Quinn, the CIO, discussed the state's recent proposal to standardize on the Open Document Format.
