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MovieBeam offers first HDTV online movie rentals — NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A video on demand movie service spun out of Walt Disney Co. is introducing on Tuesday the first U.S. home delivery service for high-definition films, backed by top Hollywood and Silicon Valley partners.
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As an Alternative to a Trip to a Video Store, Movies Through a Set-Top Box — Will people pay $230 and hook a new gizmo up to their television sets so they do not have to drive to the video rental store? — That is the question to be answered by MovieBeam, a service being introduced in 29 major markets today.

Oracle snags open-source database company — Oracle said on Tuesday that it acquired open-source database company Sleepycat Software for an undisclosed sum. — The database giant said Sleepycat's open-source Berkeley DB database will complement Oracle's existing line of closed-source databases for embedding within applications.
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Ellison suggests rationale for JBoss acquisition — Oracle reportedly in talks to buy JBoss and two other open-source companies — Oracle's plans to buy JBoss (Profile, Products, Articles) were still only a rumor Monday morning, but Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles) …

Google Windows apps coming to Linux — Google and CodeWeavers Inc. are working together to bring Google's popular Windows Picasa photo editing and sharing program to Linux. The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say.

Apple Begins Shipping MacBook Pro — MacBook Pro Features Faster Intel Core Duo Processors Up to 2.16 GHz — CUPERTINO, California—February 14, 2006—Apple® this week will begin shipping the new 15-inch MacBook™ Pro notebook computer featuring the new Intel Core Duo processor …

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search — In Part 1 of the State of the Blogosphere report, I covered the overall growth of the blogosphere. Today I'm going to cover the growth of the blogosphere as media, and discuss some of the emerging trends that deal with handling information overload.
Discussion:
Newsome.Org, B2Day, Voidstar, Guardian Unlimited, Joho the Blog, Peer Pressure, Center for Citizen Media, Somewhat Frank, Bloggers Blog, A View from the Isle, Burningbird, Search Engine Watch Blog, The Blackfriars Blog, Raw, Smalltalk Tidbits …, Boing Boing, AdPulp and www.josschuurmans.com

The Firefox Threat - IE7 Is Getting Things Right — Yesterday I wrote about my frustrations with Firefox - especially the memory leak issues and the fact that with iteration and iteration of new releases the core stability issues were not being addressed. The core issue, as also picked …

AdSense beta testing third party tracking in image ads — Selected members have begun to receive an email from Google about the new third party tracking AdSense beta they will begin testing. This is a true beta (there were some publishers questioning if it really was from the AdSense team.

Google's ad sales tested in court — Another lawsuit is poised to challenge Google's lucrative advertising-based business model by arguing it encourages unlawful use of trademarks as keywords. — The parent company of a payday loan provider called Check 'n Go has sued Google in federal court in Ohio …

Google Changed Another Help Entry — Google in response to their new censorship policies in China (in which they agreed to remove results unwanted by the Chinese government) changed another help entry. This is what was available before, live until at least late January:

Graded Browser Support — In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you — or don't you — support a given browser? When the answer was "No", user access to the site was often actively prevented.

Windows Defender antispyware beta 2 released — Microsoft Antispyware officially becomes Windows Defender with the release of beta 2, and you can download it here. — More later after I have a chance to play with it, but Neowin has this to say: … More: There are some noticeable behavioral changes in this new beta.

Camino Sends OS-X A Valentine — When it comes to browsers, there are many options for Apple users such as Safari, Opera, and Firefox. And then there is Camino, a browser that combines the visual and behavioral experience of a Mac with the speedy Gecko core. Originally called Chimera, it has been nearly four years in the making.

Blogs to Riches — To analyze the disparities in the blogosphere, Shirky took a sample of 433 blogs. Then he counted an interesting metric: the number of links that pointed toward each site ("inbound" links, as they're called). Why links? Because they are the most important and visible measure of a site's popularity.

How to Almost Live on Blogging — Enter a Google search for Harold Davis, and some resulting links will inevitably lead you back to Google. — As the author of two books on Google, operator of a blog called Googleplex and longtime user of Google's keyword advertising program …
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