News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
According to the Netscape Blog, on February 1st support for Netscape Navigator ends. I switched my primary browser from Mosaic to Netscape in 1995 and used it almost exclusively up until Internet Explorer 5.0’s release in 1999. Although I have rarely used any of the Netscape versions since Phoenix (1st version of Firefox) came out in 2002, I still think it’s a bit sad that the Granddad of the Mozilla/Firefox/SeaMonkey lineage is gone.
Hat tip to John at Stranger Fruit
Conformity Magazine pointed me to this December 4th notice from the FCC. The commission would like to eliminate the automatic expiration for the Do Not Call registry. I think every US citizen who is not employed in the telemarketing industry would like this rule change to go through.
The statement of Chairman Kevin J. Martin sums up the commission’s decision:
Todays action tentatively concludes that telephone numbers registered in the National Do-Not- Call Registry will not expire after 5 years. The Commission continues to move forward to protect consumers who have registered their telephone numbers on the Do-Not-Call list. Consumers expect their telephone numbers to remain protected under the Do-Not-Call list until they have cancelled their registration or their telephone number is disconnected or reassigned.
My regular reader 😉 may remember that I’ve recommended Instant Media (I’M) as an alternative to Joost in previous posts. Over the last 6 months or so I basically only used it for automatic downloading of DL.TV and Cranky Geeks (linked under Netcasts on the right). While I had noticed that the I’M guide wasn’t working back in September I hadn’t bothered to find out why. This week I looked around and found some information in these blog posts.
Instant Media Gone Bust? Feeling the Web Video Bubble Burst
Instant Media, Miro Competitor, Leaves The Net Without A Trace
Instant Media Grinds to a Halt
Those posts speculate on what happened and the last one linked above does have a fairly definitive answer from one the the former developers.
Scott Blum, the eccentric billionaire that was funding our company, decided to scuttle it mid-July
This was a little puzzling, why did the I’M web site stay online until September when the plug had been pulled in July. This blog post gives me an idea of why, the company tried to sue Microsoft and get a preliminary injunction over Microsoft’s use of their trademark, I’M. That seems like the reason to me, I’M had to stay up on the web until the court decided, once the courts ruled against I’M in the middle of August I’M had no further incentive to stay around.
Since I’M was gone I decided to look around for an alternative and I found a great one, Miro. This is an excellent program especially since it’s open source and cross platform. I installed it on my OpenSuse 10.3 PC and setup a Samba share so that my Media Center PC can play the videos. One feature I hope to make good use of once NerdTV starts season two is Miro’s support for Bittorrent. I like the idea of be able to easily to give some of my bandwidth to NerdTV to help defray the distribution costs (PBS doesn’t have very deep pockets).
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