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The 404 951: Where we undo a huge mistake (podcast)

Leaked from today's episode of The 404 Podcast:

Five years after its series finale, Netflix seals a deal for exclusive rights to a new season of "Arrested Development." Molly Wood fears the minefield of links spreading through Facebook's Open Graph sharing program. Publishers with Facebook apps like The Guardian are requesting access to your feed that automatically show your friends the articles, images, and music you consume. More than 200 independent record labels pull their music from streaming sites like Spotify, Rdio, Simfy, and Napster. Studies show that consumers care less about owning the music than about unlimited access to streaming tracks. Apple will open a flagship store in Grand Central Station tomorrow that spans 23,000 square feet and costs $800,000 a year in rent to the MTA.… Read more

What to make of Facebook's oversharing?

Facebook’s penchant for sharing everything you read via its Open Graph news apps caused quite a weekend stir. However, I wonder how far this flap goes beyond tech insiders and news junkies.

CNET’s Molly Wood set off a bit of a fire storm by noting that Facebook is ruining sharing. In a nutshell, she doesn’t want to click on any links on Facebook because they are broadcast to her friends. Chances are you’ve seen stuff a friend has read because they installed a news reader app from the Washington Post, Yahoo or a bevy of others.… Read more

How Facebook is ruining sharing

I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days.

No, it's got nothing to do with the spam attack and the flood of nasty images making their way into news feeds all last week. Instead, it's because the slow spread of Facebook's Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing.

I know you've seen this at the top of your news feed: a list of stories your friends have been reading. Or, simply, a single post with a great headline leading to a story that you'd really like to read. So you click it, … Read more

OpenCL adapts for control-freak programming

The Khronos Group announced version 1.2 of OpenCL today, an update that gives programmers tighter control over how they run software on graphics chips.

OpenCL is a standard interface that makes it easier for programmers to tap into the "GPGPU" idea--general-purpose graphical processing unit, which runs software such as game physics engines on a computing device's graphics hardware rather than on its central processing unit (CPU). With OpenCL, or with another technology such as Microsoft's rival DirectCompute, a programmer can use a GPGPU approach without having to worry about the particulars of individual graphics chips. … Read more

Apple issues MacBook Pro black-screen fix for Snow Leopard

One ongoing problem that has been affecting users of the 15-inch mid-2010 MacBook Pro is a black-screen bug that appears regularly when the computer is performing tasks like waking from sleep and manipulating graphics. While this problem became more prominent once OS X Lion arrived, a number of people have reported encountering this in Snow Leopard as well.

The issue was acknowledged by Apple and users were assured a fix was in the works. Shortly thereafter Apple released a MacBook Pro video update that included new video drivers and an update to the OpenCL framework in OS X. This update … Read more

Diaspora co-founder dies at 22, report says

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of the social network Diaspora, has died at age 22, TechCrunch reported today.

The cause and date of his death were not reported.

Zhitomirskiy was one of four New York University programming students who last year launched Diaspora, which is designed as an open-source alternative to Facebook. Their intention was to build "an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data."

A commercial alpha version was released November 23, 2010. The group has raised more than $200,000 in donations using a fundraising platform start-up called … Read more

Got a file to open? Use Open Freely

So you've come across a file that you need to open but can't? Maybe you just want to open it but can't. Either way, the defining word here is "can't." Open Freely can shorten it to "can" and also shorten the time and effort it takes to open over 100 different file types, including common types, of course, but also a whole lot of uncommon ones, from AMR to ZIP. It can display nearly any kind of media, edit documents and images, extract files, and perform other functions.

Open Freely's installation … Read more

Growl now costs $2--and that's just fine

Growl, a widely used open-source notification tool that lets Mac OS X applications tell users about events such as incoming instant messages, is no longer free.

And not everybody is happy about that.

Starting with version 1.3, Growl became a $1.99 purchase. Growl developer Chris Forsythe described the changes this way yesterday:

Growl as a paid application allows for good changes. We now have people working on Growl full time. Money earned through purchases in the App Store go directly to benefiting Growl...Without changing to this paid Growl model, Growl would have died off and would no … Read more

As Facebook buys Strobe, Tilde embraces its Web tech

Facebook has acquired Strobe, a startup focused on the open-source SproutCore software--but CNET has learned that a new startup called Tilde looks to be picking up where Strobe is leaving off.

SproutCore is a package of prebuilt JavaScript code designed to ease the creation of Web sites and Web apps, including those that work on mobile devices. Charles Jolley has worked on SproutCore for years, including for a period of time at Apple where SproutCore was used in MobileMe services, before striking off on his own to form Strobe.

Several programmers left Strobe in October to begin a new start-up … Read more