Titanium Developer Forum

AdamWill writes “The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There’s a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes “The apocalyptic film 2012 has dominated the box office, taking in $65 million on opening weekend. But with all those uninformed eyeballs watching the film, NASA has found itself answering so many common questions that their Ask an Astrobiologist blog offers calming, professional reassurance that there is no planet Nibiru, nor will it collide with Earth (although I do recall a massive solar storm forecast). NASA’s main site even offers a FAQ answering similar questions. NPR has more on NASA scientist David Morrison and his efforts to calm the ensuing public hysteria, but survivalists are already planning for the big one. Pretty funny, right? Not according to Morrison: ‘I’ve had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I’ve had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, “I’m so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won’t suffer?” And I don’t know how to answer those questions.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Later today Senator Rockefeller is holding a U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. He released a report on his findings in advance of the hearing.

The documents contain a lot of previously unavailable information on the size of the market, and where the money is flowing.

Background: hundreds of well known ecommerce companies add post transaction marketing offers to consumers immediately after something is purchased on the site. Consumers are usually offered cash back if they just hit a confirmation button. But when they do, their credit card information is automatically passed through to a marketing company that signs them up for a credit card subscription to a package of useless services. The “rebate” is rarely paid.

Intelius is one company that is using these scams to go public. But scores of even more well known ecommerce companies use these scams as well, including: 1800flowers, Buy.com, Classmates.com, Columbia House, Expedia, Hotels.com, Fandango, FTD, Hotwire, MovieTickets.com, Orbitz, Priceline, Shutterfly, Travelocity, US Airways and Vista Print. Each of these companies has received over $10 million in PTM revenue, according to the report. Hundreds more received less.

Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty are the three largest companies partnering on these scams. The report states that these three companies have earned over $1.4 billion in revenue from 35 million transactions. 4 million people are currently enrolled in the plans.

450 or more ecommerce sites have added the scams, says the report, and 88 of them have earned at least $1 million. Sites can earn CPMs from the ads of up to $2,600, and the conversion rate is up to 4.5%

We’ve written that these PTM scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming scams we reported on earlier this month. As with Scamville, companies that don’t engage in these tactics are at a disadvantage. They earn less revenue, meaning they can’t be as aggressive on core pricing and on advertising. So without regulation, sites that don’t engage in scamming users are forced out into the practice, or out of business.

The report and supporting documents are embedded below.

111609STAFFREPORT –

111609EXHIBITSTOSTAFFREPORT –

RepresentativeDocumentsPartI –

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, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

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CNETNate writes “Do Opera Mobile, Skyfire, or Mozilla’s Fennec have the power to take down the BlackBerry browser, IE on Windows Mobile, or Safari on the iPhone? This lengthy test aimed to find out. Speed, Acid3 compliance, JavaScript rendering capabilities, and general subjective usability were all tested and reviewed. So were Opera Mini and the default Symbian browser, but these two were unable to complete some of the tests and benchmarks.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today brings good news for PC users everywhere. Seesmic is launching a native desktop client for Windows. Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur made the announcement today at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Le Meur says that providing a desktop client that was native for Windows was of huge importance because 80 percent of Seesmic users run their apps on a PC.

There are a few native Twitter clients out there to have been formatted for the Mac, such as Tweetie and Twitterfic. Windows users have previously limited options when it comes to native Twitter clients and are forced to either used web-based clients or use desktop clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. These are both based Adobe’s AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks.

Seesmic’s new desktop client will feature integration with just Twitter (Facebook will be added in the next few weeks) and will have much of the same functionality as the Adobe Air-powered client such as lists and multiple accounts, but it will be built on the .NET framework. This means the client will have a faster, better UI, lower memory consumption. Plus the client can take advantage of Windows7 modules such as location sensor, letting the user to post a location directly to Twitter.

The native Windows client will feature multi-language spell check, while the Air-powered Seesmic Desktop supports basic English. Another interesting feature of the client is a a plug-in architecture pretty much like on a browser, so Tweetmeme can write, for example, a plug-in that will give you how a tweet is spreading or the influence of a Twitter user. Because the Windows ecosystem, it will be much easier for developers to build plug-ins and add-ons off of the client. Le Meur says that building on Windows lets Seesmic offer this as a secure platform to developers, which is not possible or difficult on the Adobe Air or web-based platform.

There are other Twitter clients that have been developed for Windows, such as Sobees and Blu, but Seesmic will have the advantage of integration with Facebook and much more.

Seesmic has been in the news a lot lately thanks to the emergence of Twitter lists and geolocation. Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client and its web-based client was upgraded with both Lists functionality and geolocation.

To be honest, I was surprised to hear that 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. I guess in the Apple-centric world of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that stat. Now, I’m eagerly waiting for Seesmic to unveil a native client for the Mac. Watch out Tweetie!

Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.

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judgecorp writes “UK company Iceotope has launched liquid-cooling technology which it says surpasses what can be done with water or air-cooling and can cut data centre cooling costs by up to 93 percent. Announced at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon, the ‘modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Server’ technology wraps each server in a cool-bag-like device, which cools components inside a server, rather than cooling the whole data centre, or even a traditional ‘hot aisle.’ Earlier this year, IBM predicted that in ten years all data centre servers might be water-cooled.” Adds reader 1sockchuck, “The Hot Aisle has additional photos and diagrams of the new system.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is embarrassing. Not only are the Microsoft Stores a clear copy of Apple Stores, but now the employees are trying to be spontaneous and stir up customer reactions with a weird bastardization of Improv Anywhere. See what I mean after the jump.

eldavojohn writes “Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013. And the problem with just opening more uranium mines is that nobody really knows where to go for the next big uranium lode. Dr. Michael Dittmar has been warning us for some time about the coming shortage (PDF) and has recently uploaded a four-part comprehensive report on the future of nuclear energy and how socioeconomic change is exacerbating the effect this coming shortage will have on our power consumption. Although not quite on par with zombie apocalypse, Dr. Dittmar’s final conclusions paint a dire picture, stating that options like large-scale commercial fission breeder reactors are not an option by 2013 and ‘no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

buzzboy writes “If you’re wondering what the folks over at KDE have been cooking up for the next major release, KDE 4.4, well, quite a bit as it turns out. In a lengthy interview, KDE core developer and spokesperson for the project Sebastian Kugler details the myriad changes that are coming with the 4.4 release — the fifth major release since KDE 4.0 debuted to much criticism nearly two years ago. The project has closed about 18,000 bugs over the past six months and the pace of development is snowballing. The ‘heavy-lifting’ in libraries and frameworks for 4.0 is now starting to pay off. Perhaps the biggest change is in the development of a semantic desktop. According to Kugler, ‘If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That’s how it should be, right?’ There is also a picture gallery of KDE 4.4 (svn) screenshots so you can see what it will look like.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newspapers continue to struggle with finding an economically viable and sustainable business model for the production and distribution of news on the Web, and not a day passes without me reading about some idiotic statement about the future of online news or journalism made by someone in charge of something at one of the world’s beleaguered newspaper and/or magazine publishers.

Today we have James Harding, editor of News Corp-owned The Times, giving some insight into the publisher’s plans to generate revenue from the online edition of the paper to an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Essex, per PaidContent.

The plans? To charge for 24-hour access to the website of the daily newspaper in combination with a subscription-fee based model.

Seriously, Harding apparently said he believed charging for a full day’s access to online news you can – and will continue to be able to – essentially get for free elsewhere is a good idea. Pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers”, I can’t help but wonder how he wouldn’t expect such a stupid endeavor to rewrite nothing but the economics of The Times exclusively.

And not in a good way.

Paywall brouhaha aside, I figured everyone realized by now that people tend to cherry pick news content online based on their time and specific interests, and that there was quite some agreement around the fact that people vote with their wallets when given more individual choice (e.g. evolution of music album sales vs. single track sales). If you could choose between paying per single song stream rather than spend your money on 24-hour access to an entire album, which would it be?

Even if you still go out and buy the news as printed on actual paper and subsequently read every single article in it, how many people are like you, you reckon? And if you wanna read everything and everyone a daily newspaper has to offer anyway, why not just, erm, continue to buy the newspaper instead of paying for time-limited access to the digital version of it? Because the advertising alongside articles in the latter case is more interactive?

Despite clear indications of the contrary, Harding believes people will be prepared to pay for news, citing the 270 million books purchased annually in Britain as evidence of an “enormous appetite for the written word and for news”. Except of course you usually pay for a book only once in your life and it (hopefully) stays relevant for the rest of it, while a newspaper by definition stops being a vehicle for actual news the very moment it gets printed.

At least Harding and I agree that micro-payments are not the way either – he claims newspapers should be “wary” of article-only economics because they could find themselves “writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka”.

An excerpt from the MediaGuardian article (see PC follow-up too):

“From spring of next year we will start charging for the digital edition of the Times. We’re working on the exact pricing model, but we’d charge for a day’s paper, for a 24-hour sign-up to the Times. We’ll also establish a subscription price as well.”

The paper’s recent decision to end the free distribution of bulk copies was in line with this strategy, he said.

“We think it’s good for us and good for business to stop encouraging the trickery and fakery of the ABCs. We want real sales to real customers – that’s what our advertisers want too.”

There’s not a doubt in my mind that that’s indeed what The Times wants and hopes for.

There’s even less doubt in my mind that this is not what readers want, though.

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