Sunday, December 3, 2006

Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia. netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."[Slashdot] 8:40:46 PM      Google It!.

Democracy Player is 0.9.2 and Growing Up Fast. Dean writes "Democracy Player, the open source answer for RSS video aggregation/playback, has just made it to 0.9.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you haven't tried Democracy Player for a while, it's time to try it again. The application is more responsive and stable, uses less memory, integrates Bittorrent, and can now play Flash videos (including stuff from YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc). Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources." In many ways, Democracy is the template of what I'd like to see out of Apple's upcoming iTV. Although my guess is that it will be more like MythTV- only for people willing to put in the effort.[Slashdot] 9:47:53 AM      Google It!.

Parallels Beta Adds Boot Camp, Desktop. Verunks writes "Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualization product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Check out this Screenshot" More interesting to me is the Boot Camp support so you can have a single partition to run IE7 in Parallels to test compatibility of a website but reboot to play video games that need a little more juice.[Slashdot] 9:45:57 AM      Google It!.

They're All Smart Phones, but With Different Types of Intelligence . Smart phones -- cellphones with a big screen, a keyboard and the ability to run add-on programs -- are not necessarily phones to the people who use them. Their versatility allows them to impersonate the other handheld devices you might otherwise carry around; in reality, any given smart phone may be... By Rob Pegoraro. [washingtonpost.com - Technology - Industry News, Policy, and Reviews] 9:43:36 AM      Google It!.