512 Pixels

Electronista:

Comcast chief operating officer Stephen Burke called Hulu’s existing business model “smart and appropriate” and said there weren’t any plans to change the way the streaming video site works. He points out that the split already works in Comcast’s favor, as much of Hulu’s content comes from basic cable and leaves out the premium channels that Comcast would want to reserve for On Demand Online.

Burke added that NBC (and now Comcast) was only one of three studios involved in Hulu and thus couldn’t determine its fate outright. However, he noted that Comcast doesn’t have any plans to implement a pay-only section of Hulu.

Considering today’s news, this is a good sign.

If you’re like me, your ISP’s DNS sucks. I’ve being using OpenDNS for years to avoid Comcast’s DNS issues. While not everyone is thrilled with their service, I don’t mind a redirection here and there for faster browsing and the ability to filter traffic.

Today, Google launched their own independent DNS service at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. While it’s not as robust as OpenDNS yet — Google doesn’t offer any filtering, for example — it doesn’t redirect any traffic, which is a plus for some users.

Update: OpenDNS responds.

Miland Alvares at Smoking Apples:

For the full year that the first gen iPhone was out, the only way to put it to any real use was to jailbreak it. Then the app store came along and changed the game of using third party applications on iPhone OS. ‘Official’ apps were far more refined, polished, and as is evident by the current figures, far more in number. But if the App Store is famous for anything other than its sheer size, is the stringent rules by which Apple allows an application to be sold at the store. In most cases Apple doesn’t even have to reject the apps—the developers of the apps in question know they won’t make it. Yes, they are that cool.

Wayne Lau for Ars Technica:

Overall, I like the Droid. The hardware design is merely par for the course; it’s well-made but has some rough edges. The hardware specs, however, combined with Android 2.0, makes this a good enough device to be a solid competitor to the iPhone 3GS. This is the hardware that Android should have shipped with. In some areas it is better, in some areas on par, and some areas slightly worse than the iPhone or other high end smartphones. But all of it is “just good enough.” It all depends on your preferences in phone features. If multitasking matters, the Pre and the Droid are your only choices. Droid lets you play music on Pandora, navigate, and check Twitter all at the same time, with no lag and no delays. If you’re looking for a media player phone or a camera phone, on the other hand, you might check elsewhere. It just comes down to the feature set you’re looking for.

I think the second revision of the Droid will improve on the hardware complaints, and by then Android will be beyond version 2.0. While the Droid is good, it’s just the beginning.

NPR:

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, is buying a controlling stake in NBC Universal which has broadcast and cable networks and a movie studio. The deal would make Comcast one of the nation’s most powerful players in news and entertainment.

The possible ramifications of this are scary. What if Comcast decides to charge other cable companies more to carry NBC? What if they only allow NBC programming to be streamed online to their own Internet customers? This is a step backwards.

Anytime a provider has control of content, the subscribers have fewer options. Here’s what I wrote about AOL back in April:

Outside of poor business decisions, my biggest problem with AOL has always been the fact that they offered a limited view of the Internet. In other words, the Internet service providers were also playing the role of content providers.

It’s the same situation now, just on a much larger scale.

Reuters:

“With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame,” he [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] wrote in the article published on Thursday.

“Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return,” he said. “The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.”

Revenue from ads that appear alongside news articles on Google’s search engine represent a “tiny fraction” of the company’s overall revenue, Schmidt said.

[…]

Individual news articles accessed through Google can often be read for free, even if the newspapers’ actual website charges a subscription fee.

“We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content,” Schimdt wrote. “But just as there is no single cause of the industry’s current problems, there is no single solution.”

Here’s a look at what Time, Inc. has been working on:

This type of device is exactly what print journalism needs to stay relevant. In a world of always-on communication, the printed word is out of date before the ink dries.

If Apple’s tablet is true, I expect this type of content to be at the heart of it.

This is from Apple’s Snow Leopard info online:

While most companies store contact information in centralized LDAP directories, IT administrators usually prevent users from modifying or adding their own contacts to the directory. This makes it hard for users to maintain a centralized list of contacts and access those contacts on multiple computers and devices they own.

The new Address Book Server in Snow Leopard Server solves this problem. Not only does it store contacts on the server, but it allows you to access and use those contacts on each of your Mac computers. With Address Book, you can even synchronize contacts to your iPhone for accessing your contacts on the go.

Sadly, this isn’t the case. Address Book Server works beautifully between Macs. It’s fast and reliable. However, the iPhone OS doesn’t support CardDAV, the technology behind Address Book Server, meaning these contacts cannot be synced over the air to an iPhone like iCal or Mail data.

The line about syncing the iPhone isn’t accurate either. iTunes only can sync to the “On my Mac” collection of contacts. When hooked to a Snow Leopard Server running the Address Book service, it creates a new collection — outside the realm of iTunes’ (and Spotlight’s, curiously) reach. Basically, if you want your contacts across multiple Macs and an iPhone, Snow Leopard Server isn’t the solution you need, no matter how loud Apple sings it’s praises.

Which means I may end up renewing MobileMe yet again to get the features Snow Leopard Server ought to have.

Computerworld:

Google said Tuesday it is changing how it grants access to news stories through its search engine to give publishers more control over how much content people can see for free.

The move by Google marks a step toward placating the publishing industry, which has raised concerns that the popular search engine has undermined its revenues.

The changes will be made to Google’s “First Click Free” program, which allowed users free access to content through Google News that a publisher would normally charge for.

[…]

Under the new changes, people will be able to obtain free access to participating sites’ premium content via Google a maximum of five times a day. The changes apply to searches done through both Google News and its regular Web search.

“If you’re a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you’ve clicked through to more than five articles on the Web site of a publisher using First Click Free in a day,” wrote Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, on a Google blog.

While I’m still against pay walls, this seems like a good compromise for both Google and news providers — just not for readers.

TUAW’s Chris Rawson:

More than a few of the items on the list are certainly debatable, especially the last one, but the point remains: in only three years, the iPhone has seen an explosion in functionality that very few people could have predicted when it was first introduced. It’s become the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, capable of duplicating or outright replacing many standalone devices and items and rendering others completely obsolete. It seems somewhat counterintuitive that something that costs as much as an iPhone could actually end up saving you money in the long run, but if you can actually manage to replace all 33 items on this list with an iPhone as I have, you’ll end up coming out way ahead.

Ramp Champ — the delightful carnival-themed game from the Iconfactory — is free for a limited time in the App Store.

There’s no reason not to get it. Be warned, it requires a wifi connection to download, as it is over 10 MB.

Michael Scalisi doesn’t think Chrome OS is a threat to Windows:

By completely omitting local apps and storage Google made it obvious that it’s not looking to replace your existing OS. Pichai acknowledged that not all apps will run on the Chrome OS and countered that “most people who buy this device next year…expect them to have another machine at home.” As my colleague Robert Strohmeyer pointed out last week, Chrome OS seems intentionally unremarkable. This demonstrates that Google isn’t positioning Chrome to take over as your media center, gaming machine, or professional workstation.

Chrome OS is being developed to fill a need for fast, dirt-cheap, Web-centric computers that are highly mobile and have extended battery life. Beyond that, the Chrome initiative exists to promote next-generation HTML5 Web apps and to create a computing ecosystem that replicates Chrome’s features and settings across multiple platforms. Chrome exists as a catalyst to accelerate the development of Web-centric applications, and to give people more reason to start using Web-based alternatives to traditional apps.

I think he may be surprised — I think Chrome do well in the netbook market.