Chorr Blog

Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update now available for download

Paul Kim — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:36:13 +0000

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com/.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.0.1 Release Notes .

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.1 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 security and stability update now available for download

Paul Kim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:50:45 +0000

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 2.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox 2.x users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.16 Release Notes.

Note: Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

July Chat with the IE Team on Thursday

ieblog — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:08:00 +0000

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat next Thursday, July 17^th at 10.00 PDT/17.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team. Thank you to all who have attended the chats to date!

If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here. Allow approximately 7-10 days following a chat for the transcript to go live.

Hope you can join us on Thursday!

Kristen Kibble
Program Manager

P.S. Upcoming IE chat dates are posted here.

IE8 AJAX Navigation

ieblog — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:22:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Sharath Udupa, developer on the IE team focusing on AJAX features for IE8. One of the AJAX improvements we adopted in IE8 from HTML5 is AJAX page navigations. In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without messing the AJAX application state.

For more information regarding the feature and sample code, refer to the Internet Explorer MIX08 Hands-on Labs for AJAX and IE8 Beta 1 for Developers. For an example of how this can be used to hook navigation in Silverlight (with sample code!), see Michael Scherotter’s blog posts titled How IE8 Enables Silverlight Deep Linking and Browser Back/Forward Navigation and IE8 Forward/Back in a Silverlight 2 (Beta 2) Application for further details.

Sharath Udupa
Internet Explorer Developer

The Way to Save Internet Video

Mark Cuban — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:35:00 +0000

There is a lot of money being spent trying to turn internet video into something its not. Its not TV. It's certainly not going to be HDTV. What is shocking about the entire attempt to turn the internet into a tv/HDTV distribution medium is how much people lie to themselves about what is actually happening.

First of all, 100pct of the internet video that you see offered on the net as HD, is not HD. Plain and simple. What is HD video ? HD Vidoe is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say..."that looks good, almost as good as it can get ". What is currently being passed as HD, is video that looks pretty good because its being played on a small PC or Laptop screen and for the big timers, even a 17" screen. Well guess what, everything and anything coded at 2mbs and above is going to look good on a small screen. But looking good on a small screen doesn't cut it. In fact, video that looks its best on a 27" TV is not going to cut it. For those of you who don't see it that way, do some research on fhe history of Fox's Wide Screen broadcasts and see how owners of HDTVs 40" in above felt about those broadcasts compared to what they got from other networks. In a nutshell, WideScreen is gone. The quality wasn't good enough.

I'm not going to go on my 19th nervous tangent about why video over the net has problems and HD over the net is not going to happen. Instead, I will give the quick and dirty on what should happen.

There are already multiple digital distribution systems in place that distribute video, in SD and HD to our homes in place. Not only can they get the signal to our home with 99pct uptime and zero buffering but there are any number of systems in place that allow the signals to be distributed around our homes. In other words, Tv as TV works.

Which leads to the solution.

Move the video cloud to the node and encode and insert into the traditional video distribution systems.

Rather than Hulu sending its video directly across the net to your PC, and let the end user figure out how to watch and distribute from there, it should send it to a box hosted by your cable/telco and possibly even satellite provider, which then transcodes the video and places it on the existing TV distribution system and sends it across a channel branded with your name and the name of the file to your TV.

The net result is that having subscribed to this "Internet Video to your TV" system for a buck or two per month, you will notice that on your electronic programming guide there is a subset of channels with your name on them. When you click on a video at your favorite site, that video can easily be rerouted to the server at the node, transcoded into the right format and shown on your TV's programming guide as "mark cuban channels" - 001 Diet Coke and Mentos -002 Cat Flushing Toilet 003 - Softball game, etc. All you have to do is watch cable/telco/sat TV like you have always watched tv. Watching video anywhere in your house will be that easy.

Of course it will take coordination between the video sites and the video distributors, but that really should be easy. Even FTP would get it done.

This approach should result in a far better use of capital for them, and more importantly, it moves video off of the last internet mile, where bandwidth is constrained, to their new Switched Digital Video last mile , which is far less constrained now, and should quickly become completely unconstrained for long tail content.

if done right, it could also replace all local DVR storage. If you think about it, its pretty stupid to have redundant storage in every home. Paying for those ever growing hard drives, even with falling cost per bits, adds up to a lot of money . Moving that storage to a video cloud at the node or even on the backbone would make set top boxes smaller, cheaper and more flexible. The Network DVR , with space for remotely loaded internet video should be the way of the future.

In addition, this approach could expand our ability to customzie our TV viewing experience. Why cant we create playlists of our favorite shows? I personally would love to create a playlist, customized with a picture of my daughter, her name as the channel name, with a playlist or on demand list of shows that are appropriate for her. When there are videos of group activities like her ballet recitals, it would be great if we could mark the video as sharable with others we designate, or other parents could do the same, and we could easily watch them on our TV.

The video distribution networks already in place are designed to move gigabits of data simultaneously to millions of homes. As these distribution networks go to IP and Switched Digital Video, they will be able to integrate back to internet sites and to interact and offer more advanced customization and cloud based applications with far more sophistication and flexibility than the internet and the web can offer around video. As middleware like Tru2Way becomes more popular, and more TVs support it, the applications on our TVs will multiply quickly.

There is no reason to re invent TV over the net when TV distributed as TV works, and all the technology is in place to move video from the net to TV distirbution networks.

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Mozilla’s Guinness World Record Certificate

Jane Finette — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:27:20 +0000

Yesterday Mozilla received the official Guinness World Record certificate for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours.” From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3!

Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, accepted the certificate from Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records, on behalf the Firefox Community. The record achievement certificate was awarded in front of a 300 strong community gathering in central London to celebrate the launch of Firefox 3, and the Guinness World Record feat. The event was organized by our friends at Glaxstar.

It’s wonderful to finally have this official document - a great accomplishment for our community and one that we can all be proud. Thank you and Well Done!

Free is only good if someone else is paying for it. .

Mark Cuban — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:06:00 +0000

Everyone wants to give everything away for free. Thats the way the internet should work, right ? Wrong. Let me change the conventional wisdom a little bit with this :

Free is only good if someone else is paying for it.

We dont want to waste our time with a product or service if its not worth anything. We want things of value, and we dont want to waste of lot of time trying to determine if what is being offered is something we would use or consume. The easiest way to make the determination ? See if anyone else is using it and paying for it.

When we see enough other people actually paying, and how much they are paying, that becomes our "due diligence" and market pricing mechanism. It also becomes part of the decision tree as to whether or not we would prefer a free version , or are willing to pay. For some, it becomes the determining factor on whether or not they are willing to steal rather than pay.

Which translates to the conventional wisdom that free is the way to go on the web as being wrong. I think many websites are making a huge mistake by going free only for their products. The real upside comes from being a hybrid, with both free and for pay versions.

When people actually pay for your product, you define a value to everyone. First you have to keep your paying customers happy. They want their money's worth. Which in turn, keeps you improving the product and the service surrounding it. Just as importantly, it creates a revenue stream for your company. Always remember this. Without a revenue stream, you have no company.

Of course, you can sell advertising around the product. But while culture of the web is such that most of us understand that if you get something for free, you accept advertising or limited features in return.

The challenge for businesses is figuring out what the right balance of price vs features and advertising is.
At Filesanywhere.com,an online disk storage company, we have a variety of offerings from free to thousands of dollars, depending on the needs of the customer. It works great because the perceived value of the free version is off the charts because everyone knows they are getting a subset of a product that is worth thousands of dollars to corporations. Its a bargain to them when they can start with the free version, see if it meets their needs, and then choose the higher end offerings if they need or want them.

On the other hand, I have tried versions of competitors of theirs, that are offered exclusively for free, and some of the products were good, but the advertising was so intrusive, it wasnt worth the hassle and I didnt have an option out.

The challenge of pricing and product options is going to become more and more complex in a digital world. Because the cost of creating and distributing one more unit of a digital product, whether its a song, movie or piece of software or anything else is essentially nothing , its very , very tempting to want to give it away and generate revenue via advertising or elsewhere. Thats a huge mistake.

Whenever you have people willing to pay for a version of your product. Take their money and return them a great product and value. Not only will that revenue act as a cash source foundation for your company, but it will define the value of your product to those who only want a free version. That in turn will create even more demand for both and leave you with happier customers

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How Youtube Can Fix Their Revenue Problem

Mark Cuban — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:44:00 +0000

It appears that Youtube can only monetize about 4pct of its content. Which leads to the question of "how can Youtube monetize the other 96pct of its content ?"

The answer, believe it or not lives within Youtube and begins with another question: "Can Youtube generate enough traffic per video to cover the cost of reviewing content for copyright violations ?" After all, Google is the king of traffic generation and monetization, right ?

Now before you go all crazy and flaming about how many gazillion hours per minute of video is uploaded to Youtube and how it would be impossible to determine what videos had materials that is public domain, has already licensed content , is fair use, etc, etc,.. do some basic math.

If its estimated that Youtube will generate about 200mm in revenue around 4pct of its content, is it feasible to think that using a combination of manual and automated review, they could jump that to 20pct and increase their revenues by 500mm dollars ?

Would it cost more or less than 500mm per year to hire, train and put in place a datacenter that has enough people to take a quick look at the 10minutes or less videos, and if they are unsure if its copyright clean for any reason, run it through the content fingerprint database that Google already has in place? If the video passes, it goes to encoding and gets posted. If not, the same process that takes place when a takedown notice is posted againat a video is initiated. Someone has to prove they have the rights to the video before its posted.

Its that simple.

Realize that they are aleady doing this process for the 4pct of videos they do monetize.The 4pct have licenses from the content owner/distributor to Youtube. Youtube has to make sure that the person representing himself as the owner truly is. So they go through this process already and 4pct of videos is no small number. So they think the numbers work for those videos, so why shouldnt it work for all videos ?

At this point, someone says... why not just look for the videos that are starting to generate the most views and get in touch with them , sign a license and glom on some advertising ? Thats a problem under the DMCA. Youtube employees pretty much are not allowed to review their site for unlicensed user uploads. If they take a peak, and the video they look at has what appears to be obviously infringing content, they have to check it out and if its infringing, take it down.

So the Youtube cure is simple. Review videos first. Run them through the same process they use for the 4pct they have confirmed and only post those that pass.It should be a no brainer. After all, If Google cant leverage all their traffic and monetization skills to allow Youtube to continue to thrive after this change and finally generate revenue, who can ? IF Google cant generate enough traffic for qualified videos to cover this cost, why would content owners want to license their content to Google to put on Youtube ?

Of course, there is the risk that by introducing this process, Youtube loses its crown as the ultimate video destination. Its a tough situation to be in, when your mind is on your money and your money is on your mind..But sometimes you have to decide between the crown and the cash

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You Just Dont Get It

Mark Cuban — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:24:00 +0000

I just want to put it out there to save everyone and anyone who deals with me time. If at any point in time you utter the words "Just Don't Get It" or "Just Doesn't Get It" in any conversation with me, I will not do business with you.

If you try to justify your business, idea, proposal or whatever and in the course of conversation you utter these words, you have just proven to me that you are lazy. That rather than discussing the merits of another position, you think I'm stupid enough to dismiss that position because you want me to.

If you truly understand your topic its really easy to stand behind your position with facts and well thought concepts. If you have no idea what you are talking about, the other side "just doesn't get it"

Call it a Mark Cuban rule of investing. If these words come up in any way shape or form, they just dont get "it". "It" being an investment of my time or money

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The Internet Hammer and the everything Nail

Mark Cuban — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:44:00 +0000

There is an old saying that I try to always remind myself of "When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail"

Its always very easy, and even more tempting to try to take a utility that is readily available at minimal cost and use it as a technology that is the solution to everything. Has there been any of the world's ills that someone hasnt suggested can be cured by using the internet ?

From Education to Healthcare to Entertainment to Sports to Security to Corporate everything and just about anything and everything else. If Robitussin cant cure it, the Internet will. Of course the internet was not the first cure all for the worlds ills. The list is long. Im sure for the longest time fire was the cure all, but even in more modern times there is an exciting list.

In no particular order, electricity was a marval, and it benefited from Metcalfe's Law. Other beneficiaries of the network effect were the telegraph, roads and highways, railroads, airplanes and airports among others. With the exception of the telegraph, all went from technological miracle that reformed the world, to utilities that we can't live without, but we no long consider amazing. Is there any doubt that businesses and fortunes were built on these and other technologies and that kids coming out of school were considered ahead of the curve if they were educated in the latest and greatest ?

In just the past 20 years, knowing how to program in cobol, fortran and assembly language went from desirable by every major employer and a "great major" in school, to a worthy job, but with a chain to a desk and some really really old code to stare at every day. Database programming was the key to development riches. Its still valuable, but nothing like the opportunities of the 80s. Same can be said of C and Basic.

If you know everything there was to know about Novell networks and Lotus Notes, you could easily earn a living. Today, you better have expanded your skill set.

From Dbase to Clipper to ASP to PHP, scripting languages have built worthy applications on top of the network of choice of their day. The nature of scripting languages is that they always will be replaced by something better at some point. What happens to all those PHP apps in place today ?

No matter what the technology, language or platform, it has a limited shelf life and will use its position as "the Hammer" until it loses it.

For the past 15 years, everyone who "gets it" has tried to use the Internet to fix or create whatever they think "the next big thing " is. How much longer until there is something new that comes along and makes Web X.0 on the net look old and tired ?

Personally, I think Web 2.0 already is tired. When social networking or Twittering ,applications that are nice to have, but not a need to have, are the best we can do. We ain't doing much. Lets get real. As much fun as Twittering can be, shouldn't we all be able to agree that if its the latest and greatest application, the Internet has Jumped the Shark ?

We saw the same thing in the "PC Revolution". Back in the 80s, we waited anxiously as new desktops came out with ever increasing chips and hard drives, which when combined with ever improving programming languages, created an excitement over new software programs. Yes little Billy, there used to be a time when we wanted to see what new Word Processor or Spreadsheet or Database would come out to topple the incumbent market leader.

There was a time when there was an interesting, if not an exciting battle between Harvard Graphics and Powerpoint. Talk about ancient history. When was the last time you even looked to see if there were any new desktop apps available ? Ok maybe if you are a gamer you care. But thats it.

When was the last time a non gamer even cared about how fast a processor was for desktops and whether or not there were new desktops coming out ? Any excitement we have at all for is reserved for the shrinking of laptops and new hand held phones or devices

The PC Revolution is over. Dead. Its now just the PC Evolution.

Anyone who thinks the same wont happen to the Internet is not paying attention.

Which is exactly why its so much fun to write on this blog and tweak all the internet bigots out there. Yes, all of you who think that the Internet is the ultimate Hammer and that every problem that technology can touch is a nail, you are Internet Bigots.

Me, I believe that all internet sites are created equal, that the world has already moved past the Internet as magic to the internet as utility stage. I believe in morning walks, sipping diet peach snapple, the beauty of a jump shot ripping the cords and that if most of the world thinks the Internet is the Hammer, the solution to everything, that is the exact reason why it is not. I believe that there is something far, far better , that will have far more utility to all of us and is on the tip of the tongue of some kid out there somewhere and I will have a blast looking for it and hopefully finding it first, which will be a lot more fun than trying to compete with Facebook or Google.

In mean time, Im going to enjoy tweaking all the Internet Bigots out there, simply because its fun

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