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Michigan-Notre Dame rivalry headed to hiatus [∞]
The University of Michigan-Notre Dame football rivalry is headed for hiatus when its current contract expires after the 2011 season. Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White said Oklahoma would replace Michigan on the Fighting Irish schedule for a two-year period, according to a story Saturday in the Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register.
Looks like the Irish are chickening out of the rivalry!
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Tracier [∞]
An UNKLE discography site dedicated to the Surrender All label releases.
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Netflix to lower cost of most popular plan [∞]
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Online DVD rental pioneer Netflix Inc. is lowering the price of its two most popular subscription plans by a $1 per month, relinquishing millions of dollars in revenue in an attempt to regain the upper hand in a cutthroat battle with rival Blockbuster Inc.
With the reductions announced Sunday, Netflix will charge $16.99 per month for a plan that allows subscribers to keep up to three DVDs at a time with no limit on how frequently the discs can be mailed back in return for another movie. The price for a similar plan that lets customers keep one DVD at a time will fall to $8.99 per month.
I recently downgraded to the 2 movie at a time plan since Netflix selectively dropped its price. With this new move, I decided to switch back to the default, now at $16.99.
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Facebook is the new home page of choice [∞]
Facebook is becoming the home page for many of us. Why? Because our friends are a lot more interesting than anything over on Yahoo News or TechMeme or other places.
Agreed. And I think Facebook is a better home page than MySpace because of the news feed, which lets you check your friends’ activity quickly at a glance. That said, it would be great to see Facebook move away from session cookies so that you stay logged in when you relaunch your browser.
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Dateline is catching a new kind of predator [∞]
Michael Lubrano: You’re Chris Hansen?
Chris Hansen: I am.
One who actually appears happy to meet me…
Jeremy Keister: It’s nice to meet you.
Chris Hansen: Thank you. (laughter)
Tonight on Dateline: To Catch a Predator, Jeremy Keister, a regular viewer of the show was captured by the Perverted Justice sting operation. He identified Chris Hansen the minute he stepped into the room to conduct his interview. The man started laughing and joked with Chris throughout the segment. His demeanor made me wonder if he knew he was going to get caught when he arrived at the house and if he did so just to get on television. If this is the case, it could be the start of a disturbing new trend — non-pedophiles pretending to be pedophiles simply to get their fifteen minutes of fame on television.
A similar phenomenon developed with American Idol — people with no singing ability auditioned and intentionally flubbed their performances because they knew viewers were out there eager to see footage of the new William Hung. However, the emerging Datelirne scenario is radically different from American Idol because its attention whores receive a felony criminal charge as a result of their actions. It makes me wonder if the Dateline editors considered not airing the young man’s case to prevent future recurrences or if they did air it as a warning to those considering such a stunt.
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Digg in between a rock and a hard place [∞]
Michi has some great insight on the troubles Digg will face as it continues to rise in popularity:
Digg no longer serves a niche. When I first found Digg a year ago, it was amazing: you could always find new hidden treasures of the Internet on the front page. But nowadays, it has swerved dramatically “mainstream”, constantly covering the same anti-Iraq or pro-iPhone stories or spammed with links to funny pictures.
[...]
What does Digg cover well? If you answer with “everything,” you just fell into the trap that Kevin Rose did. It covers nothing well. It doesn’t cover celebrity news as closely as tabloids. It doesn’t cover business development as closely any industry publication. It doesn’t cover Apple news as closely as Apple rumor blogs. It doesn’t cover politics as closely as the thousands of newspapers across the country.
The point is, Digg has scaling problems in the social sense. If it grows, it only covers more topics in less depth since front page space is always limited. As more users join, the collective opinion continues to “average out,” allowing more quality to slip through the cracks, especially on niche topics.
I agree that Digg was a great web site about a year ago, but is now becoming polluted with spam and inaccurate, sensationalist stories. Another major issue is that many sites go offline shortly after they reach the front page. Duggmirror is often unable to save a cached copy of the story, rendering the front page headline worthless to the reader.
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The leaked Harry Potter photos are traceable [∞]
The photos contain EXIF metadata from a Canon digital camera with the serial number 560151117. This will be great evidence in court if the camera is recovered. Perhaps the perpetrator was stupid enough to register the camera with Canon before committing the crime.
Facebook recently launched their application API interface, and many of my friends have added apps to their profiles. It’s a great idea in theory but the majority of applications currently available on the site are useless and unsightly. I haven’t found a single useful application except for the official ones provided by the Facebook development team. So, I decided that I’m going to block third party applications and all the other goofy stuff on the site. I managed to accomplish this with a custom userContent.css file:
/* facebook application clean up
----------------------------------------------- */
a:link[href*="apps.facebook.com"],
a:link[href*="slide.com"],
a:link[href*="poke.php?id="],
#box_2386512837,
div.ad_capsule,
div.app_install_story,
div.extra_media,
div.platform,
div[id*="box_app_"] {
display: none !important;
}
July 28, 2008
The upcoming redesign moves application cruft to a separate page, so the blocking code posted above is no longer really necessary. However, Facebook now uses social ads all over the site, which can be easily blocked with this code:
/* facebook ad clean up
----------------------------------------------- */
div.adcolumn, div.social_ad, div.sponsor {
display: none !important;
}
I stopped by the U of M Student Union yesterday to pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate. I asked one of the employees if they were planning on stocking the new Mac Pros over the summer, and he said they weren’t, but the new Apple Store that’s going in at the Briarwood Mall will!
