Technology

Barnes & Noble drops price of Nook with GlowLight e-reader by $20

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Barnes & Noble has cut the price of its popular Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight e-reader by $20.  The competition from the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, which will start shipping in October is obviously what caused the shift.

 

The Nook with GlowLight, slashed to $119 from $139, is now the same price as the Kindle Paperwhite, which Amazon introduced earlier this month. Target and Walmart stores now list the e-reader at the reduced price.

It’s a smart move for Barnes & Noble considering the interest people have shown in Amazon’s flagship e-reader. While I have been a fan of the NookColor the strong competition from Amazon makes me wonder if Barnes & Noble can continue competing in the ereader arena.

 

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Google shutting down more services

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Google announced on Friday that it will be doing some “spring cleaning” of some of its services. The list includes AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, Places for Android, and +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools.

The company also plans to merge its Picasa photo service with Google Drive, which means you’ll have 5GB of free storage for both Picasa photos and Drive items. I hope this means that the interface will be better integrated between the two services.

A service previously announced that my family will miss will be iGoogle for the browser. I’ll be sure to find a substitute for my wife prior to that being shuttered but it’s something she will miss.

 

Google shutting down more services Read Post »

Crunchbook

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Sure it’s not #ShowYourDesktopFriday or #ShowYourLinuxDesktopFriday but I had someone ask me to share a shot of my old laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS w/ Openbox. This started as a Crunchbang Linux install when they used Ubuntu as a base. I have just been upgrading it to the LTS release as they come along.

This laptop is a Gateway 5300 that boasts a700MHz Pentium III CPU and 256 MB of PC100 RAM (Max amount). At idle this system uses around 61MiB of RAM w/ synergy running in the background.

I normally run this machine as a second monitor with Xchat running on it. Though it can also run MapTools pretty well when I need a spare machine for a game map.

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End Piracy, Not Liberty

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Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. The intent of the bills is to stop the illegal downloading of copyrighted material… the outcome will be far different.

SOPA and PIPA would allow the U.S. government to order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China and Egypt. Do we want to model our country after totalitarian regimes?

SOPA and PIPA would kill jobs by legislation and litigation. U.S. Internet companies would have to monitor everything users upload or link to or risk expensive litigation. It’s also why 55 of America’s most successful venture capitalists expressed concern that PIPA “would stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness”. More than 204 entrepreneurs told Congress that PIPA and SOPA would “hurt economic growth and chill innovation”.

While SOPA and PIPA claim they will stop piracy, they won’t even accomplish that. Nefarious sites will just change their names while law abiding companies will suffer with constantly attempting to stay in compliance with mandates given them.

When you add it all up these proposed laws will censor, stifle the American economy and fail to achieve the claimed outcome. How could anyone support these pieces of legislation?

Contact your representative now! [Link courtesy of Wikipedia]

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