The screen size could determine the price of your movie in the future

Most of the time, DVDs cost, more or less, about the same price. However, it is illogical that watching a movie on TV costs the same as watching it on smartphones. After all, on our smartphones, the experience is somewhat limited in terms of audio and visual quality.

Well, maybe the price of your movie could be based on the media its displayed with in the future. Or at least that's the vision of the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg:
 
"A movie screen will be $15. A 75-inch TV will be $4. A smartphone will be $1.99"


Although this seems pretty logical, this model may be difficult to implement because of the difficulties a security system might encounter recognizing the exact screen size: who's to say that a user won't play a $ 1.99 film on a big screen TV?
 
That said, it is an interesting idea and Katzenberg is convinced that this pricing model will eventually be a standard in the industry. Until then, would you pay less to watch a movie on a smartphone?

Source: The Verge

How to treat your visitors with respect?

Everyone of us work hard to make his website or blog appealing for the audience, whether by delivering the proper content, design or services. And to be able to always satisfy your visitors, you should gather some basic information about them(page views, country, browser, OS, traffic source).

Such information in my hands or any other website's, is most probably harmless and it is to serve a specific purpose.
These information become harmful when you hand them to big corporations with huge databases containing a tremendous amount of information, that eventually, by matching them, they could end up possessing some very intimate and personal information about your visitors.
And by big corporations I mean Google, Facebook, .... or in some countries, government.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying by any means to generalize that big corporation are evil (Although it's not totally wrong) and other independent website are good. But there is a factor we can't ignore, these corporations have the power. Power that neither I nor any website have.

How is information gathered?
Well, simply put, an information is gathered whenever you Like something on Facebook, you +1 something on Google, you connect to iTunes or the scariest, when you send an email(check this post: Audacity).

Some other times, it is handed out to them by bloggers and website owners like us.

How? Well, in the process of working on our blogs and websites and making them more appealing, we need tools to help us, and some of these big corporations, as kind as they are, offer it to us for free (Check out this hostile post If you're not paying for it, you're the product). And it is needless to say, that the most powerful and popular tool is Google's web analytic.

How to treat your visitors with respect?
Whether you are a care free person who thinks that all this is delusional and worthless or whether you are some paranoid person who believes in conspiracy and spray over their webcams because you think you're under surveillance, whether you like this digital world or not, it is a fact that it is controlled in a way Hitler could've only dreamed of.

And once you have a website, you have a responsibility and whether you believe in privacy or not, it isn't up to you anymore. You have visitors, that have their own beliefs and you have to respect them. And in order to do that, you must not hand the information they trusted you with to anyone because by this you would be sabotaging your relationship and showing no respect to their privacy and freedom.

So, a first step would be keeping these information to yourself. And to do that, you must use tools developed by people who believe in freedom and personal privacy unlike Google. So what I am suggesting, is for us to stop using Google Analytic and start respecting our visitors. And by us, I mean myself too. So, join me!

What's the alternative?
If you've been coming to my blog (powered by Blogger-Google) for a long time, you would know that I won't leave you without an alternative, an excellent one:

http://piwik.org/ :a free software and by that I mean that it respects the freedom of computer users by putting the users first and granting them freedom and control. And it also happens that it costs 0$.

My Dear old MSN..

Today, April 8, 2013, Microsoft puts an end to its instant messaging software: Windows Live Messenger as announced earlier this year. 
The MSN network will remain accessible until the beginning of 2014, and it is therefore possible to connect with another clients like Trillian or Pigdin but the Messenger software will become obsolete in a few hours.

Microsoft recommends at the same time to use the other instant messaging software, Skype. Recall that if two applications were not the basis for the same purpose, they are now identical in many aspects. Like Messenger, Skype makes it possible to chat live with friends and family via text, audio or video, share files, etc.. And fortunately it is possible to import the list of MSN contacts within the Skype application.

For fans of the application, there is no doubt that today, by the end of Windows Live Messenger, a page turns. Launched in 1999 by Microsoft, the application has seen many variations on all media. Will be most remembered for all it emoticons and the silly teenage conversations we used to make...

And finally, with no words left to say, I dedicate my tears and this song to you :

 

What does the creator of RSS have to say on Google Reader phasing out?

While users from all over the world went crazy, signing petitions, begging Google to reconsider their decision about the phasing out of Google Reader in July, one person didn't give a fuck. I'm not talking about just anyone, I'm talking about the inventor of RSS!

Dave Winer, who is credited for his inventions of both RSS and blog, wanted to respond to the demise of Google Reader, Google's RSS service and feed aggregator:
"I won't miss it. I've never used it. I do not believe that a company as large as Google has common interests with me, and I do not trust them to store all the news I want to read. Besides that, I do not think that an approach such as "inbox" is a good idea. Who cares about the number of unread items? I like the idea of a river of news to read, and I have many configured flows, bringing me news and podcasts. [...] the next time, remember to pay for the services you depend on. Those have more chances of surviving the bubble. "
 

The approach is interesting, but probably too biased for the most of Google Reader users. Anyway, I have already published an article suggesting some alternatives to Google Reader.

How to download torrents from your workplace

If during your work hours, you skim the net looking for cool torrents, but you can not download from your workplace, here's a little trick.

The solution is very simple. All you have to do is to install the Phrozen Dropbox Torrent on your computer at home, then drag and drop it into your Dropbox folder (or any cloud storage service: Skydrive, Owncloud, FTP ... etc.,).

Phrozen DropBox Torrent detect new torrents from a remote location ( let's say the next day at work) and automatically start to download the associated content. And if you have good internet at work, hopefully, once you get home, your downloads will be completed.

Note that uTorrent also offers the option. And I'm sure there is a lot of other clients that might have the same option. On the other hand, you can find some web applications such as Transmission that also allow your remotely download torrents.

So you get it. There's a million way to get the same result, you just have to pick the application that suites you the most.
And I wish you the best of luck exploiting your employer's internet connection.

After Google's decision, what is the alternative for the RSS Reader?

On july 1st, the most popular RSS reader will stop working. Google has decided to cut the service, saying it was used less.What happens there at Google?
Day after day, the company is making announcements that go beyond product launch. After yesterday's announcement of the departure of Andy Rubin, one of the architects of Android, the Mountain View company, has released an info this morning to say the unexpected: the outright stop of Google Reader. 

The RSS reader which inform millions of people around the world, will be permanently closed on July 1st. Without further guidance. It gives little explanation to justify this decision. Two reasons were mentioned on its official blog: Google Reader users number is decreasing and the company need to rationalize its services. 

What is the alternative?

While Google Reader team expressed his "sadness", the followers of this service are put together as shown in the number of reactions on specialized sites and Twitter. Petitions embark on the same canvas in an attempt to put pressure on Google to reconsider its decision. One of them garnered the signatures at an impressive rate, with a number of names which reached more than 30,000 in just a few hours. In addition to these reactions, several companies offer their solution.
Services like Feedly are already offering to  automatically manage the recovery from Google Reader. They hold also to reassure their users: the removal service will not affect Google users to Feedly. Others, such as Old Reader, have decided to adopt an interface "old" that should delight fans of Google Reader. The only problem is, this service is saturated since Google's decision. The design solution is also French, it is called Netvibes. Fortunately, there are a thousand ways to recover for Google RSS Reader.