Top Items:
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker — After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates …
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
FireWire Isn't Alone: A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed — Apple has a storied history of being the first company to introduce an array of new technologies in its computers, or among the very first, at least. It all started with color graphics in 1977's Apple II and continuied features …
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Peter Cohen / Macworld:FireWire's MacBook absence—inconvenience or fatal flaw?
Discussion:
Edible Apple
Prince McLean / AppleInsider:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire [u]
Discussion:
Gadget Lab, BetaNews, Infinite Loop, The Mac Observer, TechSpot, Computerworld and Technologizer
Rebecca / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF Challenges Constitutionality of Telecom Immunity in Federal Court — San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a law aimed at granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program.
Discussion:
InformationWeek, DSLreports, Business Wire, p2pnet, Slashdot, Docu-Drama, GMSV, Threat Level and Boing Boing
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Cyrus Farivar / Salon:New EFF brief argues telecom immunity law is unconstitutional
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GigaOM
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
See who knew how to quit you on Twitter with Qwitter — We all lose followers on the micro-messaging service Twitter from time to time. It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it's because we go on 25 tweet (Twitter message) political rants in 5 minutes.
Discussion:
TechCrunch UK, Mashable!, The Web Services Report, PR 2.0, Things That and Download Squad
Paul Graham:
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy — The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. — When Microsoft and Apple were founded. — As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.
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AppleInsider:
Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs — Assuming last minute snags are avoided, the coming weeks should bring new iMacs, rounding out Apple's 2008 hardware introductions as the company enters the holiday shopping season with one of its strongest product portfolios ever.
Michael Bettiol / Boy Genius Report:
And we have lift off: AT&T Bold launches on the 27th — This is for real, kids. Information has been pouring in left, right, and center from AT&T and RIM ninjas and we can now say for sure that AT&T is planning to launch the Bold on October 27. We repeat, October 27!
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Apple's Snow Leopard to sport Cocoa Finder and ImageBoot — Apple next-generation Snow Leopard operating system will introduce a massive re-write of the Mac OS X Finder and debut a new feature called ImageBoot, AppleInsider has learned. — Cocoa-based Finder
Rich Barton / Zillow® Blog:
Difficult Times, Difficult Decisions — This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.
Discussion:
Bits, TechCrunch, Valleywag, Xconomy, Webware.com, VentureBeat, Loic Le Meur Blog and Lost Remote
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
I read a new rumor about “Facebook Music” but all I got was this stupid picture — Facebook is perpetually rumored to have some sort of in-house music service in the works. The latest story is a vague piece today in the pseudo-tabloid New York Post. Apparently Facebook has been talking …
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John / Primate Labs Blog:
MacBook and MacBook Pro Performance (October 2008) — Earlier this week Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. While the biggest changes are the new enclosures and the new graphics cards, the new laptops also have a new chipset (an NVIDIA chipset instead of an Intel chipset) and faster DDR3 memory.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
What Yahoo's Looming Costs Cuts Actually Mean (Not as Many Layoffs as You Think) — A lot has been written about the need for drastic layoffs at Yahoo, including reports that the troubled company was preparing to fire from 3,000 to 3,500 of its 15,000 employees.
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Newer Chrome, Firefox show speed improvements — The SunSpider test shows the newest Chrome build beating all comers in JavaScript performance—for now at least. Test results reported in seconds, so smaller is better. — Correction 12:00 p.m. PDT: This report has been updated …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Translation From Weasel-Speak to English of the Entirety of Duncan Riley's Second Post-MacBook-Introduction-Event Update to His Widely-Cited Week-Ago Report That Apple Was Going to Announce an ‘$800 Laptop’ — With regard to “Update 2” here. … The entire report was completely wrong.
Juan Carlos Perez / PC World:
Gmail Back After 30 Hours Down — A Gmail outage that lasted about 30 hours and affected some Google Apps customers was finally fixed late on Thursday. — At around 9:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that the problem had been solved.
BBC:
Man killed wife in Facebook row — A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his wife to death over a posting she made on the social networking site Facebook. — Wayne Forrester, 34, told police he was devastated that his wife Emma, also 34, had changed her online profile to “single” days after he had moved out.
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Video Network Heavy Fires 14% Of Staff* — The snap consensus among tech and Web outfits who are sloughing off staff this fall: something in the 15%- to 30% range seems to be the way to go. Today's entry: Dude-centric publisher and ad network Heavy, which is laying off 12 people, which it says amounts to 14% of its staff.
Mark Finkle / Mark Finkle's Weblog:
Fennec - M9 (User Experience Alpha) — Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We're calling this release the User Experience alpha. The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface.
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Peter Cohen / Macworld:
DisplayPort: What you need to know — With laptop updates, Apple supports emerging display standard — Apple didn't just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks …
Discussion:
Salon
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Search engine startup SearchMe cuts 20 percent of staff — The streets of Silicon Valley are running red this week. The latest startup to pare down is search engine SearchMe, a company with high-profile investors and a warchest of nearly $40 million. — It reduced its staff by two-thirds …
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
CampusBuddy Hands Over Campus Grading Records To Students — For many students, the academic portion of college consists of a four (or more) year quest to find the easiest professors on campus. College may be a time to learn new things, but graduate schools don't tend to care …
