Kroc Archive

Hands up if you use Firefox. Have used it? Know about it? Heard of it? 'Sites up and down the World Wide Web today will be celebrating five years of Firefox. When I sat down to write this I worried about having to list the history of its features and landmark events and the news of the past five years. Other sites will be comprehensively doing that, there is nothing I can add to that list that Google can't surmise. Instead I will be telling you what Google does not know, my story of Firefox and what Firefox has meant to all of us.

Click-to-Run is a new technology Microsoft are introducing to allow you to test out Office 2010 quickly and easily, by literally streaming the app to your computer from the Internet into a virtualised space.

Hello all, sorry about the over abundance of meta items on this week's front page, but we're adding one more item regarding changes to the podcast. The show has seemingly proven quite popular with viewers but Thom would prefer to switch to a fortnightly (every two weeks) schedule as we're finding the show difficult to do with a lack of news some weeks and Thom needs more preparation considering his schedule and that he has to talk to someone he can't see, in a foreign language. I'd like to keep the show running each week so we're looking for feedback and ideas of how to fill a show every other week with content not related to news items on the home page.

Our identities online are becoming ever more valuable to the companies that we entrust them to. What happens though when a company just ups and closes shop (Pownce, for example) and deletes your stuff? Sure, the individual files you'll have on your computer anyway, you won't have lost anything as far as bits and bytes are concerned--but what about friendships you've built up with people who you only know through the service. Your data should be portable so that you can take it to any service and not lose those relationships that you've built up in one walled-garden when it collapses, or you decide to move on. OpenID tries to solve this brand-centric problem by placing you at the centre of your data and allowing the sites you trust access through a single sign-on. OSnews is contemplating implementing OpenID and would like your feedback, but there are a few questions to consider--please read on for details

"We are pleased to announce a new stable release of libtheora, the Xiph.org Foundation's reference implementation of the royalty-free Theora video format. This new release, version 1.1, codenamed Thusnelda, incorporates all of the recent encoder improvements we have been making over the past year, though some of the code had its genesis all the way back in 2003. It also brings substantial speed and robustness improvements to the 1.0 decoder." For a more visual run-down of the changes, check out Mozilla's excellent article.

Drobe.co.uk, the premier RISC OS news website, today announced that it has entered archive mode and will no longer function as a news reporting source. The site was founded by Peter Price in 1999 and editorship was taken over by journalist Chris Williams in 2001. Chris first broke the sad news on Monday morning via usenet: "Drobe's RISC OS news service, which launched in October 1999, will sadly cease from Monday. Running the site has been so much fun over the years and the experience has been very rewarding - from the investigative pieces and tabloid tomfoolery to the libel writ threats and meeting up with users after shows. However, all good things must come to an end - if you'll forgive the cliche - and it's time to formally move on."