There goes another year! During the past 12 months, we’ve had lots of stories here on Tech Snake and some changes to the website. Because of this I thought I would compile the most interesting and important stories for 2008. So sit down, take a load off and lets have a look through the last year together..
January
Two major movie studios step away from HD-DVD
The writing was on the wall for HD-DVD after Paramount and Warner Brothers made the announcement that they will be exclusively supporting the Blu-ray format in the future. Chosen for cost-cutting reasons, it seemed as though everyone was starting to look away from HD-DVD for the first time, after the battle was very closely fought, January saw HD-DVD take the first real blow, and started a chain reaction that would eventually mean the end for the format.
February
Microsoft wades in on Yahoo, and Freedom of Speech under threat
Firstly, the biggest story of the year in the tech industry. Microsoft makes it’s first steps towards Yahoo! with an acquisition deal.
This story started a to-and-fro news story between the two companies that saw rejections, renewed interest, and Carl Icahn threatening to overthrow the board of directors for Yahoo! In the end the amount offered wasn’t enough for Jerry Yang and the board, Carl Icahn was voted onto the board, and Yahoo’s stock is now worth a fraction of what they were. Jerry Yang is also stepping down as CEO, although how much pressure there was after this fiasco internally, will never be known. The story I’m sure will continue into 2009, as there are still rumblings of Microsoft after a piece of Yahoo!
Secondly, our freedom of speech was put under threat when wikileaks.org was taken down by the US government.
Wikileaks.org is a place for confidential documents to be released anonymously for everyone to read. Having it’s good and bad points (as true freedom of speech means complete transparency) certain legal bodies in the US decided that they should remove the server’s A records, as the domain wikileaks.org was hosted in the US. Essentially making the server unreachable by it’s domain name, it wasn’t long before people had worked out ways to circumvent the court order (and indeed Tech Snake also had a good work around) Of course, banning the website was enough to propel it from underground status, to front page news – normally the case as “no news is bad news.” The decision was reversed in March by the same judge.
March
Windows Vista gets a much needed update
After constant bad press and poor adoption by the corporate markets, Vista was in need of some confidence from consumers. Microsoft had their fingers crossed when they released the first service pack for their latest workstation OS. Fixing issues with UAC and improving security and speed, meant that from this point onwards, the press slowly started to warm to the new operating system.
April
Psystar sell their own version of the Apple Mac
Written in the EULA for Max OSX, Apple state that you can’t install their operating system on anything other than officially produced Apple hardware. Psystar (and a lot of people that ordered) believed this was a little out of order, so decided to create hardcore PCs with OSX installed as an option. Doubtless to say that over the coming months, Apple were going to release the lawyers. Psystar are still going strong and will continue to sell their PCs until the courts order them to stop.
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