crazyskillsbloginitiative

Facebook, today, announced a really interesting and cool adjustment to its path of management:  From today forward, policy changes (such as the TOS changes from a couple weeks ago [crazyskills.com]) will now be reviewed by a board of users, of which any facebook user can now be a part, in what is now to be called the “Notice and Comment forum.”  I think this is a great idea and more companies out there could use a piece of this wisdom shown by the Facebook staff.  To quote Facebook’s creater, Mark Zuckerberg: “Openness and transparency isn’t an end state. It’s a process to get there.”

Cheers, Facebook!

Seems the folks over at Microsoft are listening to users’ comments and requests regarding the upcoming (early 2010?) Windows 7.  Here is a good writeup of a number of recent changes to 7RC1 [blogs.msdn.com].  Other notable changes in recent times to the 7 experience include the removal of DirectX 11, which I was looking forward to.  Now, these changes to the RC all seem like “good things;” however, is it just me or does it seem that this ought to all be released as a service pack for Vista?

Sony is now using the same blue laser technology to author CD masters as are used to author Blu-Ray masters.  Does this mean higher-quality audio from these CDs?  No.  The CD spec is still 44,100Hz 16-bit audio.  Does this mean more than 2 discreet audio channels from audio CDs?  No.  Still 2-channel.  So what’s the big deal?  It appears [cnet.co.uk] that all this is really going to do is improve “final sound reproduction, due to the reduction of reading errors when the disc is spinning in typical CD players.” In other words, improved error reduction on pressed discs.  Though the article [cnet.co.uk] is quick to point out that “[t]he vast majority of noticeable read errors result from scratching CDs over time, not because the CDs were botched during the authoring process.”