Twitter will stop the external shorten URL services

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Adrian Pintilie

In a somehow, not surprise move, Twitter announced pre-announced that they will soon allow only the use of their shorten URL services. The only negative aspect i find to this action is that we will not be able to have central management for all the shorten links used across various webs through a service like bit.ly and we will have the dashboards separately (twitter vs. others). I guess this means also the start of a new type of applications for the web, eg. those that will centralize the shorten URL links statistics from various web applications.

On another note, i also noticed that Google started to track more and more clicks from their search results under the “reason”: to improve search results quality. I think this is a new move of the web 2.0 sites to increase their tracking of user behavior activities in order to have better paralytics for their ad serving systems. This proves that having your main source of income an ad-based system is obliging you to be more invasive over the user privacy in order to sell more ads. Tz tz tz ….

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Programmers tax exemption is now extinct

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Adrian Pintilie

In effort to cut surmounting deficit, Romanian government decided to remove the tax exemption for programmers. More exactly, programmers will now be charged 16% of their wage income. The tax exemption was initiated in 2004 in order to promote the Romanian IT industry and fight back the “brain drain” to Western Europe and US.

Later edit: the tax exemption is still in place for programmers

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Bad day for the Romanian software industry

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Adrian Pintilie

A bad update on the Romanian antivirus BitDefender virus database has locked down literally thousands of users worldwide. It appears that an update on the BitDefender antivirus database has triggered the software to quarantine or delete critical Windows files making the computer unbootable. With the competition and the interest in the field, this will have a huge impact on the brand of BitDefender as major sites are already starting to pickup the story. Official acknowledgment is here.

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YouTube offers automatic translation captioning to all videos

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Adrian Pintilie

YouTube will start automatically captioning videos on its site. The technology processes the audio feed, using the speech-recognition technology. At the present, YouTube can only “understand” spoken English to auto-generate the caption track. However, Google’s translation services can also take the English machine-transcription track and translate it to up to fifty languages. The competition is now… speechless, lilu-lilu. Google has now an advantage that will be very very hard to beat.

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Botezul gropilor

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Adrian Pintilie

Recent, am parcurs sute de kilometri in regim auto captivat de peisajul rural romanesc. Momentele de captivare alternau cu momentele de concentrare maxima, cand, asemenea unui pilot auto, incercam sa evit cat mai mult(e) din gropile ce apareau in carosabil exact in momentele in care natura era mai atragatoare… unele reuseam sa le ocolesc dar pe cele care mi-ar fi pus la incercare prea mult stabilitatea masinii sau distanta dintre roti, am ales sa le traversez cu stoicism. Astfel, am ajuns sa practic un nou sport… sa dau nume gropilor prin care treceam… si multe din gropile prin care am trecut au acum sufixul de ‘nezeu.

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