"Visit http://www.youtube.com/TheYouTubeCollection for ordering details and more information about how you can hold the future of web entertainment in your hands."

"Does the world really need another C-ish programming language? Apparently Google thought so in 2009, when it channeled the Ramones and introduced Go. Now the Go team has reached a stable point they're calling Go 1 and sending it out into the world for "creating reliable products, projects and publications." Now, what's the world going to do with it?"

"Microsoft has released SQL Server 2012 to manufacturing and the database software will be generally available for customers and partners by April 1.

The company on Tuesday also released the second technology preview of its distribution of Hadoop, based on the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Hadoop platform for developing distributed, data-intensive applications."

"Microsoft's privacy protection feature in Internet Explorer, known as P3P, is impractical to comply with while providing modern web functionality such as cookie-based features, Google said Monday in response to an accusation from Microsoft that Google had bypassed privacy protections in Internet Explorer.

Google is already facing allegations that the company circumvented privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to plant cookies on users."

"Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life."

 

Goal of the Act:  Protect American intellectual property.  

Feared outcome of the Act:  The mechanism used to enforce SOPA will degrade the quality of legitimate internet content, cripple technological innovation, censor free speech, and violate civil liberties.  Ultimately, the level of web censorship could become similar to that of China.

The Act was introduced by republican Texas senator (and former ranch manager), Lamar Smith and has 31 cosponsors (http://1.usa.gov/tL0PQA).  It’s supported by the television, music, and movie industry (http://1.usa.gov/vIYgIc).  The same industry is Lamar Smith’s largest donor (http://bit.ly/rCe6qI).  The Act is opposed by major technology companies and many others (http://bit.ly/rKXYTR).

I recommend this NYTimes contribution if you’re interested in learning more: http://nyti.ms/vV54Fy  It’s excellent.

"Everyone loves standard protocols, and now Windows Live Messenger has finally moved away from its own proprietary system to use XMPP (the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). This means that it's far easier to create apps that work well with Windows Live, or even integrate it directly into devices. Currently, third-party apps which connect to Live Messenger (like Adium, eBuddy, or Pidgin) use a reverse-engineered library, but this is the first sign of support for unofficial clients from Microsoft. XMPP's also behind a number of other instant messaging services in use today, including Facebook Chat, Google Talk, and Jabber, so the work done to support one platform will be easily transferred to the rest."

Yesterday, Microsoft released Silverlight 5, available on IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on both Mac and PC. The update adds hardware decoding for H.264 media, some new programming features for developers, and other performance improvements. Silverlight 5 may also be the end of the line for Silverlight. Windows 8 will support Silverlight 5 in full desktop mode, but the Metro-style browser will not and neither does Windows Phone.

More to the point, while Microsoft plans on supporting Silverlight 5 for ten years (which in itself may be a sign that it won't have a followup), the company is clearly more interested in directing developers to other frameworks for development, including Metro apps for Windows 8 and HTML5/Javascript frameworks that are compatible with IE10. It could be that, like Adobe before it, Microsoft has recognized that the era of the web browser plugin is behind us. Silverlight has other applications, but we'd be surprised to see Microsoft make big Silverlight push again.

"TIOBE Software has released its programming community index for December 2011, and the numbers show that C# is gaining in popularity.

According to TIOBE, the most popular languages right now are Java, C, C++, C# and Objective-C. (In that order.) There's no movement at all in the top 3, though TIOBE says that C++ has lost a bit of popularity since December 2010. C# moved up from 5th place to 4th, and is just a hair behind C++. "

Google's Chrome browser has overtaken Mozilla's Firefox in market share, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer shows signs of reversing its long downward slide. Chrome accounted for 25.96 percent of global browser usage in November, according to StatCounter Global Stats, the research arm of Web analytics firm StatCounter. That's up from 25 percent in October and 13.35 percent in November 2010.