August 27, 2008– AMC asked for the takedown of some Fans of the TV Show “Mad Men” who decided to create Twitter profiles of the fictional characters. Don Draper, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell and others were restored to their original stature. Of course, you realize you are only getting Twitters from a fictional character, but what the hey! It’s a great show.
August 25, 1991 – Linus Torvalds mentions in a message on comp.os.minix with the simple question:
What would you like to see most in Minix
This is the official announcement of the Linux project. Of course Ari Lemmke named it Linux after a while, in which would be adopted as the official name. Linus first wanted to name it “Freix”, which meant Freek Unix.
August 19, 2003: The Sobig.F virus was first discovered on this day. 24 hours later, it took down many a network by sending out emails with subjects like – “Re: Approved,” “Re: Details,” “Re: Re: My details,” “Re: Thank you!,” “Re: That movie,” “Re: Wicked screensaver,” “Re: Your application,” “Thank you!,” or “Your details.”The first version was found in January of 2003. The Sobig.F was the most destructive.
August 17, 2006: Dell announced in 2006 they will begin putting AMD processors into Dimension desktops and later in the year Dell AMD servers will be available. On that same day, they announced that after an internal investigation into its accounting practices Dell would restate and reduce earnings from 2003 through Q1 2007. A total amount of between $50 million and $150 million was deducted – 2 cents to 7 cents per share.
August 14, 2008: Netflix distribution centers go offline for 3 days
August 14, 2008 Fifty-Five Netflix distribution centers go offline due to an “undisclosed error”. While they didn’t let us know what happened, they did say that it only affected the core of mail-based delivery operations. The problem took 3 days to fully resolve, although they were slowly shipping movies by that Wednesday.
AMD introduces a new brand name to compete with Intel in 1999. The Athlon processor replaces the K7 and adds 3DNow! Technology. The processor was introduced with speeds of 500 MHz to 650 MHz. The prices went from $249 to $849. The Palm VIIx was $449 and the Vx was $399.
2013: Google put on a “Secret Town Hall” meeting. Nobody knew what was going on, although some speculated it had to do with the TV. In their major announcement, Google introduced Chromecast – the HDMI-based set top box that was small enough to plug into the TV and not see it. The 2.83 inch dongle could stream YouTube or Netflix (at the time), along with a feature that turned your Android or iOS device into the remote.
The video would push to the TV while the mobile device could continue on searching, playing games, and more.
Chromecast debuted at $35 with 3 free months of Netflix.
Credit Cards
It’s whats known as “Data Pass”. You went up to Orbitz, Buy.com, Fandango, Shutterfly, Priceline or Continental Airlines and purchase something. You are then asked if you want to be a part of the loyalty program. If you say yes, the credit card would be passed to a 3rd party affiliate, like WebLoyalty, Vertue and Affinion. They would then continue to bill your card. This issue broke lose in 2009 and the US Senate commerce Committee started looking into the issue.On Aug 10, 2010, Affinion (parent company to Data Pass) agreed to pay 8 million in damages. An additional $2 million would be paid between 5 – 3rd party companies that included Classmates.com and FTD. A small amount to the millions they swindled for years…
2014 – Trying to be the first provider of over-the-air channels, Aereo was told to shut down completely after a supreme court decision went against the company.
The idea was simple – take the over-the-air network channels and offer them on the Internet. Based in New York, the company opened services in 24 different cities. You could only watch the programming of your area on your PC, Mac or Linux. There were around 28 channels you could choose from and pricing was simply $1 a day.
Aereo was faced with many legal issues, including the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition act. The rebroadcast through the service undermined cable re-transmission fees.
It was also a wake-up call as after the fact, many cable providers started offering live streaming options.
0827, aggregator, amc, AMD, amd athlon mp, Atari, day in tech history, draper, fictional character, fictional characters, findland, mad men, men rule, pete campbell, Podcast, profiles, stature, synapse, takedown, technology history, twitters
0 Comments
