Solar OP Technology Blog

Today’s hottest technology news, according to tFeeder:

• Techrunch Robin Wauters (the leading Techrunch blogger in terms of tweets-per-post), reports that Youtube no longer supports Internet explorer 6. IE6 is a terrible product, but where does it stop? Could Google one day say ‘we do not support IE6,and IE7, and IE8′ ? The post is Boiling, with over 1,000 retweets in the past couple of hours.
• Techrunch also reports that sales of the Palm Pre are flat. Techrunch has a long history with the Plam Pre, as they criticized the product early on and caused quite a stir when a fellow tech blogger reviewed a giveaway Palm Pre, hinting foul play
• Cnet news has an interesting story about the growing importance of Chip makers (e.g. Intel) as the Google-Microsoft war expands. It used to be a software war, between search engines, office suites and online services, but since Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS, it’s becoming a hardware war as well.
• Engadget, the gadgets blog, reports that Apple crossed the 1.5 Billion downloaded apps mark. That’s truly amazing. Apple invented the market for application downloads and no one to date was able to imitate its success.

Read more…

Over the past year I’ve uploaded several video clips to Youtube. Today, logging into Youtube’s “My videos’ section, I noticed a new, shocking button - ‘Download mp4‘. When I clicked the button, the movie downloaded to my desktop in an mp4 format.

It doesn’t make any sense - why would I want to download movies I uploaded myself? Although the downloaded movies are mp4 - and you can upload a verity of formats, I doubt it if Youtube  wants to become a movie format conversion service.

I could see the download button only under movies I uploaded myself. I believe the day Youtube will allow us to download any movie (with ads embedded, of course), as it might lower streaming costs. Youtube traffic bills are in the billions, and Google is yet to find a reasonable way to monetize Youtube’s huge audience.

Here’s the screenshot with the new button: