The Return of DirecTiVo
Once upon a time, a lot of DirecTV customers did their recording using TiVos. But then DirecTV dumped TiVo for its own homebrewed DVRs, and TiVo released high-def DVRs that only worked with cable TV, not satellite. (It’s one of the reasons I signed up with Comcast rather than DirecTV when I moved into a new home.) But today brought good news for anyone who loves both TiVo and DirecTV: The companies are friends again, and have announced that TiVo will develop a high-def DVR for DirecTV–and won’t sue DirecTV over DVR patents, as it’s done with Dish Network. Anything that increases the number of TiVo users in the world and thereby increases the company’s chances of long-term success sounds good to me.

Read more at: Silicon Alley Insider

Chrome EULA Drama
“You give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.” So read part of the end user license agreement for Google’s Chrome browser. Lotsa bloggers were, understandably, agitated. But Google says it was all a mistake–it reused some boilerplate language from other EULAs for other Google products–and it’ll fix it. Whew!

Read more at: Ars Technica, Matt Cutts

iConventions
Missed any of the political posturing at the Democratic or Republican conventions? Apple is providing audio of just about all the speeches at the iTunes Store, along with video of some of the major ones. I may check out some of them–I was on the road during the Democratic convention, and won’t be home for John McCain’s acceptance speech tomorrow night. Hey, I’m a political junkie. If you listen to any of this stuff while jogging, however, I feel kind of sorry for you.

Read more at: Ars Technica

iTunes Scuttlebutt
Apple has scheduled a press event for next Tuesday, and it’s all but definite that it will involve new iPods. New iPods generally mean a new version of iTunes–and Digg’s Kevin Rose has posted some rumors about the iTunes upgrade we’ll supposedly see. Rose says a new “Genius” feature will create playlists of songs in your collection that go well together and will recommend songs you should buy from the iTunes store; there’s also supposed to be a new Grid view, HD TV show downloads, and a new music virtualizer. It all sounds plausible enough. But does this mean that Apple won’t introduce the all-you-can-eat music plan that’s been rumored? Who knows? At least we don’t need to wait much longer to find out.

Read more at: Kevin Rose, Boy Genius Report

Firefox: We’re Not Slow
At Google’s Chrome press conference yesterday, it touted some JavaScript benchmarks that showed Chrome beating Firefox 3. Today, Mozilla countered with a different set of tests that show TraceMonkey, the upcoming revise to Firefox’s JavaScript engine, beating Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. However, John Resig ran Google’s original tests on TraceMonkey and they showed it to be slower than Chrome’s V8. Except that Mozilla says that that’s because of some issues that they’ll fix before TraceMonkey debuts in Firefox 3.1. Confused yet? Bottom line: The only speed tests that ultimately matter are your own impressions, and if a speed difference isn’t big enough for you to notice, it’s not of much value.