DirecTV continues to be successful in diffusing disagreements with network content providers before things got too out of hand. DirecTV customers were on the verge of losing a lot of Fox channels such as FX, Speed and the National Geographic Channel due to a pricing dispute with Fox. DirecTV felt Fox asking customers to pay 40 percent more a month for the same channels was unfair. Unless the two came to an agreement, several Fox channels would have been suspended starting November 1. Well you don’t have to worry about that now. DirecTV and Fox reached an agreement hours before the deadline to keep those channels flowing to DirecTV customers.

DirectTV customers are finding themselves days way from potentially having 25 fewer channels than they do now. Bloomberg reports DirecTV may pull Fox-owned channels such as National Geographic and FX as early as the beginning of November. DirecTV and Fox has to reach an agreement on pricing or else those channels will disappear.

According to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Google is working on turning YouTube into a site that functions more like a series of television networks. YouTube’s content is going to be broken down into channels that offer specific types of videos. This will make YouTube viewing on internet-connected televisions a more natural experience that is in line with what people are used to.

I am a Fred fan. Or I guess I was a Fred fan. Fred was an alternative rock station on XM that played some deep tracks that exposed where bands like U2, REM, Cure and others got their sounds influenced from. XM radio has euthanized Fred and other themed genre stations, in efforts to merge more »

Over the years that Adobe Photoshop has had to mature into a professional product, it has gained impressive features with each new release. The release of Photoshop CS3 is no exception. Before I get into the details of the software, I must disclaim – I tested it on a Dell laptop with 1GB of RAM, and an 1.86 Ghz Intel Pentium M processor. Any issues with performance that I mention may very well be due to my PC, and not the software itself. Now that I got that out of my system, lets get the show on the road.

Panels

With the release of CS3 comes many user interface enhancements. One of the most frequently used ones are the new Panels. Similar to previous versions of Photoshop, Panels are the tool boxes on your screen that hold the most frequently used options and styles – such as Layers, Paths, Swatches, and Channels.

The improvement of these tools not only is due to the content in the Panels, but also how you manage their appearance in your “workspace”. Similar to the older Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver, you can now click the arrows in the top right of the Panel to make them minimize. This is extremely helpful for those of us that do not have gigantic monitors, and need to get those Panels out of the way so we can work with an image. Here are a few screenshots of the different ways you can view your Panels: