Mar 30, 2011 | Entertainment, General, News
Amazon yesterday announced a new service in which you can store all of your music in one place and then be able to stream it through your phone and other devices. Well once again the music industry is crying foul. Stating that Amazon needs to get streaming licensing agreements for people to access their own music that they most likely already bought from a source like iTunes. Apparently Amazon is in the works of obtaining such licenses but not before launching the Cloud service. Of course the first thing I read about this is from Sony music having issues with the fact this streaming deal hasn?t been put into place but they are in high hopes that this happens.
This is not the first time a company has been taken to court over this back in 2007 EMI sued MP3tunes, which was a company that offered a service similar to the Cloud. It is unclear whether customers who own the music are allowed to remotely access the storage services offered by cloud computing. I am against the whole litigation against companies that are offering a service to stream music you already own to your private devices. If the music companies want to get paid for stuff they didn?t invent, why they don?t start working on these technologies. I feel like this is a bit of double dipping. The customer pays for the song but yet can?t access it from their computers via their phone. Well the funny thing s if you have an iPod and put music on that, you still have the music on your PC and iPod. So should the music industry put a tax on companies who make MP3 devices, full knowing the music could go on an iPad, iPod and still be on someone?s computer? But since it is not being streamed over the internet it?s ok to do that? This is a convenience service that a company created and people will love it and it is free for the first 5GB but the starving music industry must need a bail out from the government with all the litigation they do. I hope that if this goes to court the judge rules in the favor of Amazon. I am always angry to read these types of things, we can all understand the music industries battle against piracy because that is illegal but this cloud computing seems like a gray area to me. By ruling in the favor of the music industry this could open problems for other cloud computing ideas everywhere.
Mar 27, 2011 | General, News
New research is suggesting that at this moment 9% of United States internet users are using peer-to-peer or P2P networks, which is down substantially from 2007. The market research firm NPD Group, has stated that P2P has actually dropped from 16% to 9% in the last 3 years. This data comes from the 4th quarter of 2010, right after a federal judge shut down LimeWire. This shut down defiantly helped bring that number down, even though other P2P programs saw an increase in usage. The numbers also show that the average number of downloads per person also fell, from 35 per quarter in 07 to 18 per quarter by the finish of 2010. Warner music also did some data mining and found that 13% of consumers were pirates and noted that even the pirates spent some of their money on recorded music. Even though there has been a decent decline in the piracy sector, it is still far from eradicated. It will be truly difficult to gage whether or not we will see piracy decline even further. My money is on a slow and gradual decline but we will never truly be rid of piracy.
Mar 24, 2011 | General, internet
A few posts back I put down that when IE9 launched it had over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Well Firefox was about to double the amount of downloads with the first 24 hours of its launch. A decent 4.7 million downloads in the first 24 hour span. That is still less than the 8 million copies that were downloaded of Firefox 3 in 2008 but obviously there were fewer browsers to choose from back in 2008. With a more informed customer base you have internet users spread out across Google Chrome, Safari, IE and of course Firefox. This new version brings more features to the already reliable browser, such as new security and privacy options, faster loads and JavaScript, support for a variety of new standards including WebM video and WebGL 3D graphics, and 3D acceleration that extends to even Windows XP. Maybe with these new enhanced features, Firefox can steal some people back from Google Chrome.
Mar 14, 2011 | Error, General, Wireless
So many friends and I are always going back and forth about what phone is better the iPhone or the Android. The debate usually starts up when one of our phones has a major glitch or issue. Well today I get to put another small on the iPhone. Did anyone who had an iPhone have to get up for work on Sunday and happen to use the iPhone as your alarm clock? Well if you did you might have been extremely late to work. You may ask why if you don?t answer yes to that question. Well a glitch in the iPhone caused many of the phones to spring back instead of spring ahead. So if you were looking to get up for let?s say 8AM you got up at 10AM. Oh the wonders of the iPhone! I personally have a Droid X and I woke up and checked my phone and then checked my PC and cable box and wouldn?t you know it, all of the times were correct. Now this was said to happen in US iPhones and isn?t the first time this issues has come up. Also it didn?t matter which carrier you used for the iPhone both AT&T and Verizon had this issue, so if it is not the carrier then it is the phone. This being a known glitch it has happened before outside of the US. In England this happened back in November 2010 the alarms failed to switch from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time and this also happened in Australia during their daylights savings time. So the question begs to be asked, will Apple fix this glitch before the next daylight savings time??? A+ Apple…. A+!
Mar 8, 2011 | Entertainment, General
Now me personally I was never a huge reader and then things like digital books and comics came out and me being a tech person it was perfect. If I wanted to read I could get the book from my own home and not clutter my place up with books. There was a time when digital books were reasonably priced and people were happy to pay. Well rumblings are starting grow with the fact that 7 top publishing companies have agreed on the agency price model. This model will allow their books to be in the Apples iBookstore and with the iPad 2 launching most publishers would feel out in the cold if they couldn?t present their books on the Apple platform. This agency model if you are unaware gives 70% profit to the publisher while the rest goes to the retailer. This does also allow for the publisher to set the price and not the retailer and in some case in Europe there are investigations on whether or not this is actually constituted as price fixing and the work of an illegal cartel.
So there is a very big deal that goes along with what was said above. The pricing is somewhat unfair to the consumer. I have pulled some information that might be shocking to you readers. Here is a breakdown of a few books via digital purchase or from buying from your local bookstore.
Title: The Kite Runner
Digital: $12.99
Paper back: $7.81
Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns
Digital $12.99
Paperback $9.40
So no paper, no glue, shipping or bindings needed and yet the digital is more expensive? That sounds like extreme greed to me and when people see this type of greed going on other people step in and start pirating these products. We have seen it with music and movies and now books might be the next thing to be pirated. It something to keep an eye on, will this work or will it be a bigger issue coming down the pike with how the publishing companies are pricing these books. Only time will tell if greed will win out on this, I think it most likely will only due to convenience and the owners of Kindles and iPad?s will pay more for the convenience of downloading a book which doesn?t take up space and you have to typically go to a store to get.
Mar 7, 2011 | General
Western Digital has just announced that they have put a major deal in place to acquire a top competitor in their field. Hitachi Global Storage technologies are now being acquired by Western Digital.
This is not the first time a major competitor has been bought out. Back in 2005 Seagate purchased Maxtor for just about $2 billion. The deal for Hitachi is broken down to #3.5 billion in cash and $730 million in Western Digital common stock. It is unclear how this deal with work on whether or not Western Digital will keep the Hitachi brand name or use some of the more unique designs Hitachi has been developing and label it a Western Digital product. This is a very interesting situation as now it has come down to a two dog race in Western Digital and Seagate. There is still some competition the wings like Samsung but we all know that the two main hard drive companies are WD and Seagate.
