a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Newsday reports that Greenwich (CT) motorists will soon have the option of passing on the parking meter and settling parking fees with their cellular phones. [textually.org]
Very cool and I believe the first in the US. I don’t have a car and I don’t live in Greenwich, but I can certainly appreciate the convenience of this.
Love The Onion…
You can share the music on your iPod as if it was a playlist in iTunes over your local network which works well – exactly as you would expect it to.
You just need Music Publisher. Drag your iPod to the app’s preference panel (I had to switch the port from 3689 to 3690) and voíla! Thanks to Jason Snell on the SliMP3 mailing list for the tip!
If you’re looking for a different way to plant your Apple iSight Webcam on your desk or near your computer than the clips that Apple includes, Mac accessory maker MacMice has introduced the SightFlex. The SightFlex is shipping today and costs US$29.99. [MacCentral]
Pennsylvania State University has agreed to cover the cost of providing its students with a legal method to download music from a catalog of half a million songs. [New York Times]
Taking student mandatory student fees does not classify as the school paying for anything. It’s the students who are paying for the service… just aggregated through the university’s deal. I guess it doesn’t hurt that the university president led a committee with the RIAA and the entertainment companies to find alternatives to file sharing networks. They came up with quite a revolutionary alternative plan… you pay.
“Most of the money goes to the music companies,” admitted Jobs.
“We would like to break even/make a little bit of money but it’s not a money maker,” he said, candidly.
So now we have it on record: the music store is a loss leader. Jobs said Apple would pay its dues to the RIAA, then seek to make money where it could, from its line of hardware accessories. When the conversation turned to rivals such as eTunes and Napster, Jobs said: “They don’t make iPods, so they don’t have a related business where they do [make money]” [The Register]
A U.S. commander has created a commando force to hunt Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and key terrorists in the Middle East. [New York Times]
“RFID is a game changer for retailers, manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to name just a few of the impacted industries,” Sun executive vice president Jonathan Schwartz said in a statement. “Sun is committed to providing open, standards-based RFID middleware software that leverages our Sun Java Enterprise System.”
RFID (define) technology allows manufacturers, retailers, logistics providers, and other organizations to “tag” physical goods with tiny radio transponders that can then be used to identify the goods without having to visually inspect them. Applications for the technology include automatic inventory management for retailers and manufacturers, improved supply chain efficiency for logistics companies and their customers, and better tracking of goods to reduce theft and loss. [internetnews.com]
Cross platform iChatAV??
America Online is quietly testing a video feature for its instant-messaging products now that the government has lifted restrictions against launching such a feature. [CNET News.com]
Angry at what they see as a misuse of their funds, some Pennsylvania State University students are protesting their college’s new deal with the Napster music service. [CNET News.com]
Perhaps making it a mandatory part of student computer fees was not the best idea…
With The Matrix Revolutions, the Wachowski Brothers have cemented their place in the pantheon of science fiction movie masters. While some people have been disappointed by this capstone of the trilogy, I thought it delivered on the promise of the last two movies very well, and will hold up in time. [Blogcritics]
One word: IMAX
I won’t reveal anything here… I’ll let you enjoy it on your own.
If you have access to see this one in IMAX, I would highly recommend it. It was by far the coolest way to check out the action. The screen was so massive and the action totally intense. It never hurts when the crowd is fully engaged and quiet as well – a rarity in NYC.
Dance Monkey Boy!!
An avid Mac fan has taken the infamous Monkey Dance Boy video of Ballmer and repurposed it as an iPod commercial. The finished product is exceptional. (Caution! Stay close to volume controls.) It’s complete with glowing sweat-stained Ballmer pits and maintains the same enthusiasm present in the original video. [The Register]
A survey in the US has found that cell phones are the third most desired present this Christmas for teenagers. While the report found that computers, cd players and games consoles lead the stakes, some 30% of teenagers said that they are looking forward to buying a cell phone.
Computers top the “must-have” holiday wish list for teens this year, according to results of the recent “First Annual Youth Holiday Purchase Patterns” survey conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). This marks the first time teens age 12-17 were surveyed as part of CEA’s annual holiday shopping consumer research.
“The feedback from today’s tech savvy and influential teenagers are important to us and our members,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CEA. “This survey is one of many initiatives we are using to reach out to teens and reiterate the fun and educational benefits of consumer electronics. As expected, the results reflect how teens are actively embracing a wide array of technology and that they recognize technology influences almost all aspects of their lives.”
In addition, the survey shows that teens plan to purchase portable CD players as a gift to others (49%) this holiday season. Other products targeted for gift giving include game consoles (35%), cell phones (30%), hand-held game systems (28%) and portable MP3 players (27%). Just over half of the teens surveyed (51%) said they were planning to pay for all or most of the gifts with their own money.[Cellular News via textually.org]
If this is true, this would make Apple the defacto leader of digital music.
A story appearing in today’s New York Post claims that McDonald’s is close to announcing a deal with Apple, whereby the fast food giant will give away up to 1 billion songs from the iTunes Music Store. Pepsi and Apple recently announced a deal with Apple to give away 100 million songs to customers. According to The Post, both Pepsi and McDonald’s are paying Apple’s regular retail price of 99 cents for each song. The article notes that “a spokesperson for Apple declined comment, and a representative of McDonald’s was unavailable for comment.” [MacMinute]
Is Microsoft’s new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, a radical innovation or a return to the company’s winner-take-all software strategy from a decade ago?
Longhorn, which had its official coming-out party last week, marks Microsoft’s return to “fat client” application development–software that resides largely on desktop or portable PCs rather than on a shared server or network. The company is even considering phasing out the development of a stand-alone browser, instead building Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Web-based applications that would run directly in Longhorn as “native” Windows code.
The result would be “increased lock-in to Windows,” said Michael Silver, an analyst at market research firm Gartner. “Microsoft wants enterprises to write browser applications that take advantage of Longhorn application programming interfaces (APIs), which means that they won’t work on non-Longhorn browsers,” Silver wrote in a research report last week.
With Longhorn, some industry veterans believe, Microsoft is attempting to steer software development back toward the Windows desktop and away from software such as browser applications that can run on other companies’ OSes. Longhorn reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to the notion of powerful desktop machines that have large hard drives. [CNET News.com]
Whether or not it has escaped the sun’s sphere of influence — known to astronomers as the heliosphere — Voyager 1 has exceeded all expectations and on Wednesday was more than 8 billion miles from Earth, or 90 times the distance between Earth and the sun. [Wired News]
Amazing results…
In an interview with C|NET, Steve Jobs says that the .Mac renewal rate was 86-87%, a stunning figure. Jobs points out that many critics claimed that no one would pay the full $99 price for Apple’s suite of web services, but it turns out just the opposite is true. The renewal rate, he says, is “unheard of, higher than almost anybody’s. We’ve built ourselves the beginnings of a pretty good Internet services business.” [dotmac.info]
Evocative cover graphics are strictly optional now that so much music comes in digital form. [New York Times: Technology]
Soon anyway. While reading the latest NYT Circuits submission from David Pogue tonight I started thinking about how cool it would be to have one of the cameras he reviewed – the Panasonic D-Snap SV-AV100.
It’s a credit card sized SD based camcorder that can record MPEG-2 quality video. The cards are still too small – only 512 which holds 10 minutes and the unit sells for between 700 and 1000 bucks. That would classify it as very expensive for the how much extra you would have to pay in memory (let alone batteries) to take this on a trip, or for a day out with the family.
It won’t be long though before we get SD cards at 1 and 2 GB if not larger… by then the price on cameras like this should be much less and I am sure they will be even more jam packed with features like multi-megapixel still capabilities.
“It’s perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor,” Jobs said at a meeting with financial analysts. But Jobs said the company is happy with IBM’s PowerPC family of chips and feels the performance is “quite competitive.”
“Right now we don’t see a compelling need to switch processor families,” Jobs said. “We have all the options in the world, but the PowerPC roadmap looks very strong.” [CNET News.com]