Published on
March 25, 2009 in
music and tech.
“The Social Media Guide” points to a new Last.fm blog post that discusses their new charge for “International” users to access their streaming radio service.
In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month. In return you’ll get unlimited access to Last.fm Radio, and a promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come.
This isn’t a huge surprise considering the ridiculous royalties charged to Internet radio providers. As Mashable points out, Last.fm competitor Pandora simply cutoff International users. While I think that people generally overreact to a company charging for something it once gave away, I fear this is the nature of the beast when it comes to dealing with music copyright holders. The thing with Last.fm is that they offer so many other ways to discover music that are beyond simple streaming.
The New York Times is reporting (via Slashdot) that IBM and Sun are in talks regarding the former acquiring the latter.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.
This is an interesting development considering Sun’s recent acquisition of MySQL AB, and IBM’s speculated interest in Zend, the primary developers of PHP. Such a series of purchases would put IBM in a solid position to start using buzzwords like “cloud computing.”
Published on
March 16, 2009 in
religion.
Easter must be close. I know this because every magazine is publishing their annual “secrets of the bible” issues. I’ve read most of them or heard the same stuff on the History Channel, but this article at Time.com caught my attention. It talks to Rachel Elior, a Jewish mysticism professor, who claims the Essenes, a mysterious Jewish religious sect, never existed. The Essenes are most often credited with the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many also think they were where John the Baptist and even Jesus Christ himself got the basis of their radical views. Should this view of their non-existence gain further traction, it has the potential to change the way Biblical scholarship is approached.
Published on
March 12, 2009 in
tech.
CNET News reports that invitations are out for a media event next week (March 17) to discuss Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0. Will it be a software-only discussion or will it be hardware too? The anticipation builds!
UPDATE from Engadget:
Apple’s calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building,” so we’re not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won’t have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.
Yes, please discuss the absence of push notifications!
