07 | January | 2009 | Procrastinating in the Heat

Archive for January 7th, 2009

iTunes goes DRM free

The Price Of Going DRM-Free: Apple’s Hidden $1.8 Billion Music Tax

Yes that’s right! Free your music! No more DRM on all songs on the iTunes Store. It’s taken them a while to get there though. Amazon was among the first to sell DRM free songs and it has now arrived at the iTunes store with a cost.

It will cost each user ¢30 a song to “remove” the DRM. It’s actually downloading the DRM one and overwriting the old DRMed version. According to Tech Crunch, it will cost users $1.8 Billion to do where the math is based on the number of songs sold multplied by .30 and thus we have the = music lable tax to set their music free.

Too bad. The tax will still wont save the music industry.

2009: 01/07
POSTED BY: mdelamerced
CATEGORY: gadgets
TAGS: apple
DRM
iTunes
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Goodbye 1UP, Hello to whatever you guys plan on doing in the future

Gamasutra – Breaking: Ziff Davis Sells 1UP To UGO/Hearst, Closes EGM

Gamasutra breaks the bad news to the community that Electronic Gaming Monthly and the 1UP podcasts will be shutdown in the process. Most of the staff amounting to 30 talented individuals have been laid off.

This is a sad day for the gaming industry. EGM was one of the longest running magazines dedicated to video games but with the closing of these door I eagerly look forward to what they will come up with in the future. Much like what Ziff Davis did they sold and shut down TechTV. Coincindentally enough EGM and 1UP were also owned by Ziff Davis. That closure led to the creation of the Twit Army by Leo Laporte, Revision 3 with Patrick Norton and other members of Tech TV and now most famously Digg with Kevin Rose. I do hope that they will create something inspiring in the coming months so to monitor their activities I will be following them on Twitter and waiting for anything that comes up.

I guess the Sore Thumbs blog by Dan “Shoe” Hsu will now have more contributors.

2009: 01/07
POSTED BY: mdelamerced
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
TAGS: 1up
rants
videogames
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So what did we get right?

Now that the curtain has closed on the (last) Apple keynote to grace Macworld what did I get right?

New iWork 09
17 inch unibody Mac Book Pro

That’s it. Sadly no netbook for mac fans. iLife 09 I missed (dang those two go hand in hand) no new iMacs and Mac Minis ot that Nano iPhone or a version 3 of the iPhone software either.

Even if I were Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t wake up on a cold morning just to tell the world all this. But it’s still a satisfying array.

I’m trying out iWork 09 right now and I must say I’m about to drop the Office suite alltogether now. Numbers has greatly improved. It can now handle my office spreadsheet of over 20,000 entries. I definitely like this version now.