I don’t know if it’s true, but Wired makes a convincing case:
The new contract clears the way for Jobs to sell iPods loaded with music.
Who cares?
Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.
Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40 — the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?
Apple was prevented from doing this until now by the 15-year-old contract between Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company, and Apple Computer. This contract precluded Jobs’ Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or “physical media delivering prerecorded content … (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones’ music).”
These cheap album iPods could be sold at bus stations and airports: instant music, no computer required. Bands could sell pre-loaded iPods at concerts, maybe containing the concert they just played. There could be Broadway show iPods, movie soundtrack iPods and iPods burned at retail stores with custom play lists.
At long last, Astraware has released Hammer Heads, a game in which one smashes garden gnomes.
Obviously, this is an outrage. I’m downloading the demo so that I may play it repeatedly to determine my precise level of outrage.
(So to speak.)
It’s true: Joss is no longer working on the WW project:
Okay, stay calm and I’ll explain as best I can. It’s pretty complicated, so bear with me. I had a take on the film that, well, nobody liked. Hey, not that complicated.
Let me stress first that everybody at the studio and Silver Pictures were cool and professional. We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that’s never gonna work. Non-sympatico. It happens all the time. I don’t think any of us expected it to this time, but it did. Everybody knows how long I was taking, what a struggle that script was, and though I felt good about what I was coming up with, it was never gonna be a simple slam-dunk. I like to think it rolled around the rim a little bit, but others may have differing views.
Given how long the script was taking, I think this was kind of inevitable. But hey, now the project can be handed off to Joe Eszterhas!
Old school geekery online at last: What’s New with Phil & Dixie was a staple of the early 1980s Dragon magazine, and at long last, it’s being put online, one strip at a time.
I don’t know what this means, if it means anything, but I’m going off half-cocked anyway:
World of Warcraft users are all familiar with Thottbot, a Web site that automagically compiles information about the game, providing a (theoretically) searchable database of useful info. (The huge traffic post-expansion has really swamped the system something fierce.)
I noticed the other day that Google searches were turning up hits for Thottbott.com and Thotbot.com. I don’t know for sure that these are evil hacker sites, although given that I couldn’t find anything about alternate domain names on the official site and given the number of sites out there loaded down with keyloggers and Trojans, it’s worth always being careful when going to a site off the Internet to make sure it’s the real site you want. (The Whois search doesn’t reveal all that much about the real Thottbot, making it impossible to verify the fakes.)
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