June 2004 - Posts
This amazes me. Thank god I hate AOL and avoid it like the plague.
Whats the quickest and easiest way to turn thousands of fans off of purchasing your music?
First came The Metallica Corporation. Now the Beasties.
Musicians and the RIAA need to realize they will never be able to stop the trading of music online, they will simply cause the fans to begin hating the band and its music and hinder sales. It would be interesting to see if the drop in downloads of Metallica's music was due to them threating theose 12 year olds that were stealing it, or if it was due to the fact that all of their new music sucked ass and that they lost the fan devotion because of those petty lawsuits.
I've said it before, and I will say it again. What they need to do is simply produce higher quality content (more than one track that is worth listening too per album), with more “add-ins“ (inserts/dvd extras and such), at a significantly lower price.
In Canada the average price for a decent CD these days is still well over $20 in most retail locations; and on those releases they typically only have from 9 to 15 tracks. Drop the price way down and make it worth my time and money to go out and purchase it.
ps. Is it just me, or should the Beasties be renamed to “The Beastie Old Men”?
huhu
Anyone willnig to share some minor site statistics? I'm interested in seeing how much RSS Aggregators are beating (if at all) Netscape Nagivator for client browsers.
I dont care about raw numbers, lets see some percentages!
IMHO it sucks that people are adopting Firefox. It will just turn into another browser war where Firefox wont be able to keep up with IE and whats coming up with Longhorn and eventually die. Die die die..... Then again since IE has been so damn slow for decent upgrades its no wonder why that trend is happening. Heck I have even dumped plain IE for MyIE2 a long time ago. Maybe those of you that are considering the move to FireFox, take a look at MyIE2 first.
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/040617.htm
Some interesting things to note:
It states:
“The service was originally built in Java, but in 2001 company CEO and founder Fred Durham made the decision to migrate to .NET. “
then follows up with:
“After an upgrade from the vendor, the issues still existed so we decided we could not wait any longer for the vendor to fix things and needed to find a new framework to develop around.”
What? Java slow to progress and patch? Wow! Also:
"Project cycle times have been reduced to approximately one quarter of the previous development cycle times. “
A VERY common fact with most .NET integrations. Near the end of the peice he discusses his comments on MS's .NET Flagship IDE, Visual Studio. Some interesting points to note.
“We use notepad primarily. There are many reasons not to use Visual Studio...“
Read the entire article
New stuff on the
Yahoo web mail offering
- Increased storage capacity – from your current level to 100MB
- Increase in individual message send/receive size from 3MB to 10MB
- An improved layout that’s even easier to use
100MB is a nice thing but I dont know when I will ever need it, but its nice to know its there. Send/Receive size of 3MB to 10MB? If anyone ever sends me a 10MB file over any sort of email account I would give them a swift kick in the ass. The new UI seems a bit buggy too. Im getting a few errors here an there, ho hum... Their motives for this increase in their free offering is obvious, GMail.
The layout. Looks allot like GMail now. I guess thats a good thing, Google knows UI's dont then? KISS all the way. Speaking of GMail...
A buddy sent me an invite to GMail. I'm a GMail slut now. First thing I noticed is how “light” the UI actually is. Take it as a good and a bad thing. Second thing to notice is that it is JUST email. No calendar, no robust address book (they have a pathetic contacts manager), no tasks, no notes. I dont even see a way to create folders and organize emails with rules and such (filtering based on subject or sender etc..) They do have the “Report as Spam“, thats nice but nothing new or exciting. I dont see POP or SMTP access at all anywhere, nor Import/Export capabilities.
Basically useless for me. Maybe I wont be that much of a GMail slut after all, probably will never use it. Hmm..Maybe I should sell it on Ebay? Yeah right, I will keep it and check back every six months see how much they steal from the other free service providers.
An organization which I have consulted with recently had the Merak Email Server in place. Now thats what I'm talking about. Check out the “IceWarp Web Mail“ screen shots. So far the only thing I see that its missing right now is the whole mobility features. I want to either surf to the mail admin on my phone/PDA/WML/WAP device and manage it like Yahoo, or to be able to Sync it up with the sync capabilities in my phone via SyncML (check out http://www.mobical.net/ its a free service based on this, if it works).
More about the Merak product. It does support Outlook synchronization via a GroupWare plugin. I have my Home and Work outlook all synched up. Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, etc.. I'm kept up to date between my life at work, at home and on the road via the Web. Oh yeah, I have it set to send my reminders, events and such via SMS to my cell. Thats nice. No more missing that appointment because I'm not in at the office.
It also allows you to add more than just one email account via POP/SMTP or IMAP. I have my Web based account checking like 4 different accounts and bringing them into the single interface. So many features well worth the price tag IMHO.
Life is getting better...
I'm planning on taking a 2 week vacation in Europe with my woman (Kat P., she no weblog but I'm working on it) sometime in September and was wondering if anyone in this community has had any experiences they want to share.
Have you ever take a Contiki tour? Anything you care to share, good or bad.
We are planning to do the European Discovery trip [map]. Have you visited these places or even live near them? If so what do you recommend that we do that is “off the beaten path”? What should we avoid?
Are you planning to do something similar, around the same time?
2 weeks with no laptop, maybe my cell phone (I have to load up that weblog midlet for sure), no email, nothing. Joys.
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