Monday, July 20, 2009
Online
Kazaa Wakes Up From Lawsuit-Induced Coma, Vows To Go Legit
11:54PM John Herrman | Old-line filesharing services can’t seem to switch sides fast enough: Now Kazaa, leading purveyor of illegal MP3s and maliciously mislabelled pornography for few years in the early 2000s, has been reborn as a legal, paid music download service. $US20 a month gets you unlimited downloads, 2005-style: in WMA format, wrapped in tons of DRM. The history of iPod-incompatible music stores is littered with dead bodies, so, well, best of luck. [SMH via The Inquirer]
Entertainment
Universal Hopes You’ll Watch BD Special Features As IPhone Apps
11:40PM Matt Buchanan | As many collector’s editions DVDs as I’ve bought, I’ve never watched the special features. Which might be why Universal is turning them into apps for your iPhone, and letting you use it as a virtual remote for your Blu-ray player. More »
Phones
Good News: Palm’s Working On The Pre’s Gaming Problem
11:33PM Matt Buchanan | A June 29 job listing indicates that Palm plans to eventually rectify the Pre’s lack of gaming of powah—they’re looking for someone to “design, implement, debug, and optimise frameworks for game development” who has “knowledge of 3D graphics, including hardware graphics pipelines and programmable shaders.” More »
Peripherals
The Inevitable 256GB Thumb Drive Comes To Pass, Via Kingston
11:00PM John Herrman | Here’s your cold, bitter, daily dose of hardware obsolescence: Just a month after passing the already-ridiculous 128GB barrier, Kingston has released the 256GB DataTraveler 300. It isn’t available in the US, but if/when it is, it’ll run around $US900. [Kingston] More »
Business
Whoa, Apple And RIM Make A Lot Of Money
10:54PM Matt Buchanan | Surprise, Apple and RIM actually make a lot of money despite selling only 3 percent of the world’s mobile phones. Together, they pull in 35 percent of the industry’s operating profits. An analyst suggests that if iPhone and BlackBerry’s marketshare climbs to 5 percent, they’ll rake in something like 58 percent of the industry’s operating profits. More »
Software
Time Warp Backs Up Your Time Machine, Er, Backups To Amazon
10:45PM Matt Buchanan | One of the more interesting, ways to keep your precious Time Machine backups safe: Time Warp is a $US25 app (free while in beta) that compresses and encrypts your backups, then uploads them to your Amazon S3 account. More »
Computers
Gateway Ambles Downmarket With Ultra-Generic LT2000 Netbook
9:59PM John Herrman | Say what you want about the Gateway LT3100’s AMD processor and operating system options, but at least it had an angle. The $US300, Atom-based 10.1-inch LT2000, on the other hand, is as predictable as netbooks get. More »
Software
4:00PM Nick Broughall | If it’s good enough for Apple (and Nokia, and Microsoft, and RIM, and Palm, and Android…), then it’s sure as hell good enough for Lucky Goldstar! That’s right, LG has just launched the beta of their very own app store for LG feature phones. Even better, the press release is full of smacktalk! More »
LG Launches Their Own App Store Beta
4:00PM Nick Broughall | If it’s good enough for Apple (and Nokia, and Microsoft, and RIM, and Palm, and Android…), then it’s sure as hell good enough for Lucky Goldstar! That’s right, LG has just launched the beta of their very own app store for LG feature phones. Even better, the press release is full of smacktalk! More »
Science
