Reuters: Electronics retailer RadioShack Corp. on Tuesday said that it has agreed to sell Apple Computer Inc.’s iPods, adding the popular music player to its shelves.
I’ve got nothing against this – seeing as my local Radio Shack is a hell of a lot closer than my local Apple store – but it makes me wonder. If this deal was made twenty years ago, the iPod would have become the “Tandy Music Player” or something cheesy. Back then Tandy often re-sold popular products but they would rebrand anything they sold, then often offered at a slightly higher price… was comical but it must have worked for them at one time – after all they did it for years, and they weren’t alone in this practice… Sears did the same thing, back in the day. If I remember correctly there was a re-branded version of both the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision consoles and yep, they were both “Sears” machines. Must have made sense to someone.
I wonder what Apple’s comment would be if Tandy attempted to rebrand the iPod… *smirk*
Bloomberg: Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, threatened to pull its Windows operating system from South Korea if antitrust regulators order the company to remove programming for instant message and movie player services.
I have nothing to do with any of this, but I still have an opinion as a stock holder and speaking as a non-employee: I have to say I’d rather see a response like this, over the than the response that came out of the WMP concerns of the European Union (EU) that resulted in the development of Windows XP N. Continue reading Windows N++?→
RTM. Three letters that have taken over two years to put on a label, and sixteen months of my own time, but it’s been printed. It’s been posted. It’s available to MSDN Subscribers. It’ll be on store shelves in November.
Not the normal kiosk: they got a 360 in the case with a wired controller and a wide-screen LCD up in the air. In fact, it’s a really interesting “design” since you can’t play with it for more than 4 minutes before your neck starts to ache – it’s that high up the wall – which I guess helps drive incentive to buy your own, rather than camping out at the store. [pics after the jump]
I think I might have mentioned it before, but I’m opting to do it again: what are people calling this on the outside?
Windows XP has been XP and WinXP in my travels. If Windows Vista follows suit is it Vista? Or WinVi? I like Win-vee, personally: in the grand scheme of things, it’s Windows version 6.0 so it’s got the Roman numeral tie in, in addition to rhyming somewhat with kawaii.
Looks like another new version of PSP firmware is available – not 2.01, but 2.5 this time. 2.01 was released to close another homebrew exploit hole; 2.5 has that plus a bunch of features… and of course the typical “don’t upgrade because you’ll lose homebrew support!” Yeah, well, I have had a homebrew-capable ROM for months now and never bothered to run anything but UMD games – I can get MAME on my home PC :)
However, as my PSP has been running fine I thought I’d hold off on 2.5; I scanned the list last night and said “whatever”. Then the ‘goat mentioned LocationFree. I read that as “location/region free playback of UMD discs” – Steve points out that it will stream TV feeds to your PSP. This is a feature I’ve been demanding since I fit got my mits on the PSP – now I just need $350 to get the base station that would let this work… boo.
[Apple take note: handful of features make this 2.5 – a whole shitload of features would require it to be 3.0!]
NetCrucible: This is a really bad article. The article asserts two falsehoods: one, that Microsoft is afraid of Google; and two, that Microsoft will win by being a relentless tortoise and copying features. Let’s talk about the “copying” theory first. Five years ago, Bill Gates shook up the industry by announcing a dual-pronged strategy — all productivity apps seamlessly integrated into the universal canvas of the web, and the “web as a platform”. This wasn’t vapor, this was what I used every day.
I personally like the comment of “take [MSN] Messenger, which has been shipping new releases three times a year. Google just shipped their first version. Please don’t say we pre-emptively copied Google.”
I use MSN.com for my home page on a couple of computers and keep it bookmark’d at work, where my home page is an internal news site. I’ve done this for years, since there’s usually a nice smattering of news on the MSN home page.
Looks like they’ve made a change that will force me to change my home page on the majority of my PC’s. Continue reading Too Much Video→