I’m going to tell you about a great idea I’ve recently discovered. You can now watch TV anytime you want without actually having to have a television. With TV on Your PC you can watch where ever there’s a computer or laptop!
With TV on Your PC you will have access to more than 12,000 channels!! [...]
VOIP stand for Voice-over-Internet protocol. At a very basic level it is the idea of using a data network to transfer voice between two points. Although voip has become a buzz word in recent years has it origins as far back as the early 1970s. The pioneering work of Danny Cohen at the University of [...]
Launching a classical music download store is a very brave, or perhaps foolhardy, thing to do. While kids shell out loadsamoney for ringtones, classical music buyers tend to be pernickety about recordings, and careful with their money, as Passionato may soon discover.
Passionato is a straightforward site offering classical music albums at decent quality but not at low prices. Typically, albums cost £7.99 for 320kbps MP3 versions and £8.99 for lossless Flac, though some cost £4/£5, and there are tracks at 79p/99p. Tracks are mercifully free of DRM (digital rights management) copy protection, so you can play them on anything, including iPods.
You can browse Passionato’s catalogue by Composers, Artists, Genres/Periods or Record Labels. The labels include EMI, Naxos, Chandos, and BBC Worldwide. Deutsche Grammophon isn’t listed, but there are lots of DG albums inexplicably hidden under Universal Classics & Jazz.
The navigation doesn’t always work. Looking for the sublime Alison Balsom, for example, I went to Artist, Instrumentalist, and clicked Trumpet, but she’s not in the 76 results or its alphabetical listing. A global search for Balsom finds three albums, which is OK, but searching for Lang Lang finds hundreds because the hits include the “Sung Language” subheading, Jean Langlais, Nadia Boulanger etc. “Lang Lang” in quotes gets no results. Did no one test this thing?
Really there should be an Advanced Search facility so you can specify composer, work, orchestra etc. It would be uniquely better if you could also specify things like modern or period instruments: we can dream!
The site also has sections for new releases (Critic’s Choice), a chart and special offers – sign on and you get 10 free tracks.
Currently, Passionato doesn’t have a deep enough catalogue or enough musical information. The catalogue ultimately depends on all the music majors signing up and making “out of print” recordings available. Ideally, for example, I want all four of Karajan’s great Beethoven cycles, a choice of the original or remastered versions, and a guide to the differences. Passionato just has the remastered 1961-62 set and a couple of quotes.
Full background information is probably not affordable unless you crowdsource it by providing a wiki or – as Amazon does – user reviews. Passionato has neither.
But the biggest problem is money: if you find something you want, will you buy it?
Take, for example, the Bach concertos played by Hilary Hahn. Passionato wants £7.99 for the 320kbps MP3 version. However, go to Amazon.co.uk and you can buy a new CD for less (£6.23 plus £1.24 shipping from Caiman USA) and rip it yourself. Which I did, ages ago.
At Amazon.com, the MP3 version (256kbps) costs $8.99, and individual tracks cost 89c instead of 99p. For those who enjoyed the controversial Russian site AllOfMP3.com, MP3sparks.com offers the same download for $2.38 at 192kbps, with tracks at between 14c and 28c. And, of course, popular stuff like this circulates for free on file-sharing networks.
Given the scale of the market challenge, one has to wish Passionato luck. It will need it.
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The free gifts actually help in promotion of any product or service very easily. Moreover, the case of ‘monopoly’ no longer exists in any arena of business. Where there is only one individual earning profits in any particular he is bound to have a competitor very soon. The main aspect that rules the economy is [...]
Ipods are a type of portable media player or method of listening to music that are made by the company Apple Inc. and first burst onto the electronic market on October 23, 2001. Ipods quickly became popular with the listening public because they are sleek, slim, easy to carry and can hold many songs. These [...]
So, while it turned out to be a myth that China would drop the Great Firewall during the Olympics, it’s still a bit surprising to hear that China is apparently blocking at least some access to iTunes. Apparently, an organization put out an album of pro-Tibetan songs, and asked Olympic athletes to download the songs and put them on their iPods as a sort of quiet protest. Of course, then the group put out a press release, claiming that 40 Olympians had done so… and, suddenly folks in China are having trouble accessing iTunes. Not surprisingly, a “semi-official news portal” of the Chinese gov’t claims that folks in China are denouncing Apple for even offering the music, and are calling for the musicians featured on the album to be banned from playing in China.
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Tiernan Ray, over at Tech Trade Daily, has an amusing post up explaining the rather circuitous route of a particular Apple rumor found on various Apple rumor sites. Basically, one Apple rumors site claimed a new research report was coming out detailing potential upgrades to various Apple products. But, the problem was that there was no such new report. The research firm in question had actually released a report over a week earlier. And then things got even more mixed up:
Macrumors, in mentioning the phantom report from *today*, cites a PC World article from yesterday, that erroneously references the August 6 note as being analyst comment *today*, meaning, Monday, the date of the PC World article. Even more hilarious, in the Macrumors post, the author says that the phantom report from today about updates to the Mac laptops and iPods is “consistent with whispers we’ve heard.” And he cites … ta da! A post from AppleInsider last week commenting on the original August six note. Oy vey.
So, basically a report from last week is used to confirm a non-existent report from this week, which is actually… the original report from the week before.
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We’ve covered the disturbing levels of secrecy surrounding the ACTA treaty — which is basically a way for various industries to push through new copyright laws without having to actually go through the legislative process. The most annoying part is how secretive various governments have been in crafting the treaty — basically allowing various industry groups to tell government trade representatives what they want, and then letting the governments negotiate amongst each other. This process leaves out many parties impacted by these rules (and the public!). Michael Geist has some details on how Canada has taken this process to new levels of secrecy beyond even that in the US.
Apparently, the Canadian government has created an “insider” group to work with the government on the treaty. What’s disturbing is that this insider group seems to involve mostly lobbyists who have a one-sided take on this issue. Not included are any lobbyists from industries who are opposed to ACTA or any sort of representative of consumer rights or privacy issues (which is a big concern, considering that ACTA may allow border searches of laptops and iPods). Given that the Canadian government is already getting beaten up for writing its newly proposed copyright laws in secret with help only from industry representatives, you’d think that maybe (just maybe) it would try to be a bit more open and inclusive with ACTA. Apparently not.
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I have tunes bought from the Apple site, but I also use Windows Media Player and have music that isn’t iTunes compatible. I would like to get an MP3 player that will let me play all my songs. I also want it to have a radio.
Meriel Whale
JS: I don’t know of any player that can handle music protected by Apple’s digital rights management (DRM) and also Microsoft’s. Apple has avoided supporting WMA (Windows Media Audio) and hasn’t licensed Microsoft’s DRM. Apple also hasn’t openly licensed its own FairPlay DRM so that companies such as Sony and Archos can use it. You must therefore go for one DRM or the other, depending on which is most important to you. You can rescue the incompatible tunes by burning them to disc in audio CD format then re-ripping them to WMA, AAC or MP3. However, this will lead to some loss in quality.
Choosing an MP3 player is partly a matter of taste, and it’s worth trying them in a shop to see which you like. Look at the 8GB iPod nano, even though it doesn’t play WMA files or have a built-in radio. Other 8GB models to look at include the Sony NWZA818, the Creative Zen (model 70PF216000115), and the SanDisk Sansa e280. All three can play WMA, protected WMA and MP3 files, and the Sony and Creative Zen models also play unprotected AAC files. The Sony has the best sound quality, beating iPods etc in a H-Fi World review. However, it does not have a radio, and the other two do. Since these players generally cost around £70 each at Amazon.co.uk, you could also get an iPod Shuffle and cover all bases for roughly the cost of an 8GB iPod nano. For the future, I’d suggest never buying any music files that include DRM.
My service provider told me that I would shorten the life of my router (Netgear DG824M Wireless) if I were to continue my practice of switching it off as a way of reducing our energy consumption. I had been in touch with their support staff over occasional brief interruptions in my broadband connection.
Graham Rooth
JS: I don’t know of any reason why turning a router off should shorten its life. On the other hand, I had two routers die in about three years: I turned them off and they never came back on. I now leave mine on all the time, and stand it on Blu-Tack legs to get some air underneath. Routers consume relatively little power - probably around 8-15 Watts - but you could measure yours with an energy monitoring plug.
I am using a broadband router which has a firewall built in. Is it still necessary to run a software firewall?
Steve Gorwits
JS: Yes. The firewall in the router should stop most probes, but if your PC gets a virus or Trojan from a USB drive, a program you have downloaded or some other source, the router will not stop it from calling out. And after it calls out, your router firewall will not block the response. You need a software firewall to control the programs running on your PC: not only malware but also legitimate programs that access the net without telling you.
Could you tell me why I keep getting “Internet Explorer cannot display the web page”? Also, is it safe to use Microsoft Updates, as I read that these were causing problems.
M Alderson
JS: There are a lot of reasons why IE might not display a web page, and Microsoft has a trouble-shooter. One reason not covered is that you might have a virus or browser hijacker, which can result from failing to install critical Windows Updates. These can sometimes cause some problems, but not as many as can be caused by not installing them.
Hotmail now makes me enter my password twice. After the first time, the page refreshes and says my username or password is incorrect. If I retype my password, it lets me in.
Harry Annison
JS: This seems to be a recent Hotmail bug and it affects Mac and Linux owners with various browsers, not just Windows users. The trick is to bookmark the second page when it appears, and go straight to that page in future. The address will look something like bit.ly/2im8EV, and this may work for you.
Backchat
· Following our discussion of firewalls, “Bill Blagger” provided a link to firewall tests. The results are exaggerated because if a firewall fails the first test, it doesn’t get to take the others. But Comodo and Online Armor come through as the best free firewalls.
Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
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The world might be spinning toward a recession but Apple is riding high, reporting record third quartet profits of $1.07 billion on revenue of $7.46 billion. This compares with profits of $818 million on much lower revenues of $5.41 billion for the same time last year. So just what helped those profits jump?
Apple said it shipped 2.49 million Macs in Q3, up 41% in units and 43% in revenue growth against the same period last year. It also flogged 717,000 iPhones - up from 270,000 last year - and 11.01 million iPods, up 12%.
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