It’s for sure a sign of the rise of digital music and casual gaming when it’s reported that one of the greatest bands of all time — Motley Crue — has sold more copies of its new single through the Rock Band downloadable store than it has through iTunes. In fact, Rock Band has almost five times more sales of the track than iTunes, an interesting feat.
Of course there’s a lot less competition in the Rock Band store than there is in iTunes. Rock Band members are hurting for new content, wanting the good stuff every week, whereas iTunes literally gets new stuff every day. Still, it proves that as a money-making idea, in-game distribution might actually be more profitable than traditional digital sales. Now if only I could get it from my Xbox to my iPod I’d be happy.
You may have seen our review of the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX high-speed thumbdrive. If so, you’ll remember how it proved itself far superior to the peasant drives I put it up against. Well, it’s far from the only high-speed USB key on the market, so we got our hands on a couple other leading offerings from Corsair (the Voyager GT) and SanDisk (the Cruzer Contour) and have evaluated them thoroughly. Find out which of these handy little things comes out on top by reading on.
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It’s all over, folks. Fortune is reporting that the state of New York’s sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon.com starts this Sunday, June 1st. Peter’s already been enraged about it here and here and I’m guessing he’s not going to be too thrilled about this post either. He’s pretty excitable as it is, so hopefully he won’t read this.
The state’s justification, you may remember, is that since Amazon has an affiliate commission program and since some of those affiliates might be based in New York, all sales on Amazon.com that get shipped to anyone in New York should be subject to sales tax. Sounds pretty dumb to me. Scary, too, as I bet other states use this case as precedent to start taxing online sales as well.
Amazon, to its credit, sued the state but it looks like it didn’t help much.
Is this the alien everyone’s talking about, everyone’s waiting for?
From the Rocky Mountain News’ liveblog:
The film shows a window, reportedly 8 feet off the ground in a rural Nebraska town in 2003.
In the enhanced version of the video, a creature pops up in the window, looks around, and pops back down, again and again.
“It looks like the quintessential Gray, right out of E.T.,” Scheiber [a skeptic] said.
Audience members wanted to know why the creature traveled all those light years just to peep in a window.
I, too, would like to know why. Hoax much?
UPDATE So it turns out that this video is a hoax. The Rocky Mountain News now reports that a Denver man created the video in a couple hours for a grand total of $90. That said, a screengrab of the actual video, from the press conference earlier today, is now making the rounds. This is it:
As I said in our chat room, to think that our dumb planet, our dumb blue rock, is the end-all, be-all of Life is patently absurd; we still get excited over multi-touch for Pete’s sake. But I reject and denounce the idea that all aliens have to look like Mars Attacks.
This is pretty cool if you’re an active retro gamer. Canada’s arm of Nintendo found a cache of old NES and SNES video game carts, sealed in packaging, in their old warehouse. Instead of just trashing the deprecated games, they’re auctioning them off, with the proceeds going to the United Way of Canada.
They’re going in lots to collectors, and you can get in on the action by hitting up the eBay page.
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re nostalgic and rich, then happy bidding.
Before I write this gem of a post, let me attempt to absolve myself of all legal responsibility: I’m merely doing what I was told to do. That should hold up in court, no?
My second charge this fine Productivity Week is to teach y’all how to pirate movies, music, video games, etc. more efficiently. On what planet is this type of advice is both approved of and encouraged I don’t know, but here we are.
I’ll divide this into two parts: helping make the most of your BitTorrent experience, and doing that Usenet thing as painlessly as possible… while you still can! Oh, man. The fun, it never stops here.
BitTorrent is for poor people or jerks who either cannot afford to pay for Hollywood works of art like that hilarious Zohan movie, or who think they’re being righteous and thumbing their nose at The Man by downloading. I fall into the first category. I’m not about to pay $30 for the Blu-ray version of Rambo, but I’ll sure as hell download it, watch it and then delete it, then forget I ever watched it.
But how to use it smarter? That’s what everybody (nobody?) wants to know.
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Well, will you look at this — a nice-looking iPhone/iPod Touch dock plus alarm clock with an equally nice-looking price. The iH41B from iHome will be available in July but can be pre-ordered now if you’d like to avoid the rush.
It’ll work with most dock-able iPods (and presumably, the iPhone) but is “specifically designed to take advantage of the iPod Touch’s variable aspect screen.” You can also use other audio devices by plugging them into the device’s line-in jack.
Product Page [ihomeaudio.com] via DVICE
Windows 7 is coming out in 2009. It is supposed to be amazing, which multi-touch, surfaces, and small parasites that with eat dead skin from your back while you sleep. It sounds great. What won’t it have? WinFS.
WinFS was supposed to me Microsoft’s super fast file system that enabled amazing search on your desktop. When Apple launched Leopard, however, WinFS was still a glimmer in Ballmer’s eye and MS engineers were amazed at Leopard’s speed.
At the June 2004 WWDC, Jobs blew away the MSFT engineers in attendance by demonstrating lightning fast Spotlight searches on Tiger (OSX 10.4). The court-released MSFT emails show how flabbergasted they were, and the imperative of getting the Tiger preview DVDs back to Redmond for reverse engineering. Comments by MSFT’s Jim Allchin and Lenn Pryor were priceless.
Here’s Pryor:
” You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. ;) Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”
Here’s Allchin:
“Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.”
Come on, guys. Let’s do this thing. I’m a die-hard Mactard because day-to-day Windows use became grating rather than easier. Win me back.
Because of the Wii’s rather silly amount of storage space available (512MB), developers have been loath to plan on downloadable content for the system. But Vicarious, the developers for the upcoming Guitar Hero 4, understand that to make the most of the Wii market may be the difference between a success and a smashing success, so they’re doing it anyway.
They’re not revealing how they’re going to store all those songs; the Wii won’t access them if they’re on an SD card and 512mb would fill up mighty fast. So what’s a developer to do? Allow me to speculate wildly: a gig or more of space built into the next-generation Guitar Hero controller. Why not? You can get 1GB SD cards for five bucks these days, and in bulk they could probably include a couple gigs of space for less than $10 extra on top of the controller price. Mark my words, it’s gonna happen.
We know that Apple will add an app store to iTunes very soon so that people can buy and download new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Google’s going with a similar solution for Android, and is said that it will create a central storefront for commercial apps for handsets running the search giant’s new Linuxy OS.
More interestingly, Google has said that handset makers using Android will have full access to the guts of the OS, meaning they can pull stuff they don’t want out or put stuff that’s not there in. That means that phone makers can customize every part of their phones while keeping interoperability. That compromise is what gives Android an edge, and what makes it a real threat to Apple and the iPhone.
Space beer. It’s right up there with space wrestling as something that’s long overdue, but the wait will soon be over. Sapporo will launch a beer in November that’s brewed from International Space Station-grown barley. Initially, only 100 bottles of the space brew will be made, and none of them released commercially, and it’s unlikely that the beer will taste any different. But that’s irrelevant. Sapporo could slap a “SPACE BEER” label on a bottle and it’ll sell out everywhere.
There’s a scientific reason for the beer, and it’s to determine the effects of space on growing edible plants. Not that you care.
via Popular Science
Today Onkyo unveiled a new stereo system which will go on sale in Japan on June 28th. The Nippon-only BR-NX10A is priced at $710.
It comes with two bookshelf speakers, a CD player and an LCD color display. The most distinctive feature is the 80 GB HDD which is integrated into the main unit. Onkyo says this is enough to store a total of 40,000 songs.
The company placed “cushions” under the HDD and cooling fan in the main unit. Onkyo claims this “floating technology” significantly reduces vibrations and noise .
User can record music on the the hard disc drive in linear PCM/ATRAC/MP3 formats. The BR-NX10A is equipped with a USB port and Ethernet connection for CDDB. The two speakers feature an output power of 26W each.
I don’t use a mouse. I use the trackpad on my MacBook or a trackball when I’m at the desktop, but Bill Gates thinks all these things are going they way of DOS. He sees a future where waving ones hands over a sensor is the way to interface with your computer. He stops short of saying the keyboard is going away — that’s a Jobs thing — but he claims the days of the mouse are numbered.
And he’s probably right. With multitouch going everywhere, and devices like the touchwall and Surface are about to explode into the mainstream.
Computers will still have use for mouses, though. Gamers in particular are fans, some spending real money for precision mouses for precision sniping in their virtual worlds. For the rest of us, though, you might start seeing them disappear sooner than you’d think.
Remember that little thumb-drive that beat the heck out of your Apple TV until it gave up its precious? Well, due to some fair use issues (read “People getting pissed that aTV was stealing their programs”) they’ve discontinued the product.
In our interpretation of the fair use doctrine, our software does not cross any lines, but since this is a grey area issue, we have taken a proactive approach and decided to seek clarifcation directly from the rights holder before we offer the product again.
The site says outstanding orders will be refunded but seriously, just do it yourself. It’s not hard.
Could “Mobile Me” be the new name for .Mac? That’s what it looks like, at least according to what Blogging Robots (is that name a social statement?) has discovered. Strings in the iPhone 2.0 SDK reveal the name “Mobile Me” left, right and center, as pictured here.
More evidence: Apple trademarked the name in 2006.
So reasonable minds have concluded that, yes, Mobile Me is the new .Mac. Dotmac is fairly opaque and doesn’t really convey what it does, while Mobile Me, I think, is a little more descriptive.
via TUAW
A former OiNK user was arrested last week, TorrentFreak has learnt. The user, who was not identified, was later released on bail. More arrests are expected.
This news should concern a lot of us here, I’m going to assume. For one, if the police are involved, and not some anti-piracy watchdog like MediaDefender, it suggests that the post-OiNK investigations are criminal in nature (as opposed to civil).
Just as troubling, the arrested user’s crime was the seeding of a single album. A show of hands: how many of you are seeding at least one album right now?
Would now be the time to shutter Azureus for good? It would be prudent to wait for more information before taking any drastic measures, I think.
You can chat with us during the show via AIM by pinging username “crunchtips” or call into the show at (646) 200-4163 should the mood strike you.
Here’s the link for today’s show…
Tokyo-based accessory maker Green House’s newest invention is a true dreamfor all gadget fans who don’t want to leave their computer to play golf. The company started shipping an (almost) golf ball shaped USB mouse along with a mat resembling a green.
The set also includes a small putter, three “real” mini golf balls and a flag which can be placed on the mouse pad/green. The company will even print your own name, picture or logo on the flag for an extra fee.
The set is available only in Japan and costs $29.
Here are some shows where you can really see some gear crunch. They’re part of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels series, which cover (as you may expect) the major works, megastructures, and, in this set, the spectacular failures of modern engineering. You won’t be seeing the Apple Newton on there or Microsoft Bob, but you will see bridges and buildings collapsing, huge ships crashing, and so on. Sound fun? Then read on for your chance to get a copy of the recently launched DVDs.
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As we all know, Hop On Wireless finally (they’ve been promising hardware since 2001) released the Hop1800, a $10 disposable dual-band phone with no screen. Great, right? So what am I so antsy about? I did a little digging recently and came back worried.
Hop On has been hyping this device for seven years. Its founder, Peter Michaels, made a huge splash in 2001, receiving accolades from the Washington Post and BusinessWeek. It turns out he just put a Nokia phone in a plastic case and passed it off as his device. Knowing that devices that take a long time to come to market are usually fishy, I found that the company had some shady dealings in the Web 1.0 world.
From SFGate.com:
Hop-On is officially registered as a Las Vegas corporation that focused on online gambling under its prior name, NWDP.com. It also is intertwined with a defunct online betting firm, also run by Michaels, called World Wide Web Casinos. That Orange County company was raided by California regulators two years ago for allegedly fleecing hundreds of investors out of as much as $20 million.
A separate shareholder lawsuit filed against WWW Casinos accused Michaels of siphoning off funds to pay for at least five cars, a $125,000 racing boat and gambling trips in Nevada. The suit was settled out of court two years ago.
The company also sells tiny little phones from Asia and there hasn’t been much mention of a scam recently, but the glossy renders in the product page make me and the fact that you can’t actually order one online make me concerned. Let us know if you spot one of these in the wild. Otherwise, steer clear.
