He isn’t calling iPod users thieves, but Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer thinks most of the music stored on the popular Apple player may have been copied illegally. "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen,'" Ballmer told a London press conference. "Most people still steal music. "We can build the technology but there are still ways for people to steal music." Ballmer also said there was a coming explosion in demand for portable players with audio, video, and computer capability alike. "People weren't really sure where these new devices fitted in. At two hundred bucks, maybe, but at three hundred or four hundred bucks, it was too hard to bootstrap the device type,” he said.
How would you like to download music to your cell phone and put them into your computer? If you’re an AT&T Wireless cell phone user you can – the company launched its mMode Music Store October 5, offering about 750,000 tracks at 99 cents a download, with complete albums downloadable for $9.99, billable on your monthly cell phone bill. "From our view, it really turns the mobile phone into kind of a remote control for buying music," said AT&T Wireless vice president Sam Hall. "Our intent is to have the mobile phone become the discovery platform."
Yahoo users can expect to discover some new search tools soon, with the portal planning to start testing such features as sorting and saving search results into distinct categories, recording personal notes about the saved results, and sharing them through email or the popular Really Simple Syndication method. Yahoo also plans to start testing a spam-fighting feature it says will be able to block irrelevant or unwanted Web sites from search results.
Slashdot is getting political. They said October 5 they added a political section to their news and discussion site, “Politics for Nerds: Your Vote Matters.” It features real-time “alternative” political articles and news and a discussion/debate forum. Slashdot recently featured interviews with Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik and Green candidate David Cobb.
Apple is getting ornery about certain types of people tinkering with the floor models in their computer stores. They don’t mind you trying out the email or surfing the Web in the store, but they’re drawing the line at someone like the webmaster who used the local Apple store’s Macs as his own performance test lab. Robert Morgan was fool enough to publish his test results for the iMac G5 contradicting Apple claims about the new machine, and Apple has told told him out-out-out-out! The Morgan report was said to have stirred a little controversy in cyberspace, in hot debate on various Mac-oriented forums. He’d been using display machines in various such Apple stores since 1995.
