What is Wal-Mart?

As you all know that's become a famous quote from Paris Hilton.

"It's, like, they sell wall stuff?"

Nope. It's a huge playground.

If you haven't live in a rural town before, you won't realize how bored life could be. I still recall during my college days dating means visiting supermarket together.

Bloatware Marketing 101

Let's say company X invented a new format for video called FOO and ask you to download a FOO player from them to play these videos. When you download FOO player, you have to download BAR player, which has nothing to do with video but it sells other stuff for company X.

By this time you'll probably cry foul and start condemning M$.

Although it sounds like typical "evil" M$ tactics, it actually comes from the "angel" company: Apple.

This is what I found when I helped my dad to view QuickTime movies taken by his digital camera: if you download the free QuickTime player from Apple, it comes with iTunes as well. Both pieces of software are known to hog system resources on Windows. I certainly don't want any unnecessary software on my dad's computer. So, we have to go with something like QuickTime Alternative or VLC Media player from VideoLAN

What surprise me the most is not Apple's tactic but the few number of critics that condemn this. If this is from M$, you'll probably have heard of it a million times.

All these led me to thinking: the power of a cult is really scary. Although it has very few members, the members are exceptionally loyal and defend real hard for their faith. The masses cannot drown out their voice.

So, if your company doesn't have a cult, you won't get away with bloatware.

Side Note: I am also shopping for solution to protect/clean marking from keyboards on the screen of my iBook. I do not know of any manufacturer other than Apple that makes notebook that have keyboard marks on the screen yet I've never seen this criticized in reviews of Apple's notebooks. Talk about unfairness!

The bottom line is: when you're the darling of the media, you get a lot of breaks.

Why U2 sucks?

Here is why.

The part about those 2 DJs got fired certainly doesn't bode well for me as it showed they are just hypocrites. Not that I like U2 much to begin with. I guess artistic freedom other than theirs is not so important after all.

One port USB hub for $29

Last time I searched PriceGrabber, 4-port USB hubs are sold for $9-$20.

If I sell you a 1-port USB hub for $29, you're gonna scream "Ripoff!!!" right?

Well, I guess iPod Shuffle fans who bought their "dock" from Apple probably would think otherwise.

Side note: This is from a review of iPod Shuffle:
"the real story of the Shuffle is that it is designed to encourage you to approach your music differently than you would with other music players."

Man, is he for real? I think next time he visits a restaurant, they should sell him a piece of white bread for $10, that's designed to encourage him to approach food differently than he would with other restaurants.

Online Music Service (and when to ditch my iPod)

As a music lover and music maker, I constantly look for ways to listen to as much new music as possible (and legally so that the artists get paid!) Satellite radio certainly sounded exciting to me but my initial impression was so-so. While there are lots of free or paid radio available online, this article is about "music on demand," i.e., services that allow me to pick songs to listen to.

The most successful digital music store is, no question, Apple's iTunes Music store, but the fact that it restricts the purchased music only playable on iTunes and iPod does not bode well with me, not to mention $0.99 a song seems too expensive to me (see the side note at the end of this article) Even though I own an iPod, I don't want my purchased music to be tied to it.

Although its nature is very different to iTunes Music store, Real's Rhapsody is an indirect competitor IMO. All-you-can-listen-online costs $10 a month. Ideal for people glued to a PC 75% of the time when they are awake, like myself. Although "downloading" the songs (burn to CD then re-rip) is troublesome and costs you extra, technically speaking, you could digitally "record" the stream and thus get the songs free. That's a lot of work to "build a library" though. Their audio quality are praised over others like Napster and of course, XM satellite radio.

The new Napster-to-Go has make a splash in tech news because of its unique "renting music monthly" model. For $15 a month you could download as much as you want and listen to them as long as you continue paying the monthly fee. At a first glance it sounds totally counterintuitive to normal spending habit on music, i.e., paying a couple dozen $ to buy a few CDs per month and you own them for life and pay no more. However, if you think of it as a radio-like service (think Rhapsody), $15/month for unlimited rotations in your playlist chosen by yourself that you could bring with you anywhere you go is actually a pretty decent deal, especially for music addict like me. Their ad is kinda exaggerated but they do have a point. The downsides are: 1) Napster's selection is not that great compared to others according to some 2) their software works with Win XP only so my Win2K and Mac OS X machines are out of luck. 3) if you are taking your portable device out on a trip that lasted more than a month without sync-ing to your PC, your playlist is nothing more than a lengthy dead silence. Nevertheless, this model is in the right direction for digital music IMO. I'll check it out once I ditched my iPod.

On a side note: I found it interesting that Apple removed the claim that iTunes is "fair to the artists" from their website after people like those from Downhill Battle has pointed out artists were treated just as unfairly as CD sales "despite huge new efficiencies created by internet distribution --no CDs to make, no distributors to store and ship them, no CD stores to build and run"