The ScooterBlog

Here’s the thought of the day, and basically, how YOU can help the Scooter spend his money!

Yahoo! Unlimited is the latest of those “download-as-much-as you-want” rent your music subscripton services. It claims to have one million songs (this is pretty standard now), and maybe most enticing, it has a super low rate: $4.99 per month! This is where the enticement is.

I’ve been disinterested in these services when it was $15 per month, but I would be willing to fork out $60 per year. They have a seven day trial too which I am very tempted to sign up for and give it a go. That’s the advantage for sure.

The disadvantage? I don’t own one of the many devices that can be used to play these outside of just a computer as of yet. and there’s a limited amount of these (which of course, doesn’t include the iPod!). Also, the whole rent-to-own music thing. Songs can still be found through the non-scrupulous methods easily for me, but this would be going more “legal” if you will.

Mark Cuban (you know, that guy who owned broadcast.com and now owns the Mavericks) made a great point about the whole going legal thing … the TRUE cost of going legal now might as well be $5 per month, not the ludacrious $150,000 per song that the RIAA tries to sue for (and by the way, they’ve never gotten this)

So … what do you think?

Actually, probably not, but Monday was a big day for me as an Apple junkie: they are switching over to Intel chips for their next operating system! The good news is two fold:

1) Your Mac did not just die today (and this is good cause my G3 is close enough to obsolete anyways!). New Macs will of course have compiled code for the x86’s, as well as a transcoder for old code that will still be running, kind of like how they did emulation on the old 680×0 processors when they went PowerPC, and also like how a PearPC does it now.

2) Maybe this will open up other doors not even thought about yet. The rumor was that Apple wanted Intel not just cause of chip availability (which was becoming an issue), but for its DRM support which would bode well for, say, an iTunes Movie Store.

This blog post sums it up well … your Apple is gonna change, but it’s not the drastic change people want to make it out to be.