I just got this email from  Tim Westergren the founder of pandora 3:32 PM MST

What is Pandora ?

Pandora is an automated Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar.

Heres the E-mail.

Hi, it’s Tim - I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack. I’m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining. First, I want to let you know that we’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful. While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might. We hate the idea of capping anyone’s usage, so we’ve been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We’ve come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you: Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn’t a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You’ll be able to keep listening as much as you’d like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable – the same price as a single song download. Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one. If neither of these options works for you, I hope you’ll keep listening to the free version – 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you’re really careful about hitting pause when you’re not listening. We’ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and we’ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours you’ve already used each month. We’ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the “per song per listener” royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can’t ignore…but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come. Please don’t hesitate to email me back with your thoughts. Sincerely,

Tim
Founder

Whether for the limited-time savings or an eager need to ditch Vista, preordering of Windows 7 has been immensely popular at certain online retailers. Amazon.com in particular has handled quite a number of orders placed for the operating system, with the majority of people buying the $49 upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium. As it stands, the package is ranked as number one at the retailer’s electronics products section, beating all other software and electronic gadgets on the site.

Microsoft’s pre-retail success with Windows 7 is not exclusive to the US either, with several reports around the web suggesting that demand has exceeded the company’s expected supply in Japan. As far as ad campaigns go, Microsoft hasn’t played up Windows 7 nearly as much as they did Vista, so why the demand? – Especially after such a short time since Vista’s release. Whatever each individual’s reason for upgrading is, it seems Windows 7 is off to a good start but can it keep it?  That is the question people want find out.

From Friday through July 11, consumers in the U.S. will be able to buy an upgrade copy of Windows 7 Home premium for $49 or Windows 7 Professional for $99. That offer is good for both XP and Windows Vista PCs, regardless of whether someone has been trying out the pre-release version of the operating system. That matches the details in a memo from Best Buy that leaked earlier this month.

When boxed copies of Windows 7 go on sale on October 22, Microsoft plans to charge $119 for Home Premium, $199 for Professional and $219 for Ultimate. The Home Premium upgrade is down $40 from the product’s original price, although the Vista product had already gotten a price cut along the way. The Professional and Ultimate versions are priced similar to where Microsoft was with Vista. The upgrade prices apply to those moving from a previous version of Windows to Windows 7, but only those from Windows Vista will be able to upgrade without doing a clean installation of the product.

The full versions of Windows 7–the editions for those without a copy of Windows–will be priced at $199 for Home Premium, $299 for Professional and $319 for Ultimate. The Ultimate and Professional editions are again on par with their Vista counterparts, while Home Premium is down from the $239 that Microsoft had charged with Vista. Microsoft also plans to offer the operating system in an easier-to-open box.

Of course, even at the preorder price, Microsoft still finds itself undercut by Apple, which has said it will only charge $29 for Leopard users moving to Snow Leopard (those on older versions of the Mac OS will have to buy a full-boxed copy combining Leopard and Snow Leopard).

The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,647¹

For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

The Tweet of the Twitpocalypse occured on 2009-06-12 23:52:04 GMT
the Twitpocalypse is still happening and its current rate is 204 tweets per second
Tweets so far
2147483649

UPDATE

So we got the pics of are “Official” tent on the street of Toronto

to bad the MMVA’s line got trashed and are fans didn’t get any tickets

———————————————————–

By Ryan Johnson editor at large

So its the much music video awards again
but this time its a little different.

How do you mean well we have some well dedicated fan’s in line over night
waiting to buy tickets
best of all they have are official
Mr.Vinux tent that we just happened to let them use
… and to do some advertising

ether way you look at it, its’ a good turn up.
and we wouldn’t want them not to have not shelter
from the scary homeless people and the rain would we?

So if you did happen to see are tent
and came to the site welcome we hope you come back and interact
with us and hope you had fun ether in line or from the comfort of your own home

By Ryan Johnson editor at large

Pack your bags stay a wile because if your on a windows 7 beta right now and want to update its going to take you a long time. In sort Microsoft has remade the installation process of windows 7 and to make sure there they have made it right they are making people go back to vista and then upgrade with the new beta version of windows 7.

Quote from Microsoft

“We know many people (including tens of thousands at Microsoft) are relying on the pre-release builds of Windows 7 for mission critical and daily work, making this step less than convenient,” the company acknowledged in its blog. “We’re working hard to provide the highest quality release we can and so we’d like to make sure for this final phase of testing we’re supporting the most real world scenarios possible, which incremental build to build upgrades are not. At the same time everyone on the beta has been so great we wanted to make sure we at least offered an opportunity to make your own expert and informed choice about how to handle the upgrade.”

Of course if you happen to buy windows 7 when it is officially released you will not have to upgrade to vista then windows 7 this is just for the beta release versions.

By Ryan Johnson editor at large

For the people that are no aware there is a msn virus and its a little harder to get rid of than most viruses in the wild today.

So what dose this virus do we are not sure exactly. I have seen this virus grow from user to user but when it stared I thought it was a glitch.

What it dose is it sends your msn contacts a broken link when you are offline. Then your friends take a look at what they think are pictures from a party and the virus gets downloaded from what looks like a broken page.

So how do you get rid of it. Well as of right now you cant but it doesn’t look like its doing much harm. There is no evidence that I have found of it stealing information from your computer but it very well can be. I am testing this in a virtual machine in the meantime. Some say by using a program called hijack this might stop it but I have not tested it.

Some would say it is meant for the gen Y market as a lot of apple products are

.Is it the price, the fact that almost everyone has one or is it the reliability.

For me its the reliability I have had to many mp3 players and multimedia devise to know that its just reliable

Knowing the youth of to day I think it mostly a trend. If its something that everybody has than everybody is going to want it. The reason I got mine is because someone stole my Cobby mp4 player from work I will end up reviewing this later.

When I whent to the Wal-mart to buy the Itouch I found it to be a very good and reliable little devise so the answer to this is there is no answer. there is a very wide difference between why people want them but as long as they like it I don’t see why its a problem.

Safari 4 vs. Firefox 3 vs. Google Chrome vs. Opera 10, 9.6 vs. Internet Explorer 8, 7

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(still in beta)

Ustream is targeting this service at companies that may want to live stream meetings to employees, as well as to Websites that want to offer their own live-streaming programming and need more than what they can get by simply embedding a Ustream.tv player today.

Watershed is a cloud computing service, with pricing on a pay-as-you-go basis. Pricing starts at $1 per viewer hour for 1,000 viewer hours per month or less and scales down to $0.25 per viewer hour for streams that a reach 50,000 viewer hours per month or more. (A viewer hour is one viewer watching a stream for one hour, or 60 viewers watching for one minute, etc.).

So a live stream watched by only 30 people for a half hour would cost $15, but a stream watched by 30,000 people for a half hour would cost $7,500. I am not sure how much a comparable content delivery network like Akamai would charge, but Ustream CEO John Ham says they are aiming for a comparable price. Watershed’s advantage being that customers only need to pay for what they actually use.

A federal judge last week ruled that Psystar Corp. can continue its countersuit against Apple Inc., giving the Mac clone maker a rare win in its seven-month-old battle with Apple.
TAKE THAT!

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