Apple responds to NBC, won’t offer upcoming fall season shows

Sic ‘em, Apple…..greedy frakkin studio….

iLounge: “Apple has announced that they will not be offering NBC television shows
for the upcoming season on iTunes. In the announcement, Apple revealed
that NBC wanted it to pay more than double the wholesale price for each
episode, a move that would have resulted in the retail price of each
episode increasing from $1.99 per episode to an eye-popping $4.99 per
episode. Apple also noted that ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with
more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their
upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode.

“We are disappointed to see NBC leave iTunes because we would not
agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice
president of iTunes. “We hope they will change their minds and offer
their TV shows to the tens of millions of iTunes customers.”

Because the agreement between Apple and NBC runs out in December,
should Apple have begun sales of fall series, NBC could have pulled the
content from the store mid-season. To avoid this potential problem,
Apple decided not to carry the shows at all. According to the
announcement, NBC provided iTunes with three of its ten top-selling
shows last season, accounting for 30 percent of iTunes TV show sales.”

Cameraphone: Turn Your Digital Camera into a Scanner with Qipit

Lifehacker:

“Webapp Qipit turns a digital photo of a whiteboard, handwritten notes
or a typed document into a PDF. Much like previously mentioned Scanr,
you can email cameraphone snaps to Qipit, or upload images via email or
the web site. Qipit stores up to 100 scanned documents in your account
for free, where you can make them public and tag them, too. When you
sign up for Qipit, optionally register your cameraphone’s make and
model, and the app will tell you what it can do with images from it
(whiteboards, hand-written notes and/or printed documents.) My 1.3MP
Nokia can do everything but finely-printed documents, as shown…”

FULL ARTICLE

NBC to End iTunes Sales of Its Shows

Idiots…yes, remove them from iTunes so more people will just download them via Bittorrent…

Digg: “”NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing,
has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of
television shows on iTunes.”Media giants have new brilliant plan for
making more money from their content: by pulling them off the most
popular online music + video store.”

THE MIST trailer is a tease that you’ll want more and more and more from!

AICN: “Hey folks Harry here - this is the number 1 - I need to see it as soon as humanly possible movie out there. The trailer looks great - only thing I’m not real big on is the logo at the end… but who the f*ck cares about a damn logo. This is Frank Darabont directing Stephen King… ALWAYS F*CKING AWESOME… but this isn’t subtle Stephen King… this is RIGHT SMACK UP THE SIDE OF YOUR FACE Stephen King and I can’t wait to see that FRANK DARABONT!!!

See THE MIST in Glorious Quicktime!!!

Japan: “butt biting bug” video is huge

Seriously, you have to read the subtitles…bizarro…

Boing Boing: “I am told that this video is a recent and wildly popular thing in Japan. Here’s an English subtitled YouTube of “the butt biting bug song,” Oshiri kajiri mushi. It gives me acid flashbacks. “Tight asses and hard asses and beaten asses and shriveled asses.” In what universe do these constitute appropriate lyrics for children’s music?”

Miss South Carolina - Jimmy Kimmel Explains What She Said

He he…seeing it written out makes it even worse…

Neatorama: “If you know the background, jump to 01:45 for Jimmy Kimmel’s explanation:”

Tweak Vista and XP with Xdn Tweaker

Lifehacker:

“Windows only: Tweak system settings in both Windows XP and Vista with
lightweight freeware application Xdn Tweaker. We’ve looked at several Windows tweakers lately, especially following the release of Vista,
but Xdn Tweaker offers a nice change of pace, offering a strong set of
simple yet useful tweaks that you don’t see in a lot of similar
applications (like removing Windows Media integration with the
right-click menu or the always-annoying “Shortcut to” text before all
new shortcuts). Xdn Tweaker is freeware, Windows only.”

Xdn Tweaker [via FreewareGenius]

EFF report on four years of RIAA vs P2P

Boing Boing: “EFF has published the latest installment in its annual RIAA v. The
People, “Four Years Later,” which is a comprehensive, exhaustively
researched and cited white-paper on the RIAA’s campaign against music
downloaders. The paper starts with the earliest days, when the record
companies went after companies manufacturing portable music players,
and continues up to the present day, with these companies suing tens of
thousands of individual music fans (including people who don’t own
computers, small children, military servicepeople, dead people, etc),
often for sums that end up bankrupting them. EFF describes other RIAA
initiatives, such as a deceptive “amnesty” campaign, advising a MIT
student to drop out of school in order to pay her fines, and using
universities and Congress to try to shake down students for thousands
of dollars.”

CONTINUE READING

Featured Firefox Extension: Chat in the Sidebar with gTalk Sidebar

Lifehacker:

“All platforms with Firefox: The gTalk Sidebar extension puts Google
Talk into the Firefox sidebar for easy chatting no matter what page
you’re on. Once the extension’s installed, add its icon to your Firefox
toolbar, and pop it open to see your Talk contacts and chat in the
sidebar whether or not you’ve got Gmail open in a tab. The How-to Geek
points out that it’s an easy way to send off a quick email as well;
just click on a contact, then the email button to compose a new
message. The gTalk Sidebar extension is a free download that works with
and wherever Firefox does.

gTalk Sidebar [Mozilla Add-ons via the How-To Geek]“

Open DNS…replace your ISP’s DNS servers

Discovered this awesome service via a tech podcast…

opendns.com: “OpenDNS is a safer, faster, smarter and more reliable way to
navigate the Internet. Our service is free and requires nothing to download.

OpenDNS is safer

OpenDNS protects you from phishing — bad websites trying to steal your personal information. When you try to go to a phishing site, we let you know. We also let you optionally block adult sites as a category, or individual websites of any type. These services help you better protect those on your network from websites they shouldn’t be visiting.

OpenDNS is faster

You use DNS every time you use the Internet. The speed of your DNS service determines how quickly websites load for you. That’s why you want your DNS service to be blazing. OpenDNS is so fast because we run some of the largest DNS caches around and do it on our own high-performance network.

OpenDNS is smarter

The address bar is how you navigate the Internet. We make your address bar more intelligent. With OpenDNS, you can create shortcuts
that let you type something easy-to-remember into your address bar and leap straight where you want to go. And we’ll correct your common spelling mistakes, on the fly. That means when you are typing fast and type yahoo.cmo instead of yahoo.com, you still get there.

OpenDNS is more reliable

Little is more frustrating than intermittent Internet outages.
When your DNS service isn’t working, you can’t access the Internet. When you start using OpenDNS, your days of dealing with DNS-related downtime will be over. We know reliability is important, and we stand behind ours.”

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS FOR EVERY OS