Links for Tuesday February 9th, 2010
Music Sales Slowing at Apple iTunes: A Lesson on Price for E-Book Sellers?: The music labels bitched and moaned about Apple's restrictive fixed pricing (a buck a song). They finally got Apple to relent, so that they can have variable pricing, and what happens? Sales growth slows. Classic. What a bunch of maroons running these companies.
An interview with Kurt Akeley: Long, technical, yet interesting interview with one of the very early people at SGI.
Royalty-free codec still needed despite no-cost h264 license: The chilling effect of unknown patent licensing payments on content providers cannot be understated. If you put a streaming h.264 video on your website for free, but you have ads, do you have to pay? Even if everything is free and has zero ads, but you allow users to upload video that you then enocde into h.264, do you have to pay?
The whole thing is entirely confusing, and a mess. Instead you'll see companies stay out of video, or stick with things like Flash, which are far easier to understand from a licensing perspective. And that's a bad thing, as far as the future of video on the Internet is concerned.
Apple investigating Mac Pro performance and heat issues: Good to hear that Apple is working on this problem, athough more direct communication (and status updates) would certainly be apprecaited.