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HBO hates babies and parents and puppies--beware the DRM boogie monster!

I sat on the phone with Tivo for a combined total of 30 minutes this morning (roughly 22 minutes on various stages of hold) to figure out what happened to my daughter's favorite Goodnight Moon show that we Tivo'd off of HBO.

As it happens, HBO encoded the program with DRM--a dated self-destruct mechanism and when Tivo ran it's nightly update and the clock turned over the program was deleted without any interaction from Tivo.

(Side note: Tivo support is really good and very nice. I can't fault the company or the support team for any … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 703: No doughnuts, no peace

If Flickr's not buying doughnuts for the world, then Tom's not buying. But he's in San Francisco, so he won't have to buy his own doughnut anyway. It's a doughnut paradox. Also, Psystar lays down the smack on Apple's Mac OS X EULA and really, we only care about one thing today: rocket racing. For real. Rockets. Racing. Awesome. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 703

Psystar: Apple's terms violate U.S. monopoly laws http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1685

Elusive 'Twitter ads' spotted in the wild http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9919041-36.html… Read more

Does 'platform as a service' mean developer lock-in?

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded "lock-in."

Tim O'Reilly dissected whether Google's App Engine is a lock-in play on Monday, and RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady hit the issue head-on with his excellent Q&A on what Google App Engine actually is.

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"? … Read more

Amazon's MP3s not affecting iTunes

Amazon.com's MP3 service is growing but not at the expense of Apple's iTunes, according to a report issued Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.

Only about 10 percent of the people who shopped at AmazonMP3 in February were previous Apple shoppers, NPD said.

This is a "healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community," Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD said in a statement.

Apple's iTunes remains the No.1 digital music store. AmazonMP3, which launched in September, slipped … Read more

Google App Engine meets Amazon EC2

What do you get when you cross Amazon's EC2 on-demand cloud computing infrastructure with Google's new App Exchange foundation for Web applications?

It's hard to say what the union could produce besides ugly children. But it's not just a hypothetical hybrid: programmer Chris Anderson has released software called AppDrop that brings App Exchange to EC2. Programmer Andy Baio spotlighted the development Monday on his blog.

OK, now I need to mention the caveat that this isn't really one cloud computing foundation running inside another.

In fact, Anderson just has the single-computer version of Google's … Read more

Amazon adds persistent storage to cloud computing service

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) … Read more

How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine.

Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google's cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google's infrastructure:

What … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 701: Doughnut for your hate

Flickr-haters get free doughnuts. If that's what you get for hating, sign us up! Also, Gartner hates on Windows, and no one gets any doughnuts for that. Europe rejects plans to criminalize file-sharing, offering doughnuts in the form of broad exemptions for fair use, and Network Solutions gets a big, fat doughnut hole for putting ads on your subdomains. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 701

Mike Please keep doing the show.

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9916717-56.html http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1870375122;fp;;fpid;;pf;1 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8428… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 700: Merger-mania!

Yahoo and Microsoft bring Google, AOL, and News Corp. into the ring for a pretty awesome merger-mania that we sincerely hope involves the gratuitous use of Spandex. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday on Pay-per-view! That darned RSA conference continues to scare the sneezes out of us by demonstrating how taking down a national power grid is trivially easy. (Insert nervous giggle here.) We guess it's good to know? Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 667

Yahoo-Microsoft buyout brawl, one-two punch with a swift comeback punch http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9916001-7.html http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9915835-80.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120776803032602423.html… Read more