The Pirate Bay will be changing soon... And probably not for the good.

I’m sad to say, that the Pirate Bay will be changing very soon.  And probably not for the good.

The Pirate Bay (TPB), launched on November 21, 2003, and has been the pinnacle website to go to for your needs.  Nearly everything you could ever want has always been available to download.  Music, Porn, TV Shows, Movies, cracked programs, console games, PC/Mac (lol Mac) games.

The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of legal threats, none of which they took seriously.  They’ve received threats from Microsoft, Apple, SEGA, EA, Dreamworks, Warner Bros, the MPAA, and the RIAA.  Their responses to these companies has always been something like this:

Actually, being in different countries (even on different continents) means that we don’t have the same laws here.  You know, in Sweden, it’s still legal to do a lot of things. Elks can have sex with each other without being prosecuted for instance. And people are allowed to copy.  It’s quite natural, both of them, don’t you think?

They announced in late November 2008 that they had reached over 25 million unique peers, and approximately 3.6 million registered users.

On April 17, 2009, the founders were sued by the MPAA and IFPI in the Swedish courts, and were forced to pay 3.6 million in damages.  They tried to appeal the case mainly due to the fact that the judge hearing the case, Tomas Norström had connections to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups but the courts deemed him unbiased and therefore there would be no retrial.

On June 30, 2009, they announced on their blog that there is a good chance they will be bought out for 7.8 million dollars by a Swedish advertising company called the “Global Gaming Factory X AB.”  They also said:

If the new owners  screw around with the site, nobody will use it.  That’s the biggest insurance one can have the site will be run in the way we all want to.

That comment doesn’t bode well for their future.  I have seen this type of situation before, and frankly these buyouts never end up for the good of the users.  A company putting up that kind of cash will definitely be driven by pure profit, and will most definitely change the idea & concept of the Pirate Bay into something different then what it is now.  Remember Napster?  …Yeeeaah.

Farewell The Pirate Bay, it was fun being on-board while the waters were calm, but it looks like I’ll be jumping ship elsewhere.

Sources:

• TorrentFreak.com – Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Discusses the Site’s future
• The Pirate Bay Blog (while the site structure remains intact)
• Wikipedia – The Pirate Bay

All I can say is It's about time!

All I have to say about this is: “ABOUT FUCKING TIME!”

Palm & Sprint both released their own Press Releases announcing the pricing of the phone as well as the release date which is expected to be available June 6th.

New customers (those that are not with Sprint) will be able to obtain the phone for $199 with a 2 year contract.  Suggested retail price of the phone will be $549.99.

For those who are curious as to how the breakdown works see below:

• You got $150 taken off that price with a 2 year contract
• An instant rebate of $100
• A mail-in rebate of $100

Making the price of the phone $199 when all is said and done.

Those with Sprint already (like myself) will have to wait at least 1 year through their contract before they can see any rebates or discounts.  In my case, I’d have to wait until August 1st 2009 if I were to get the Pre ad a discounted price.  This of course would also mean that I would have to extend my contract for another 2 years.

I’m kinda torn here.  Right now I’m currently paying roughly $80/month for my current plan, which is the lowest plan you can get with the Palm Pre.

My plan consists of the following:

• 450 Anytime Minutes
• Unlimited data including text, pics, etc..
• Free nights/weekends
• Other common included features, (voicemail, caller ID, etc)

That is $69.99 for the plan alone.  I also have phone insurance which adds an additional $7/month seeing as smartphones (like the one I have now) are pretty expensive.  You throw in federal & state taxes on top of that and the total comes out to about $80/month.

I didn’t realize how much money I’m spending for my phone. I ran the numbers $80/month x 24 (months) which gave me 1,920.  This shocked me as I thought that the total number was going to be lower so I ran the numbers again to double check and apparently that’s what I’m paying for 2 years of phone service.  That’s alot of money.

The thing that kinda tears me is I really don’t want to extend my contract a second time as I just renewed it again last August when I got my Blackberry.  As much as I like my Blackberry, there’s a few things about it that prevent me from using the phone as much as I would like to use it (namely the shitty browser), which is why I want to get the Pre ASAP.

I think in the long run it’d be cheaper to just pay full price for the Palm Pre and let my contract run its course.  The way I see it, it’s $80/month x 12 which comes out to $960 + $549 (for the Palm Pre) = $1509.  That why Sprint won’t have me by the balls for another 2 years.

Initially I had contemplated just paying the ETF (Early Termination Fee) and just signing up as a new customer, but that would put my existing phone number into a 6 month hold where it couldn’t be migrated or used (even by me on a new account) and I really don’t want to deal with that mess.

A visit to Disneyland – April 18th, 2009. Went with friends: Pio, John, Jobe, Kristin & Miranda.  Pio’s company rented out a bunch of rooms at the Disney Grand Hotel, so we took advantage of that and spent our Saturday at Disneyland and California Disney.

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The iPhone and iPod Touch are due to get the new 3.0 firmware sometime in Summer 2009.

Apple announced last weekend that they were getting close to releasing their new firmware 3.0 for the iPhone.  This new 3.0 firmware is due to come out this summer.  For 3G (2nd gen iPhone users), this firmware update will be free, for iPod Touch users, firmware 3.0 will be $9.95.

Today (March 17th, 2009) Apple had shared with everybody what the 3.0 firmware will include; so far what has been announced:

• 3rd party push notification system
• New API for streaming audio and video
• New API for allowing in-game voice chat
• New API to allow developers to slipstream in new content to their software
  • For example: you buy a game, it comes with 10 levels, the developer can down the line add a few new levels to the game, you now could have the option of purchasing those additional levels for a minor cost, have them added to the application.
  • This can also be done within the application itself.  For example, you’re playing a game (like the Sims) on your phone, within the game itself, you can actually purchase additional content from within the game.  (like how this works in Second Life)
• Improved Media Player that automatically adjusts the bitrate of the audio/video you’re streaming depending on the signal strength of the network
• Ability to transfer signals (via Bluetooth) from a device to the iPhone.  They showed off a glucose testing (finger pricking) meter that sent the information directly to the iPhone
• Copy & Paste… (jesus christ about fucking time)
  • Double tap on the text, and the phone will select it, then grab the end-to-end points, and a bubble will come up with a cut/copy/paste option.  (supposedly will work across any application, so you can copy a URL from your email and paste it into your “To do list” or whatever application.)
  • If you want to clear the clipboard of whatever it was you cut/copied, just shake the phone and it’ll undo it
  • This will also allow you to copy paste photos, so you can essentially copy multiple photos and paste them into an email (compared to having to select one photo at a time)
• Landcape keyboard capability on all applications
• Apple’s Text Message application now supports MMS (a feature that every other phone has supported for years)
• Support for Subscriptions (the .ics format)
• New Voice Memos application
• Improved the stocks application: now shows news stories at the bottom, also supported the application to readjust if you hold your phone sideways
• Changed the search so that it works with all their key applications, like Mail, Calendar (essentially this like the Universal Search feature that the Palm Pre is going to have)

After the announcements on the new 3.0 features, Apple had a Q&A panel

Q: Why did copy/paste take so long?
A: It’s not that easy, they were “security” issues.

Q: Flash, what is going to be done about this?
A: No announcements on this topic today.  But there are alot of video streams that we can handle.  H.264 works great.  We’re adding HTDV streaming for audio & video.  We think there’s a lot of great video solutions for a single chip.

Q: Will peer to peer work with other devices?
A: It’s limited to Bonjour peer to peer devices

Q: Where do you stand on tethering?
A: We’re supporting tethering on the client side. We’re working with our carriers around the world to include it

Q: Push notification, will you make uptime promises?
A: No

Q: Are you addressing any of the lagginess with the new O/S?  We saw some of that when you loaded SMS up.
A: We’re definitely addressing those issues.  The units you saw today are demo units

Q: (Asking about the approval process for submitted applications)
A: 96% are approved, but there are things we have to watch out for.  There have been issues, issues about content that’s available to children for instance.  But at the end of the day, we have a great solution that’s working, and we’re constantly making it better.  We’re tracking these numbers, and speaking to developers, and we’re constantly doing that.

That’s pretty much it.

Palm Pre

CES happened happened not too long ago and one particular product certainly had its time in the spotlight.

Palm announced their new product which they showed off at CES, a smartphone they call the Palm Pre.  This was Palm’s last ditch attempt to regain their ground since PDA’s are being replaced with smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, HTC Mogul, etc..).

The Palm Pre is scheduled to be released the late second quarter of this year.  Sprint will be the exclusive carrier for this phone upon launch.

Here are the announced specifications for this phone:

• Operating System: Palm webOS
• Network: 3G EVDO Rev A (GSM Network will also be included in a separate model to be released sometime afterward)
  
• CPU: Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 Processor (almost comparable to the Intel Atom CPU  you’d find in todays Netbooks)
• Display: 3.1 inch touch screen with a vibrant 24-bit color 320×240 resolution HVGA
• Physical QWERTY keyboard
• Email Capability: Microsoft Outlook w/ Microsoft Direct Push technology, POP3/IMAP, Yahoo! Gmail, AOL, etc…
• Messaging: Integrated Instant Messaging, including, AOL/ICQ, Yahoo, Live, GTalk, SMS and MMS protocol
• Built in GPS (GPS software will be reliant upon 3rd party software like Telenav or Google Maps)
• 3 megapixel camera with LED flash and extended depth of field
• Sensors: Ambient Light, accelemoter, and proximity
• 3.5mm headphone stereo jack
• Supported audio formats: MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV
• Supported video formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264
• Supported image formats: animated GIFs, JPEG, PNG, BMP
• Wireless Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11b/g with WPA, WPA2, 802.11X authentication Bluetooth 2/1-EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support
• Memory: 8GB storage (approx 7.4GB available) USB Mass Storage support
• Phone as Modem (tethering)
• Charging Dock
• Dimensions:
  • Width: 59.5 mm (2.34 inches)
  • Height: 100.5 mm (3.95 inches)
  • Thickness: 16.95 mm (0.66 inches)
  • Weight: 135 grams (4.76 ounces)

I would also like to note that this phone WILL support Adobe FLASH according to the Business Wire PR.  This feature alone is a huge selling point for me as alot of content that I frequently access uses Flash.  The negative is support for Flash won’t be available upon release until the end of this year (or so what PreCentral.net says).

While my Blackberry is a great messaging tool, (despite the fact that Sprint has still borked the MMS capabilities) I would like the ability to do more with my phone if I can have that option.  You might say go with the iPhone, but I refuse because for starters, I hate AT&T with a passion, and second because the iPhone lacks a true QWERTY keyboard.  No mobile/smartphone in the U.S. currently has support for Flash, although this is also due to the limitation of hardware that most smartphones use.  The Palm Pre CPU (made by Texas Instruments) is supposedly capable of being able to handle 720p HD video, if that’s the case then it shouldn’t have any trouble processing/rendering Flash.

I like my Blackberry for the most part, however I’m a bit put off when  90% of the features my phone has can’t be utilized due to the incompetence of RIM whenever they have server issues.  Last Friday was a perfect example.  I needed to go pick up a friend of mine, and I was relying on my phone to provide me directions to get to her place, at that exact moment, my phone lost data coverage and I was unable to pull up the location as to where she was.  I was really depending on my phone at that time, but was unable to do so, further complicating what should have been a simple task.

The details as to how the Palm Pre will be storing/recieving information through this “synergy” method that Palm keeps talking about still hasn’t been announced.  After watching the CES preview of the Palm Pre, something tells me it’s going to work the same way where all the data information runs through a centralized server, and streams whatever data you request to the phone.  If that’s the case, I can only hope that their server infrastructure is better setup then RIM’s.