Daily Archives: January 21, 2009

Jan 21 2009

Obama Looking At Open Source?

From Slashdot:

Obama Looking At Open Source?: An anonymous reader writes “‘The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.’ The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.”

This could be huge. I hope it’s true. If so, it could signal the end of the de facto Microsoft monopoly on office software, which can only be a good thing.

Jan 21 2009

Pandora is Adding Commercials?

From Slashdot:

Pandora Trying Out Invasive Commercial Breaks: Nathan Halverson writes “The popular online radio service Pandora.com has added brief commercial interruptions to its service. Pandora says this is a trial and is targeted to a subset of listeners at this point. In one case, a brief ad for the Fox TV show ‘Lie To Me’ interrupted the music stream for about 15 seconds after ten songs had initially played, and the same commercial interrupted 22 songs later. ‘But [Pandora’s] founder promised the site will never carry as many audio ads as broadcast radio, despite the fact it pays substantially higher royalty fees to the recording industry.'”

Please, God, **NO**.

I have no problem with the adverts that show up on the web pages or on my iPhone, but please do not interrupt my music. Pandora is **PERFECT*’ as it is. In understand the desire to increase revenue… but not at the expense of customer satisfaction. Please, ‘*DO NOT DO THIS**.