Engadget has a story about the record labels wanting more money for songs when sold through the iTunes Music Store. One of the reasons they state is because less people are buying the full CDs and just buying the songs they want, so they are making less money. I wonder though, if Jobs refuses to increase the price on songs, will the big record labels stop producing full "albums"? There always seems to be a few songs on a CD that are destined to become singles and then there are other songs that maybe don't fit the "format" for a hit single. Will the record labels force artists to only churn out "hits"? I hope not. Whenever I have bought a CD in the past for a couple of songs that I had heard on the radio, I almost always found other songs on it that I never would have heard on the radio, but I liked a lot.

Engadget has a story about the record labels wanting more money for songs when sold through the iTunes Music Store. One of the reasons they state is because less people are buying the full CDs and just buying the songs they want, so they are making less money. I wonder though, if Jobs refuses to increase the price on songs, will the big record labels stop producing full "albums"? There always seems to be a few songs on a CD that are destined to become singles and then there are other songs that maybe don't fit the "format" for a hit single. Will the record labels force artists to only churn out "hits"? I hope not. Whenever I have bought a CD in the past for a couple of songs that I had heard on the radio, I almost always found other songs on it that I never would have heard on the radio, but I liked a lot.

I figured out my problem with iTunes syncing my iPod contacts with Outlook. The 5.0.1 update of iTunes now pops up a message telling me why it can't sync my contacts. Turns out I didn't have Outlook set as my default email and contact manager. Once I did that, It started syncing just fine.

So Microsoft has a new technology called SideShow. It is basically a platform that lets you display data on various devices besides the PC's screen. It looks pretty cool, but who comes up with these names? Did anyone do any research on the meaning behind the word sideshow? Does anyone else think it's funny that "sideshow" is basically a polite term for freakshow?

If you want to remove ads from MSN Messenger, but you don't want to go to the extremes documented here, there is another option.
Open the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad and add the following line:

0.0.0.0        rad.msn.com

The banner ad at the bottom of the main messenger window will stop cycling and will just display the MSN Messenger logo. The text ads in the IM windows will be gone too.
This information is for educational purposes only :)

iTunes 5.0 has been released. I like the changes so far and was excited to see that it can now sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts to your iPod. I have the Calender sync working, but I cannot get it to sync my Contacts. I keep checking my iPod after a sync and the Contacts menu has nothing in it. Is anyone else having this problem?