News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Satellite radio giants XM and Sirius have decided to merge. They still face regulatory approval, however, before the merger can go forward. Even though it smacks of a monopoly, I believe this will be a good thing for the listeners.
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Link #2: http://investor.sirius.com/…
Kodak, still reeling from the collapse of the film industry, is entering the inkjet printer market with a novel scheme: cheaper ink. The prices, $9.99 for black and $14.99 for color, are about half of what I used to pay for my Epson cartridges. The printers themselves are a bit more expensive—probably because they’re not selling them at a loss to gain ink customers—but the extra cost will be recouped over the long term.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Link #2: http://www.kodak.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
This week’s big news is North Korea setting off a nuke Google’s decision to purchase YouTube, a highly popular video site. Internet analysts, as well as anyone with an iota of common sense, have been predicting the implosion of YouTube. A vast majority of the content uploaded to YouTube is copyrighted, and the internet community has been holding its breath, waiting to see who would file the first lawsuit of the many that are expected. But we may all be disappointed. YouTube announced a deal with multiple music labels to provide music videos and other content free of charge—so it will no longer be necessary to upload pirated copies. In addition, Google must have some plan to avoid the lawsuits. Why else would they pay $1.65 billion just to take on a huge liability?
In an update to an earlier post on fires caused by defective laptop batteries, Sony has finally decided to do a recall. This makes sense, as Sony is the battery supplier for the laptop manufactuers that are experiencing problems—it’s really been Sony’s fault from the beginning.
The CPU maker AMD will be purchasing the graphics card/chip maker ATI, pending ATI shareholder approval. This acquisition has led to all kinds of speculation, including combining a CPU and GPU on the same chip. In addition, there are questions about how this will affect AMD’s relationship with other graphics companies (e.g., Nvidia), as well as ATI’s relationship with Intel. More details are available in the official press release (65KB PDF).
