Apple's Music iCloud Is Nice, Not Revolutionary

After months of anticipation about Apple iCloud, Steve Jobs finally unveiled the service to developers (and viewers of  unofficial live streams ) at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, with one major new feature for music fans: the ability to store up to 20,000 songs on Apple’s cloud and download them to any authorized device (iOS, Mac or PC) for $25 per year.

But wait — Music Beta by Google offers to store and stream the identical number of songs, for free. ( Amazon Cloud Drive , on the other hand, offers 5GB for free, or about 5,000 songs for $20 per year.) How can Apple justify charging $25 for something similar to what Google offers for free?

First, $25 isn’t much to pay, considering that it means you can download nice, clean, 256 Kbps AAC versions of even your dodgy bit-torrent-downloaded MP3s from iCloud to any iDevice or iTunes-running computer for a year. In addition to the $100 million advance that Apple reportedly paid the labels to offer this service, this $25 fee is essentially a way to pay for all the free music you’ve been stealing or grabbing for free from MP3 blogs, your friend’s computer, or wherever.

Second, the fact that Google offers neither a dominant music playing mobile app, nor software like iTunes, nor a music store — and the fact that so many people already use Apple’s products for all three — means that Apple’s version of the cloud will require much less adjustment from music fans than Google’s. In many cases, they can go on using the same things they have been for music, but now, with this attractive cloud feature.

to up to ten authorized machines (iOS devices and Macs and PCs running iTunes), as well as the ability to sync iTunes to iDevices using a Wi-Fi connection rather than a USB cable — both long overdue features and hardly worth all of this hullabaloo. Jobs then revealed his trademark “one more thing” — this ability to store up to 20,000 songs in iCloud — validating Apple’s offering for serious music fans, but only to an extent.

Apple’s music locker is a nice feature for those who like Apple’s hardware and software, but it’s not the cloud endgame: a Rhapsody- or Spotify-type music subscription service on steroids, which some thought Apple would launch. As such, it encourages the same old behaviors — downloading songs one-by-one from music stores or P2P networks instead of subscribing to the entire world of music.

Slime City Massacre 2011 DVDRip Xvid – P2P

In the wake of a “dirty bomb” attack, a New York City neighborhood known as “Slime City” has been evacuated, except for the homeless (“displaced refugees”). Four squatters searching for food in the ruins of the Zachary Devon Soup Kitchen (Jennifer Bihl, Kealan Patrick Burke, Debbie Rochon, Lee Perkins) discover a supply of Zachary Devon’s Home Brewed Elixir and Himalayan Yogurt. When they drink the elixir and eat the yogurt, they are transformed into hideous slime creatures driven to murder – an intermediate step as they are possessed by the spirits of Zachary Devon (Robert Sabin) and the members of his Coven of Flesh, who committed suicide years earlier. When a greedy developer (Roy Frumkes) sets his sites on Slime City, he hires a team of mercenaries (Nelron Hubbard, Tommy Sweeney, T.J. Merrick, Eric Mache, and Nicholas John Morgan Anderson) to wipe out the homeless population.

Forensics in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia, Second International Conference, E-Forensics 2009, Adelaide, Australia, January 19-21, 2009, Revised Selected Papers

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