The Cloud Eclipse Of MySpace I remember a time, not three years ago, when a band was measured and judged primarily by the number of views and – more importantly – plays that they had managed to amass on MySpace. This was after the time, of course, when bands were measured solely on the merits of their musical ability, but that’s neither here nor there. Way back in 2009, if a band had 1 million plays on MySpace, you could bet that that band would soon be scooped up by an indie label trying to find the industry’s next social-media-driven
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Put A Clamp on Cloud Music? Village Voice Insists Yes Music writers have rung in the New Year with cloud complaints. A recent edition of New York City’s “Village Voice,” America’s largest weekly newspaper, finds head music columnist Maura Johnston picking away at premium music-listening services for the dearth in their artistic content. Her article, “New Year, New Rules,” advises readers on several cogent ways to improve their appreciation of fine music in 2012. Among her recommendations is to refrain from the cloud as a source of comprehensive music listening. Johnston specifically maligns Spotify, one of the most popular streaming
Cloud Computing 101 For Music Lovers In the music world, clear skies and clouds go hand in hand. And we don’t mean meteorologically. The boom of cloud computing continues to redefine the ways in which we experience our favorite tunes. The music industry, for example, is no longer packaging songs and albums as products that you purchase. Instead, your tracks are converted into services that you pay to access, very frequently via streaming servers. We understand cloud computing’s rep as confusing. To help you grasp a real world application of this software redefinition, we wanted to present three practical examples
Rdio killed the iTunes star You may have heard of Apple’s iCloud, the Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music Beta, remote music storage services for smartphones, laptops and desktop computers. Rdio is another such service, lesser known but at least equally connected, and with one major advantage over its competitors. Founded by the creators of Skype and KaZaa, Rdio has recently signed deals with Verizon and Telus to make the cloud service an optional feature for telecom clients. There’s a rumour that Rdio is going to be integrated into Facebook, which would be a bonus for the music-free social network
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Managing the Virtualization Maturity Lifecycle Virtualization demonstrates substantial benefits — in agility, availability and cost reduction — but it is not all clear sailing. Most organizations struggle, sooner or later, with added complexity, staffing requirements, SLA management, departmental politics and more. In fact, most organizations face one (or more) clear ‘tipping points’, where virtualization deployment stalls as they stop to deal with these new challenges. This ‘VM stall’ tends to coincide with different stages in the virtualization maturity lifecycle — such as the transition from tier 2/3 server consolidation to mission-critical tier 1 applications; or from basic provisioning automation to
