→ Apple's limited auto-renewal subscriptions

Apple's limited auto-renewal subscriptions

Marco Arment:

Ultimately, I had to ship Instapaper 4.0 with non-renewing subscriptions, I was able to delete all of the clunky auto-renewing server code, nobody sees that terrible dialog in my app, and I need to ship an update soon that will annoy my best customers with manual-renewal notifications.

But this is a great example, like Newsstand Kit’s background downloads, of Apple adding a capability to iOS that’s potentially useful to thousands of developers, and then restricting it so that only a handful of players (usually big companies) can actually use it.

Apple certainly doesn't cater to developers first. This is one of those cases where I assume Apple will one day get it right. Easier to gradually allow developers more power than to take it away. Still, it sure does stink until then, doesn't it?

→ Sony Pictures: Digital Movie Prices Are Too High

Sony Pictures: Digital Movie Prices Are Too High

Interview by Mark Hachman at PC World:

John Calkins, executive vice president of global digital and commercial innovation for Sony Pictures, noted that extras work for certain movies. But, he added, studios must bring down the sale price of a movie sold digitally, as well.

At least someone in the industry gets it.

→ Digital music overtakes physical in US

Digital music overtakes physical in US

It's about time.

→ Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed

Windows 8 Storage Spaces detailed

Peter Bright at Ars Technica:

Unlike RAID systems of old, but in common with other modern storage technologies such as Solaris' ZFS and Linux's btrfs, pools can use disks of different interface technologies—USB, SATA, Serial Attached SCSI—and different, mismatched sizes. New disks can be added to a pool at any time. Pools can also include one or more hot spares: drives allocated to a pool but kept in standby until another disk in the pool fails, at which point they spring into life.

Storage in a pool is then distributed among one or more spaces. Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space's data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.

A feature of both server and desktop Windows, this is killer.

If the feature does indeed ship in desktop Windows, it will overnight obsolete a range of SOHO-oriented storage systems; products like Drobo and ReadyNAS will find it hard to survive in a Windows 8 world.

It looks like I'm going to have to build myself a Windows 8 storage server.

→ Wired.com's Report on the State of 3D Technology

Wired.com's Report on the State of 3D Technology

This is the most significant bit to me:

But even handsome 3D specs can’t mitigate the headaches and fatigue suffered by some viewers of 3D content

Avatar in IMAX made me nauseous and dizzy after just a few moments. The Nintendo 3DS is the only 3D display I've been able to use for more than 10 minutes at a time, but even then it tires my eyes out faster than normal displays.