Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

HBO to the Internet

Friday, January 25th, 2008

HBO will soon make many of their shows and movies available on the Internet[reuters.com] for no additional charge, similar to what many other channel are already doing. In related moves, Wal-Mart recently suspended Internet movie rentals and Apple added movie rentals to its iTunes store.

While people are undoubtedly interested in accessing this type of content on-demand over the Internet, I wonder whether Wal-Mart’s move indicates an unwillingness in consumers to pay for such services. It will be interesting to see whether Apple has better success with their movie rentals.

Unintended Denial-of-Service

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

For those who do not follow Apple news, today was the annual Apple keynote by Steve Jobs. These keynotes are highly anticipated as Jobs usually surprise announces the new Apple products: iPod, iPhone, MacBooks, etc. Since most people cannot go to the keynote, websites like Engadget[engadget.com] provide a live running blog of the event. Even knowing that they would have a abnormally large number of visitors to their site, Engadget was still taken down[engadget.com]. The massive amount of people visting their site caused a denial of service at 2 AOL data centers (AOL hosts Engadget). This goes to show that even with advanced planning, unintended or non-malicious denial of service is still a threat.