Saturday, January 14, 2006

iPod users are not as likely to steal music

According to a study conducted recently, owners of Apple iPods are less likely to steal music than users of other MP3 players. The survey of US and UK music buyers reveals that even though 25 per cent of people admit to downloading music from file-sharing services, only seven per cent of iPod owners do so. I guess we iPod owners are just an honest bunch, eh? This sure would seem to contradict Steve Ballmer's opinion of iPod users, back in 2004 he told reporters in London that "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'". Oh well, I guess you can't be right all of the time, right Steve?

Friday, January 13, 2006

Email spam on the decline - uh yeah... sure it is

Here's another quick post for today - I found a funny opinion article written for The Guardian that seems to think that spam emails are on the decline. Right - SURE they are :) I get quite a bit of spam still, but I'll admit that very little of it ever hits my inbox. The majority of it is filtered out by the spam filters I use - my ISP provided accounts (which are POP accounts) I pull down with Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5, and it has a really great built in junk mail filter. I also have a Google Gmail account, and their spam filtering works really well too. I still get spam - but I can just delete it easily and never really have to look at it much. Which is nice, since I'm not looking to buy any penny stocks, or help out the Nigerian Finance Minister, or increase the size of my member.

Computer problems driving UK citizens to alcohol and smoking to cope with the stress

Howdy all - sorry I haven't posted in so long, but I've been pretty busy recently. Having to come back to work after a vacation sucks, hard. Anyhow, I was reading this article from BBC News about a poll conducted by UK charity Developing Patient Partnerships about what causes stress for them. 30% responded that 'IT Problems' cause them the most stress, and out of the 1000 people polled, 27% of men and 23% of women said they would light up a cigarette in such situations. And more than a third of men and a quarter of women have a drink to cope with stress. So it looks like computer woes are leading people in the UK to ruin - I know that my problems make me wish I could have a few drinks every now and then!