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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Jack Dorsey’s criticism of Twittter’s board, solar panels generating electricity at night, a 108 megapixel camera, Tesla restarting production in China, an electric Mercedes Benz with a 600+ mile range, lasers and pilots, Facebook ditching podcasts, Elon the homeless, the electric F150, NASA looking to explore Uranus, and more.
Chris in Millsboro, Delaware listens on 105.9 WXDE and asked: “Question on the new iPad Air… It seems that when you try to run Microsoft programs, the programs run slower than other programs. Is there something I can do to speed that up, or is that just the way it is on the new iPad Air?”
Chris, the current iPad Air is a powerful tablet and its not itself slugging, however software can be optimized for different architectures and it is possible that Microsoft hasnt gone out of its way to optimize their offerings to run better on a new Apple product.
Long term that would probably be shortsighted of them, the truth is that switching from Office to Googles Workspace takes minutes, costs the same, and once someone switches to a product that works normally theyre unlikely to start up another paid subscription just to see if the old product got any better. The same goes for Outlook, or any cloud storage, for example.
Having said that, they may see it differently and they may have a vested interest in making tablets seem inadequate for work so that more people settle for laptops running their operating system when they would otherwise not need them.
In any case, Microsofts software will need to be updated to take advantage of the new hardware and squeeze the most it can out of it, but the new iPads are more than capable of running Microsofts programs.
Jerry in Mineola, Texas listens on KTBB and asked: “I was born in 1942. I never learned to use the Internet or learned much about it. I composed the words and music to a number of songs. My question is… Are there any ways on the Internet, to market them without CDs? And if I were to market a CD on the Internet, what would be the best way to do that?”
Jerry, you can self-publish to the main media platforms like Apple Music and Spotify by way of a distributor.
There are plenty of those like Believe Digital, CD Baby, FUGA, IDOL, Ingrooves, and countless others.
Once you submit to the distributor you will be able to have them push it to different platforms.
You are likely going to make next to no money. Even bigger names in music make next to no money from music sales and streams these days and largely survive off of touring.
A while back musician David Crosby shared that Apple Music was paying a little over seven tenths of a cent per stream, which is far better than Spotifys four tenths.
Nils Lofgren, guitarist for Bruce Springsteens E Street Band, published a 2019 royalty check for the amount of $7.01. He wouldve been able to use it to buy a Big Mac burger (not the full value meal) in most US states, but not in Massachusetts.
Spotify is still planning to lower royalty payments over time.
Unless you expect to get millions of plays, publishing your music is likely not worth the effort, you might as well give it away and skip the leech of a middleman.
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