Alex Reid

Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.

Seagate and Western Digital, the largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the world, both announced that they will reduce warranty coverage on some of their hardware in the new year.

The two companies produce the hard drives in most major computer brands, and both companies recently bought out their competition (Western Digital bought Hitachi, and Seagate bought Samsung’s HDD business) making them the two largest HDD companies in the world.

It is believed the recent monsoon floods in Thailand are reason as the floods have crippled industry component factories. Thailand is the world’s 2nd largest producer of hard disk drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world’s production. The floods have impacted the industry greatly with pundits predicting a shortage and a price hike for hard drives in the coming year.

Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced from five years to one year. Seagate warranties for hybrid drives will be trimmed from five years to three years. Warranties for Seagate’s external drives and enterprise-oriented drives will remain unchanged.

Western Digital warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced from three years from two years.

Overall, the maximum life warranty will be three years.

Seagate’s new warranty policies will become effective on Dec. 31, and Western Digital’s changes will begin Jan. 2, 2012. Hard drives bought before those dates will retain their original warranty policies.

The reason I’m writing this post is because this upset means a lot for the future of data use, as there is a growing demand for disk space – cloud or not – and this lack of supply will drive up the cost of HDDs. It may, hopefully, push other technologies such as flash storage.

Today, after 12 years, the company that sparked a revolution in how we purchase music online, is no longer.

Rhapsody, the largest on-demand music service in the United States, bought its assets, intellectual property and subscribers last month from parent company Best Buy for an undisclosed sum and a minority stake.

The acquisition nearly doubles Rhapsody’s subscriber base. They had 800,000 subscribers in July 2011 and at the time of the purchase, Napster had 700,000 subscribers.

Napster started in 1999 and almost immediately were being sued for distributing music for copyright infringement. It took two years for the service to be shut down by court order, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets to German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. However an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale and forced Napster to liquidate its assets, and it was sold to Roxio who in turn sold it to Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million.

Interestingly, when Napster was shut down, Rhapsody was started and will be celebrating their 10-year anniversary this Saturday (December 3rd). There’s also talk there might be a Napster documentary in play.

I may not agree with everything that anyone says.

I like to keep my politics loose and my morals solid.

However I have a weak spot for Jello Biafra, specifically because his “don’t hate the media, become the media” mantra was the source of many of my successes, so I give him my audience.

If you listen to the end, you’ll find me agreeing with him.

Run policy like politics.