linkman

AppleInsider said:

While much of the engine's popularity stems from being a default, alternatives like Microsoft's Bing -- used in Siri searches -- have been criticized for sub-par results.

Agreed. Google's search beats the pants off of the competition for most searches. Most of the time that I have to resort to Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo I cringe. Bing's image search is fairly decent however.

Koliadascope said:

Rayz2016 said:

 But given the choice, won’t everybody just skip the ads? I might be missing something here. 

I'm guessing the thought might be if you're listening to music in the background while you're doing something else, you might not jump to skip every time a commercial comes on... maybe just the really obnoxious ones. The goal is to tune your ad preference like it does the music. It would be funny if the Skip did a skip to the next ad!

After reading the 9 to 5 Mac article on this subject it indeed appears that the listener skips to another ad; keep skipping until you get to one you like or are tired of skipping. The thought is that Spotify can charge more for better targeted ads and won't have to present as many ads (yeah, right), thus leading to better consumer satisfaction. I think if Spotify gets better ad revenue they'll keep just as many running and maybe not be as much in the hole in the financial sector.

Intel is running up against the fact that wavelengths of light can get only so short (10 nm is pretty stinking short) and physics is going to win at attempts to get much smaller. A transistor can't get smaller than an atom. Progress on ICs is getting slower and will need some sort of breakthrough (like power reduction, using neural-type processing, memristors, light instead of electricity, etc.) before we can see performance improvement rates that we've experienced over the last 40 years.

Rayz2016 said:

So, a billion streams. 

How much, roughly, would he earn earn from that?

Assuming that the report means one billion songs streamed and not one billion full album streams, then around $5.8 million USD was paid by the streaming services. Since we don't know how many streams per service and we don't know for certain the payouts for each service this is definitely a rough number. A big question mark is how much Drake gets of that because that money gets split further between the record label, publishers, rights holders, songwriters, etc.

My simplified math: Spotify at $0.00380/song, AM at $0.00783/song, and 500M each for just these two services. If a significant number of plays are coming from a stingy payer such as Youtube or Pandora then it'll drag the amount down and conversely go up with bigger payers such as Tidal. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-services-pay-2018/

So Windows 7, which was first released in 2009 and lost mainstream support in 2015, still gets extended support from Microsoft and Apple iTunes. Hmmm...