The Urge To Download

If you've been hearing the buzz on Urge recently, it's not about a deep desire or compulsion - it's about MTV's offering to the world of online music downloads and streaming. Urge is a subscription based music download service in which its patrons can subscribe for a monthly fee of $10 and listen to as many of the 2 million songs in MTV's coffers as they like. If they'd like to download that song, then it costs 99 cents each. But it's not just MTV behind the latest addition to the world of online music. Microsoft and MTV are working together on this one. Bill Gates must have seen the success of similar sites like Napster and Rhapsody and decided to jump on the bandwagon. Urge's challenge will be to convince all those music lovers who prefer to buy songs and download them through sites like the incredibly popular iTunes, owned by Apple computers, that subscribing to a site and being able to listen to whatever songs you like, in whatever order and as often as you like is just as good or better than buying them one by one. It's just one more battle to add to the long running conflict between Microsoft and Apple. Does Bill have anything different to offer through Urge? Anything that makes this latest venture stand out from similar sites? Not really. Should you choose to become an Urge subscriber, you won't find any music that you wouldn't find on any other download - subscription site. The prices are even pretty much the same. What they do offer is a aesthetics - their site looks good. Plus, there's the camaraderie. Subscribers can post on blogs and converse with one another. But that's about it. But with Microsoft powering the marketing and advertising engine behind Urge, it's sure to do well. Even the latest incarnation of Microsoft's Windows Media Player has Urge built in. Everyone with a PC has access to this free player and therefore easy access to Urge. What PC users won't have is the portability provided by the wildly popular iPod. Current owners of iPods, should they decide to subscribe to Urge, will have to buy songs through the site, download them, burn them onto CDs and then convert the music files to mp3s in order to be compatible. Other portable devices are compatible with the service, however, and those are listed on the site. This all may change in the Christmas of 2006, as buzz indicates Microsoft plans to release their "iPod Killer". Based on the Xbox brand, and including additional features like gaming, this media player is aimed right at Apple's heart, and could quickly make "Urge" a household name, assuming the two products are closely linked. Each of the music download sites has their own strengths and weaknesses. Urge fully divides and subdivides genres so that its subscribers can easily find what they're looking for while exploring other bands that they might like. Yahoo Music Unlimited personalizes the start page to include suggestions based on the subscribers previous downloads and offers a cheaper subscription rate. Rhapsody has the best radio services, providing specialized stations that stream a pre-set list of music. If you can't decide, then try one or try them all. Each of them offers a free trial subscription. You can experiment with all of them and decide which one suits you best.

At A Glance: ASP.net vs. PHP

In the world of web development, the choice of which development language to use commonly comes down to two popular choices. Web applications, specifically those relying on back end databases, are typically being created using either Microsoft's ASP.Net language, or the Open Source alternative language of PHP. Reasons why one might choose one over the other can include: The cost of development tools, or availability of such tools, or even ones comfort level with the Open Source initiative. The goal of this article is to provide some perspective on reasons why one might choose one over the other.

Active Server Pages or ASP has long been an option for creating dynamic web content. Active Server Pages facilitates the ability to use databases such as Access or SQL just to name a few, to create dynamic, feature rich websites. The work going on behind the scenes in serving up the dynamic content is being done at the server level by the Active Server Pages source code. Microsoft has spent a great deal of time and resources promoting their .Net family of programming languages of which ASP.Net is a member. In order to develop with ASP.Net one must obtain the extremely expensive Microsoft Visual Studio Programming Suite. While expensive, Visual Studio is an asset to any programmer due to its vast amount of features. As with all of Microsoft's products, support and updates are constantly made available for ASP.Net. The shear amount of features that Microsoft packs into Visual Studio, coupled with Microsoft's extensive support make certainly make ASP.Net an attractive solution for any corporation's web development needs, but the cost can be prohibitive, if not impossible to afford for the individual web developer.

PHP which is in its 5th revision now, is an Open Source web development language that also facilitates the creation of feature rich, dynamic websites that can use databases. Being Open Source means simply that PHP isn't owned by anyone. Just as with Active Server Pages, the work going on behind the scenes of serving up the dynamic web content is being done by PHP at the server level. As with most Open Source products, the resources available to a PHP developer are free of charge. This makes PHP extremely attractive to the independent web developer. There are some commercial quality development suites available from companies like Zend, but there is also wealth of free resources just a Google Search away. Because there is really no corporate entity behind PHP, support and development on PHP is done by the community of its users and developers themselves. Surprisingly this does not seem to adversely affect the ability to find support for PHP.

All in all, ASP.Net and PHP are both excellent options, offering basically the same functionality. Whether the decision comes down to the cost of initial investment, or the comfort level one has regarding Open Source, or something else entirely, the end result depends upon the mastery of whichever language is chosen.