Google looks to compete with Amazon Prime, offer speedy delivery service in 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may sound patently obvious at this point, but there’s still cause to celebrate — Sony’s streaming subscription music service, Music Unlimited, is headed to both the PlayStation Portable and its pair of divergent spiritual successors the Next Generation Portable and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play. Eurogamer sat down with Sony Network Entertainment VP Shawn Layden, who spread the news readily, confirming that the service would be activated (at least in the UK) on PlayStation Portable “in a matter of weeks.” Meanwhile, Android phones including the infamous PlayStation handset will get Music Unlimited “this year,” and SNE “will make it happen” on the NGP as well, presumably sometime after the company reveals when its beast of a portable game station will actually come out. All in the name of taking your tunes with you wherever you happen to travel — a concept that’s getting rather popular right now.

Sony’s Music Unlimited streaming service coming to NGP, will hit Xperia Play this year and PSP ‘in a matter of weeks’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 02:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Publically, Amazon wants you to think it doesn’t care about licensing the music that it will let you store in the cloud, but privately we’re hearing the company is scrambling like mad to work things out with angry music labels as we speak. Specifically, the Wall Street Journal cites a pair of anonymous sources who say Amazon’s actually negotiating deals with the four major labels right now — though Amazon won’t confirm such a thing — which the e-tailer hopes to close in a matter of weeks. What’s more, they say Amazon may move to an system that compares users’ uploaded songs with a database of those tunes it’s managed to licence should the deal go through — a system much like Sony’s Music Unlimited, by the sound of it. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that the Journal quotes Sony Music chairman Martin Bandier in its final paragraph, who makes his pointed indignation at Amazon’s announcement heard:

“This is just another land grab. I can’t make it any plainer than that. It’s really disrespectful, and of course we are considering all of our options.”

Nothing like a little bit of mainstream media coverage to help pressure a business deal.

Amazon negotiating for Cloud Player music licensing deals after all? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember Gaikai, the cloud computing service that lets you demo video games in your browser window without downloading a thing? It’s live, meaning it’s no longer just us tech journalists that get to give it a thorough try. Provided you have a blazing fast internet connection and both Flash and Java installed, four streaming game demos are a just a click (and possibly a survey, or a short wait) away, including three EA titles (Mass Effect 2, Dead Space 2, The Sims 3) and Second Life. As we discovered in our initial hands-on, it’s not a flawless experience even with a fantastic internet connection, but it’s not meant to be — the entire point is to allow you to adequately sample a game right before making a purchase decision. It’s also a free taste of the future, and you don’t see those every day.

Gaikai beta goes live, brings Mass Effect 2, Dead Space 2, Sims 3 and Second Life demos to your browser window originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thinking of upgrading your Peek or Peek Pronto to a shiny new Peek 9? You may no longer have a choice — following an epic fail when migrating to a new network provider, loads of older devices were reportedly fried. Normally consumer outrage would run rampant at this news, but Peek CEO Amol Sarva has a plan — he’s offering brand-new Peek 9s to existing customers, free of charge. It’s not clear what will happen to the older units at this point, but a Peek customer service rep says that while fried QWERTY candybars are no more, the unscathed Peeks might possibly be turned back on. “We are currently waiting on T-Mobile to decide our fate,” the rep wrote, “There is still a CHANCE that the sky is not falling and older devices will continue to work.” In the meantime, Sarva has a rather difficult instruction for affected customers looking to get in on the deal: “Just check your email.”

[Thanks, standingup]

Peek experiences permanent outage for older devices, vows to replace with free Peek 9 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comments I found when searching on the net for reasons.

Comments Massimo Luinetti (Last update 5/12/2007):
If you have performed an upgrade from version 2003 to version 2007 and you have only one configuration database, you will probably have to disable the old “SharePoint Portal Administration Service” (version 2003). That was the solution in my case.

Michel Dawidowicz (Last update 1/28/2005):
In my case, this symptom started to appear when the database backend was down for a short period. The event is logged twice per minute in the log. To resolve this restart the “Sharepoint Portal Administration” service on each affected server of the farm.

Ionut Marin (Last update 11/3/2004):
From a newsgroup post: “Go to IIS manager, open each site, and go to the home directory tab. Then, there is a section at the bottom called Application pools. Edit each and set the account to someone who has logon as a service right to the local server”.