Apple announced today a preview version of QuickTime 5. The coolest thing about it is the OSX window-widgets. I have no idea how they made them act exactly like they do in OSX, but they did. Download it today, or something.
From Wired:“Right now we use bar codes on products in retail stores to track everything,” said Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s senior vice president and general counsel.
“We need the same sort of capability for digital music files, only we need more,” Sherman said. “We need to know how the track is being used as well. Different royalty payments are going to (be) applicable based on how the songs are being used.”
The identification system will be built to incorporate licensing and tracking activities that the RIAA and the major labels believe is important to future of online music sales.
Something tells me there will be a crack for this ‘tracking system’ 2 days after it’s released. Some people never learn. You can’t fuck with our MP3s.
Check this horseshit out: MSLinux.org.
In case you don’t see it at first, this IS a joke site, but brillantly executed. I just don’t want to be there when MS finds out about it
An email from a BBEdit tech support dude:
‘Kevin, we will have a Carbon version of BBEdit available when Apple
ships Mac OS X (final, not beta) and this will be a free upgrade to
BBEdit 6.0.
As for beta testing, we generally cull beta sites from customers who
have regularly reported bugs in the shipping versions or provided other
substantive feedback on the software.’
Kinda sucks, but I hope this trend of free upgrades for Carbonized software continues. I could just see Adobe making you pay through the teeth for Photoshop 6.1 or something.
If you’re using MacOS X, and you’re a little unhappy with the default music player (I mean, it’s nice and all, but the playlist feature leaves a little to be desired), then I would recommend picking up PR2 of Audion from Panic. You can even use your current playlists (just drag ’em on the Audion icon in the Dock; don’t double-click them, or I’m assuming they’ll open in Classic, and no one wants that).
And as a sidenote, if anyone has heard of either Adobe of BareBones carbonizing their software, let me know.
‘Yahoo’s latest quarterly earnings weren’t exactly the stuff of investors’ fantasies, though it performed about as well as expected during a relatively difficult quarter.’
How can any technology company expect to do well in such a hostile market?
This guy just refuses to believe the truth. Maybe I need a mousepad that says, “Michael S. Malone is a cocksucking whore.”
Here is another example of what happens when a journalist tries to think about what’s going to happen to the record industry because of Napster. He basically suggests that the recording industry is going to come up with its own version of MP3, only their version you’ll pay for.
He almost dismisses the fact that the MP3 format was introduced and developed entirely by the public. But it’s in fact this very point that ensures that the record industry will never seize control over it. To illustrate this, I’d like to use The Allegory of the Cave, from Plato’s Republic. In case you’re not familiar, it tells the story of people who live their whole lives in a cave, watching shadows playing on the wall in front of them. No one tries to look behind them to see what’s producing the shadows, they’re just content with looking forward, being almost hypnotized by them. One brave soul decides to venture out of the cave, and into the sunlight. What he experiences is both painful and liberating: the sunlight burns into his eyes, but he realizes the truth. This, of course, is where my analogy breaks down, because the character cannot deal with the truth. But I digress.
The people in the cave, to me, are like everyone who’s ever purchased a CD without knowing truly what forces lie behind the production of it. To us, it seemed as though basically the Band On The CD went through the entire process themselves, with the record company only having a logo on the bottom: the shadows on the wall. The MP3 revolution, however, has served the purpose of the brave person leaving the cave, only we are all now enlightened as to how the industry really is, and we now know we have power.
Maybe this is a fantasy of mine, but I see the record industry slowly falling into oblivion. They will not be able to harness this digital format, only succumb to it. I’m not saying Napster is the answer, but it certainly was the catalyst. The ingredients for this revolution have been around for a long time. Anyone who remembers bookmarking Hotline servers, FTP sites and Newsgroups to find the latest music knows this, but it wasn’t readily accessible to the public. Now, with broadband internet access in the home, Napster, and cheap easy-to-use MP3 players on the market, we have the power. The RIAA might as well go after Covad and AT&T for providing DSL and Cable access. They might as well go after Intel and Motorola for making faster processors. How about Diamond Multimedia for making the first really cool MP3 players?
This ‘MP3 thing’ is not just going to go away if Napster is done away with. And I’m not just talking about Gnutella and whatever else. I’m talking about the fact that we have control over what the record industry spoonfeeds us, and we don’t have to pay $17.99 for it any more.
I know you were all waiting with bated breath to see this:
Thanks, Jen!
This article (thanks to SVN for the link) poses some interesting points about the state of the internet today. He seems to think that ‘the net’ is dead, and everyone finds it boring and frustrating. I’ve got some things to say about that.
The whole problem is that the author assumes that everyone reading his article perceives ‘the net’ to be comprised solely of those sites who had staggering IPOs last year despite a complete lack of revenue. Anyone who didn’t see this year’s fall coming must have been a complete idiot. My definition of the net is this: sites like ours, and any other site devoted entirely to the distribution of knowledge, opinion, and joy. We had it first; the hackers, the geeks, the artists. It was ours. We built it (not me personally, I was like 15 when this all started). It would only make sense that when corporations and people with big ideas of big money came along seeking only to fatten their wallets instead of making the world a better place, that their brief world would fall. Now it’s back in our hands. And we now know what to do with it.
His first annoying comment is: ‘stocks don’t lie.’ My response? Oh, yes they very well do. A company’s stock price usually has very little to do with how the company is actually performing, and more to do with how the media perceives them to be performing (case in point: the recent drop in Apple’s stock price).
And this: ‘I keep waiting for my brain to come up with answers about how to beat the conundrum of how something like this column, with its built-in ephemeral nature, could get a much better return in print, where it might already be late, than on the Web, for which it’s perfect.
And here’s what I come up with: Nothing. It just makes no sense. None at all. But it’s the unbreakable reality that no one has been able to solve. It has only gotten worse, not better, as the years go by.’
He’s wrong only because he never got it in the first place. None of them ever did. And now they can’t figure it out. And I just can’t stop laughing. :>
