05.28.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:12 am by
The California Senate has passed a bill that would place strict limits on what an email provider could do with their email.
“My legislation guarantees that our most private communications will remain just that–private,” said Sen. Liz Figueroa, D-Fremont, the bill’s author, according to a statement.
What a load of hoo-ha. There is nothing stopping any email provider right now to look through email. And how dare a free service attempt to cover their costs!
Pfffft. Luddite.
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05.27.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:36 pm by
It’s not quite there yet, but search engines are increasinly finding it necessary to index sound recordings. As broadband spreads, more and more sites are replacing written words for audio streams. The problem is that these streams are unindexable by the major search engines even if their content is incredibly relevant to the search.
StreamSage has flown under the radar during its last four years of operation while it has invested heavily in research and development. Its chief scientist, Tim Sibley, is known for his work in computational linguistics. StreamSage has received funding from research grants, including the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program. Harvard University uses StreamSage’s technology to allow medical school students to search past lectures on related subjects. AOL is using the technology to provide closed captions for streaming video and audio on AOL Broadband.
It’s neat their able to transcribe like that. Imagine being able to search audio recordings of a professor’s lectures before a test or having sound recordings of meetings indexed and available for skimming. That would be very cool.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:28 pm by
The U.S. Congress is about to vote on new legislation to turn the Department of Justice on those pesky P2P file sharers. While legislation has come and gone before, the stealthy way in which they’re trying to get it through is raising some ire:
Foes of the Pirate Act have been alarmed by the unusual alacrity of the proposal’s legislative progress. It was introduced just two months ago, on March 25, and not one hearing was held before the Judiciary committee forwarded it to the full Senate for a vote a month later.
“This was an attempt to move it in a stealthy manner,” said Philip Corwin, a lobbyist for Sharman Networks, which operates the Kazaa network. “I can’t imagine that (Hollywood lobbyist) Jack Valenti or (RIAA chairman) Mitch Bainwol really wants to come before Congress and give testimony saying, ‘We can’t afford to bring these lawsuits. That’s why we want the taxpayer to pay for them.’ I can’t believe they want to do that in public.”
And what would a music bill be if there wasn’t a nugget of wisdom from our own Congressman/rockstar Orrin Hatch:
“Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said when announcing his support for the bill. “I doubt that any nongovernmental organization has the resources or moral authority to pursue such a campaign.”
Tell you what. Let’s fix Iraq and get a handle on the whole terrorism thing and then well worry about the hole in our cultural heart that each download burns everyday. 
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Posted in forum archive at 9:16 am by
While, by no means, a smoking gun Sony
>has hinted that the PS3 might come out in 2006 (registration required):
According to Sony chairman Nonuyuki Idei, “We’ll first focus on developing a successor console to the PlayStation 2. But incorporating the CELL chip into TVs will give us greater control in adding functions, so we’ll concurrently pursue the development of a new game console and the incorporation of the chip into TVs. It just means that demand for TVs with computer-like functions is starting to emerge, and we are going to meet such demand.”
The statement further indicated that the first CELL based products would be launched by March 2006, which considering Idei’s comments would presumably mean the PlayStation 3.
If I remember right, Microsoft is still pushing for a Christmas 2005 release and Nintendo is too busy skipping through fields with Samus and Mario to a Donkey Kong plastic Bongo beat to comment.
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05.26.04
Posted in forum archive at 10:11 pm by
Tomorrow night (Thursday) Frontline is doing an in depth report on the sorry state of the music industry today. While the site says 9pm I’d double check one’s local listings.
What I’m really interested in is how they portray Internet distribution and p2p trading of music – I really want an in-depth news story that puts some meat on the bones thrown out haphazardly in most stories. And I hope they don’t cop out and spend all their time talking about the easy issues up till this point and spend a minute and a half mentioning it.
Anyway, brainfood for free, tomorrow night. :upper:
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Posted in forum archive at 9:56 pm by
While the news is somewhat second-hand, Microsoft has paid Opera $12 million for something it had every right to do.
Awhile ago Opera accused Microsoft of altering some of its webpages to look slightly altered in the browser of Scandanavian origin, Opera. Now Microsoft is giving them $12 million in karma money. Some perspective from Ben Forta, guru of the ColdFusion masses (and himself a news pundit):
1) So what? If I want to make my own web site incompatible with any browser, OS, IP range, or whatever, isn’t that my prerogative? Access to MSN pages is not a right that must be consistently granted to all. The lawsuit, had it actually have been brought, should have been immediately thrown out.
2) On the other hand, if this was indeed a terrible sin, and part of some devious scheme to prevent Opera from becoming a threat to IW, is $12 million even significant?
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Posted in forum archive at 9:50 pm by
The results from the multiformat 128kbps public listening test are in and Ogg Vorbis, the best little codec nobody has heard of, swept the competition in nearly every category.
There are plenty of results along with some additional commentary but the bottom line is this: Ogg Vorbis rocks (if only anyone would support it in their player), iTunes is best of the big boys, and the Lame Project continues to pump out competitive sounding encoding in a 10-year old format.
The big loser is Sony’s Atrac3 (the format that was developed for use on its MiniDisc Players). The second worse? Microsoft’s WMA format (ouch, a format that I had championed for awhile).
Makes me wonder if I should take my collection of CD’s and re-burn them as Ogg files… 
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05.23.04
Posted in miscellaneous at 11:54 pm by
I know, big surprise – anarchists on a college campus; for some reason its really easy to be idealistic and outspoken when you’re unemployed and have parents paying your tuition. Or at least that’s the picture that’s painted in my head of the person that’s been plastering posters around the University of Utah campus. I still like to take walks around the sprawling, hilly campus and have been noticing an increasing frequency of posters, all of which link back to a rather unhappy website called CrimeThinc.
If that sort of thing interests you, by all means take a look. And while I admire the passion and intensity this organization seems to apply to everything from world poverty to Bush sneezing, it just doesn’t make much sense to me. Ok, so there is some bad stuff in the world and its important to get it out but thats where the thought and calls to action seem to end. What do we do instead? How do we make things better? For all their protesting the way things are why don’t they have an idea of how they should be?
Course, maybe I’m just jealous. Instead of changing the world I settled for random discussion with close friends. 
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Posted in forum archive at 11:36 pm by
In the tradition of music charity events like LiveAid, FarmAid, etc, a new British Digital Music Download service named OxFam has launched. Ten pence (about a quarter) of every download will go to fight poverty and, well, aid humanitarian aid.
“Music lovers get great tracks and artists see their music helping some of the poorest people in the world through real cash support,” Adrian Lovett, Oxfam’s director of campaigns and communications, said in a statement.
But the charity is entering a brutally competitive digital download market. Last week, Napster launched in Britain and Apple Computer’s wildly popular iTunes is expected to make its European debut in the coming months.
A nice thought but the jaded old man voice in my head tells me most people don’t give two shakes and a shingle where their money goes – just as long as their paying the lowest cost. 
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05.19.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:45 pm by
iTunes has released their Windows dev kits, and indie devs couldn’t be happier.
The tools do not go so far as to allow other media players to play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, but they do allow a variety of applications to extend iTunes use. For instance, using the tools, a developer could write new software that launches and controls iTunes remotely.
“It looks like it’s exactly what I was hoping for,” said Andrew Carson, a Chicago-based developer who is using the tools to create a continuously updated list of recently played songs on his Web log. “Until this release, we haven’t had a Windows equivalent to what iTunes users could do with AppleScript on a Mac.”
Me? I’d like a stripped down version of their radio player – they’ve got several feeds that otherwise require a login. I never browse the music selection. If I could get a basic radio player that creates playlists of songs listened to over time for saving later, that would be :upper:.
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