Whats all this modern pop music about anyway? it sounds like a bunch of stupid beeps and rude men shouting swearwords. Thats not real music is it, like Elvis used to play.
Why do the youngsters listen to it so loud, and whats with those why-pod things? I suppose they have to listen to something when they go car-jacking or smoking their E’s…If I was in charge I would make it all illegal, and that would teach those young people some respect…
A federal appeals court in Nashville ruled that musicians would have to pay for every musical sample included in their work
As an owner of an iRiver iHP-140, I both love it’s cool hardware features and have an intense dislike of it’s trashy incomplete firmware. While the machine is great, the software is somewhat lacking compared to what Creative or Apple offer users.
Playerblog and Slashdot are reporting on the announcement from alternative firmware group RockBox to standardise on the H-series as their preferred target for their next generation firmware.
RockBox started out by making alternative firmware for the now very obsolete Archos music players. The iRiver machines are technically more capable, and are made from parts which are better documented - it is to be expected that a porting effort should yield faster results.
It was widely reported that the current firmware release was Delayed for more than 4 months, and I even mentioned this in a previous report on this blog. It’s possible that the existance of a 3rd party firmware maker will encourage iRiver to compete, and perhaps meet their own deadlines for a change.
A friend has put together this film about use of GNU software in the UK. It’s telling the Linux story from a grass-roots point of view. I assisted (distantly) with some of the pre-production, and am even featured in a short section of the film - you can see me dismantling a tivo.
Slashdot and SFGate are both covering a new feature of the new Microsoft music service that has the ability to ‘mimic’ local radio stations. All you do is choose the name of your favourite local station from a pop-down, and MS Media Player re-creates that station’s play-list minus adverts, weather, news, branding and DJ Prattle.
Of course the radio industry are profoundly upset; but what can they do? American radio stations are so heavily ‘formatted’ that their service is easy to automate. Infact, since most US radio stations follow a number of quite well-defined playlist formats, Microsoft have demonstrated how easily those formats can be cloned and improved. If the radio stations were doing anything that was even vaugely unique and imaginative then microsoft would not have been able to do the exact same thing with such ease.
In my opinion this sort of thing should be encouraged; the invention of the formatted radio station herralded the death of independant local broadcasting. If formatted radio becomes economically unviable because of the sheer force of competition from Microsoft and other online broadcasters then we might see a return to original, inventive use of media.
I think I will stick with Resonance FM for now.
Another one of those stories that show the US Republican party for the lovable, huggable bunch of great guys. The anonymous protagonist of this story exemplifies the ass-kickingest standing up for whats rightsiest aspects of all that made american great… This guy was caught on camera kicking a female anti-Bush protestor as three secret service men held her down. According to various blogs, she was arrested and he walked free.
THIS “MAN” KICKS WOMEN
But only if 3 Secret Service Agents are holding her down.
Watch him do it.
He is still unidentified. Have you seen him?
If so, reply here.
Not so long ago, a gmail invite was a precious thing, a commodity in short supply circulated amongst only uber-geeks and lunix hacker-terrorists. Having distainfully avoided becoming a gmailer (cos I didnt believe the hype), I now have an account courtesy of Leo Mirani (A friend I met in Bombay via iTunes). Now that I am in, I too have the ability to invite up to six more people to partake of Gmail.
Given that the world’s population is approximately 6.3 billion people and 10% of these have access to the internet, if each person was able to pass on a gmail invite to an online friend, the entire internet-using population of the world would be on gmail within 12 generations of invites.
Now assuming all this was possible, at peak, this many gmail users would require 6.2 x 10^5 Terrabytes of storage. Assuming further that Google store all this information on 250Gb IDE hard-disk drives, they would require 2.5 x 10^6 drives to store all that data.
The chances are that Google use at least RAID5, which typically requires 25% redundancy, and each of those hard drives consumes about 40W of electrical power. I would estimate the power consumption of the hard-disks used by the gmail system to be 125Gigawatt.
Your Gmail will require 99 more of these…
To put this in perspective, Sizewell ‘B’ (the UK’s most advanced nuclear power station) produces only 1.25 GW per reactor. So gMail operating at it’s theoretical maximum would require 100 nuclear power stations to run at full blast.
Therefore I conclude, that by using gmail, you help propel the world into heat-death or nuclear winter. Now is that what you want to happen?
PS. I still have 6 gmail invites left, so let me know if you want one. They are quite good for sending large files.