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yesterday, on CNN, in between terrorism and more terrorism, on the ticker at the bottom, i saw something that said "RIAA reports loss of $5B last year, says mostly attributed to CD burning piracy". I've been all over the RIAA and CNN's websites and can find nothing about it. If you find something, please post below

Specifically, the dollar value of all music product shipments decreased from $6.2 billion at mid-year 2000 to $5.9 billion at mid-year 2001--a 4.4 percent decrease. Unit shipments dropped from 488.7 million at mid-year 2000 to 442.7 million units at mid-year 2001--a 9.4 percent decrease, according to figures released today by the RIAA.

"....The Xbox will sell for $299 at retail - losing as much as $110 on every box sold - and Allard wants to get the retail price to $100 as quickly as possible."

I think the X-Box chipset is nvidia 2.5 (not sure on the number) I read something like, the GeForce3 was 2.0, and X-box is 2.5...

Since the X-Box is a PC, how long is it going to take before we can run all those NES, SNES, N64, PS, PS2 emulators currently found online on our X-Boxes? I don't know much about this, but it seems to me that since the X-Box is really just a PC, it has a harddrive, a built-in ethernet/broadband adapter (note: Gamecube has one as an additional purchase only), it has a real Intel processor, and a real NVidia graphics card, then it can be hacked and it can be programmed to run programs emulating ALL the other consoles and the games that run on them.

Now THAT would be cool.

Wired magazine had a (imho good) article about PayPal, how and why it worked while other initiatives of big banks failed on internet money transactions:

The Money Shot

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.
If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

When it comes to British inventors/inventions this is all too common occurrence, there is some great innovation in the UK but traditionally they concepts aren't followed through to commercialisation.

It happened to Sir Frank Whittle and the jet engine and consequently the first supersonic fighter, the Bell 1 which was based on the British design after the British Government withdrew funding for the project.

There was also the debacle over public key crypto research at GCHQ.

Donald Davies worked a the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex, unfortunately the British Govt/Grants agency didn't see the potential of the invention at the time and no funded was given, so he went over to APRA who were throwing money at anything.

Donald died June last year at in Australia, where he went to retire, he didn't get a lot of recognition outside of a few small circles, but he did get quite a few awards from the various computing institutions in the UK, I think he's still relatively unknown in the US, probably because he was too modest, which is why some many scientists can claim to have invented Packet Switching.

As we all know, wherever America goes, Europe gets dragged along kicking and screeming!
However, I definately couldn't imagine the Duch or the Danes going along with such draconian anti-privacy laws, even if we in the UK seem complacent about our privacy and rights.

Terminal Velocity talks about Cheryl Stears (U.S.) and Rodd Millner (Australia) who are both going for a record skydiving attempt from 130,000 feet. It looks like QinetiQ is going for altitude. Millner and Stearns are going for altitude and extreme gravitational acceleration.

Perhaps file trading companies will be driven out of business by the RIAA, MPAA, et al (have any been put out of business yet? Napster (the company) lives, Aimster (barely) lives...), but the practice will only grow.

They're not yet attracting enough attention to get shut down by the court system

Too late... they're already under the gun. At least EFF has decided to support MusicCity now.

This recent article on Wired seems to offer some hope that the music industry is starting to get a clue that the sustainable solution to the piracy threat is in co-option of the existence if P2P networks. It's in the creation of business models (ugh, sounds like MBA-speak) that accept that file sharing is here to stay, and seek new ways to still make a fair $ return.

I don't know what I think about the "jiveplayer.com" approach that EMI is taking. I'm willing to accept some degree of correctly targeted ads and deep site links, to offset the cost of truly free content sharing. But maybe it's just a new attempt to scam a buck that otherwise might actual flow to the artists?

Some links:

The patent

The company with the patent.

Wired article

Nieman said Product Activation is required for individual users only; corporate and site licenses will be handled separately. Microsoft wants to reduce a form of piracy it calls "casual copying," which is sharing among individual users, claiming the practice is responsible for up to 50 percent of its sales losses.

Corporate users will get a site license with a unique key required to activate the software, so no registration is required, and if a corporate copy of Windows XP or Office XP is pirated, the source will be traceable via the key, said Nieman.

I noticed a distinct difference between the summary on the main page of Slashdot, and that given by the BBC, and what is being reported by other websites and the American television news. The stories linked to from here say it's a 3-way equal split, and "experts" expect a long legal process to decide on a penalty. The more "mainstream" press is saying the settlement is a done deal with (the last count I just heard) only 3 states holding out and going after penalties on their own. Both views are supported by quotes from the attorney generals involved and even the judge herself, so what is the real story?

Is this a case of people only hearing what they want to hear?

Its lucky that nothing like that would ever happen in the land of the free.

ps. I hate responding to so called trolls, but this one has been modded up twice

http://www.atlargestudy.org/final_report.shtml

If you don't have time reading the report, read the Wired summary of the report:

"On Monday, a committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said it wants to adopt a proposal allowing directors to be elected by members of the public who own Internet domains."

Newsbytes take on the report:

"It's a mistake to push these issues entirely down to Ghana," Bildt said, referring to ICANN's next scheduled meeting, which is set to take place in Ghana, Africa next March."

Regards

Mikael

Not by a long shot.

Wired has an article about the settlement allowing dual-boots. An addition at the end says that Senator Pat Leahy intends to have Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to review the settlement.

Also, the EU is still going forward with its investigation

Finally, Sun is mulling the possibility of a civil lawsuit of its own.

Not by a long shot.

Wired has an article about the settlement allowing dual-boots. An addition at the end says that Senator Pat Leahy intends to have Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to review the settlement.

Also, the EU is still going forward with its investigation

Finally, Sun is mulling the possibility of a civil lawsuit of its own.

Wired News: Monsters, Inc. Used Monster Tools.

Great article (although a little short) on the tools used to create the movie. Modelling is done on SGI workstations, but the final rendering is done on Sun hardware. If you watch the end credits of any Pixar movie, they tell you so.

Boom! There is your movie.

If you don't mind me asking, where do you get your information? You sure make it sound easy to make a full-length CG movie.

A LOOOONNNGGG time. An article on Wired said that every single hair was individually modeled.

How was this possible? I mean, was U.S. Bank giving PayPal rights to modify account information? Or was PayPal trusting that user owned that account and had enough money to withdraw in which case it would have hurt PayPal, not account owner. If some website could modify my bank account, without me granting the right for transaction to my bank, I'd sue my bank instead of that website.

A online bank's opening has been marred by a glitch that let customers transfer money from any U.S. bank account.

This was a much larger problem than any problem with Passport ever could be -- you didn't have to use x.com to become a victim. Anyone with a U.S. bank account could be affected. But Paypal has become extremely popular, so I guess people have forgotten about this.

The following:

Patents can generally only be enforced over implementations sold or distributed in the country where the patent is issued. So, if a company has a US patent that is essential to a W3C Recommendation, then it could only seek royalties for products/services distributed in the US.

I'm all for Ireland ... mmmm Guiness :)

Absolutely -- Read the Wired article -- Silicon Valley movers spent years getting this thing put together.

Note also that Gates left several proposed settlements on the table -- If Microsoft hadn't been up their ass over "the freedom to innovate" and had been putting their tricky lawyers to work, this would have been over years ago under the *Clinton* DOJ.

Sounds great. In fact, it sounds like the early Wired Magazine manifestos about the Net, some of which I wrote.

That is just perfect...it really does show how much JonKatz knows about what he is talking about. I was looking at the predictions of the future in cover stories of the wired magazines in the last few years, and without exception, they are so far off base it is hilarious.

For example, the huge breakthrough push technology was going to be, the proclaimation in March 2000 that the market is hotter than ever, and the cover story on how great Loudcloud is going to be. Hilarity ensues on every cover story!

but the government has gotten a bad rap for the dot-bomb crash which occurred shortly after they sued MS

It actually happend shortly after Microsoft refused to settle. But this is the stockmarket gaga public we are talking about - the same people that drove LNUX up to $200/share.

Since I'm posting -- Everyone should read the Wired article on the MS lawsuit. Microsoft could have settled this thing at any time with terms similar to what's being reported. That's one reason the original judge was so pissed at them -- they had a good deal and they left it on the table. So, it's not really a Bush versus Clinton thing -- it's a change of heart over at MS.

"...a pro-Microsoft trade group, the Washington-based Association for Competitive Technology, said only Microsoft's competitors don't want to see a settlement."

"Microsoft also funded the Association of Competitive Technology for the same exact purpose (of being a front group)."

Wired News yesterday ran an interesting story about how Intel adopted the Napter model to distribute its own multimedia material to its various far flung offices around the world. They found the system was ten times cheaper than sending the file out from big central servers, and a lot faster as well.

It was interesting to see the p2p idea moved beyond academic theory and actually implemented in real world situations by a commercial entity with beneficial and measurable results.

Trickster Coyote
Reality isn't all its cracked up to be.

Windows for Pens came out in about mid-'92, not long after Win 3.1. If you believe Jerry Kaplan it was a fast hack by MS to muddy the waters for his Go pad computing product. It was essentially an API extension for Visual Basic and MS C and possibly drivers for some common pen products (can't remember) but I can't imagine that there was much development for it. It was combined into the Win32 API in Win95. It's probably still there.

I highly recommend reading "The Hit Charade" on Wired. It explains why -- Altavista wants more page views to boost its stats.

The article is written at a very high level of abstraction. One huge unconsidered factor is the XBox, a sub-300$ computer whose effects on the market will be negligible (doubt it) or catastrophic. We'll see in a couple of years.

OTOH, between my RedHat 7.1 disks, the KDE 2/Qt Bible, and some downloads, I am still finding installing KDevelop an ...educational... experience. 'T'sall good, I'll figure it out, but what a prolonged tooth extraction. C++ Builder under 'Doze this is not.

When this war of escalation reaches the point at which all browsers except MSIE allow easy user tweaking of USER-AGENT, expect M$ to introduce something along the lines of "CUAAP," a.k.a. CU2AP or "Cryptographic User Agent Assurance Protocol." This will make it harder to spoof sites that lock out non M$ browsers, perhaps under penalty of law, and will dovetail nicely with their attempts to hijack the Internet with .net.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but here is the esteemed Declan McCullagh's report on the subject. Deconstructing this 'filtering' is becoming so easy it's almost boring.

Nice article on this now online from Wired, about Google licensing and other parts of its semi-unique profit strategy...

I am trying to think of an off the top of my head way to find single disk games using a favorite search engine, but am not thinking of any really good queries. This is under the assumption that I don't find aggregation sites such as tiny apps.

Evidently Wired News got duped as well:

check out the "elsewhere today" section:

http://www.wired.com/news/nc_index.html/

so, the big question is: if YOU were a major media corporation's CEO, and YOUR family's livelihood depended on keeping your corporation afloat in the face of underground distribution channels, what would YOU do?

That's the trick, though, isn't it? It's not their welfare that's being hurt by underground distribution channels. BSA companies in particular are some of the wealthiest companies in the world despite rampant piracy of their products. Truthfully, it's not even their pocketbook.

As has been said many, many times before, you *cannot* assume that a sale of your product through piracy would have resulted in a sale for you had the pirate copy not existed.

Case in point:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47617,00 .html '"It's not that people would just buy legitimate software if they can't get pirated copies," Cheng Yi, a self-described "alternative software dealer" from the Guangdong province said through a translator. "Many people here can't afford the legitimate software, and it is capitalist to say that only the rich should have the advantages."'

Do you think that every 15 yeal old webmaster who uses a warezed copy of Photoshop could get mommy or daddy to drop the $600 for a real copy? Does *anyone* think that less affluent people who build their own computer but don't really know linux can really afford a $300 Windows 2000 license?

The same goes for music. I don't buy RIAA CD's any more because of the RIAA's actions, but beforehand, I wouldn't even consider buying a CD without hearing at least some, and preferrably all the music from the disc. Napster was providing this service for millions. Accordingly, CD sales rose. Now that Napster is gone, CD sales have plummeted.

What is being hurt by underground distribution channels is control. In the case of the software companies, it's the ability to say who and who does not use their software. They lose the ability to lock people into licenses and 'upgrade cycles' if they are illegally using software. Even though they would never profit from those people, the loss of control is unbearable.

The same goes for the music industry. As has been noted by many research firms, Napster helped CD sales. Long and Short, CD sales rose while Napster was in operation and have now leveled off and even decreased. It was never about money for RIAA labels. It was about the ability to control not only their pet artists, but their listeners as well. Do you think that listener choice controls what is a 'hit' and what is not? Think again. A song may be catch, true, but the labels pour big $$$ into artist, songs, and music videos they want to be popular. This includes paying radio stations to play it, as well as putting together concerts, commercials, and promotional material. Look at 'O-Town' for chrissakes! The band is so fake they made a TV show about how fake it was. They have singles in the top 40 though. You think that wasn't entirely due to the effort of their label?

The same thing goes for movie studios, newspapers, televison networks, etc... etc.. etc...

We are living in a time that is analogous to the late middle-ages, just before the emergence of a real middle class. We have an oligarchy of rich, powerful individuals, Corporations and their executives in this case, who know that their continued survival is entirely dependant upon the serf classes. If those classes cannot be controlled, they cannot be trusted to allow the oligarchy to remain in power. Just like the French nobility, however, the aristocracy of money and power in the United States has decided not to try to adapt to the changing world.

Orv wiv'er heads...

What is an Apple trademark, though, is the "iPod" [ipaustralia.gov.au] (NOTE: if you can't get the page to display, just start a new search for "iPod"). From the description, though, it does sound like a PDA...

The iPod is Apple's portable audio player that they'll be announcing later today, according to this article at Wired.com.

What is an Apple trademark, though, is the "iPod" [ipaustralia.gov.au] (NOTE: if you can't get the page to display, just start a new search for "iPod"). From the description, though, it does sound like a PDA...

The iPod is Apple's portable audio player that they'll be announcing later today, according to this article at Wired.com.

Do a search on iWalk on Google and you'll find an existing product with that name. The product is one that Wired covered a while back about some kind of artificial leg. It seems unlikely that Apple would use the name of an existing product. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,39262,00.ht ml

Oh yeah. I forgot to add that Jamming Eschelon wasn't so much of a program, but rather a unified effort in an attempt to jam. No one knows if Eschelon was effected or not since they are unsure of how it works at this point.
A nice 'day-after' follow up article is over at Wired with some comments from Macki of 2600

BTW: When I "preview" my post.. it looks fine. But the final post includes [the.website]. I previewed.. I promise... Ask ALLA!

Oh yeah. I forgot to add that Jamming Eschelon wasn't so much of a program, but rather a unified effort in an attempt to jam. No one knows if Eschelon was effected or not since they are unsure of how it works at this point.
A nice 'day-after' follow up article is over at Wired with some comments from Macki of 2600

BTW: When I "preview" my post.. it looks fine. But the final post includes [the.website]. I previewed.. I promise... Ask ALLA!

This guy did it as a project. And This guy apparently felt his effort was worth a web-photo album about his computer "Woody".

I also remember reading an article in Wired a couple of years ago about a company that was doing high end PC's what were encased in mahogany and teak and other stuff like that, but I can't find the company now. I gues it's for the executive who has everything and doesn't actually need anything.

Honestly, I think making a computer case out of clay, adobe or ceramics might be better and cheaper. Additionally, there would be a reduced fire hazard and the materials are available onsite. I also think Paper Mache might be good for laptops (weight, you know). Of course, you'd have to have a KILLER fan to keep it from bursting into flames and you'd most certainly have to keep it out of the rain, but there you go.

This radio interview with the gov really says more than the articles...(realplater, WinMedia, and quicktime) here: http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45866,00.h tml#

BTW: I think this is really a great idea, and although its bound to be misunderstood and misimplemented by many teachers and administrators, it does have the potential to really benefit TONS of students. I'm encouraged by the governors actual awareness that faculty will need just as much training and help (if not more) than any of the kids. Good stuff.

For those who work in the GPS community the DoD statement has a faulty reference. It links to ICD-GPS-200 revision B when in fact the last release of the ICD was revision C. Hopefully this will be corrected shortly.

For those who are wondering why the DoD removed the "degredation" from the civilian GPS signal it is because they now have a more effective means of preventing enemies of the US from using GPS - selective deniability. This link talks of its use in Afghanistan. By improving the signal to friendly nations it improves GPS as a product which means that US companies who make GPS equipment (and dominate the market) can improve their sales figures.

scott.

Of course, at that time, almost everyone was shell shocked, and it was not on the radar yet

In this situation, war has not been formally declared. Usually, in a war, such laws are "for the duration". Since we are not "formally" at war, there is no such limitation.

Freedoms lost may likely be a permanent loss, unless people strive to make sure otherwise.

Never played with magnetic fluid though.

Michael can't have been to a science museum of late. I can remeber seeing small tanks of magnetic fluid that allow you to wave magnets around near them to see what happes in museums a couple of years ago.

Oh, and Wired magazine had a lovely picture of magnetic fluid in a beautiful state that was to be shown at Siggraph (See wired for article check here for video)

Not only will they give us a new form of storage, but they can also be used as a treatment for AIDS.
Interesting how versatile a simple molecule can be..

this came out yesterday. (the wired article :)

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