Six months from now, when the music industry has signed up their first 100 subscribers to their new online services, will they say “there is no demand for paid online music”? I’ll be keeping my eye out for such a quote. The services that are opening up right now, RealOne, PressPlay and AOL MusicNet, are doomed to fail because their usage schemes are insane. I would be willing to pay $10/month to download 100 MP3s.
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By mid-2002, Universal will be copy protecting all of their CDs. These discs supposedly will play fine in standard CD players, but will not work in other devices such as PCs and Sony PS2s. I have zero doubt that people will work around this (though that might be a violation of the DMCA). I rip all of my CDs for personal use at home on our server and in my Nomad Jukebox, and I won’t support record labels that want to remove that capability.
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More Segway commentary. This one is from Dan Bricklin, who hasn’t had a chance to ride it. I think his points are very valid. No one knows at this point if the Segway will actually alter the way cities are planned, but it does seem likely that the Segway’s release will make people think about new ways to approach transportation.
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I just added Blogdex and Daypop to my news feeds. I’m glad I did! If I hadn’t, I would’ve probably never foundThe Catapult Watch. It’s a relatively classy looking steel watch with a catapult for shooting BBs. Gadzooks. All that for just $59.
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Dave Winer has caused a stir with his first Scripting News Awards. Cam sees them as a big ego stroke for Dave, and doesn’t particularly care for the fact that he’s been nominated. My opinion: sure, Dave’s got an ego. But, the awards page says “These are my favorite weblogs.” Dave’s got a lot of readers and wanted to recognize the blogs that are most important to him.
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Arts & Farces has a great article about spam including references to all sorts of anti-spam viewpoints and info. I agree that spam is a huge problem facing the Net and email, and I also agree that the junk fax provision of the law should be extended to junk email. $500 per violation would make spammers think twice. By the way, SpamAssassin is the best tool I’ve seen for flagging spam.
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PhotoPoint goes dark, draws concern - The online photo site has been unavailable for days, wreaking havoc with thousands of customers who store pictures on the popular site. [CNet] The article talks about people using PhotoPoint to store eBay auction pictures and pictures for unrelated sites.
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Dave Winer writes. Two years ago we were contemplating a new millennium. “It’s like a graduation, but on a global scale. There’s never been anything like it. It’s never happened before, and in our lives it will never happen again. If you screw it up you won’t get another chance. So play it safe and assume everyone means well, and let it go at that.” [Scripting News]
I didn’t expect that things would go poorly on January 1, 2000. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to play a good practical joke: we held a New Year’s Party, hooked up all of the lights (and the TV set!) to X10 home control interfaces and, as the ball touched down in New York, I clicked a button that turned everything off. There was dead silence as everyone stood there for a few seconds… Then I said “Just kidding!” and turned it all back on. I’m glad I didn’t miss that chance.
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The ACM has a list of free database software. There are a number of interesting looking projects in there.
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I just installed a snapshot of the current drupal cvs and added my patches to it. It’s looking good. Now I can hopefully get my patches installed in drupal so that I don’t need to do that again :).
It looks like there’s lots of new stuff going on in this version of drupal, and I’ll finally be back online with Weblogs.com.
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