Coming November 4th, for just $13.99, it’s Weird Al Yankovic-Ultimate Collection, which has all of his videos to date! Plus, on-screen lyrics! Don’t forget to also get a copy of UHF while you’re at it!
Magnatune is an experimental record label that offers music for download at $5-18 per album (you pick the price you think is fair). They split the proceeds 50/50 with the artists. All music is released under a Creative Commons license which allows sharing and derivative works as long as it’s non-commercial and attribution is given. It’s great to see such experiments, and I’d love to see an artist become a breakaway success from something like this.
Via the Democrats’ Kicking Ass blog, I come across this dissection of Cheney’s appearance on “Meet the Press”:
In his appearance on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable.
Standard Internet routing techniques allow any machine on the network to talk to any other. It’s a basic part of how the net works. Then, people started setting up firewalls to protect their less-secure (or more private) hosts. Now, some folks have reimplemented java.net.Socket to allow you to run any service over JXTA, essentially doing nothing of value other than circumventing your firewall. I guess there is a little value in that a lot of people are not behind firewalls, but are behind NAT devices because of their limited IP space. Anyway, this still feels a bit crazy to me.
Via Martin Perez: PatternBox: Design Pattern Editor Plugin for Eclipse. Want to use a GoF pattern? Start with one of the templates included here.
Artists blast record companies over lawsuits against downloaders:
“File sharing is a reality, and it would seem that the labels would do well to learn how to incorporate it into their business models somehow,” said genre-busting DJ Moby in a post on his Web site. “Record companies suing 12-year-old girls for file sharing is kind of like horse-and-buggy operators suing Henry Ford.”
A number of artists chime in here with thoughtful commentary. Moby, by the way, is not really a “DJ”… he’s a multi-instrumentalist and a producer.
Sci fi author Orson Scott Card chimes in on the file sharing debate with MP3s Are Not the Devil
In other words, the people complaining about all the internet “thieves” are, by any reasonable measure, rapacious profiteers who have been parasitically sucking the blood out of copyrights on other people’s work.
I agree with most of what Greenspun says about how music CDs are dead, and really should have died years ago. I don’t wholly agree with this part:
Most people don’t want to make a lot of 25 cent or 99 cent purchase decisions every day. They’d rather pay a fixed known subscription and have the freedom to “flip channels” to their heart’s content.
I think that people actually want both and I think there’s quite a bit of history on my side in that argument. People have been buying singles and albums for a long time. Why? Because they want to be able to listen to whichever songs they feel like whenever they want (and wherever they want!) Sure, XM has a lot of channels… but if I feel like listening to Depeche Mode, they don’t have a “Depeche Mode” channel, whereas my iPod does.
Buying singles for under $1 is something that people can get their minds around, and I don’t think it’s just the Macintosh types who have sucked up 10 million ITMS tracks.
Parentstages has some tips on how to camp with children. We enjoy camping quite a bit, and look forward to being able to do it with Crysania.
Last week, I was looking at Swing application frameworks. It’s hard to consider creating a Java GUI application today and not consider the Eclipse platform as a possible framework. There is a document in CVS, Rich Client Platform Facilities, that describes how Eclipse 3.0 will work as a platform for non-IDE applications. This is a specific, stated goal for Eclipse 3.0, and there appear to be many people in- and outside of IBM who are interested in this.
