Bill May Disrupt Downloading Music. "Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecedented new authority to secretly hack into consumers' computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material." [This industry is going to try and kill us all, rather than realize that they are the wheelwrights of yesteryear. Dave says "If this bill becomes law I'm going to join Saddam Hussein in calling for the destruction of the United States." I'd rather see corporate death penalty legislation enacted.]
Apple's .Mac membership terms: "Apple reserves the right to delete, move or edit any item (email or other Content) that Apple, in its sole discretion, deems abusive, defamatory, obscene, in violation of copyright or trademark laws, or otherwise illegal, inappropriate or unacceptable [...] " [Oy, and then some. (via Macintouch)]
[Dave's being annoyed by stop energy. Go gettem!]
Mercury News Life of highs and lows ends in suicide for Net visionary. "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure." [What a terribly sad story. (via Hack the Planet)]
Music Software *
[I've never been a huge fan of music software. Music isn't any one thing, and it is difficult to bring ease of use to packages that are a flexible as many of these applications feel they need to be.
At Macworld I spoke with the guys from Sibelius, a music notation program. I watched as the demo progressed and was impressed, but as anyone knows, the demos can be very slight of hand, either through avoiding the weaknesses or the sheer skill of the operator.
I collected a copy of the demo, and finally had a chance to sit with it today. In under an hour I created a lead sheet for one of my tunes. If you look at the picture, realize that this is a screen snap at 72dpi. It prints beautifully! (It doesn't look bad here either, frankly.) I didn't do a perfect job because I ran out of play time and made some beginner mistakes, but that was me, not the software.
This application understands so much about music and how you want to work. Adding the chord symbols was especially enjoyable because it worked exactly as I would expect. There were no bad surprises, only "Gee, that worked exactly as I expected" exclamations. I haven't used a notation app for years because my last foray into the genre was so disappointing.
I also love the font that looks like handwriting. It looks just like a lead sheet should, except far nicer than my own hand writing.
Sibelius also tied directly into the general MIDI stuff built into OS X, so I could play back my piece as I was entering it, ensuring that I had notated it correctly. Totally no muss, no fuss. It was also completely stable without a hint of bad behaviour.
Frankly, this is as good a piece of software as I've used in a long while. It knows more about the topic of scoring and notation than I do, but it doesn't force me to learn what it knows in order to make use of any of its features. Simply awesome! If you produce written music, from simple lead sheets to complex scores, this is the software for you.]
1:28:33 PM 
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