Robert Cringely has an interesting idea for music distribution. Instead of owning CD's, paying to download tracks or a subscribing to a service, he proposes that a central repository of CD media be established to which individuals could "invest". Like a mutual fund, all the investors could claim partial ownership. The key to the system is that it would "check out" CD's to individual participants, thus operating within established legal parameters, allowing the participants to listen to or download tracks from the CD at their leisure. When a participant is done with a track/CD, they can "check it in" thus freeing up the media for another participant's use.

Every time a shareholder wants to download or play a song, he or she must ensure that their download is matched on a one-for-one basis with a physical CD somewhere in the system. The database does that by locking and unlocking access records to the physical CD. The CD doesn't have to be in the possession of the shareholder, just under his or her control. The Snapster 2.0 database handles that by effectively borrowing control of the physical CD for a period of time, during which it is agreed that particular physical CD can't be played by anyone else. It is a token passing scheme, and only the shareholder with the token can play the song [Snapster 2.0].

Sounds like an interesting idea, and it could work. Now, Cringely, you ready to put your money where your mouth is? 11:29:00 AM    comment []  

My next PDA is going to have built in GPS [Garmin iQue 3600]. 11:17:18 AM    comment []  

I'm constantly on the lookout for technology standards that will help me build better, more maintainable software faster. XForms is a standard that is being proposed by the W3C that just might be one of those tools [Slashdot]. XForms decouples model, presentation and data for web based user interfaces allowing for modularity and probably more code re-use. 11:16:07 AM    comment []  

Check out this guy's self-made backyard roller coaster [Jeremy Reid]. 11:06:59 AM    comment []