Tuesday, October 15, 2002

News Flash!! New Wallace and Gromit content from Nick Park . The BBC is producing a series of short films that will be available on the Internet. Read all about it and view the first http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/2314339.stm It has been a long time since we've had new W&G. If you haven't seen "Wrong Trousers" or "A Close Shave", you owe it to yourself to rent a copy. 8:43:11 AM     O'Reilly recently held a geek's conference on OS X with invited speakers like Stuart Cheshire, Rob Flickenger, Dan Gillmor, James Gosling, and Jordan Hubbard. There is enough interest in OS X among readers of this blog that the conference proceedings (mostly in PowerPoint ... sigh) may be of interest. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/19/presentations.html 6:32:36 AM     So how do you follow the Divx act? Cinea, a post Divx player with the old Divx players, managed to get a two million dollar NIST grant to help prevent the taping of movies in theaters. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-961484.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed Divx was a heavily protected scheme that failed miserably due to a misreading of consumer behavior. I really doubt the piracy figures quoted and suspect other leaks are likely. It seems strange that the government would cough up money for something that the movie industry would finance if they believed it was a potentially useful approach. Where is Senator Proxmire when we really need him? 6:32:06 AM     The FCC recently approved the iBiquity digital radio scheme. Their site has some technical detail and other interesting information http://www.iBiquity.com/ there are still a few technical and regulation issues though http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20021011S0040 For those of you who follow codecs, iBiquity uses Lucent's PAC. I would guess this may kill the currently bleeding satellite providers. Digital radio might improve the quality of the audio signal, but it does nothing about the quality of programming. Clear Channel Communications, with over 1000 mind numbingly boring stations nationwide is going to be a player, but there won't be anything worth the listen. Sadly we are also seeing the demise of diverse Internet Radio even as I write. Perhaps eighty percent of the people will be happy, but it is sad to see so much potential extinguished. I'll stick with my iPod as a digital jukebox for my car and myself - the sound quality is there and the music is generally more interesting than anything I could get on commercial radio. 6:31:42 AM     WFMU represents the sort of station that is actually interesting. While it isn't a perfect match for my tastes, it always shows me new music (much of which I like). I doubt that a dozen stations of this caliber remain. The good news is that you can listen on the web and use their extensive playlists to find the music you need to get (and there will be quite a bit of that). http://www.wfmu.org/playlists For what it is worth I capture the stream and move it to my iPod for listening while I walk - a fine portable Radio! 6:31:21 AM     Lorraine, a real expert when it comes to the expert use of the human singing voice, points out an online song contest. http://english.art-song.net/CyberSing/ It would be very interesting to know how useful this is. I wonder if mp3 is sufficient. 6:30:49 AM

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