Nosce te ipsum

Here's a story for my good friend Rob who was fond of the story that I posted a few weeks ago about the Coder Turned Bicycle Courier so here's something a little unusual but fairly interesting none the less:

Ride Along With a Real Verizon Wireless Tester

So you're probably sick of the Can you hear me now? ads, but here's a new article about a real-life Verizon Wireless network tester. This guy logs over 3,000 miles a month in a station wagon decked out with over a quarter-million dollars worth of network gear (I dare say the most valuable station wagon ever?). An audio file is linked at the bottom of the article that has a few minute sample of the audio Verizon tests with. It's bizarre! -- Originally posted at Slashdot. Follow-up discussion

Congress is toying with the idea of mandating one standard for all online music platforms.

Thanks but no thanks -- the industry can figure it out, said music industry and consumer groups at a congressional hearing about the plan Wednesday.

During a hearing to discuss mandating interoperability standards between competing music platforms such as Apple's iTunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody, lawmakers sounded off on the lament of many a hipster that wants to take iPod tunes to another device.

Apple's proprietary iTunes format currently dominates the legal download market, but iTunes cannot be played on portable devices other than Apple's iPod, at least without some reverse-engineering on formats. The Apple portable music player also does not recognize music file formats or digital rights management (define) systems other than than the iTunes format.

I guess no one bothered to tell them that the iPod supports the single most popular and important music format there is, namely mp3. Leave it to someone in the government to be one of the few people who actually buy music from Real's online music store. You can read the full article here.