Amazon MP3 Music Downloads

Amazon MP3 Frequently Asked Questions
Which computer operating systems are compatible with Amazon MP3?

You can buy songs from any computer with a web browser capable of downloading files from the Internet. The MP3 files you purchase will download directly to your computer and are compatible with any system that can read the MP3 music format. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a tiny application that is required for purchasing and downloading an entire album and is currently available for Mac and Windows operating systems. If you use Linux, you can currently buy individual songs. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases. For more information, please visit the Amazon MP3 Downloader Help page.

Good news everyone.

** UPDATE **

I downloaded two songs using Linux. Works great!

You need a special utility to download an entire album, but that utility is not available for Linux (yet). Promised RSN.

Someone somewhere asked hadn't Amazon figured out how to create zip files yet. Possibly they don't want to count on users being able to deal with them and are rolling whatever file packaging they are going to do into a "foolproof" interface they supply. If that's all that's going on, it shouldn't take long. One less proprietary OS dependency for me (I've bought music through iTunes, but use Linux software to serve and play them).

Get with the program Apple! Don't become just another Microsoft mini-me! (Lock-in)

Years in the Making, Powerful Yahoo Mail Is Worth the Wait | Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD

Even though almost every comment submitted for this article disagrees with the favorable treatment given to Yahoo mail, my post must have gone over the line somehow. It got deleted. I hate when that happens, and when it happens I tend to become a bit bitter about it. I don't remember what I wrote now, but basically pointed out that the review was wrong, WRONG, WRONG! and that it read like a sales piece for Yahoo (which I still think it does).

Saying that doesn't make it so (in other words I wasn't accusing them of being on the take, just implying that it read that way) but having my saying that deleted makes me wonder just what the fixation is between ATD and Yahoo. It merits watching. They're independent, yada, yada, yada, but they got to get advertising from somebody. And they've even boasted lately about how frequently they write articles about Yahoo. Let's keep an eye on who wins the big banner ad sweepstakes shall we?

Succinctly:

(1) Only Gmail and AOL/AIM mail (which was not even included in the comparison) allow you to read your e-mail into any generic local POP/IMAP compatible reader without paying a fee (Yahoo and MSN charge for the privilege).

(2) All the e-mail systems under consideration now have more storage than the average person is ever likely to need. Only Gmail offered it first and the rest followed. Sans competition, Yahoo mails storage limits actually went DOWN.

(3) Yahoo's spam filtering is horrible. Again, they make you pay to get better service in this area.

(4) Yahoo is slow. That's in web mode. Comments in the referenced article indicate the POP capability is even slower. I have no reason to doubt that.

(5) Finally, Yahoo ads are obtrusive, annoying, and so bloated they even crash your browser from time to time, not to mention adding even more delays between screens. Gmail ads are text only, take up little real-estate, and because they are targeted, are occasionally handy to have around (for example taking you to pages that allow you to track a package when you get a confirmation from a vendor on something you have ordered).

As I've had to do with other "objective" journals, I'll be mirroring my posts to the WSJ and affiliates right here from now on. Heck, I may even cancel my (paid) subscription. I'm PISSED!

Second Life is trying to get rid of the nasties - Scobleizer

... and Scoble tries to free the stick from his craw ...

@24: You nailed it. (Even though your Vegas analogy seems to have escaped Robert's grasp.)

But don’t forget this is a long standing vendetta for Robert who isn’t so much interested in being a part of a community such as SL. He wants to be treated as a VIP journalist who is above the rules that others have to follow.

SL is a labor of love for the people who work there as well as many of its users. It’s a small company, and unlike Microsoft, potentially vulnerable to a media bully. I think nothing would please Robert more than hearing of a financial setback to SL that could be attributed to these all too regular pot-shots.

While I’m sure that all the decisions made regarding SL aren’t perfect, and I’ve criticized the bandwidth issues since the program’s inception, I also know that the people involved are not making these decisions in a vacuum. They have been involved and studied many similar programs that have gone before and are attempting to improve on limitations (like static content) that those programs still have.

SL was started on the premise that it would only perform well on computers 5 or 10 years out, and it’s getting there. It was promised to work on a variety of platforms and (finally) I can use it as well on Linux as I could on Windows or OS X. That last change took two years longer than they thought it would. I forgave them. If I were Robert, I’d be throwing eggs at their windows for eternity.

I also know that the economic system of the program was changed many times before it reached relative stability, and I’m quite sure that many other aspects will look very different in another 5 years. Child users were NEVER a priority for the company during the early years. In fact I seem to remember them saying they would NEVER allow children users. The kids grid was only added long after (in Internet time) the adult nature of the main grid had established itself. Unlike the economy, this is not a parameter you can tinker with on a weekly basis. Whatever they come up with next in this area, whether an improvement or a step backward, will have to be stuck with for a good long time. I don’t blame them for proceeding with caution.

Silicon Valley Blog: Are Leading Bloggers Getting Blog Fatigue?

Of late, I've seen signs of fatigue from a number of high-profile bloggers who are taking blog vacations, begging for guest bloggers to take their normal place, or in some cases, the bloggers are choosing to keep us updated in other ways - preferring Twitter or other venues.

Also:
Scoble
Calacanis

I read both Scoble and Calacanis (who doesn't post with nearly the frequency of Scoble) and I'm not too dismayed, or surprised by their throttling back a bit.

We live in an era of specialization and I think blogs are finally settling down out of the "gee-whiz blogs are going to replace everything" mode, into something more realistic.

The kinds of blogs that are going to survive as a money making engine are those produced by specialists who draw readers interested in that particular thing. As has been mentioned, that thing was Microsoft in Scoble's case, and in Calacanis's case that thing was... well, "How I got rich off of AOL".

Now they are both journalism school graduates I think, and as such, if any good at that profession they should both be able to hold an audience. But do most mainstream journalists write 5-10 articles a day plus handled all the reader feedback on those articles? I don't think so.

Journalism has never been a really high paying profession except for those few who hit the big time by working for either one of the larger papers or TV networks, or who write repeatably best selling books.

Now blogging COULD change that dynamic a bit, but I don't think the entire news-gathering industry is going to be replaced by blogging. Rather blogging will augment those other things.

Look at David Pogue of the New York Times. Successful book author and columnist. Now he also blogs, and does regular podcasts. Everything he does points to everything else. I never actually read his NYT column in fact until I started reading his blog, and then from that I subscribed to e-mails from the NYT to save having to check the blog which isn't even daily, and then I subscribed to the podcasts because I found them more entertaining than the writing alone, and his writing, is really aimed at novices and as such, for a true geek, more entertaining than informative. Great work by Pogue and the New York Times in building a "brand", whatever it is though.

That I think is going to be the formula for MOST people to succeed as journalists. You have to be comfortable with all, or at least most of the media formats out there. It still helps to be photogenic and have a good speaking voice, even if you can write very very well.

Now for people who thought they were going to start making a living writing a blog, reality is going to set in, or already has. I guaranty you if there are people making six-figures by only writing a blog in their PJs every morning, they aren't going to get tired of it (or if they do I want to apply for their job!).

I track a few hundred feeds via Google reader. Only now that it is keeping statistics on me, I'm noticing some that I don't actually read all of them that closely. Soon I'm going to whittle that list down a lot and I bet others are doing the same. The RSS feed may serve as the meat in my reading list every day, but that will probably get augmented by searches (some automated into my Google Homepage) that are subject based and don't lend themselves to a particular feed. I think the feed reader technology has helped many people zero in on what their daily list looks like, and that is probably making the long tail even longer than before.

For those of us who have always blogged (or done other creative writing) just because we enjoyed it (and not to make a living) nothing is going to change. But for those who had higher aspirations, I can see how "fatigue" would be a good way to describe what they are going through. If the blog is keeping such people away from some other activity that actually earns them a living, or if it is keeping them away from a normal social life (assuming they want one) then the adjustments are probably well overdue.

Civilization Watch - February 18, 2007 - Evil Fiction - The Ornery American

"Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated.

I didn't hate it because it was badly written -- it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable.

No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil."

WOW!

I've sworn off anything that can be described as "historical fiction", which includes a lot of movies as well as books. Even if I can't detect what the agenda is, and if I can then whether or not I agree with it.

I can't read nearly as much as I would like to any way and this is a convenient way to shorten up my list.

Carl Malamud to Brian Lamb: “You should not treat the U.S. Congress like Disney would treat Mickey Mouse”

From Jon Udell's blog:

What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” Mr. Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.

I wondered about that, but lacked context. Now Carl Malamud has provided the missing context. In a stunning letter to C-Span’s president and CEO Brian Lamb, which includes the above quote, Malamud points out that C-Span is supported not only by its revenues operating as a nonprofit business, but also by “considerable public largesse.” Taxpayers, Malamud argues, are footing the bill for much of the facilities, wiring, and equipment that enable C-Span’s camera crews to do their work.

Read the title link for more. My comments:

Great catch!

I’ve long been a fan of C-span and when I first got cable I soon found that I was watching it a large percentage of the time. I learned a lot of things about how our government works that were not covered (or were just plain wrong) in my high school civics classes, and now I find they don’t even teach civics any more! I tell everyone I talk to not to let another election go by without watching a few hundred hours of C-span (unfortunately almost nobody takes this advice).

In protest to the shoddy workmanship of most cable content I canceled my service several years ago and find myself much more informed about the world than I was as a couch potato, but part of the reason for this is that I still watch and read C-Span on the Internet. I constantly worry that they will start requiring some proof that I have cable service in order to get to their programs, which are in fact partially funded by those same cable monopolies.

I am of the opinion that all of the coverage of government should be in the public domain, and if the taxpayers have to foot the bill to make it so, then fine. Let C-Span broadcast those materials for the cable community and turn the digitized versions over to archive.org, Google, or anyone else willing to host them. I have no problem with C-Span selling the DVDs, CD, and so forth that they do either, such things are a convenience for many people who are not savvy about downloading, or don’t have fast connections, but for the rest of us there is no reason we should have to ask permission of C-Span or anyone else to make use of public hearings.

C-Span is at the same time performing a public service and, as your article indicates, possibly serving as a barrier to an even greater public service. One has to wonder if they have not become so set in their ways that they don’t want anyone rocking the boat.

Let’s rock!

Sirius Guarantees Radios Will Work After Merger - WSJ.com

But will there be any content for them to receive?

Solution to ID Overload

Here:

"...it’s just too f****ing bad I can’t remember my Yahoo user ID so I can log on to Pipes or any of this other “cool” stuff that Yahoo is doing. You say you want a revolution, well you can just count me out (in) only if you can remember one of the thousand IDs I’ve logged on to Yahoo with over the years of ignoring all their cool apps."

And here:

Well, I just tried to get back into Second Life to cancel my credit card. Problem is, I can’t get in. Someone changed my password.

The other problem? I can’t get my password. I think I signed on with my Microsoft address.

Are two bad examples of a real problem, the solution to which is known, and fairly easy to implement.

In the first case, celebrity journalist Gilmor can't remember IDs and passwords, so he makes up new one whenever he wants to sign in. Well, that certainly helps Yahoo inflate their user numbers for the "benefit" of advertisers. If you sign up for some new (as in new to the world, not new to you) service, chances are you can get your name, or favorite pseudonym as an ID, but for Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, chances are such an attempt will result in a friendly suggestion that you try something like "Gilmore4983" or "mac$beach_whoohoo". Nobody can be blamed for not remembering such monstrosities.

In the second case, Scoble has enough income that he can subscribe for months to a service he isn't using, and then blame the company for not magically being able to do anything about it even though it's the Sunday before a holiday, he has changed e-mail addresses, moved, gotten a new phone number. Secondlife has one of the better support systems on the planet, but he can't be bothered to even attempt to contact them. So, instead, he compares them by implication to Netzero, that has a truly deserved reputation in this area. Give us a break!

In days gone by, when there were only a dozen or so big names in "Internet Service Provision" it probably made some sense that you would get a unique ID for each of those dozen or so services. Chances were you would only be using one or two of them, and companies like Yahoo were sure you only needed one of them, so they set out to provide every possible service, proven or not, fully functional or not, buggy and broken or not, developed in house, or bought. Those days ended about ten years ago, but to this day, most ISPs (in the broad sense) still demand that you try and create a unique ID for yourself to use their service. Go ahead, try it! It's sort of like a game. "We have 75 billion users, see if you can come up with a short meaningful name for yourself"... "R6vnt_768x? HA! your going to have to try herder than that! We've never expired an old ID and we don't plan to start now succa."

Now for the solution. It starts with everyone, including Robert Scoble, obtaining a nice meaningful personal e-mail address for themselves. Preferably, the basis for the e-mail address should be a domain name, and that might be tricky too in terms of all the names already created. But the domain name system is far less tapped out than the Yahoo or AOL name systems are, for one thing, domain names aren't used as the basis for ad sales. For another, domain names expire, although you can register for 100 years or so if you really find a name you like. But while there are a lot of people out there who think having one or several domain names is the key to fame and fortune, there are fewer of those than the number of people who have signed up for free e-mail addresses from one or more of the above mentioned companies. Scoble owns (I presume) scobleizer.com, so he certainly should be able to use robert@scobleizer.com rather than a hotmail address.

Why is this a good idea? Well, that takes step two. ISP companies need to stop requiring people to have an ID that only goes with their service. If I am "macbeach" on blogger that should not tell you anything about my e-mail address, nor should it imply that I even have such an address at gmail. For most of these companies, identifying yourself as "macbeach" implies that you have an e-mail address by that name. That name also gets used for every other service you use from that vendor. That seems like a convenience at first. But what if I really like Flickr and I also really like Blogger, and I really like the MSN live web page system, it is very unlikely that the same name, unless I make it intentionally obscure, will exist for all three of those services.

Secondlife (while we are at it) makes you pick a first name, and select a last name from a list. I always thought this idea sucked. There was a reason for it, but not a technical reason. It was to provide something like a genealogy, except not really, of older names, and newer names, or something. Cute, but not really useful. I picked "Beach" as a last name because I was preparing to move to the beach, and since then the combined name has found a lot of homes, but there are a surprising number of places where the name is taken already. Maybe there is actually someone out there named "Mac Beach", but it isn't me, except in Secondlife that is. I also have short meaningful names at Yahoo, and Google, because I started using them when they were new. My name at AOL isn't very pleasant to me, so I use that service less as a result.

AOL has recently taken a half-step in the right direction. They now allow you to create a domain name of "your own" for free. So if your last name is "xxxyyyzzz" (sorry if that actually IS your last name) you could set up a domain at AOL called xxxyyyzzz.com (or .net I think) and allow your family to each have a personalized email address there. Half-step, because the "free" domain doesn't actually belong to you, and if you decide you don't like AOL e-mail at some point you can't move the domain to another service. It's also half-assed, so far, because they promised the ability to set up a family (or other small organization) web page, and so far there is no indication of when, or if, you will actually be able to do that.

Google on the other hand, appears to be getting it right (they didn't at first, but it's getting there.) You can now sign up for almost any Google service by using any existing email address. If you hate Gmail, you can still use most of the other Google services by using a Yahoo, MSN, AOL or any other e-mail address as your login ID. If you are not paranoid about security, you could also use the same password you use for e-mail, if you are both paranoid and have a bad memory, you'd better start recording things like this somewhere safe.

I did a test just the other day and signed on to almost every Google service using an external e-mail address. The exceptions (of course) are Gmail (for e-mail) and Googlepages (for personal web pages) neither of which would make sense with external IDs.

Imaging if all vendors took this step... I'd pay somebody (cheapo, or free if a truly open service were available) to register my preferred name (by the way I did this long ago, but I ain't tellin' what it is to just anybody until Gate's promise of "solving spam" is universally fulfilled) and then I'd direct that ID/domain name combination to my favorite e-mail service (and how many free e-mail services allow you to do this so far? I can think of only one) and I'd use that to sign up for all the Google services I liked, and if the other service providers would open up their name spaces the world would be a better place. TADA!

Can I do this with MSN? I don't think so, first, since you have to run Windows to even get to the sign-up page I'll likely never know how wonderful it is (although I've read several newsgroup messages from people that USED to use it).

Can I do this with Yahoo? Only sorta. They do allow external e-mail addresses for Yahoo Groups, but that's only if you are just receiving e-mail message from the group. Anything else requires you to get a Yahoo ID that you may have no other use for. They recently made some changes with the Flickr ID system which were unpopular, again, favoring the use of Yahoo IDs I would guess (I stopped using Flickr when Yahoo took it over).

AOL? Like I said they show a glimmer of intelligence in this area, but it is clear that their management shuffles make any promises they make for future capabilities suspect. My free domain name gets mail, and that's about it. Using it to log into almost every other AOL service gets either a cryptic, or just plain wrong error message.

How about the smaller players? Do any of them allow you to just sign in with an e-mail address as your ID? There must be some, but I don't know of any. I'm all sign-ined out. This wave of web services is (I hope) coming to an end. So many new things aren't really that new and are also not different enough to be worth even trying out, much less switching to. They current Internet bubble is ending with a slow pin-hole hissing sound, hardly audible, not with a bang, at least so far.

I'm just hoping that if there is a next wave of new technology, really new, not just warmed over, they will start out in such a way that everyone doesn't have to invent yet another new name.

We'll see.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap - Gizmodo

'You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you're making up the "bleeding edge" of "gadget pimpatude" but you're really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money. "Give me the latest version," you coo, hiking up your skirt another inch over your exposed wallet. "Point Oh One upgrades make me so hot." '

Hard to pick a best paragraph from this story. Well deserved criticism of tech media.

Peter Coffee Leaves e-Week

"Speaking of moving on, I said last week that Jan. 22 would mark the end of my time with eWeek. Thank you for letting me be part of your world view for these past 18 years—and make sure that your view continues to include clear cues for when something's about to break, with a strong set of options for what to do when that warning comes. Someone out there is counting on you to know how everything works.

Former Technology Editor Peter Coffee can be reached, for a while, at posteweekpc@earthlink.net"

I don't read anything regularly in eWeek any more, but I was sorry to see this departure notice. One less person in the media with hands on experience in the older technologies, some of which still haven't been surpassed by the new stuff... Virtual PC... indeed.

Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

'Clearly, they’re exploiting the lawless, Brave New World of the blogsophere, where, since they’re Not Quite Journalists, they don’t feel constrained by any of those pesky journalistic ethics guidelines. Like the one that says, “You don’t keep $2,200 gifts from the subject of your review. You might think you can still write an impartial review, but it’s highly unlikely-and either way, nobody will believe it.”'

I'm willing to endure David Pogue's wrath, risk my (non existent) journalistic integrity and accept one of the free laptops from Microsoft. I'll also guarantee a bad review of Windows and Office, comparing them unfavorably in every way with Open Source Software alternatives. I have nothing against Acer or AMD though, so I can't promise to pan those products. You can use my negative review to demonstrate that this was not a bribe.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Hey, today at Sam's club I noticed the formerly empty shelf normally filled with laptop computers now has three new residents. The top price was $900 and there was a quite nice system for around $500. Better hurry Microsoft the value of this bribe "loaner laptop" is going down all the time.

Can Technology Trends be Forecast Based on Book Sales?

O'Reilly Radar - State of the Computer Book Market, Q406, Part 2: Category Winners and Losers

Analysis: iPhone a 'wake-up call' for the industry

I'm glad they put that in quotes.

According to figures quoted by Steve Jobs during his keynote, 957 million mobile phones were sold in the U.S. last year. (That compares to 209 million PCs.) Just a 1 percent market share would mean selling around 10 million units, the Apple CEO figures—and that happens to be Apple’s goal for 2008.

But get this:

While it will be some time before the full effects of the iPhone will be felt, Apple has strong feelings on what its impact will be. “It will do for the phone market what the Mac did for personal computers,” Joswiak said.

Uh... and what exactly is that? This is one of the few times when I think the acronym "ROFL" might be appropriate.

I'm just about the only person I know who uses an Apple computer and I'm sick and tired of the fact that it is easier to use, more reliable (etc. etc. etc) getting absolutely no traction from my Windows using friends. If a Microsoft representative came to their homes to personally tread on their private parts they'd have no problem paying for the experience.

Apple "addicts" or "Mac Addicts", as they call themselves have true brand loyalty. But most Windows users are oblivious to what brand of anything they are using. It's "just a PC" and for most people it will be "just a cell phone", "just a music player", and so on.

One Slashdotter today referred to the US as the "third world of electronic gadgets". Do most Americans even know this?

What would be great for Apple at this point would be some new wave of American isolationism (not out of the question that this could happen, but I wouldn't place a large wager just yet): "Samsung, Nokia, LG, Sony and on and on, you guys all go experiment on the Asian and European market. Once you get something that works, bring it over here and we'll slap an Apple logo on it."

That must be the fantasyland (pun intended) that Apple is moving into. And once 2008 comes along and they've captured ONE PERCENT of the cell phone market... what next? Refrigerators? Window unit air conditioners? HEY! Office furniture! No wait, that's too limiting, HOME furniture! Your imagination is the limit.

Never mind the fact that there most certainly is going to be a tech retrenchment soon, and based on the "wonders" from CES, VERY soon, I think it's time for some mergers. Didn't someone let slip a joke about an Apple/Google merger? I think it needs to become non-joking material.

The most versatile company in America right now is (drum-roll, and in spite of my, um, non-fan status) Microsoft. Maybe this is Apple's attempt to diversify better too, but frankly, I don't think they are that well positioned. As dominators of only one market (online music) which has hardly gotten off the ground yet (really, when you look at the numbers it's peanuts) they are not in the same league with Microsoft. Microsoft is diversifying from controlling both the Home and Office software market to getting into portable devices (poorly at the moment) entertainment equipment (XBox is at least viable as a profit center), they compete in the online service and advertising business with Google, Yahoo, etc., and they claim to be moving into business consulting and a few other things (although I have my doubts still that they have the stomach for it). No American company is going to make hardware PERIOD. Intel and IBM have nice businesses designing chips, and AMD isn't going anywhere for a while, but in terms of end user products, we just slap the label on the box, uh, I mean we ask the nice people in Singapore to do that for us before they ship it to the customer.

So Apple, is a BRAND, and name recognition is a good thing. The Apple brand is a rising star as is Google, while a lot of older brands are sinking or stagnating. Marrying off one of these rising stars with a company that is otherwise in decent health could have some great synergistic effects.

Matchmakers matchmakers make me a match: Let the speculation begin. Who's it going to be? Apple-Yahoo, Google-Apple? Sony could use some diversification too at this point, and IBM... it's been a while since they tried to get into the consumer business, are they over embarrassment about the PC Jr? They could have course OWNED the PC business if they had taken it more seriously, was that failure so colossal that they can never think of the possibility again? A tech retrenchment might make strange bedfellows.

After all, the most fun part of the roller coaster ride is that big drop. Everyone hold your hands up and start screaming!

Update: I forgot to mention... some say that the BIG news today from Apple was their name change, from Apple Computer Inc. to just Apple Inc. I tend to agree. Maybe I should have just titled this post that way, but I got such a jolt from the two quotes in the Yahoo article that I couldn't stop myself from just linking it.

I even went over to one of the Apple forums to throw cold water on the iPhone thing and found them already shivering over the name change. Oh yea, more on names:

*here*

Back to you, Steve

Meanwhile, Steve is now in deeper than ever. He no longer is being portrayed as ignorant, he apparently had a direct hand in backdating, and - worst of all - the company apparently faked a board meeting to justify the process.

Hoh boy...

Meanwhile

Sponging off the same title, I wonder what if anything Apple will have in response to the new Windows home server:

*link*

Gates even addresses the Apple weakness here:

*link*

From the video... the good news is that the home server (I wonder what it will cost?) doesn't exactly seem to require Windows, on the other hand the set-up demo all seemed to use a Windows client application, there were other bits (like accessing it remotely) that could be done with a web interface (surely they wouldn't require IE would they?). The Q&A about Apple and Linux compatibility went so fast I thought maybe they sped up that part of the video, but the answer seemed to be in the affirmative.

Yes, it is just SMB, disappointing, but what else could they have done? Well, other than fully documenting it, eliminating any secret back-doors, nailing down some things about timestamp handling, you know... that sort of thing.

I still prefer the idea of some sort of generic box to do this sort of thing, but hey, if it will make life easier for all the Windows users I know who can't spell the word "backup" then I'm all for it.

Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 for PS3 now available for free -- how is it?

Engadget demonstrates cluelessness:

what have your experiences been like with the Dog? Has it been worth your while? We're still holding out until Ubuntu gives us the love we crave.

Hey!

Why don't you just go run out and get an XBox instead? Or wait for Windows on the Wii? A whole new generation of technical wusses is out there waiting for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.

Oh, THAT's what he meant?

Back to my nap.

Slant of media is driven by audience, not owners, U.S. study shows

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Shapiro put it during an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales."

But if this is true, can the financial difficulties of the MSM be completely explained by the advance of the Internet? Or is it that we are becoming a nation of illiterates? Maybe some combination of these things?

There is no question in my mind that the mainstream media deserves what is happening to them at this point. I happen to like biased media. The country was founded in a time when there were many small, mostly local news sources with differing, (and this is critical) openly stated points of view.

When possible, I like to read the same story from both a conservative and liberal perspective, and if both don't give me the "hmmm, I never thought of it that way" reaction then I've wasted my time.

Sadly, you don't have to read much beyond the title and first paragraph of MSM stories to know there is nothing new in it at all, and all too often the online media isn't doing much better.

Direct citizen driven journalism as made possible on the Internet has great potential, but also could reduce important issues to the level of WWF competitions.

There is reason for cautious optimism.

*Related Link*

Inside Microsoft's Labs

It's not every day that Microsoft Research opens up about technologies still in its labs. Microsoft's R&D arm was launched in 1991 with 20 researchers and has grown to 700 employees worldwide. Rich Draves, an area manager, shared with InformationWeek some of the most promising emerging security technologies on his team's workbench.

No. It's only on days when a journalist asks. You can get a pretty good idea of what they are up to here:

http://research.microsoft.com

The question remains, given the size of the company, do they do much more than "research" on how to keep their cash cow products in their current comfortable positions. My vote is mostly "no". But there are some exceptions.

Apple puts Intel chips in MacBook Pro computer line

Apple announced that its line of MacBook Pro notebook computers had completed the switch to higher-speed Intel micro-processors.

Sloppy reporting.

Viruses: The New Weapon of Choice for Workplace Violence Offenders

"A recent study sponsored by Risk Control Strategies, a threat management and risk assessment firm, found that an overwhelming majority of 223 security and human resources executives who manage between 500 and 900 employees said workplace violence is a bigger problem now than it was two years ago. As a result, 23% said employees have intentionally and maliciously downloaded viruses over the past 12 months. The study found that hitting employees in the pocketbook is prompting the burgeoning retaliation."

So, I wonder what pissed off all those CNN and ABC News employees recently?