Maybe it's just me, but these are the people that I hate when it comes to the music business. I love music, but I hate every radio station that plays music (except the local college station), and I absolutely loathe the record labels. These people are the problem, not the solution, at least as far as I'm concerned.Agreed. These have to be the same minds who decided on putting DRM on every file loaded to the player -- a direct violation of music released under Creative Commons licensing.
"Gabrielle," too, has been snubbed in favor of "Dysnomia," which is the name of Eris' daughter in Greek mythology.Just so long as you don't snub Eris. Bad things have been known to happen.
Today was Apple's heavily-hyped "Showtime" presentation, Steve Jobs's latest new products announcement. Only a couple hours after the presentation, the story is all over the web, and the details are still a bit contradictory from site to site. The highlights:
- There are a handful of incremental improvements to the full-sized iPod: Brighter screens, longer-lasting batteries, a $50 price drop, and a boost to 80GB in the higher-capacity model. I'm still not clear on whether these are considered a new generation of iPods. Nothing I'd go out of my way to upgrade, but if I had actually bought a new iPod a couple of weeks ago (instead of scraping in just under the 6-month warranty for a free replacement), I'd be kicking myself.
- The new 2nd generation iPod Nano is the love child of the 1G Nano and the Mini: all the features of the first-gen Nano in an even smaller form factor, with the colored aluminum body construction of the beloved Mini. Dare I hope that the true next-gen iPod might have a similar body?
- The Shuffle has gone aluminum as well, moving from the outsized memory stick form factor to a tiny clip-on rectangle only slightly larger than the control circle. The half-gig model is out, leaving only the full-gigabyte model at the same price. Looks like it now needs its own itty-bitty dock instead of plugging in directly to USB. Still, this is very tempting as a secondary player.
- If I'm reading this right, iTunes 7 will alow you to synchronize your library across multiple authorized computers using your iPod. I'll definitely be downloading that as soon as I get home to find out. It looks as though the new version will feature a number of UI improvements as well, possibly including the kind of album-centric view that I miss from my MusicMatch days.
- The iTunes
MusicStore will now offer new types of content: Games as well as the much-heralded feature lenth movies. I can't see getting more than a couple of movies for sheer novelty value, but a couple of puzzle games to carry with might be nice. Here's hoping Zuma will be a nice fit for the Click Wheel. - The most unexpected announcement appears to be the iTV, a wireless set-top box expected next year, for playing iTunes content on your TV. Meh. Maybe once I hear more about it, it'll have some appeal for me.
A year ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The storm surge on that day wrecked the house where I grew up, my home for over half my life, where my parents still lived. My parents themselves had evacuated, thankfully, and it took them most of a week to make their way back to learn the extent of the destruction. Vast swaths of the area where I grew up were washed away entirely. A city that I loved and romanicized was flooded.
That's just my personal view of the loss. Many lost so much more -- lives, family, livelihoods -- either in the storm itself or due to incompetence and negligence after the fact.
In the past year, my parents have resettled and started a new life for themselves. Other have done the same, or been able to start reconstructing their lives in the affected areas. Many more, though, seem to be stuck in a kind of limbo, without the resources to make a new start.
So much more I wish I could say, but can't find the words...
- "What hurt more, Sidarth said, was when Allen gave him a sarcastic welcome to his own country, his birthplace even."
- "...the 20 castaways for Survivor: Cook Islands will be grouped by race, with competitors divided into four tribes consisting of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics."
- "The church was 'afraid Joe might come with his people and have blacks in the church,' Stevens said."
- "Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children."
Well, that's what it looks like as the Websites as Graphs visualization tool reads, maps, and arranges the DOM of a web page as a graph. I can't pretend that it's particularly useful in its current form (though ading some mouseovers to show what part of your page a node represents might help), but it's sure nifty to watch working.
