BBC NEWS | Technology | Online music lovers 'frustrated' : UK music lovers are getting frustrated with restrictions placed on digital music tracks once they buy them from online stores, says PC Pro magazine.

- Consumers don't like DRM on online downloads of music.
- Consumers don't like being told where they can use their purchase
- Consumers don't like paying the same for a track on a CD as they do for the "near CD Quality" they get from online downloads.

What a surprise. As another poster said "Pretty much, the effect of DRM is not endearing nor encouraging people to purchase online. For one the quality is not on par with the price. There is no reason beyond the mandate that a song cost x amount that it should be so high. In this you see the majors are still practicing price fixing, even after being convicted of such. The DRM basically restricts the buyer and there is no trade off of any sort to make it worth the money."

Just Say No To DRM[1].

[1]DRM = Digital Rights Management. It's the software controls that prevent you the consumer from doing what you want with the product you bought. [from: JB Ecademy]

Skype Journal: Using Skype for a POTS Denial of Service Attack
Nasty and evil. And inevitable. [from: del.icio.us]

What if there was a system like del.icio.us to bookmark people instead of web pages?

I really like this idea but we're back into the digital identity sphere because people don't have URIs. Which pretty much means that it could only be done inside a YASN.

Marc's Voice: The elite insider's blogging scene : For those of us who have been paying attention - Joi Ito hasn't attended one of the 'mainstream' power elite A-list blogger thingies in over a year and a half. Neither SuperNova, Etech, Web 2.0, Always On Innovation, BloggerCon, BBS, DIDW, PC Forum, SXSW, blah blah blah - none of them have nee graced with Joi's presence.

This reminded me of something I'd thought at Etech. Almost everyone there was broke! Very roughly you could fit the ETech audience into 4 or 5 stereotypes.
- Employees (often BBC). Salarymen, and like almost all salarymen, underpaid.
- Industry Commentators. Scratching a living from speaking tours and articles.
- Startups. The days of VC funded apartments in NY are over. Especially at Etech, the entrepreneurs were in bootstrap, moonlighting mode.
- Unemployable geeks. You know who you are. Too bright (and sometimes too old) to play well with others.
- Post-Exit serial entrepreneurs. The few people who'd struck gold. These were the only moderately (or sometimes fabulously) rich. And most of those were on the podium. You can include in here the very few who had made a fortune from options along the way.

We've thought at times that Business Networking is psychotherapy for the recently (or soon to be) redundant. Which perhaps explains the large number of life coaches and freelance consultants that haunt business network sites. Perhaps the Blogger - A-list - Tech conferences are psychotherapy for unemployable geeks.

Then each went to his own home » Tags: Database schemas
A view into the data model for del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Longhorn is big - no, this time we mean it | The Register : Ballmer claimed Longhorn would take 70 per cent fewer reboots than previous versions of Windows.

So that's 7 times a week instead of 10 then. Tada!

Google Maps Standalone Mode
hmmm, much to ponder here [from: del.icio.us]

The very wonderful Google Maps now covers the UK. Some interesting points.
- Zoom all the way out and the world appears to consist of N America, UK and Ireland. With the UK a litle south of Iceland in the middle of the Atlantic. The rest of the world seems to have shrunk. And Mexico is alarmingly empty.
- Google's idea of what constitutes a road (or rather navteq) is rather different to everyone else's I've spotted several "roads" that are little more than cart tracks and may or may not be RUPPs or BOATs.
- Sad that the UK has much less satellite data than the US. The Zoom level fades very early. There's actually more detail of Iceland than the UK.

Daily Wireless - Belair Does London Hot Zone

Islington council have covered Upper street in free WiFi apparently running from the Angel to Highbury corner. Now I wonder if I can get it from my favourite cafe in Torrens St [from: JB Ecademy]

Wanted: Good Windows programmers to work on the Skype API

Because it's there. There's no money involved. Probably.

I have some projects in ascending difficulty involving the Skype API.

1) A toolbar App that watched the Skype presence status of the logged in person and their contacts and called a simple web service whenever it changed.

2) A toolbar App that watched the Skype status of the logged in person and their contacts and FTPed a GIF to a web site whenever it changed.

3) An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out

4) A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out.

I have a prototype for the first and second but I'm not good enough at Windows programming to finish it with out a lot more research.

Drop me an email at julian_bond at voidstar.com

A VC: del.icio.us : The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know.

Lovely!

PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth : By Robert X. Cringely

Bob describes connecting to three neighbour's WiFi simultaneously to get fast reliable internet access. In each case he's borrowing a cup of bandwidth! Now to do this he says he's got three patch antennas on a pole on the roof connected to three Linksys WRT54G running Sveasoft firmware and set to client on 3 channels. Then there's a proxy server/router with three ethernet cards linked to those and running on an old Mac G4. Finally there's a local DNS server also running on the mac.

I can't help thinking that there's some potential shortcuts here. What you need is an OS like Linux that can support multiple connections to multiple networks with multiple DNS. And a box with 3 USB ports for USB wifi cards and one ethernet connection to the local network. In fact a baby Soekris box or perhaps a MeshBox from Locustworld could do this. Or any old Intel based PC running Knoppix as long as it's got the USB connectors.

Hidden in here is what I think is the holy grail USP for local mesh networks. It's not to extend internet connectivity off the edge of the broadband network, but to aggregate internet connections for a whole street. Let's say that my street has 5 houses with a broadband connection from multiple vendors. Another 5 houses have networks but no internet. We should be able to create a local WiFi cloud so that anyone in any of the 10 houses can get a connection. And if one of us needs short term high bandwidth (like a big bittorrent download in the middle of the night) we should be able to get 5 times the normal speed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Daily Wireless - T-Mobile Brings WiMax to Trains is a good roundup of T-Mobiles experiments with providing WiFi on trains from Brighton to Watford. It also covers the work GNER are doing with providing WiFi on the London to Edinburgh line. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bloggerheads (UK) - A way forward gave me pause for thought.

There's something I don't really get about the current Election campaign from Labour. And I don't understand why the opposition parties aren't making more of it. It goes like this.

Why should we vote for, and how can we vote for, someone who has already announced they are going to resign?

Let's say Labour get into power. Some time during the course of the next parliament, Tony Blair is going to resign. If past history is anything to go by the leadership challenge and change will be bloody and messy. And there's no guarantee that it will be in 5 years or 3 years or even one month.

So Labour is asking us to vote for something that we have no hope of predicting and with an uncertain outcome. This makes no sense to me. So wouldn't it be better if Tony resigns now, the election is called off until Labour can agree on a new leader and we start again? Which is all about as likely as Veritas forming the next government.

Blair Out - Labour In.

grat.uito.us
me too [from: del.icio.us]

How to Make a Simple Curry "Anything" : Joe Grossberg
Me Too. Found on del.icio.us bookmarked on del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Looks like linkedIn have introduced a feature to mass message all your contacts. That'll upset a few people.

See the left box Grafitti. Does Ajax get round the traditional problems with refresh on web based chat systems? Are we about to see a renaissance of web chat all over the place?

The usual approach is to use IRC which then means a Java or Flash IRC client and they're all pretty nasty.

Uncle Davey gets a new MP3 player...? : I want a device that interfaces as a hard disk through USB, so I can use it on any computer I like, and add and remove music using operating system commands. ... And [MS] iTunes sucks! It really is awful.

This is a perfectly reasonable request. Why don't the iPod fanatics understand this? Let's face it, Apple is now part of the content distribution industry as much as the technology industry and their pact with the devil means they are deliberately hobbling their products to keep the other content industry players happy. Why? It's time a few more people stood up and said Apple aren't wearing any clothes. And he's absolutely right, iTunes on Windows does suck.

RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency

I'm not going to even attempt to precis this. Just go and read it. It's a study of the implications of 2005 being the year that oil production peaks. [from: JB Ecademy]