Apologies to those of you who have received large numbers of emails from Ecademy containing an "EAP Report".

This report went live at the weekend and should have sent one report each week. A glitch in the code meant that the servers resent a copy every half hour or so. This has now been stopped.

Unfortunately this coincided with a problem with the mail server which meant there was a large backlog of email waiting to go out which included these multiple copies. Consequently we didn't catch the problem quickly enough. Sorting out the mail server and clearing the backlog then released the waiting copies.

The mail server is now delivering mail correctly. There may still be some mail from the backlog going out where remote mail servers were temporarily unavailable.

We're working on finding out why multiple copies of the report were sent to avoid this happening again in the future.

Apologies again for the inconvenience. [from: JB Ecademy]

Cory nails it.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

This was in an article about a Disney Exec saying,

"We understand now that piracy is a business model," said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood's most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. "It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We don't like the model but we realise it's competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward."

So how do you compete with "Free"? The answer is by providing "Easy" or "More". Hence I believe there is a market for 10c music tracks and music DVDs where the DVD is packed with extras. But there is no market for low quality, DRM infested $1 tracks or $10 CDs.

Free Will: Just the mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did

Consciousness: At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously and we're not very good at it.

Consciousness costs. Compared to non-conscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive. So how does it make us more fit to survive?

Leaders: Interesting to note how often sociopaths show up in the world's top echelons. The ones who succeed have become adept at blending in. But once they get there, they no longer need to try since people aspire to emulate them, making them perfect actors who's surroundings blend into them. (Hollyweird, then he acted like he was president of the United States)

That last one is disturbing. Pack Leaders appear to be fundamentally sociopathic, selfish and self obsessed. Like teenage males they lack empathy so perhaps they are teenage males that never grew up. While their ethics coincide with the packs ethics they make the pack more fit to survive. But when the two ethical drives diverge, the pack should kick them out and if necessary kill them.

Re: [xml-dev] XML has arrived :

Brother: "There, I've done the school news web page and I used Web 2.0"

Sister: "But the screen is blank!"

Brother: "Well, duh! You have to type the news in before you can read it!"

Offline messages : As you'd expect, this enables you to send messages to Google Talk friends who are offline. The messages will be delivered to your friends the next time they sign in with Google Talk or a third-party client. And when they sign in to Gmail, offline messages will be displayed as unread messages in their inbox. In Gmail, offline messages can be searched and organized -- just like instant messages in your chat history.

The guys at GoogleTalk development just don't get it and this is another example. One of the best things about Skype and in the current MSN Messenger is that you can send a message when the other party is offline and it arrives *in their* IM client when they come online. Routing messages into Gmail is not the same. Especially when you no longer need a Gmail account to run Googletalk.

It turns out Google can accept OPML for the Coop Search. Go to the admin page and choose Advanced. What they don't do is collect it automatically. You have to upload it.

Dene Schonknecht, the company's (Microsoft) media and entertainment alliance manager the earliest date it will be in the UK is towards the end of 2007. However, it could easily be 2008... ...We haven't yet selected a music store provider to build Marketplace in the UK, which means we're way off launch

Bwaahahahaha.

But wait a minute. Isn't teh Zune supposed to work with teh Urge, now they've dumped PFS and WMA-DRM? So they've pissed off the few poor fools who tried to build a WMA based music download site and now they haven't got a replacement can't do it themselves and need to find "partners" to do it for them. Do I detect a bit of channel conflict here?

So then we have the continued lunacy that whoever wants to build a legal music download site needs to build a new one in each market. So this won't just be the UK, but each and every country outside the USA.

iPod Killer. Right.

UK Political Blog Feeds now has a Google Coop Search that searches all the blog sites in the system. What I don't have yet is a good way of keeping it up to date. Maybe there's an API for adding sites but I haven't found it yet.

Of course, what I should be able to do is to just to point them at an OPML file. But that would be much too easy and they have to re-invent the wheel. I have the same problem but more so with Google Base. That system actually accepts extended RSS for entries but you can't just say "Here's an RSS feed" and have them read it. You have to FTP the feed to them and include all previous entries in the feed. It's a bulk upload, not an incremental upload.

If anyone wants to help contribute, feel free to volunteer through the Coop Search Home Page.

And BTW. I've got yet another profile to fill out for the account that owns the Coop Search engine. And the form for uploading a photo is broken. It respondes with Bad Request Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request. with both IE6 and FF2

I could really use some technique for being a full peer in Skype so that file transfers were quick but without being a supernode. My PC is getting random slow downs and kicking it's fan into action and every time this happens, Skype is using 30%-50% CPU which suggests it's relaying something for somebody.

People tell me that going to tools, options, connection and turning off "use 80 and 443 for alternate connections" prevents you from beinga supernode but it definitely doesn't work.

And why are relayed file transfers so slow?

Locale is one of the neater mashups I've seen. It collects shopping, museums, cafes, around a postcode and generates a day's worth of activities. Guess it might encourage you to do things and g to places you wouldn't have otherwise thought of.

Google and the Gradient

So now you've got all the bright, smart young things who want to start companies starting them on your servers, with clear and unambiguous incentives: get traffic, get paid.

Woo. Great, great post. Especially when I've just written about Incubator 2.0.

Of course, it's not going to happen because Google doesn't listen to the outside world.

The Internet startup screen in the UK is clearly ramping up. And predictably, getting seed and angel capital in the UK is as hard as ever.

So maybe it's time for the re-emergence of the Internet Incubator. Let's call it Incubator 2.0.

GorillaPark, GlassHouse, AntFactory, where are you now?

So what would an Incubator 2.0 look like? Would it encourage everyone to work from home? Provide hosting, accountancy, graphic design, PR services?

ITV News - Hacker cracks iTunes code

Trying to get my head round this. I think it means.

1) A company could create a music store that sold AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes which would then play in iTunes and on an iPod.

2) A company could create a music player that played AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes bought from iTMS

And somewhere in there, a customer could take AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes from anywhere, strip the DRM and play it on anything that supports AAC but that's not what DVD John is selling.

What's the deal for Apple? Well if any company actually does any of this they've lost their virtous circle lock in on the iPod and they have to compete purely on their ability to design and ship a quality product. Arguably option 1) doesn't actually affect them much and actually makes the iPod more attractive. Any competitor selling tracks will have to get music company approval although they may be able to undercut iTMS. But even if iTMS sales drops to zero, it doesn't make any money.

But option 2 would make it easier for someone like Creative to compete directly with the iPod with no downside. And I think Creative is just the company to do it given that they must be upset with Microsoft for making PFS obsolete. The iPod is where all the money is. So that's where the lawsuits will come.

So then we have Microsoft. Will they license the Zune DRM to Creative? Because then Creative can build a player that works with all major formats and all major DRMs. Something neither Apple or Microsoft are likely to be able to bring themselves to do.

And of course all DRM is evil. But DRM from a single supplier is even more evil.

Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds
[from: del.icio.us]

Don't you just love Government Catch-22s

Boing Boing: No-Fly lists even dumber than suspected : Even worse, because the gargantuan lists have to be widely circulated, the CIA won't allow the names of actual terrorist suspects to be added to them -- in other words, the No Fly lists only contain the names of people who aren't under any serious suspicion.

So. If you're a terrorist you're not on the list and so you're allowed to fly. But if you're not a terrorist you could be on the list which will stop you flying because you might be a terrorist. In which case you couldn't be on the list and so...

Other Advertising Networks Besides Google AdSense
Could come in handy? [from: del.icio.us]

Project FindMusic
Mostly works, but not so good for obscure artists [from: del.icio.us]

Plastic: Why Is Our Universe Just Right? is the classic problem of why our universe seems to be perfectly poised with every fundamental constant just right for the universe to be the way it is and so for us to appear to see it.

But this is what really happened.

God was lonely and had nobody to talk to. She tried creating somebody but as she was all knowing, all powerful and everywhere, the creation was part of her so she was just talking to herself. And she could do that without all that creation nonsense.

So she cleared a space where she wasn't. An empty void. Then she broke off a tiny piece of herself and dropped it into the void where she wasn't. There was a small bang but it fizzled out and nothing came of it. She tried again and again, tweaking the initial conditions an unimaginable number of times for aeons and aeons, until finally there was a Big Bang and our universe came into existence.

Now at last, God had a chance of somebody appearing to talk to. She just had to wait and wait for a thing to appear in the universe that could reach out and talk back across the space she had cleared in herself.

So there you have it. The universe is the way it is because God kept trying until it turned out just this way. And it's screwed up because she's not here. And our challenge is to contact and talk to her through the void and to give her some company. And if that doesn't happen, she'll just try again with another set of initial conditions until it does.

A comment caught my eye in the middle of this rant : "I've been looking for a good verb to describe losing all of your music to DRM because it's increasingly common and I think I have one: zune."

What about the iPod? Shouldn't we be worrying about that instead?

iPod doesn't seem to work as a verb. My music has all been ipodded. has the wrong sense.

How about Gah, the iPod ate all my music. Or Sigh, my iPod broke and I lost all my music. Or I plugged my iPod into someone else's computer and now all my music has gone.

I still can't find out how you are supposed to get usic off your computer and into the Zune. It apparently doesn't use or support PlaysForSure. But does it still use MTP? We're just beginning to get 3rd party support for MTP in things like Winamp and for those of us who are non-Ipod people stuck with a PFS/MTP player, it would be a shame if Microsoft ditched it completely. I guess this probably involves WMP v11 but we're already hearing about issues with WMP11 refusing to do firmware uploads on PFS hardware.

All this stuff must be seriously pissing off people like Creative, Toshiba and Samsung. They thought Microsoft would help them write the software and provide something to challenge iTMS. INstead they've been screwed. However there is a solution for them that is good for the consumer. They should turn their backs on DRM and build a machine with plain old USB mass storage and specifically designed to run Rockbox. And then give a 10th of the money they would have spent on Microsoft licenses to fund the Rockbox team.