Steve Jobs on the future of DRM...

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Apple - Thoughts on Music

This is how to install bootcamp and end up with one OSX Partition (NFS ), one XP partition (the preferred NTFS system) and one MS-DOS Fat32 Data partition that both operating sytems can read/write to.

Bootcamp, sharing data between OSX and XP with 3 partitions - Detailed (Long!) Version

Make's holiday gift guide - good stuff in there.

MAKE: Blog: MAKE's Mostly Under $100 Gift Guide 2005!

Interesting... from the blurb -

"DOT-TUNES was conceived by a group of professional musicians who use iTunes for storing their own copyright music and recordings and who wanted to be able to easily demonstrate their work to clients and to share 'works in progress' and other original compositions with others.

Share your original iTunes tracks with everyone in your home or office.

Share your compositions with the world via any web browser.

Only with DOT-TUNES - the ultimate iTunes web server."

DOTTUNES.NET

Much of what Eric McLuhan says about the social effects of the Internet -- and much of what his father, Marshall McLuhan, said before him regarding the social effects of electronic media and computers -- challenge some of our most basic assumptions about the fundamentals of democratic society.

Like his father, Eric McLuhan talks about many of the social effects of new media as if they already have happened. Indeed, a fundamental premise of the McLuhan perspective is that new technologies and new media create hidden environments whose social effects are generally not seen by most people until superseded by a new medium or a new technology. Hence, what we become sharply aware of are the effects of the old media rather than the new.

Visions Nov99 - Eric McLuhan

Headphone amplifiers are standard equipment for the average music loving audiophile. The problem with this is that most quality headphone amplifiers capable of delivering enough juice to power your big bad Cans can become costly. So then comes along some genius named Chu Moy ( www.headwize.com ). Chu created a monster quite some time ago by openly publishing his schematic and circuit diagrams for what became known as the "cMoy" amp. These cMoys spread like fire through the audiophile and audio-tweaker community and with good reason. Chu's creation is based on a simple OP AMP (operational amplifier, the actual chip that drives our creation), they need few other components (a few resistors, switches, pots and caps) and they run happily for a long time on a single 9V battery, not to mention that, assuming its put together correctly, they sound incredible.

Ah yes, the mad headphone science of Mr. Chu Moy.

.: Modfatha.com :.

This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. It was developed by the BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D team - for this project consisting of myself, Tristan Ferne, Chris Bowley, Helen Crowe, Paul Clifford and Bronwyn Van Der Merwe. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... (plasticbag.org)

Under the Annotatable Audio project, radio listeners would be able to mark and add descriptive keywords to segments of programming they want to flag for bookmarking or sharing with others. It means they could highlight a specific item within a lengthy bulletin stream and return to that particular point later

Public could help BBC to index archive

Microsoft Corp. today called on Congress to enact a new federal privacy law, a move that is sure to prompt lawmakers to consider whether consumer privacy both online and offline should go further than merely requiring companies to notify people when their personal and financial data is lost, stolen, or inadvertently disclosed.

You're kidding, right? What's in it for M$?

Security Fix - Brian Krebs on Computer and Internet Security - (washingtonpost.com)

This fellow has created a small, simple DIY synth that you can build (provided you have a little experience with electronics) at home.

DIY Small Synth