Year 2008

DRMless Europe

According to the BBC report, 7digital.com is the first online music retailer to offer Warner music sans DRM in several European states. This is not exactly true: Technically, even though you cannot actually download the tracks, the honour falls onto the popular last.fm service which started offering DRMless music on demand in the US, UK and Germany a few months earlier. Still, this is a great sign of things to come and hopefully the availability of AmazonMP3 in Europe later this year will makes things even better. At the same time, the success of Radiohead's latest release, as well as NIN's Ghosts I-IV that just came out --- and which netted $750K in its first few days through the sale of the $300, 2500-copy vinyl limited edition alone --- are certainly signs of change that seep into what one might call the 'mainstream music' realm.

OMNI: Ghosts

About three months ago and just a few days after posting my review of OMNI’s Paint by Numbers album, I was contacted by the band and asked whether I could write a review of their upcoming Ghosts album. I tried to be as objective as I could in my presentation and criticism, after having listened […]

Cube "Oblique" Live

Τη περασμένη Πέμπτη πραγματοποιήθηκε στο 'Κύτταρο' μια συναυλία των The Earthbound την οποία άνοιξαν οι Cube [on MySpace], σε μια 'ατσαλάκωτη' παραλλαγή του σχήματος, με ακουστικές εκτελέσεις αρκετών κομματιών τους καθώς και κάποιες διασκευές. Κινηματογράφησα τη συναυλία των Cube και ανέβασα ένα μικρό απόσπασμα αυτής και συγκεκριμένα το κομμάτι Oblique το οποίο αποτελεί και τη συμμετοχή τους στην συλλογή 'In the Junkyard 3' της μη-κερδοσκοπικής Spinalonga Records1
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Το βίντεο είναι κωδικοποιημένο σε H264/AAC και είναι hinted για streaming. Θεωρητικά θα πρέπει να είναι συμβατό με όλους τους βασικούς media players στις τρείς μεγάλες υπολογιστικές πλατφόρμες των ημερών μας καθώς και smartphones/PDAs/touchy-feely mp3 players κλπ συσκευές που δεν προβληματίζονται από τη μη συμβατική ανάλυση. Μπορείτε να βρείτε το βίντεο σε HD στο Vimeo. Διατίθεται κάτω από άδεια Creative Commons 3.0 By Attribution - Non Commercial.

1. Full disclosure: Για όσους δε το γνωρίζουν, συμμετέχω στην οργάνωση της Spinalonga Records και επιπλέον γνωρίζω αρκετά καλά τα μέλη των Cube.

Νομοθετικοί Ακροβατισμοί στον Βωμό του Διαδικτύου

Αναστάτωση έχει προκαλέσει τις τελευταίες ημέρες η προσπάθεια της κυβέρνησης να ελέγξει την έκφραση στο διαδίκτυο, ενδιαμέσω ενός γελοίου, τόσο νομικά, όσο και επιστημονικά ή ηθικά, νομοσχεδίου. Η αναστάτωση αυτή, πέραν της έκφανσης της στα ελληνικά ΜΜΕ (τα οποία δε παρακολουθώ και για τα οποία ακούω από φίλους) είχε ως αποτέλεσμα έναν σημαντικό όγκο σχετικών […]

DroidDraw

Android Logo (small)A first attempt at creating a visual UI designer for Android. While not exactly sophisticated compared to more mature visual UI design tools, it greatly simplifies the task for designers (cf. programmers). Worth a look for anyone interested in developing for Android.

Realignment: Complete. Almost.

The XServe RAID is no more. It won't be missed by many and was probably owned by fewer. Still its existence, along with that of the XServe were the primary reasons I entertained the idea of an enterprise friendly Apple back in 2003-2004. Admittedly not for long. [via the daringfireball.net]

Charlie says 95, Ars says 50. Well, I say 30.

The lunacy of extended copyright and patent terms, the most threatening aspect of modern society with regards to freedom of information, progress, innovation and business comes to Europe, courtesy of Mr. Charlie McCreevy, the EU's Internal Market Commissioner. What Mr. Creevy seems to completely ignore is that the European Union is a completely different market and a different socio-political entity to the U.S., where extended copyright terms are already in place and the patent hell has already resulted in a vastly diminished cultural output1. And while in the United States there's increasing concern among academics, lawyers and even corporations (with the exception of the few colossal ones that stand to benefit) regarding the country's IPR legislation, many of the corporations controlling cultural output globally are European and would certainly like to see things change in Europe too. Given the radical change that the music 'industry' has been facing in the past decade, a proposal for the extension of the copyright term for music to 95 years by Mr. Creevy seems like a thinly concealed attempt by panicked record companies to hang on to whatever legislative vehicles are available to them in order to conserve a flawed and harmful (for everyone, but them) status quo. If anything, the copyright term should be reduced and should be accompanied by an overhaul of the intellectual property rights mechanism that --- to this day --- keeps musicians from enjoying the wealth that they deserve by forcing them to share the vast majority of the profits of their work with dozens of intermediaries, IPR management, marketing and promotional companies (the 'industry').
  • The main argument here is that with a more liberal legislative framework governing intellectual property in the United States, the cultural output of value, other things being equal, would be considerably higher to what it is under the dominance of a handful of multinationals and the unabated commercialisation of the main forms of art.

Wifi Mesh: Μια λύση για τα νησιά

Διαβάζω από τον Παναγιώτη πως μια ομάδα παιδιών από το νησί του Αγίου Ευστρατίου (39.522°N,25.002°E) έχει φτιάξει blog όπου δηλώνει την επιθυμία της για ευρυζωνική πρόσβαση στο διαδίκτυο. Θα έλεγε κανείς πως στην Ελλάδα του 2008 θα έπρεπε τουλάχιστον να υπάρχει μια σχετικά καλή τηλεπικοινωνιακή υποδομή μεταξύ της ηπειρωτικής χώρας και των νησιών. Κι’όμως, ενώ […]

Nokia Maps 2.0β

Nokia has been after the navigation market for quite a while now. The free inclusion of Nokia Maps in some of its high end models and the fact that the application and maps are given for free --- with the user optionally purchasing navigation for set amounts of time and having access to updated maps whenever those are available --- was in itself a radical departure from the buy-to-own products sold by companies like Tomtom, Navigon, Destinator, Michelin etc. Nokia's €5.7bn acquisition of Navteq, one of the two major mapping companies around, cemented what was previously speculation about Nokia's interest in this market. While accessible and relatively economical, Nokia Maps 1.0 was not without its problems: a relatively disingenious interface coupled with slow performance left it trailing far behind its leading rivals. Today Nokia released Nokia Maps 2.0 in beta form, for free on their Nokia Betalabs web site. The new application sports a much improved user interface, faster performance, new map modes (satellite and hybrid modes were added) and a clear shift towards catering equally for pedestrians as well as drivers --- a very welcome addition, sorely missing for the most part from other offerings.
Nokia Maps 2.0 on the N95 8GB
To my eyes, Nokia has already surpassed many of its competitors in the market in navigation and mapping. Its inclusion of free mapping and (paid) navigation functionality in mobile phones leverages its dominant position in the mobile phone industry and might render it a trojan horse, its more 'traditional' competitors might not be able to counter. We live, after all, in the era of convergence.

MovieLens

Movielens is a great site by the University of Minnesota that was recommended to me by Markos. It works like this: You rate movies you've seen and it makes recommendations based on your profile. The more you rate, the better the recommendations are. From the little time I've spent rating movies there, its recommendations are great: it clusters people based on their ratings and as such it starts recommending 'good' movies almost immediately. Within the first 5 minutes of my registration it started recommending movies I'd seen and that I've liked. This also accelelerates the learning process as you can rate the movies you've already seen much faster than a chonological, genre-based or other listing might allow. In about 40 minutes I managed about 250 movies I'd seen and liked, several times faster than what's possible with IMdB. If anything, MovieLens represents what IMdB sorely needs: a good recommendation service.