The four students that were sued for hundreds of millions by the RIAA, have settled with the industry group for sums between $12,000 and $16,000 each, to be paid in installments over the next 4 years. For many of us who make electronic works (be it music, software …

NOTE: this information is out of date and is left here for historical purposes There is a nice hint1 discussion on MacOS X Hints that describes the formats and shortcuts for building URLs that link either to songs served from people's shared music or for searches/albums in Apple's …

OK, given that there are a wide range of opinions about the various music services, I decided to sign up for them and find out what they all look like and are about. My preliminary results are in the table on this site. Feel free to add your comments by …

An article in Mac Daily News cites a Fortune article in quoting an AOL/Warner executive as saying that they are courting Apple to provide the new iTunes service on the AOL service. Seems like a lot of indirection to get to the point, but it might be interesting as …

Nomad, Creative Lab's attempt to compete with the iPod has just gotten larger. One day after Apple announced their new, redesigned iPod with up to 30GB (for $499), Creative announced that their 60GB Zen will be available for $399. Exact specs on the 60GB version aren't available right now …

I couldn't resist this BusinessWeek article's title. This is part of BusinessWeek's "Byte of the Apple" column, that appears every couple of weeks. The author believes this may mark the beginning of the end for the big labels. I'm not so certain, but I do think it has the …

There is a great article (followed by some nice follow-ups) on MacRumors detailing the particulars about Apple's DRM for the Music Store feature in iTunes. The summary is that you are allowed to (as Jobs said in his speech on Monday): Play a purchased song on up to 3 …

No announcements yet, but a quote from Mr. Jobs in Time from an interview with Apple's CEO has the following exchange: TIME: What about independent labels? Will they follow suit? Jobs: Yes. They've already been calling us like crazy. We've had to put most of them off until after …

An article in Sensors1 (a magazine devoted to sensors and sensor technology) describes a new proposed standard for describing sensors and their data using a new XML dialect called SensorML. The idea is to provide a standard language for describing the sensors and the kinds of data that they …

One of the new features in Apple's Safari browser is the availability of the various auto-fill capabilities. These have been done before in many browsers, but there are some very unique implementations to the version that the folks at Apple have brought us. My favorite, by far, is the …

I know, you hate having to call your cable company, Dish Network, or DirecTV to tell them that you want the latest and greatest channels. The folks at The Anime Network (a network of, well.. anime) have made it easy for you to do just this. Go to their home …

The SBC frames patents have been discussed here before (January 28 and February 3), but here is a more recent and more in-depth discussion of the tactics from King and Spalding. It's not surprising that the folks at SBC (a member of the former Bell monopoly) have chosen to assail …

Since Apple's new iTunes 4 software supports display of album covers, we all need to load up our album covers into our play lists. A discussion thread on MacSlash discusses this very issue.

I'm a little concerned that the Gartner Group wasn't playing fair when they wrote this, but giving them the benefit of the doubt, here1 is their report republished by ZDNet. All the usual, variety is the enemy of efficiency (now, show me one single Windows house that has the …

Thanks to Amanda who pointed me at this page which contains a number of amusing filk songs. The Mr. Anderson one is particularly amusing, although Losing My Connection is good too.

In celebration of the release of The Matrix:Reloaded on May 15th, we will be presenting a special edition MovieFest on Saturday, May 10th. In keeping with the trapped in the machine motif, TRON will be shown first, followed by a break and The Matrix will be shown after that …

If you are interested in CNet's take on the new Apple music service, you can check out the analysis article. I've read it and I agree that the visible changes may be evolutionary, but the packaging, ease-of-use, and DRM changes are rather large. I was amused to see some …

IBM has released a set of routines designed to be integrated into portals that will allow for accessing web sites via Cellular (and presumedly other) phones. The code (called the Transcription Applet) is written in Java (of course), and is available as a free trial (along with some interesting documentation …

Intel has an article on their site describing "Audio Visual Speech Recognition" and the technique employed to achieve higher reliability in recognizing human speech. The kicker is that there is open source code available as well. Way to go.

A consultant using a TabletPC running Microsoft Windows XP has written about his experiences in the first 150 days for Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine. The long and the short of it is that he likes it, with some quirks. Especially for the kinds of meeting related and document review work …