b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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RIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Looking at the World Through a Different Lens
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Friday, December 27, 2002
OPML Outlining for Palm OS
Thorough and useful notes from Rick Klau on connecting via Palm OS and OPML.
Editing Radio Outlines on Your Palm.Thanks to my new Treo, info on my PDA is always close by. I'm increasingly reliant on outlines as a way to organize info, collect thoughts, etc. But one limitation was that I couldn't edit the outlines on my Palm. When the Treo arrived, I put a little effort into trying to fix that.
You can read the results here.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
For the New Year
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance." -- Samuel AdamsRIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Here's the next big idea for copy protection -- only allow RIPping to Windoze™ Media Player files. Surely <strike>these morons</strike> they don't really think this will work.Jacobs at SunnComm said his company's latest technology fits the bill, and it's being tested by three of the five major record companies. Sexton of Macrovision, which bought Midbar in early November, said his company will have a similar offering early next year.The goal, Sexton said, is to enable all the personal uses consumers expect from an ordinary CD, just in a more limited fashion. In particular, the dual-session discs being developed by SunnComm and Macrovision don't allow consumers to convert songs to MP3 files, the most popular format for music on computers and portable digital players.
Instead, when consumers copy one of the new discs onto their computers, they end up with a set of scrambled song files in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio format. Those files can be transferred only to portable devices that support Windows Media.
So the geniuses at the copy protection factories have decided to disable the entire galaxy of portable, personal, auto, and home MP3 players. This is a strategy? This is allowing all the same uses, just in a more limited fashion?
Even if the tech guys can sucker Valenti and friends into paying them a few hundred million for this brain-dead idea, it has about as much chance of succeeding in the US market as I have of winning the PowerBall. If this is the best they can come up with, the game is already over.
Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection. "For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits." "Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before." [snowdeal.org | conflux]
Monday, December 23, 2002
Looking at the World Through a Different Lens
Recently a long-time friend said to me, "Your view of the world is just a bit different." We were discussing how the convergence of new technologies is fundamentally remaking my old industry and none of them seem to get it. She's right. But the evidence is growing daily that I am, too. I've been watching the printing and publishing industries too long not to understand some of the basic, and fatal, flaws that engross both industries. Now if Gary Hamel is right, then at some point my different view will pay off in the right innovation at the right time. That time is getting closer.
Innovation Now!by Gary Hamel from FC issue 65, page 115
[...] My colleagues and I have studied hundreds of examples of business innovation during the past couple of decades. Again and again, we have asked ourselves, "Why is it that some people see opportunities and others don't? How do the radical innovators look at the world?" The answers that we have found can be summed up by Alan Kay's famous aphorism that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens. [...] When most people think about the future, they typically take 98% of the industry orthodoxy as a given. That means that before they start, they've already limited their potential for innovation to about 2% of the available "space." To innovate, you need to spot the absurdities that no one else has spotted, to ask the stupid question that no one else has asked, to take some existing performance parameter and push it so far that suddenly you have illuminated a new possibility. [...][FastCompany]
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Humor on the Dole
Her Majesty's favorite blog trollop, emilyd, shares some offbeat humor by pointing to Odd Todd. This is funny. Check the cartoons.Odd Todd used to work for BN.com and AtomFilms. He's unemployed and wants to get a cartoon gig. My old friend Dan Piraro of Bizarro might be able to help, but Dan worked cartoons as a sideline for years before going full-time. I was in one of Dan's cartoons once, but I can't find it anymore. Oh well, fame is fleeting.
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