I tuned in a bit to the RealAudio broadcast on Thursday and monitored it IRC session, but I’d love to see video, if anyone there is willing and capable. Mahalo.
A question for those knowledgeable about copyright law.
Of course I’m going to consult our university’s attorney, but wanted to see if this started any interesting discussions. For my MA thesis, I transcribed (in music notation and text) the recorded musical performances of John Kameaaloha Almeida. John passed away 18 years ago, and a couple of the songs were written as recently as 1977. I want to post the transcriptions as .pdfs on the web, but not sure if it would possibly constsitute a copyright infringement. Are transcriptions of copyrighted songs, with their inherent limitations and possible errors, copyrightable themselves? I’m also going to try to contact John’s…
Slashdot also points to an internal Apple document
that offers battery replacements for older iPods for $99. Good news for those too squeamish to open up their iPod themselves. Unfortunately for European users – this doesn’t apply to you.
iPoding.com points to a site that has replacement batteries for iPods for about $50.
So things are not as bad as they may seem in the iPod world. The video still is pretty darn funny, though perhaps not to Apple.
iPod’s Dirty Little Secret – An Unreplaceable Battery That Lasts 18 Months!
Boy, am I glad I didn’t buy one of these when they first came out. I wonder what this will do to sales. I hardly consider a $400 dollar piece of hardware a consumable or disposable product. The question now is will Apple a) make this situation right and fix or replace the bloody thing beyond its warranty, or b) sue the guys who did the video and make them take it offline. I’m guessing it will be b.
Watch your language if you want a home in West
This is cool. Want to buy one of these new homes in Connemara? You have to speak Irish.
Here’s some non-Userland documentation of Dave’s authorship of weblogging tools in 1997.
I only steal from the best. When I noticed the format Dave started using on Scripting News, I quickly mimiced it for my Hawaiian music website, NahenaheNet. The format is now commonly called – a blog! The earliest entry on this page is 10/21/97, but I know I was doing it earlier as well, but definitely after Dave started it. The link above is an old archive page still on the server from the days that I used Frontier’s website framework to maintain the news. Now I use Manila, and FTP the page over to my static server. So people…
What makes a weblog?
What really ‘makes’ a weblog for me, in the sense that was makes it work for me, and keeps me going back, is none of the technical or structural features, but the passion of the weblogger. Passion not only for the subject(s) that they cover, but passion for logging them. It’s not difficult to see if a person really believes in what they are posting about and ones that simply report on a topic. This is the difference I’ve seen on the political logs. Dean’s people seem to be as passionate the weblog medium as they are about getting him…
It’s not really piracy, its illegality is questionable, but does that make it right?
Dave touches on some good points in his essay on piracy, I can’t imagine the industry every giving up their license to make money, i.e., their old catalogs. However, his observations of the industry’s improprieties are accurate. The industry treats its customers like the enemy, and its artists like farm animals. While they are productive you feed them enough to keep them alive, and when production drops they get a bullet to the head and sent off to the meat packing plant. Some are mercifully sent out to pasture, and if they are lucky, maybe find new “owners” who will…
I’m looking forward to Dave’s piracy essay…
but to borrow a line from Don Henley, “A man with a briefcase steals more than any man with a gun.” Or any 12 year-old with a cable modem. The fact that labels are charging the same for old songs that have recouped their production costs over many thousands of times as they do for new material is ludicrous, particularly pre-digital material whose quality is substantially lower. It’s like a license to print money – you only have to buy the paper and ink and the rest is profit. I can’t imagine the labels ever giving that up voluntarily.