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Geek (attempted) humor: Absolut Hacker.
- jim 3-16-2007 2:04 am [link] [add a comment]

Also making waves on the music front is the Slacker music service. It's a free streaming radio service, plus a portable playing device that can also stream over WiFi or Satellite connections (portable player coming "soon".) The company behind it, Broadband Instruments, has some big name executives from Diamond / Rio, MusicMatch, and iRiver. You can't listen to exactly what you want, but you can configure "radio stations" that will play particular artists you have selected, plus other artists that Slacker thinks are related to those you have chosen. The free service allows you to skip 6 songs an hour, while a future payed service will let you skip more.

Engadget has some more info.

Pretty big play. My guess is it won't work.
- jim 3-15-2007 10:18 pm [link] [3 comments]

SNOCAP Announces Alliances with Major Labels (sort of....)

The company revealed today that it would now be offering tracks from major indie labels like Sub Pop, New Line and Dangerbird. While this seems innocuous enough at first glance, I should point out that all of these labels operate under the Warner umbrella, making the announcement far more savory.

Perhaps I'm being overeager in my assessment, but I envision this as a key break in the DRM-dam. A vast army of listeners get their music from MySpace and I'm certain that, with it offering DRM-free copies of popular musicians, this number will grow exponentially. I'm confident that we'll begin seeing far more announcements from major labels in the very near future.


I'm not as confident, but this certainly is moving in the right direction. In a strange way the iTunes store might actually force the labels in the DRM-free direction merely in an effort to kill the Jobs juggernaut they unwittingly created. Still, when push comes to shove, I just don't see the labels being able to swallow the medicine. They're too used to getting payed.
- jim 3-15-2007 10:06 pm [link] [6 refs] [add a comment]

Funny diagram of programming language hierarchy. Wouldn't Python be on top of Perl though?
- jim 3-15-2007 9:26 pm [link] [3 comments]

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