Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Hey, that was fun. I was just on the BBC Five Live Up All Night radio show – up all night alright, it was almost 3am there (10pm here) – with host Dotun Adebayo. We talked about Pearl Jam leaving Epic Records and its ramifications – the producer caught the …
Read More »Culture and Society
“Where oh where have my CD sales gone?”
With all this talk of the future of the music industry today, it’s a great time to read Jim Wilcox’s terrific article in Sound and Vision looking at the various claims and theories as to why CD sales are down: it’s not surprising that the record industry sees downloading as …
Read More »Microsoft Grabs “networked interactive entertainment system” Patent
This seems, uh, overbroad: If your company is thinking about delivering interactive video-on-demand cable-television programming or movies via satellite to consumers, maybe it’d better start thinking about paying royalties to Microsoft first. That’s because Microsoft has just been granted exclusive United States patent rights to a “networked interactive entertainment system” …
Read More »Pearl Jamming
Pearl Jam leaving Epic is potentially a VERY big deal – please check out my commentary on MSNBC.com: Bands come and go from record labels in a revolving door of euphoria and dejection, so when the news came out that Pearl Jam had fulfilled its contract and was leaving Epic …
Read More »Vanishing Record
Maybe my dad isn’t so crazy for printing out every flipping thing he does on the Internet, including email: Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and …
Read More »“Cryptographic signatures could be used to verify that clients on the network are trusted”
This is funny: not like “funny ha ha,” but like “funny ironic” and “funny your weapons are useless against us, dickhead”: Plans to build security features into personal computers to make unauthorised digital copying more difficult could backfire by strengthening controversial peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, say US researchers. ….Security measures proposed …
Read More »Faster, You Fool, Faster
Had broadband for a while? Taking it for granted? Does everything seem slow again? Coming: an entire movie in seconds: The Fast TCP system, designed by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, runs on the same Internet infrastructure currently used but is designed to be …
Read More »Ross Is Boss
The splendidly erudite, urbane, polymath, and wicked cool Ross the Bloviator, our fellow Blogcritic who speaks equally well on public health law and nocturnal jazz, has his ONE YEAR BLOGIVERSARY TOMORROW. All hail Ross and visit his site to heap praise and traffic upon him. I have spoken.
Read More »Rowling Reading to Be Webcast
The J.K. Rowling Albert Hall appearance will be webcast hither and yon. J.K. Rowling [will read] from the next Harry Potter adventure at the Royal Albert Hall on June 26, and [do] a live interview about the book that will be broadcast simultaneously on the Internet, organizers said Tuesday. At …
Read More »“They, like, don’t know anything”
Though the subject matter is deadly serious, this just cracks me up: As undercover assignments go, posing as a teenage girl online to catch pedophiles has its share of challenges for the typical FBI agent. Should he ever capitalize words in instant messages? Is it okay to say you buy …
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