NTERNET radio is still in danger. The major record labels cannot cope with or accept disruptive technologies, so they decide to use money and power change rules (or more more precisely—rewtrite the law).

This is an interesting debate because the same thing has been happening with proprietary software vendors (even though it’s a lost cause). In the case of radio, broadcasters unite and fight back.

There is no greater enemy of the music business than the music industry itself. Never before in the history of mass entertainment have we witnessed an industry who worked harder to destroy itself. Maybe once upon a time, music companies tried to expand their business and reach wider audiences, but those days ended long ago…and if the RIAA has its way, they’ll be gone for good.

Good luck beating the RIAA. I bet they know many people in the Establishment, so this battle will be a hard one to win.

T turns out that Larry King, whom I recently mentioned, is not the only technophobe in showbiz. Have a look at this one.

According to Starpulse.com, O’Reilly dubbed all iPod users “geeks” and implied that those who bought one were socially inept.

In a move illustrating how in touch he is with young people he spluttered: “I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod. Did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?”

Related: Ballmer’s iPod

The title of this post is a bend of the lyrics “I’ll live a lush life in some small dive” from the song Lush Life, which is among my personal favourites. Why did I choose it? Because it radically contrasts what I’ll discuss here.

When I go out clubbing, I like to experience change. Going out is about breaking a routine. Sometimes I go to rougher places where I can get my mouth dirty rather than a posh bar or a so-called gentelemen’s club (or anything akin to it). The type of people whom I meet is fascinating and at times even inspiring. It gives a nice break from the ordinary and otherwise banal life.

When it comes to literature, on the other hand, I don’t fancy quite the same contrast. Frankly, I no longer follow sports and ‘celebrity’ news. I don’t read tabloid either. Some days ago I received another request for my address, for a free preview (prerelease) of a book. The last time I turned down the offer, but friends argued it was silly. In hindsight, I should have probably accepted the offer that was there. It was a book packed with sophistication. This time for a c change, the book appears to be tabloid-style, with sheer disdain for George Bush.

I found the following article quite fascinating.

Songs we hear as teenagers tend to remain lifelong favourites because they become hardwired into our memory during a critical time, a memory conference has heard.

[...]

“You recall more memories from the period of 10 to 25 [than previous or subsequent periods] and the bump has a peak between 16 and 20,” he says.

“The brain works at its optimum in that period. It’s a sponge and it soaks up everything.”

To name just a few songs that will remain with me forever: “Tonight” by Blackstreet and a couple of renditions of “I Can’t Go for It”. I tend to associate — mentally that is — album covers with certain songs that eternally stay in my head.

S part of the recent crackdown on piracy on the Web,American corporations are using politics to subvert international laws and ethics. Firstly, they ‘invade’ Sweden owing to government approval . Then, they also pose conditions to the Russians, due on Web sites that they harbour, or turn a blind eye to. Bear with me as I justify my view on this.

“How is this related to Linux or the general theme of this blog?”, you might ask. As many people have said, it’s a demonstration of the growing trend where governments assist businesses, or get manipulated by them. As one commenter in Digg said (typos corrected):

There are many who say that “they deserved it because they are violating copyrights”. We could debate for ages on copyrights… but the reason for the demonstration is not all about the copyrights. When a cooperation has the ability to manipulate a foreign governments law enforcement and government into raiding a legal business (it may not be legal in the US but US law does not apply outside the US), then theres reason to be worried. Cooperations are getting greedier and worse as time progresses. In the last decade they’ve been trying to make as much money as possbile with spending as little money as possible. In the next decade we will likely see more corporations attempting to persade governments into taking serious actions (legal or not) for their benefit, and we’re already seeing the very beginnings of this trend.

I hope this post is not perceived as redundant. Linux/Open Source is often boycotted by corporations, even with government’s assistance (through direct action or legistlation). The GPL does not serve the interests of money-making, long-standing software vendors.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

N my own eyes at least, this story is pretty remarkable as it marks a certain milsetone. Sony, being a large and proprietary-oriented brand, has opted for Open Source solutions. The news has so far it has been covered in techworld.com and computerpartner.nl. To quote:

Sony Online Entertainment is to replace some Oracle databases with software from EnterpriseDB in a vote of confidence for the open-source company. Sony is the company’s biggest customer win to date.

Oracle’s acquisition of Open Source companies was not enough to prevent the inevitable. They even tried to buy and thus eliminate MySQL, unsuccessfully so.

O you know the feeling of listening to playlists which contain assorted tracks from various different albums? More familiarly perhaps, have you ever pondered this issue of volume shifts?

The sound becomes louder and quieter as one track bounces onto the next one. Balancing the — shall we call it — ‘cross-song imbalance’ is an unnecessary nuisance. This lead to a lot of manual intervention with the volume control throughout playtime. Should music players not have the capability to adjust this on-the-fly, before playing a track? Equating in one form or another the volume baseline? Would this be done better off-line? The latter option often requires that the entire track is analysed first. One wonders which players incorporate such functionalities already.