iDallas!

Allofmp3.com has been selling unrestricted music downloads in a variety of formats for about 4 to 10 cents per song for a few years now. It’s a Russia-based business which claims to have legal rights to sell the music in this way to Russian citizens for personal use. Of course, they don’t do anything to verify that their customers are Russian and the site is available in English and fully usable by any English-speaker. It looks like the Russian authorities may drop the proverbial hatchet on the service and force them to pay copyright fees for the music they have sold. It will be interesting to see how this plays out!

If you feel like you are falling farther and farther behind your children in your understanding of technology and the Internet, you probably are! The first step in understanding the kids of today is learning to communicate with them. This guide should help you get started by revealing some of the common slang used in reference to computers and the Internet. It explains the meanings of coded words like !337$p34k and pwn3d and provides a clear description of key ways to decode other words and make up your own new ones.

My first real computer was a Commodore Amiga 500 way back in 1988 or so. At that time I had no idea about the underlying technical awesomeness that was the Amiga, but I did know that all of my friends’ PCs and Macs looked pretty stupid compared to my Amiga. I remember wondering why anyone would buy anything but an Amiga. My family never bought another Amiga after that first one (though that one did last something like 7 years!) and pretty much no one else did either and the Amiga platform has been basically dead ever since. There have always been rumors that it might return one day and now it seems to have actually happened. The whole history of the platform is pretty amazing even if you don’t read through the whole article. I’m not quite ready to be an early adopter, but it sure is tempting. Anyway, read on.

The bankruptcy and closure of what may be the last pro-level manufacturer of analog audio tape in the world may be the beginning of the end for analog audio. The plant employed about 250 employees and in its heyday employed around 1,800 workers. Musicians and producers all over the world are scrambling to stockpile the last reels of unused analog tape available. I’ve never used analog tape much myself, but this may be the end of an era and that’s always accompanied by a bit of sadness. The ramifications of this go beyond music, too. Here’s more from NPR.

Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who reported on the connection between the CIA and the crack trade in Los Angeles, shot himself a couple weeks back. Those articles he wrote back in 1996 struck some nerves and several notable newspapers worked hard to discredit him and his reporting. They succeeded and his career was destroyed. Since then the bulk of his findings were have been admitted to by the CIA itself, but the LA Times completely failed to mention that in his obituary. Instead they took the opportunity to discredit him further. Sad sad sad.

Yamaha, known for making motorcycles and jetskis, as well as lots of musical instruments and professional audio gear, is buying Steinberg, the company behind music software Cubase and Nuendo. Cubase and Nuendo are notably the last cross-platform PC and Mac digital audio workstation (DAW) applications out there, other than the venerable ProTools which can only be purchased along with their hardware. The other two major audio and midi applications (Logic Pro and Digital Performer) are both Mac-only. There’s some other notable applications that are cross-platform, but Cubase/Nuendo, Performer and Logic are the ‘Big 3’. This move puts Yamaha directly in competition with Apple, who owns Emagic and their Logic software (now called Logic Pro and branded as an Apple product). I suspect Yamaha wants the software technology as a complement to their range of digital audio hardware, but we’ll see what happens!