Monthly Archives: December 2008

Paul Westerberg – D.G.T.

30 Tuesday Dec 2008

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Paul Westerberg has posted three more songs on TuneCore for a mere $0.74, although I’ve not yet heard them, so cant comment on the quality of the material.  The tracks are the Christmas traditional Away In A Manger, Streets of Laredo and D.G.T. This does continue with Paul’s approach of putting the material out there for silly small prices.

RIAA change of approach – no more lawsuits?

19 Friday Dec 2008

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News articles are surfacing that say the RIAA after years of prosecuting or attempting to prosecute individuals for illegal downloads and attracting enormous amounts of flack for the manner in which they’ve persued the strategy, with numerous cases being rejected because the data is suspect or the way that the RIAA have tried to persue the cases.

The RIAA are now taking the approach that they will ask the ISPs to cut off the connections of people who share or download coyrighted material after several warnings have been issued. The problem with this, as we have already seen in the UK, that some of the warnings are not valid, and the ISPs are unlikely to fight back too much.

An article on this can befound on the Wall Street Journal here.

download Taxation

19 Friday Dec 2008

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New York’s Governor has started to address the down turn in revenue by starting to add taxation to items considered to luxuries, for example soft drinks, cinema tickets, and media downloads.  The question is will the companies providing the download services absorb the taxation, or add it to their prices.  If they do the latter then the tax could be seen to potentially fueling illegal downloads.

NME coverage of the story here.

Quiet on the blogging front – wave bye bye, say hello

10 Wednesday Dec 2008

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I’ve been a little on the quiet side on the blogging front, as I’ve been busy with work related activities.

Firstly getting SeeWhy’s first SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM customer up and running on a platform combination we’ve not really dealt with much before namely JBoss 4.2.2 on Red Hat Linux. Taking into account the fact that the installation included setting up the environment and a jBPM source machine the install went very quickly and smoothly.

Secondly, I shall be parting company with SeeWhy in the New Year for pastures new, and green (literally) as I’ll be going to work for Specsavers as an Integration Architect. The Specsavers interview process has been an interesting experience which included, psychometrics tests, stand up presentations, and technical exams, along with the traditional face to face conversation.

So in January I’d imagine that my blogging activities will be a bit on the slow side as I’ll be pretty busy getting my feet under the desk as they say with the new job.

Cat Power – Dark End Of The Street EP

10 Wednesday Dec 2008

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Dark End Of The Street EP

Dark End Of The Street EP

Cat Power has according to her Record Label released a new EP released as two 10″ vinyl discs or as a digital download. As much as I like having vinyl, practicality dictates I dont get it – as I’m rapidly running out of storage space, not to mention generally mail order vinyl doesn’t arrive in immaculate condition very often. So I have to settle for the digital option.  I go to the obvious places to try buy the download – Amazon, HMV and so on – I’m trying very hard to avoid iTunes as I dont like its ethos. However no mention of the release. So I use our beloved Google, and get loads of hits from dodgy websites and nothing from online stores that I know to be legitimate. what is the point of priming the music press if you don’t follow through? It does leave me wondering why is it the music industry is moan ing about bit torrent and Russian online record stores with suspect licensing setups, if when they control press releases, have strong relationships with major music retailors cant get everything lined up?

In the end I’ve had to conceed to going to iTunes, purchasing the download and burning it to an audio and then back to MP3 so I can listen to the EP through my Slim Server – very annoying.

Censorship Gone Mad?

08 Monday Dec 2008

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On UK’s Radio 4 this morning was an interesting discussion about the application of censorship.  Wikipedia, has been subjected to a degree of censorship for having included some album art work by the band The Scorpions which was released back in 1976.  The first version of the cover to Virgin Killer is a poor image of a naked young girl (but can be found on the internet if you want to form your own opinion), and the band where told that at the time, so made an alternative cover available.   I understand that it is possible to purchase a copy of the album with the first verion of the artwork, and tha art work has never been withdrawn.

It is worth noting now that the image concerned is no more explicit than Nirvana’s Nevermind, or Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. The only difference is that these two alternative’s are in my opinion artistically far better, but that is only an opnion.

However as wikipedia included the image and information about the  group and included the artwork the Internet Watch Foundation have been directing ISPs to block the page. There is more information here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(band)#Controversy. The crazy thing about the situation is both the uneven application of the guidance and the fact that it has only taken until now for the foundation to determine that the artwork breaches a 1978 act, and that other sites do not appear to be subject to the restrictions yet.