thomas fitzgerald.net

Proof that the people at the top of the Recording Industry are a bunch of, I believe the technical term is: “A@$%holes.”

From T3:

With iPlayer already established as one of the most popular sites on the net, the Beeb is getting tough with any ISP that tries to traffic shape site content. Auntie has threatened to create a blacklist of providers attempting to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period or the maximum rate at which traffic is sent.

[Read BBC iPlayer gets tough on ISPs - www.t3.com]

Oh my God, this is hilarious. Someone took the classic 1999 iMac Commercial with Jeff Goldblum and slowed it down 30%. The result: Drunk Jeff. Classic.

[Via MacUser, via Macenstein]

Be careful what you read on the internet. Tech sites have a habit of releasing press releases and stories today that are completely bogus. Just remember, you’ve been warned.

How Cool is this? From Wired:

University of California scientists are building a distributed earthquake-detection system that uses the accelerometers inside many notebooks, including MacBooks

The idea is basically to create a huge grid of earthquake detectors using the motion sensors in laptops which report over the internet and could give valuable seconds to people about to be hit by an earthquake. Think of it like seti at home only for earth quakes.
[Read Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection]

This is a pretty funny parody on the MacBook Air commercial.

From Breaking News.ie:

People who send excessive text messages and emails may have a mental illness, according to an editorial in a leading psychiatric journal

[Read Excessive test messaging may be a sign of mental illness: US Journal | World | BreakingNews.ie]
You have to wonder what defines “excessive”.

From The Apple Press Release:

CUPERTINO, California—March 18, 2008—Apple® today introduced Safari™ 3.1, the world’s fastest web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers, and is the first browser to support the latest innovative web standards needed to deliver the next generation of highly interactive Web 2.0 experiences*. Safari 3.1 is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari for both Mac OS® X and Windows.

“Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.” The incredible performance of Safari, combined with its elegant user interface, lets users spend more time surfing the web and less time waiting for pages to load. Safari features an intuitive browsing experience with drag-and-drop bookmarks, easy-to-organize tabs, an integrated Find that shows the number of matches in a page and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information.

Safari 3.1 is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts, giving designers limitless choices of fonts to create stunning new web sites.

[Read Apple Releases Safari 3.1]

I didn’t get a chance to write about yesterday’s releases, but the announcements of new Macbook and MacBook Pros was all over the internet so there didn’t seem much point repeating. Anyway, here’s some good coverage from various sites:

Macworld on the new laptops

The Unofficial Apple Weblog points out some of the “fine print” on the new releases

Also released yesterday was another update for the iPod touch and iPhone, which nerds have dissected to find evidence of network support for O2 Ireland. I hope this is true. Despite a surprisingly large presence of iPhones on the streets of Dublin, I had been holding off importing one and jailbreaking it in favor of an officially supported release. Mostly because our networks here offer terrible data plans.

From TechCrunch

Amazon is betting big on digital media. This morning it announced the $300 million acquisition of Audible (a 7 percent premium to Audible’s $280 million market cap at the time of this writing). Audible is the leading provider of audio books in digital form, with a library of 80,000 titles.

[Read Amazon Strengthens Its Digital Hand With $300 Million Purchase of Audible]

Commenting on yesterdays story about Adobe Apps linking to a web analitics firm, Adobe’s John Knack has a lengthy comment on his blog…

“Every year around this time, the online community latches onto some story (CS3 icons last year; “Microsoft to buy Macromedia” before that; etc.) and goes nuts with speculation. The specualtion is all the more thrilling given that the affected companies are only lightly staffed right now, making it hard to provide a meaningful response.”

I don’t think that’s a very fair representation of the story. There are very legitimate concerns here and putting it down to random internet malice is not really very fair. I don’t think people deliberately waited till the Holiday season to break this story, it just happened to be discovered around this time. Such an attempt to shift the blame is a pretty lame attempt at avoiding the issue.

He goes on to explain a few situations why the external connections are made but fails to grasp that it is the underhanded way in which it is done that caused the reaction in the first place. He later writes another post where he acknowledges the fact that the network address that the software calls hiding as a local address may be a call for concern, but to be honest, a simple “listen, we’re not doing anything untoward here” mea culpa would have been far more appropriate rather than pooh poohing everyone’s legitimate concerns and those that wrote them because everyone should just…

“give Adobe the benefit of the doubt.”

Yes, because big corporations never do anything wrong what so ever.

(UPDATE) Fixed some brutal spelling mistakes on my part !

Mark my words, this is a story that’s about to explode…

(From Uneasy Silence)

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7. That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren’t running multiple copies of their programs

Except it’s not a local network address, it’s a cleverly disguised internet address owned by a company called Omniture. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Adobe chose to hide the address being used in this manner will lead many to assume its use is nefarious and cry foul. This has “Sony root kit” written all over it.

[Read Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies]

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Internet, Spy, Privacy

According to the Financial Times:

“Apple has signed News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio to a new online video-on-demand service in a deal that could change the way people pay for online film content.”

This could be very interesting and would certainly add life to the Apple TV. I suspect that this may be part of the Macworld announcements and hopefully a major update to the AppleTV

Amazon has added a catalog of DRM free mp3’s from warner music to it’s music download service. This is important because it means virtually all the major record labels are now supplying DRM free music. Only Sony is still holding out although I suspect that will change soon. Of course, many are already calling this as bad news for Apple as it still only has DRM free tracks from EMI and independents. However, I wouldn’t rush to chicken little the situation just yet, as Apple generally likes to make a big splash with announcements like this, and it does have a rather large event planned in the near future that would be far more in keeping with Apple announcing a similar deal with Warner than just a press release. Given the recent comments of Warner’s boss Edgar Bronfman I would be very surprised if they weren’t going to launch on iTunes soon too.

However, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they have failed to secure a deal with Warner, in which case it is still good news for Apple customers in the long run because it puts increased pressure on Apple to a little less arrogant and more pragmatic in its dealings with the studios. I know many people see Apple as a champion of consumer rights in these issues, but being a champion means squat if they have no content at all. Competition is always good for everyone and having more than one major player in this space will allow the direction of the technology to be directed by the market rather than dictated to by one company, however well meaning.

Still, I would hedge my bets that you will hear an announcement about this at the Macworld keynote.