What Price PlayStation Portable?
"Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Portable, which goes on sale in Japan later this year and overseas next spring, boasts the superb image quality of its home-console counterpart. But the big question on everyone’s minds is: How much will the handheld gaming machine cost?
"The pricing question is crucial as competition heats up in the game machine market ahead of the holiday season, when video game hardware makers rake in as much as half their annual profits.
Yuri Kageyama. Price at Issue With PlayStation Portable. WashingtonPost.com. Sept. 25, 2004.
(Editor’s Note: The Post allows free access to their stories on the Web for 14 days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archives.)
Downloading Via Subscription Service
"Long before Sir Richard Branson dreamed of becoming the latest billionaire with a reality TV show, before he started his cellphone company, his airline and his record label, he sold music from the Virgin Record Shop on Oxford Street in London. When he began in 1971, of course, music was presented as grooves pressed into a vinyl disk.
"Today, Sir Richard starts a new music store, VirginDigital.com, this time selling music as streams of bits to be downloaded from the Internet. Virgin becomes the first major music retailer to enter the download market, which has been dominated by Apple Computer and other technology companies.
"What’s interesting is that Virgin is putting its biggest emphasis on its subscription service, rather than on selling songs one at time for 99 cents a track, as Apple and Microsoft do.
"It is betting that new customers will join its Virgin Music Club for a $7.99 monthly fee to listen to an unlimited amount of music from Virgin’s one-million-track library on their computers."
Saul Hansell. Music Sites Ask, ‘Why Buy If You Can Rent?’. The New York Times. Sept. 27, 2004.
See also:
John Borland. Virgin Launches Online Music Service. News.com. Sept. 26, 2004.
Sue Zeidler. Virgin Launches New Digital Music Service. Reuters. Sept. 27, 2004.
(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)
10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet’s First Decade of Public Use
"Ten Years, Ten Trends’ Highlight the Major Findings in Year Four of the Digital Future Project’s Study of the Impact of the Internet on Americans.
"Ten years after electronic portals to the Worldwide Web were first opened to millions of computer users, ten significant trends have emerged that vividly illustrate how the Internet affects America, according to findings from the comprehensive year-to-year study of the impact of online technology by the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.
"Year Four of the Digital Future Project (formerly the UCLA Internet Report) provides a broad year-to-year exploration of the influence of the Internet on Americans. The project examines the behavior and views of a national sample of 2,000 Internet users and non-users, as well as comparisons between new users (less than one year of experience) and very experienced users (in Year Four, seven or more years of experience)."
USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet’s First Decade of Public Use. Sept. 23, 2004.
USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. Digital Center’s Internet Report 2004. (.pdf). Sept. 23, 2004.
Conservatives Slam INDUCE Act
"The American Conservative Union, the nation’s oldest conservative group, has become the latest and most vocal critic of an anti-file-swapping bill that foes say could target products like Apple Computer’s iPod.
"The ACU, which holds influential Republican activists and former senators on its board of directors, is running newspaper and magazine advertisements that take a humorous jab at the so-called Induce Act — and slams some conservative politicians for supporting it."
Declan McCullagh. Conservative Group Savages Anti-P2P Bill. News.com. Sept. 24, 2004.
Spamassassin Adopts Apache License
"Programmers on Wednesday released the new version 3.0 of SpamAssassin, open-source software for filtering out unwanted e-mail, but the changes are as much legal as technological.
"Project leaders for the widely used software chose to enter the fold of the Apache Software Foundation to take advantage of the nonprofit group’s legal and technical resources. To make the move, SpamAssassin had to adopt the Apache License.
"Previously, the software was available under a choice of two licenses: the General Public License that governs Linux and many other open-source programs and the Perl Artistic License."
Stephen Shankland. SpamAssassin Sports New Open-Source License. News.com. Sept. 22, 2004.
Tax Downloads?
"Pop piracy should be decriminalised and the music industry should realise that efforts to stop illegal downloading are doomed, a conference has been told.
"Instead the music industry should embrace file-sharers, said technology journalist and author Andrew Orlowski in a keynote speech at the Interactive @ In The City conference being held in Manchester. One way could be the addition of a small surcharge to net subscription fees which could be shared among artists whose music is being downloaded."
Mark Ward. Call to Legalise File-Sharing With Taxes BBC. Sept. 22, 2004.
Interview with “Father of the Web”
"Perhaps for some, being credited with inventing the World Wide Web would be more than enough as far as life accomplishments go. But for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, it’s merely the beginning of something even more fulfilling.
"The man who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century is now busy channeling his energies into the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body he founded and now directs.
"Moments after delivering a keynote address at the SpeechTek Conference in New York earlier this week, Sir Tim sat down with internetnews.com to discuss the state of the Web browser market, the growth of the Semantic Web and some of the challenges facing the W3C."
Ryan Naraine. Tim Berners-Lee, Director, W3C. internetnews.com. Sept. 17, 2004.
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