Link Catchup

Rather than flooding you with two dozen delicious linkblog entries, I'm coalescing the results of my catching up from nearly six weeks of highly intermittent net access into this one post. Here are some things that have caught my eye:

• "The war between the music companies and the consumers has been fought. We lost." -- Chairman and chief executive officer of Warner Music Group, announcing a CD-free online-only music label.
• "Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers" -- Chris Anderson in a post titled "Just Enough Piracy" that reminds me of Tim's Piracy is Progressive Taxation riff from a few years ago.
• Chris Anderson also had the chat with Bram Cohen at FOO Camp that I was hoping to have (but never got to because 250 people is more than I can have deep one-on-one conversations with in a single weekend).
• Javascript interpreter embedded in Perl. Nice! Use Perl for the rapid application development, then use Javascript as the embedded scripting language because Perl is Too Damn Hard to make safe as such.
• Handheld fun: PSP as Linux system monitor, Google Maps on PSP, and Doom on iPods. [Via]
• Build an ambient orb. Display low-bandwidth information visually. I want something that changes colour the closer I get to my next appointment .... [Via]
• X-Rays Reveal Ancient Texts. How to use a synchrotron to reveal writing once thought obliterated. I need this for my great-grandfather's tombstone. [Via]
• How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan is a review of a book you can buy on Amazon about how the Japanese so rapidly adopted mobile phones and incorporated them into their culture. It's on my to-read list.
• There's been a lot of talk about OS X running on Intel boxes. In short, hackers have worked around the DRM checks in the OS X that shipped on the preview boxes Apple gave to developers, and found a way to install it on any Intel box. There's been a lot of wishful "Apple will nudge and wink about DRM but they'll look away" thinking. Apple are a hardware company. It's just not possible for them to throw away their hardware business. Apple folks I spoke to at FOO Camp confirmed this.
• Visual HOW-TO for in-MMO activities. Learn how to farm craft in Star Wars Galaxies by watching screencasts from the game. Sweet!
• A three-minute MP3 would take 40,960 punched cards to store and 228 cards/second throughput. Now there's a project for FOO Camp 2006.
• Inventables is a subscription service that delivers new materials in your hands with guides on how to use them. Very cool!
• Jon Stewart fails to opine on the future of television. (Hint: it's all about the nipples)
• 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company.
  

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