Mike Cohen

Today Unsanity announced a "haxie"

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Today Unsanity announced a “haxie” to get rid of the brushed metal appearance. Shortly after MacHack, “Adam Atlas” showed me a hack he was working on that does the same thing. I asked him about it and he said “they stole my idea”.

If Unsanity thinks “he’s just a kid” and they can rip him off, they’re very wrong. Adam is one of the most brilliant young programmers I know & he made a big impression on everyone at MacHack.

When I went out for

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When I went out for lunch I stopped at the used record store & picked up “Puritan Vodou” by RAM for $5. I love this CD – I expected something like Boukman Eksperyans but this is more like pop music with a Haitian flavor & a bit of Reggae mixed in.

I confirmed that my Cisco

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I confirmed that my Cisco Aironet 350 card doesn’t work with Jaguar, as reported in MacFixit. I installed Jaguar on a separate partition on my G3 and re-installed the Cisco driver & utilities on that partition. When I ran the Aironet utility, it wouldn’t recognize the card. It looks like I won’t be running Jaguar on that machine until Cisco releases new drivers. I was really looking forward to using that machine as a print server under Jaguar.

"Justin" told me the copy

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“Justin” told me the copy of 10.2 that came with his new G4 is slightly different than the developer seed version. Even though it’s still build 6C115, some of the file dates & sizes are different.

Morons in the News: Two

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Morons in the News: Two More Arrests in Miami for Vote Fraud. Two more have been arrested in Miami, including the head of the Miami Christian Coalition, in connection with Take Back Miami Dade’s attempt at vote fraud… [Morons Dot Org]

Isn’t it interesting that the Religious Right had to resort to forged signatures to get their petition on the ballot. Too bad I don’t live in Miami-Dade county so I could vote against it.

Reuters.   Music labels are pushing

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Reuters.   Music labels are pushing to censor access to Web sites (via Michael).  This is another VERY bad idea.  Checking my ISP (Verizon), and it looks like it is already blocked….

The world’s largest record companies sued major Internet service and network providers on Friday, alleging their routing systems allow users to access the China-based Listen4ever.com Web site and unlawfully copy musical recordings.

[John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

I’m using AT&T Broadband I was able to access it last night, but now I get “no web site is configured at this address”. However, I can still go directly to http://www.lmp3.net/ which that site redirected to.

MP3s are good for music

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MP3s are good for music biz – Forrester. Pigopolists should monetize P2P networks [The Register]

Forrester Research has surveyed a thousand music customers and concludes that MP3 downloads are good for the music business.

Twenty per cent of those surveyed – two groups Forrester describes as “music lovers and music learners” – buy 36 per cent of CDs, and these enthusiastic downloaders said MP3s had no effect on their CD purchasing.

“The idea that digital music is responsible for slump is completely false,” concludes Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff.

Forrester attributes the 15 per cent slump in music sales to a number of other factors. The economy is in a slump, there’s much more competition from games, from DVDs – which saw an 80 per cent rise in sales – and most interestingly – from the “limited playlists” rotated by commercial US radio stations.

Forrester notes that one company, ClearChannel controls 60 per cent of radio, so new artists don’t get the opportunity to be heard.

I’ve discovered some new artists – and bought their CDs – thanks to Napster. I would do a search for an artist I like, and when I found someone who had a lot of that artist’s music, I would browse that user’s library.

That’s how I discovered Senegalese singer Alioune Mbaye Nder & le Setsima Group and bought his CD. I’ve also bought CDs by Los Van Van, Capercaillie, The Pogues, and a few others after downloading their music.