For those of us who seldom show interest in Proton collisions at this time of the year, the coming red-button day at the CERN might have escaped our attention. The fact that a circular tunnel 27 kilometres long under the Swiss / French border will be used this summer to recreate Big Bang conditions pulling the veil once and for all on the elusive ‘God Particle‘; maybe a few extra dimensions as well for the taking; not to mention the true nature of dark matter and dark energy; might not have drawn a cocked eyebrow from where you’re standing.
Faire enough. Each to his own.
But the technology fall-out from the LHC vundertube will, in the long run, produce something that’s a little closer to your [visible] planet, believe methem. How abooouut… an Interneeet… thaat’s
“10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds…In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so….Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate”.
What d’yer mean ‘not that old chesnut’?! It’s coming. It’s on its way I tell yer.
Radiohead have started a music video competition called the In Rainbows Contest over at independent video animation site AniBoom. It started two days ago - Monday 17th March - and storyboards can be sent in up until April 27.
Outline: Submitted work will be rated by the Aniboom community who will choose the 10 semi-finalists that receive $1,000 to create a one minute video based on their storyboard. These 10 will be judged by the members of Radiohead to pick the winner who gets a $10, 000 budget to produce the video for the band, in June. Competition details.
You can listen to all the songs on the In Rainbows album over on the contest page and choose any song for your video.
As they say on the site it’s a “…unique chance to work with one of the world’s most groundbreaking bands and get invaluable recognition” - so get busy why dont yeh?
Quaero - ring any bells? In a word it’s the former European Google-Killer turned Gallic pied de nez (cock-a-snook). There are those that have said it’s more like a bottomless money-pit which will never amount to much. There are also those that are willing to throw money into it like there is no tomorrow. But we still aren’t very likely to see Quaero surfacing any day soon I’m afraid, regardless of the European commission green-light just given for a 99 million €uros funding program from France. A program that will represent in all - 199 million € over a five year period. Europa Press Release.
This things been money hungry since conception back in 2005, so bon appetit Quaero, put it to good use because as soon as you’re out of the wood shed - you’re just a word an’ a click away from raining critics or sunny praises - which shall it be I wonder?
CitiZen L has some interesting counter-points (in french) to Loic Lemeur’s list of 10 reasons Quaero will fail
The next stage in the evolution of the mobile web has become clearer [this] … announcement is a powerful message to the internet industry. Because Nokia’s phones, and specifically those running the S60 operating system, have a dominant place in the market, with more than 53% of the market share.
It means that Silverlight could well become the standard platform for web development on a phone and that in turn could have a knock on effect on the PC because smartphone sales will overtake laptop sales any day now.
Fair enough, if it was an exclusive deal - but it isn’t. In Nokia’s own words they are: “Adding support for Silverlight” which “will extend opportunities for developers”
Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java(TM) language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.
Homes in Paris are to be fitted out with fibre optic relayed Internet connections that will cost 1 € (1,19 with tax) a month for each household connected. This has got to be the cheapest deal in Europe at the moment, no?
It’s part & parcel of the “crossing the digital divide…we want to turn Paris into a digital city” bonanza promised by the Mayor a couple of years back, this ‘triple play’ offer (net, tv & rent free phone line) will be available soon to 100,000 HLM accommodations. [HLM = habitation à loyer modéré, sort of council/private housing where the rent is guaranteed to stay moderate].
Two downsides to it so far, bandwidth capped at a measly 512 kbps and no choice when it comes to the ISP. There will be options to upgrade the bandwidth later on I would hope.
With shake-ups and shake-downs fast becoming monnaie courante in the online music world, music discovery service Last.fm have shook a leg once again:
launching its on-demand service in the US, UK and Germany immediately, [Last.fm] plans to roll it out globally over the coming months…’the world’s biggest free music service‘.
The service allows anyone to tap into the entire back catalogue of the big four, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner plus more than 150,000 independents labels. All tracks and albums can be listened to 3 times over until the ‘buy it?’ button cometh.
That’s one angle on Free-and-Legal by a hosted music service. Short ads preceding each song is another broad-shot, as proposed by UK company, We7 for example, who have an interesting angle - every month you can take the ads off 20 songs, and/or pay 20 pence (35 cents) to remove ads from extra tracks. Third party hosting and playable search is another shot, like Seeqpod. Or the new Songza - music streaming/search engine, brainchild of 23 year old Aza Raskin son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin, which offers independent artists their tracks featured on the site’s recommended page for 24 hours (40,000 unique visitors a day) for 99 cents. They only kicked off last november and already have a library of over 28 million songs! No fee, no subscription.
Then “Free and Legal Music Downloads Have Arrived” announced ReadWriteWeb yesterday (not heard that before), with the launch of Qtrax (set for today - site down as of writing). Touted as the world’s first free and legal P2P file-sharing network that has the full support of the gang-of-four.
UPDATE:
The service, Qtrax, boasted it would carry up to 30 million tracks from “all the major labels”.
But Warner, EMI and Universal all say they have not licensed their music. #BBC
There will of course always be illegal ways of finding and downloading music but with countries like France ready to hausse le tone, your average houshold will one day need more alternatives:
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said that “tens of billions” of songs were illegally downloaded in 2007, and that the ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold was about 20 to 1.
The trade organization called on Internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect file-swappers and install filters, and pointed to recent actions along those lines taken by France’s president, Nicholas Sarkozy.
There is only one acceptable moment for ISPs to start taking responsibility for protecting content — and that moment is now. After years of prevarication in the discussion, the French government’s decision to seize the day is deeply refreshing,” said IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy. #
Fans get a chance to have their say on managing an English football club. The Beeb’s sport page is reporting that myfootbalclub.com, [the site has crashed at the minute] a community site launched in April, has mustered £700,000 already, enough to buy control over the non-league club, Ebbsfleet United! How’s that for crowdsourcing. 20, 000 paid -up members (£35 plus a similar annual sub.) will be having a say on the team line-up, transfers and other major decisions.
Mentioned in the last post, nearly all the free wi-fi access points promised by the Mayor of Paris, are now up and waving.
Gripe: the official Paris Wi-Fi site is not very helpful for finding a ‘borne‘ in your immediate…, there is a list with links to zoomable aerial photo views of the corresponding hotspot, not quite the intuitive - drag it around and toggle the street/hybrid map - that we’ve gotten used to. ‘Someone should Gmap mashit’, shouts innocent blogger. Well, someone didn’t wait too long to heed the advise - as usual, he’d done it already before it was mentioned. So, if your out there Chris Z, do us all a favour and update it with the latest ‘bornes’. Looks like he’s been putting some of the free wi-fi cafés on as well. A map showing cafés, bars, brasserries and Macdos with free wi-fi is up on Quickmaps by tmilard. More info Cafés Wi-Fi.
Turned my back for a minute and Neuf Cegetel have jumped into bed with Fon. According to JeromB at blognation, Neuf Cegetel - second largest broadband operator in France - has
installed FON firmware on more than 600 000 “neuf box” and should invite its subscribers to be part of the FON network, which could virtually triple its size within the next weeks. FON Triple its Network Thanks to Neuf Cegetel
Opened in-box, WebUser tells me that as from the 8th October, all Macdos throughout Britain will offer free wi-fi with frites.
For those of us who seldom show interest in Proton collisions at this time of the year, the coming red-button day at the CERN might have escaped our attention. The fact that a circular tunnel 27 kilometres long under the Swiss / French border will be used this summer to recreate Big Bang conditions pulling the veil once and for all on the elusive ‘God Particle‘; maybe a few extra dimensions as well for the taking; not to mention the true nature of dark matter and dark energy; might not have drawn a cocked eyebrow from where you’re standing.
Fact: Flash Player is the most widely installed software in the history of computing.
