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 me them. 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.

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?

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

Question: Given today’s press release from Nokia, are Adobe going to be outmanoeuvred by Microsoft’silverlight on mobiles ?

Answer: Pull the other one, it repeats “I’m a Flash killer” in a squeaky voice

Sparked by Daren Waters over at dot.life blog

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.

via | Ecrans

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. #