Month: November 2002

  • New digital cameras trounce 35mm

    Finally! I’d suspected that tests of the Canon EOS-1D (11 megapixel) and the Kodak DCS Pro 14n (14 mgapixel) would finally put the digital vs. 35mm argument to rest, and they have — the new cameras easily beat 35mm in terms of noise/grain (by a lot) and resolution (by a little, for now). Norman Koren…

  • DCMA: Evil for all, even worse for Mac/Linux users

    TidBITS (a venerable Mac-focused weekly newsletter) is running a wonderful summary of the issues around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). …it’s been used to jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications, and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. […] …the Electronic Frontier…

  • Palm licenses RealOne Player Mobile for Palm OS

    <yawn> | Link

  • AOL's new streaming technology

    Today AOL Time Warner introduced Broadband Radio@AOL, a broadband radio service built on Yet Another Proprietary Streaming Format. This YAPSF is called “Ultravox”, and was apparently developed in large part by the folks who created Winamp (AOL acquired Nullsoft in 1999). This isn’t a good sign for AOL, since it reveals to investors that they’ve…

  • SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG graduate to "Proposed Recommendations"

    The W3C has announced that SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) 1.1 and Mobile SVG have become Proposed Recommendations. SVG can be thought of as Flash, but re-imagined as an open standard based on XML and JavaScript. SVG 1.1 is basically a cleanup of 1.0, and “modularizes” the standard into reusable building blocks — not terribly exciting…

  • Is Macintosh losing ground as a digital media client?

    An article on News.com today discusses how most pay-to-play (and many free) content services don’t support Macintosh. As is the case with many of News.com’s articles about digital media, the reporters are a little too lazy or uninformed to follow up on some of the most interesting bits. For example, the story quotes Movielink CEO…

  • MusicNet and Pressplay sign the last of the big boys

    Today, MusicNet announced that they’ve signed Sony and Universal for their service. On Wendesday, Pressplay announced that they’d scored a license from Warner. As of today, then, the score is: MusicNet: BMG, EMI, Warner Music (the three founders), Sony Music and Universal. Pressplay: Sony Music, Universal (the two founders), BMG, EMI and Warner Music. So…

  • Roxio purchases Napster's remains for $5 million

    Roxio, known mainly for its CD-burning software, is getting its fingers into as many pies as possible before that core business is completely commoditized by OS vendors. (Toast remains useful if you’re making hybrid CDs for commercial products, but otherwise I find that the stuff that comes with Mac OS X and Windows XP do…

  • Philips, Sony scoop up InterTrust for $453 million

    Today, the DRM landscape is much, much different than it was yesterday. Philips and Sony have purchased the most important independent player in DRM technologies, and will be licensing its technologies to others. This is the start of the DRM shakeout, folks, and here’s how it’s going to play out. Fidelio (the holding company that…

  • Film Gimp masters space and time

    Film Gimp is a video painting and rotoscoping tool — the third-dimension brother to Gimp, which is a popular open source alternative to Photoshop. Given Film Gimp’s adoption by and contributions from the special effects industry, this may spell the end of high-priced, low-volume commercial competitors like Pinnacle’s Commotion. According to DesktopLinux.com, programmers at studios…