BlueNosedDog

Bopaboo is a new startup company which allows you to upload your MP3 files and, if you’re American at least, excercise your right of first sale.

This service allows you to set your own prices, but of course takes its own cut. How they prevent you from selling multiple copies of the same song has yet to be seen, as has whether the service will be alive much longer than a week.

Personally I feel this is simply baiting the music industry into taking action, how it was decided that this service is a good idea I just don’t know. You’d have hoped that those starting up websites such as this would have thought about all future legal possibilities - but it seems in this case that all those in charge of the site are after is a quick buck. If anything this service is doing more harm to the case of DRM free music than anything else.

Via

Featured, Online, Software Bopaboo, DRM, First-sale doctrine, MP3, Startup company

Not content with making it’s onsite video’s fugly, by adding black bars to non widescreen uploads YouTube are at it again, this time adding a ludicrously useful (ummm?) search bar to the top of off-site embedded videos.

Many are of the opinion this is Googles way of getting even more data off its users for its main business (selling you ads). They may be right there, but again the calls are coming in pointing out that YouTubes better quality competitors, DailyMotion and Vimeo f.ex don’t do this sort of crap.

Sorry for getting a little angy, but youtube isn’s what it once was.

Featured, Online Dailymotion, Entertainment, Google, Shopping, Uploading and downloading, Video, Videos and DVDs, Vimeo, Widescreen, YouTube

We thought that we should tell you , because Amazon don’t seem to be, but Amazon UK has now launched the same MP3 service that our friends over the pond have been getting the benefits of for the last few months. Singles start at 59p, albums at £3 and there are over 3,000,000 tracks available right now. Oh and did we mention they’re DRM free MP3’s encoded at 256kbps - and that Amazon allow you to download directly into your iTunes library. Sexy eh?

Featured, Online, Software Album, Amazon, Amazon UK, Amazon.com, Brazil, MP3, MySpace

The very impressive startup, animoto, has just launched a new Christmas themed link n their website which allows you to turn your animated picture slideshows into Christmassy animated picture slideshows. It does this by giving you a choice of backgrounds and intro / outro sequences. You still need to come up with the relevent imagery and music though.

For those that don’t know, animoto is a little site which was funded by amazon (for an undisclosed fee) which creates clever little animations out of your pictures. It makes montages so easy and professional looking that it’s almost worth the $30 a year fee. See below for both a demonstration of the site (which is permanently in my favourites) along with the new Christmas skinning.

http://animoto.com/play/LwttyHU4ME8mqFN5LUtp8g/greetings/holidays2008

Featured, Online animoto, Christmas, Holidays, Image, People and Society, Website

A new government database kicks off production in the next month or so. It will detail names and addresses, schools immediate adult contacts and more basic data for all children in the UK. That’s 11 million children, and it’s going to cost us, the taxpayer, £240 Million. Thats a total cost per head of just over £21.8 Million. That’s a pretty damn big number.

Now, please, don’t get me wrong. I understand the benefits of multiple parties having access to the most up-to-date information on one of our most velnerable groups, and I think it’s important to do whatever needs to be done to help protect our childrens safety. As a father of a 15 month old I truly cannot understand the way people can harm their children - especially babies. I also recognise the arguments against such a database, it will mean that our health workers, social services, doctors, teachers and all that come into contact with our children have less time to do just that - come in contact with our children, this post however is not to discuss the merits of the system but the price which we as taxpayers have to pay for what adds up to little more than a contacts database.

I’d very much like to see the tendering process for this project, and why it was decided that £240 Million is good value for money. I’d like to see what we’re to get for that money and exactly where the money is going to end up. Getting the data into the database initially is going to cost quite a bit, I recognise that, but let’s have a look at how much this would have cost if we were to use an internet mentality over it.

The whole database has to be accessible UK wide, so the cheapest way of doing this would be over the internet. Dedicated hosting from a top provider would cost no more than £500 per month, I very much doubt that this system would need much more than that as it is a simple database after all - and you may have noticed I am in no way looking at the cheapest dedicated hosting you can buy. The software to run the database doesn’t need to be anything special, so let’s use MySQL - but cluster it, so thats an extra £100 a month. That should be able to handle the limited requests the 50,000 people with access to the system are likely to be loading it with. We can use the rest of LAMP to throw webpages at people, and since the £500 server is already clustered we’ll not need much else hardware or software wise. Now for the programming. This is a big project, so lets make sure we get it right, we could mess about with some Open Source software, make it do what we want, but it may be best to make up your own system. £1,000 a month for maintenance, and a one off of £120,000 should do it, I don’t believe that it should take more than 6 months to write the software and test it thoroughly.

 

So, what’s next? Well, we need to load up the existing data. 11 million children, so lets say 100 Million rows - gives us some room to play in. Let’s also give ourselves 4 months to get the data in, use the first 2 months of the software timescale to setup the database you see, that would mean we have to load up nearly 1.2 Million rows a day. Let’s also assume the worst case, all these rows need to be manually entered. Let’s employ 5,000 people to do it, that’s 230 ish rows per day per person. I’m going to pay those people £7.00 an hour, for 8 hours a day, because I’m nice and don’t think the minimum wage is enough. So that’s a £24 Million wage bill, plus £15k for the people running payroll, we’ll have 2 of them and another 20k per HR person (3 should do it).

What’s the total? £24.5 Million. Now since we’re a private company let’s double the figure, just in case, and we get £59 Million, well we may as well round it to £60 Million eh?

So, we could build a new national database, take 15,000 people and employ them for months during a recession and hit a tight 6 month deadline and still cost 1/4 of the amount being spent. The problem is though, £60 Million is so much less than the “best” other quote that we’re likely to now win the business for being too cheap… And that my friends is the real truth of this story, to win any government business you have to be prepared to rip the taxpayer off, because otherwise you’ll just be seen as a joke.

Featured, Uncategorized Databases, LAMP, Minimum wage, MySQL, Open Source, Solaris, Sun Microsystems, United Kingdom

Today as i was surfing the net, i stumbled across a website listing all the very latest in tech gear. Apparantly the “Epoc Emotiv” is the future of all gaming technology. By this time you may be wondering, what’s so special about this? Two words. “Hands Free”.
The Epoc Emotiv is a headset that taps into the lobes of your brain, and allows you to move everything telekineticly.

The features of this that will be appearing in the first few Emotiv game titles will include the ability to manipulate and control objects by thought, weilg amazing superpowers just by thinking about them, creatures in games will react to your facial expressions and enviroments will change due to your emotional state. Can you imagine what it would be like if this was made for a game like Fable?

But the applications for this are not just for gaming, there is computing applications for this, imagine no more mouse or keyboard. This (BCI) could even be the key of giving speech to people that can’t who suffer from ALS.

A test run reveals EPOC can be difficult to learn but mesmerizing once mastered. To think “vanish” and watch a cube disappear borders on unnerving.

University of Ulster video gaming lecturer Darryl Charles told CNN he was also uncertain whether Emotiv’s technology would take off.

“It’s a little bit harder to see. It’s quite a complex thing to force your thought on a television screen.”

However, Emotiv’s Le strongly defended the headset, saying it “works on a vast majority of people and can adapt to a wide variety of thought patterns. Emotiv has carried out tests with hundreds of people and so far we have had success on every single person,” Le said.

The website for this piece of amazing technology is www.emotiv.com, pre order one of these amazing things for the mere price of $299

Featured, Gaming BCI, best, Emotion, Emotiv, Emotiv Systems, Epoc, Epoc Emotiv, Game, Gaming, Gear, Gen, New, Next, pwned, Tech, University of Ulster, Video game, www.emotiv.com

After only 6 months, the latest version of Fedora has been released to the masses, offering a plethora of updates and upgrades there’s very little reason left to be stuck on an older version.

Areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security received the greatest updates. The new virtualization features include the ability to manage virtual hosts and storage remotely, which should appeal to network administrators with fragmented teams. “These features combine to make administration of remote hosts much easier, even in cases where direct physical access is limited or non-existent,” the Fedora Team said in a recent blog post on Red Hat’s Web site.

Users can now also share their Internet connection with others, and Fedora 10 can also start up faster, thanks to a new graphical boot system dubbed Plymouth .

Security improvements include the addition of SecTool, an auditing and detection kit.

Red Hat has also enhanced PackageKit, a software installation and updating system that debuted in Fedora 9 .

“In Fedora 10, PackageKit now detects when the user opens an audio or video media file, and offers to search for codecs used to play that file,” the Fedora Team said in a blog post. “With the user’s authorization, it searches all the software repositories configured on the Fedora 10 system, installs what is needed, and the media begins to play.” Down the road, this capability will be extended to areas like fonts and applications.

In addition, Fedora 10 has a revamped audio system that uses less power; support for “a vast array” of Webcams; improved printing capabilities; and “support for more hardware than any other operating system.”

If you’ve read this far then we also have a little something to let you into. As part of trials to increase traffic and to test the new Amazon Cloudfront CDN we’ll be hosting a mirror of the main ISO ditribution of Fedora 10, and in the future even more software. So, if you’d like to download the Live CD and Installation disk for Fedora 10 you may do so by clicking here. Just please let us know your download speeds in the comments, and how they compare to other sites.

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Featured, Uncategorized Computers, Fedora, Fedora 10, Fedora 9, linux, Live CD, PackageKit, Red Hat