Techno Babble

Noticed that Amazon have recently launched their own music downloading service, to compete with iTunes from Apple.

http://amazon.com/gp/dmusic/…

Will Amazon succeed when companies like Virgin Digital recently decided to close their doors?

The Virgin Digital site will finally close on October 19 see more detail at

http://www.virgindigital.co.uk

The point of note, with the new Amazon venture, is the fact that music tracks which they have available (more than 2 million songs) are completely free of any Digital Rights Management (DRM) control.

DRM is a digital padlock which is used to prevent copying of the downloaded material and can also be used to ensure that the material can only be played on a specific device.

Music which is free of DRM makes it more appealing to a wider audience and with the backing of a large company such as Amazon, which can ensure competitive prices versus iTunes, looks certain to be a success.

However, the price per track still seems on the high side to me even at a rate of the quoted $0.89 - $0.99 per track. Why not retail at $0.50 ?

It appears so, according to a recent news report in Yahoo

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/…film-s-march-obscurity.html

There seems to be a market for disposable (film) cameras with a quoted figure of 202 million disposable cameras sold last year in the US.

This is good news for Kodak Eastman and Fuji the worlds top 2 makers of photo film who aren’t shying away from inventing new flavours of disposable cameras.

Is there a continued need for disposable cameras in the current and future digital market?

One Year Old Today.

Today is the first anniversary of this Blog - started exactly 1 year ago today.

In the past year, more than 150 articles have been written covering a diverse range of topics from interesting “gadgets” through to the more in-depth looks at what has been happening in the competitive world of 3D Cad.

This article discusses some of what has been noticed over the last year…

Some random thoughts – Trends in man-machine interaction

I recently came across an article entitled 3D Modelling is not for WIMPs – a brilliant title referring, of course, to Window Icon Menu Pointer in regards to how users interact with computer applications.

Then I was reading an article “PAD Paper Aided Design” about the design process how it is easy to sketch out your design on a scrap of paper before committing it into a CAD system.

And it got me to thinking some more about UI aspects for CAD software.

Continue reading »

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Collection and recycling of waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) will be the responsibility of manufacturers and retailers of the equipment from June 2006 following a (UK) Government announcement (10 Aug 2005).

Do recycling/environmental concerns affect the design process ?

You can now read articles from the New Scientist on-line.

http://www.newscientist.com/news.ns

For example check out weird and wonderful patent applications in a column by Barry Fox or how about Pocket-sized computer ’soul’ developed at

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7826

Check out del.icio.us - a bookmarks manager. It provides a web service for sharing bookmarks - everything posted is publicly viewable, so its not a tool for storing private collections.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Find out more http://del.icio.us/

British researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating their surroundings with a single hive mind.

The University of Essex’s UltraSwarm project is an experiment in swarm intelligence and wireless cluster computing that might one day spawn military surveillance applications. In one scenario, a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, with video cameras could take in a hostile landscape from a variety of angles and process the image locally, in the sky.

Read the full article at wired.com

http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,67695,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

Adobe Systems it had agreed to buy Macromedia for about $3.4 billion in stock, in order to extend its lead in the market for creating and distributing digital documents.

Read the Press Release at

http://www.adobe.com/…/041805AdobeAcquiresMacromedia.html