Wow, just one more reason to love this Mac OS. The next upgrade to iTunes is going to have some great new features:

- a free song every Tuesday
- iMix: publish your playlists
- Music videos
- Radio charts
- a lossless encoder (TOO COOL!)
- importing non-DRM WMA files

I'd love it if they would upgrade the mp3 encoder to something as good as LAME, but I'm really happy about the lossless encoder. That is a great tool for audiophiles who really care about sound quality but still care about HDD space.

iTunes 4.5 to add iMix, videos, trailers, WMA import, more [news.yahoo.com]

Justin Ruben '95 has a powerful op-ed in The Dartmouth on the topic of responsible investing and the trend for universities to invest via hedge funds, which often obscure their investment vehicles.

As institutional investors who collectively control almost $200 billion of assets, colleges and universities play a major role in the global economy. Students need to come together on the Dartmouth campus and many others to debate how we can reconcile college and university investment strategies with the values at the core of the Academy. But first, we need more disclosure about where our monies are invested, so we can ascertain the facts on which that debate must be based.

I worked with Justin and many others to convince the trustees to divest from their investments in the Hydro-Quebec project my first year. I am glad to see Justin is reminding the Dartmouth community of their responsibilities.

The Dartmouth Online -Responsible Investing - by Justin Ruben

I've passed by the site of Manzanar on the way to Mammoth from LA. It is a desolately beautiful place. Wind-swept and dry high desert. I hope to visit the new museum sometime soon.

Eiichi Norihiro, 77, of Simi Valley had been imprisoned at Manzanar when he was 15 but was transferred to a camp at Tule Lake in Northern California after being called a troublemaker for refusing to wear a shirt labeled "POW."
He recalled his parents' bitter feelings.
"We were a family of eight, and we lost what little we had," he said. "We went back to Japan after the war, then lost our land there. We lost on both sides of the Pacific."
Norihiro, a retired accountant, returned Saturday because "I don't want to forget it, and I don't want the government to forget it."

WW II Japanese internment camp opens as sad museum [news.yahoo.com]

Manzanar National Historic Site [nps.gov]

Gree.jp, one of two major Japanese social networking services (mixi.jp is the other), had a social event on Sunday. I didn't attend but here are the photos.

GREE NIGHT 1.0

Elizabeth Andoh does a nice profile of the "depachika" ("depaato"= department store, "chika" = basement) or the basement-level food halls that are found at most of the major train stations in Tokyo.

Even the most optimistic economists concede that Japan's retail environment is "challenging." Yet in those department stores that succeed, depachika pull in astonishing sums. Gross sales for a best-selling brand of cake or cookies can, at a single location, come to about $4.5 million.

No one can say for sure just why Japan's food markets were first placed at basement level, nor why they generate nearly a quarter of a store's total revenue, but the most likely explanation lies in the pervasive train-taking and gift-giving culture here.

When I visited Seoul last year, I saw similar food halls in Korean department stores.

Culinary Delights Laid Out to Tempt Japan's Commuters [nytimes.com]

A great review of the Librie, Sony's new e-book reader, on Dottocomu.

dottocomu: First look at the Sony EBR-1000 Librie eBook reader

Good piece in The Guardian re: google and Linux and that one of google's strengths is their ability to leverage the Linux platform.

The computing engine that powers Google is the largest cluster of Linux servers in the history of the world. If you talk to computer-science folks, you find that they regard this - rather than the number of web pages indexed - as the most interesting thing about the company. Managing such a vast server-farm is a formidable task. For example, how do you implement security patches and operating-system upgrades (much more frequent in Linux than in proprietary systems from Microsoft or Sun) on thousands of servers without causing disruption to service? Google manages to achieve this with sophisticated techniques for rippling changes through the cluster, yet achieves 100 per cent uptime. This is serious stuff, and there are a lot of IT managers out there who would give their eye-teeth to be able to do it half as well.

What can't you find on Google? Vital statistics [guardian.co.uk]
via Slashdot

Some notes on the Markoff profile of Jobs in the NY Times.

- Apple now has 78 retail stores (and one in Ginza, Tokyo that pissed me off yesterday)
- Jobs did not back Newton nor General Magic
- Jobs cancelled all consulting contracts at Apple in '97 (yes!)
- "The success of the iPod doesn't seem to have significantly changed Apple's market share,"
- only top execs at Apple are allowed to speak with the media
- Apple claims 70% market share for legal music downloads
- Apple claims 45% of MP3 market
- only 4% of the personal computer market
- 1Q04; 807,000 iPods sold; 750,000 Macs sold
- non-Mac revenue at 39%; total revenue $1.91B
- Tony Fadell ex-Real gathered 35 people to build the first iPod
- original iPod used licensed software from Pixo (former Apple engineer)

Oh, Yeah, He Also Sells Computers [nytimes.com]

I didn't know until now that dodgeball.com (which is a location-based community service based on social networking services) came out of Anthony Townsend's "Mediated Urban Spaces" class at NYU ITP.

How cool is that?!?!

So I was one of the early owners of the 15" Powerbooks here in Japan, and I have the problems with the white spots on the LCD. As long as I have it replaced before my first year of ownership is up, they'll replace the LCD for free.

The problem is that I use my Powerbook daily. I use it for mail. For web surfing. For blogging. For playing music. Watching DVDs. I haven't found the time to return it to get it fixed since I bought it.

Today I was thinking about purchasing for myself an iPod. It's almost a running joke because for those who know me well, it is very surprising that I don't own an iPod already. So I went to the Apple Ginza Store today and before I bought the iPod, I went to the Genius bar to inquire about replacement LCD screens for my Powerbook. Here's how it went: