Archives for the month of: November, 2005
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seige at Sony-BMG

November 30, 05 //
3

Most folks who are reading my blog and my coverage of Sony know about the “rootkit” issue that’s made headlines, as well as the problems with the Sony Connect software.
I wasn’t aware that the management of Sony-BMG was in such a state.

Gunter Thielen, the chief executive of Bertelsmann, acknowledged recently that there were some problems with the management structure at Sony BMG, where both sides have three seats on the board.
“We have to work a little bit on the question of leadership after the departure of [Chief Operating Officer] Michael Smellie,” he was quoted as saying in The Financial Times Deutschland. “The merger of the companies went well; now we have to merge the cultures, which is the most difficult thing.”
Since the merger, Sony BMG’s position has eroded in many markets.

Don’t you just love the understatement in that, “work a little bit on the question of leadership,” comment? Basically the whole world knows that the Sony-BMG “company” is not working. Saying that there’s a need for a “little bit” of work on leadership is just as bad as when Thomas Hesse, President of Sony-BMG’s Global Digital Business was quoted as saying that, “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care
about it?”
I have friends at Sony-BMG. I hesitate to contact them as I am sure they are busy trying to fix the problems, but with management like this, Sony-BMG doesn’t need competitors.
On Top of Talk of Rifts, the Problems Keep Piling Up for Sony-Bertelsmann Venture – New York Times

audio format wars

November 30, 05 //
4

Could a panel of pro DJs and industry professionals tell the difference between the different compressed audio formats of mp3, AAC, WMA, and Vorbis?
DJmag put five experts to the test through the infamous system at London club Fabric

Fwiw, I’ve decided for myself that 192 AAC is all that I need. I used to rip things at much higher rates but I just couldnt tell the difference.
If you do a lot of your own ripping, what do you generally choose?
DJ Magazine: Cutting Edge dance music, club culture and DJ technology – DJ Technology

Apple Broadband Tuner

November 29, 05 //
1

Cool!

What does the Broadband Tuner do exactly?
The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts.

Apple – Support – Downloads – Broadband Tuner 1.0

Hersh on leaving Iraq

November 29, 05 //
1

New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh on leaving Iraq. The stuff about Bush is the most disturbing of all.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.
…
“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

The New Yorker: UP IN THE AIR
Where is the Iraq war headed next?

The history of electro

November 28, 05 //
1

A Guy Called Gerald (AGCG) waxes nostalgic about the early days of electro. Gerald asked Greg Wilson, a DJ who influenced Gerald, to create a mix for Samurai FM. You can download that mix from AGCG website.

The people that were into Electro and breakdancing were basically crazy – it was definitely a young movement. We had a kind of careless aggression about things – a Punk attitude – people would be laughing at us for washing the floor and spinning on our heads, but you could see they would never know how to break out of a system. And that’s basically what we felt we were doing.

Greg Wilson talks about Legend – a club that was more important to him than The Hacienda, which was a seminal club in Britain for dance music in the 1980s.


Nowadays, people naturally want to talk to me about The Hacienda and how incredible it must have been for me to work there. Given its subsequent worldwide recognition, I can appreciate how difficult it must be for them to fully comprehend that, although I had some great nights at The Hacienda, it couldn’t begin to compare with the intensity of what was going on at Legend. The rave scene might have kicked-in some years down the line with The Hacienda at the forefront of the movement, but people were full-on ‘raving’ at Legend in the early 80′s, and this was without the aid of chemicals! It’s just that these people were mainly black, at a time when black culture was marginalized in the UK – the style press had yet to catch up with what was happening on the black scene.

No Sell Out Part 1 – Legends / Wigan Pier Electro Retrospective – Mixed by Greg Wilson For A Guy Called Gerald

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