David Emery Online

Friday Links XXV

3 August 2007

Unauthorized music downloading hits record levels in UK – survey in people-download-music-ilegally shock.

Building Demolished from the Ground Up Looks Better than New – very cool photo from the city.

A Man of Illegible Letters – my handwriting, much like Khoi’s, is pretty much illegible and has been pretty much forever. Before reading this article, I have to say I was maybe slightly ashamed about my prowess with a pen – writing much more then a sentence or two is practically impossible, I’m that out of practice. But as pointed out, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing – we’re just all moving on.

Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service to compete with Google Checkout, PayPal – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Amazon are the most interesting web company at the moment. They may not capture the headlines like Google or Yahoo, but things like this really underscore how important and interesting they are; the micropayments stuff (which I’ve long been interested in) is very important, I think.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) – Limited Beta – having said that they could really do with working on their URLs – I guess they’ve never heard of clean URLs…

Scrollovers – A New Way of Linking – mmm, nifty Javascript ‘scrolling’ rollovers.

BoH’s Bridwell Talks YouTubers, New Album, Sex Clubs – “Is there no sanctity left for live performance with going to a show and seeing it with your own eyes and remembering it? Do you have to tape every second, or even just your favorite song? I understand it, but it’s becoming annoying.”

It’s an interesting viewpoint, but certainly – as a avid gig photographer – not one I agree with. It’s certainly a very self-important viewpoint; the audience have paid to be there, doesn’t that mean that if they want to preserve the memory by taking photos they can? It’s an academic argument, though – with the unstoppable rise in camera-phones (which are impractical to disallow into gigs) cameras are now a permanent live music fixture.

Official iPhone Tool – if you look at the full resolution image you can see it has a very small ‘Designed by Apple in California’ etched on it.

A few words about the new Office 2008 ship date – almost 4 years between releases seems a bit too long, to be honest.

First Third-party Native iPhone Application – it’s getting to the point that, like with Bootcamp, Apple may be forced to release a dev-kit for the iPhone lest they loose all control over the platform.

Grand Theft Auto IV delayed from Oct. to fiscal Q2 ‘08 – well, the silver lining is that I probably couldn’t afford it in October anyway…

EA to remove online servers for 49 games – an interesting problem now that more and more games become reliant on online aspects; they have a much more limited shelf life then games used to. Of course, now that graphics are pretty much plateauing they would otherwise last longer – I certainly still don’t mind playing PS2 games.