Monday, July 25, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Happy Birthday, MP3 (via @HistoryChannel)
Jul 14, 1995: A revolutionary new technology is christened "MP3"
Representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were not in attendance at the 1995 christening of the infant technology that would shake their business model to its core just a few years later. Known formally as "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3," the technology in question was an efficient new format for the encoding of high-quality digital audio using a highly efficient data-compression algorithm. In other words, it was a way to make CD-quality music files small enough to be stored in bulk on the average computer and transferred manageably across the Internet. Released to the pubic one week earlier, the brand-new MP3 format was given its name and its familiar ".mp3" file extension on this day in 1995.
The importance of MP3, or any other scheme for compressing data, is made clear by some straightforward arithmetic. The music on a compact disc is encoded in such a way that a single second corresponds to approximately 176,000 bytes of data, and a single three-minute song to approximately 32 million bytes (32MB). In the mid-1990s, when it was not uncommon for a personal computer to have a total hard-drive capacity of only 500MB, it was therefore impossible to store even one album's worth of music on the average home computer. And given the actual connection speed of a then-standard 56K dial-up modem, even a single album's worth of music would have taken literally all day to transfer over the Internet. In this way, the nature of the CD format and the state of mid-90s computer and telecommunications technologies offered the music industry a practical barrier to copyright infringement via Internet file-sharing. But then came MP3.
Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, several teams of audio engineers worked to develop, test and perfect the standard that would eventually gain the blessing of Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Their approach took advantage of certain physical and cognitive characteristics of human hearing, such as our inability to detect the quieter of two sounds played simultaneously. Using a "perceptual" compression method, engineers were able to eliminate more than 90 percent of the data in a standard CD audio file without compromising sound quality as perceived by the average listener using standard audio equipment.
Suddenly, that digital copy of your favorite pop song took up only 2-3 MB on your hard-drive rather than 32MB, which in combination with the growth in average drive capacity and the increase in average Internet connection speed created the conditions for both the rampant, Winamp- and Napster-enabled copyright infringement of 1999-2000 and for the legal commercial distribution of digital music via the Internet. In the eyes of the RIAA, those are the conditions that also explain the 29 percent decline in the sales of music CDs between 2000 and 2006.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Video: Light Up
It's not the official video for Drake's "Light Up" but this is a cool interpretation of what the video could look like... if the rappers were female.
Saturday, July 09, 2011
Cancer horoscope for Jul 9 2011
Cancer Jul 9 2011
In a world where many people follow trends, fads, and the opinions of the majority, you are a true original, Moonchild. Sometimes, though, that leaves you feeling like an outsider, and that can be lonely at times. You may now be tempted to follow the crowd toward a conclusion or a choice, but you really must follow your own heart instead. A true representative of the Cancer tribe has impeccable integrity - so if you lose sight of your own moral code or you accept an opinion that isn't your own, then you will not feel good about yourself. Follow your heart.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Video: Google Chrome
From the youtube page for Google Chrome:
Lady Gaga builds one of the world's largest fan bases by using the web to talk directly and openly to her community. This film celebrates Lady Gaga's special and unmediated relationship with her fans, the Little Monsters. The making of this film is a demonstration of the power of the web in its own right. The entire project, beginning with Lady Gaga's shoot in NYC on May 8th, to shipping materials to the television networks for air, took 10 days. Within hours of the release of her new single "Edge of Glory" on May 9th, fans began uploading videos on YouTube, making the song their own by dancing to it, singing it and playing it on all kinds of instruments. Lady Gaga then posted a message on her website asking for more videos to be used in the film project. Fans responded within minutes and uploaded hundreds more videos. Back in the editing room, in real time as fan videos streamed in, editors were putting them into the film. The film was completed on May 18th in time to air during Lady Gaga's performance on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, and to also live on the web.
It shows how powerful connecting through the Internet can be.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Photo:
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This is the cover for the long-awaited Jay-Z & Kanye West album, "Watch the Throne." That's all I have to say about it.
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