Team A'Hearn

Although the concept has been known for some time, I’ve recently been reading more about the so-called “loudness war“; also referred to as the “loss of dynamic range”. This is the tendency for music to be produced with increasing levels of loudness, thereby significantly affecting fidelity. I’ll let the wiki speak for itself because it’s a great article, but for a quick practical reference give a listen to this. Audiophiles can be a really picky bunch, eh? It certainly gives significant credence to the long-held assertion that LPs “sound better” than CDs.

Supposedly, it’s poor form to simply blog about a blog, but I can’t resist passing along this great find. Pet owners can be a sad, looney bunch.

Today Amazon unveiled the Kindle, their own digital book reader for a mere $399 … and I want one. It has a nice display, great storage capacity, tremendous battery life, and what appears to be a well thought out user interface. And no computers or syncing necessary – it connects to the net using the same kind of high-speed data network as some cellphones, but without requiring the customer to sign up for a cellular data plan. Hopefully the price for ebooks ($9.99 for bestsellers) and the unit itself will come down a bit in the coming months.

Check out this neat utility called Jing, a freeware program that will create screen captures or recorded actions and share them on the web. The capture capability is little more than an enhanced “Print Screen” (“Oh, so that’s what that key is for!”), but the video recorder is a pretty great way to demo a few seconds worth of computing (with audio!) and post it out to the ether quickly and easily. Available for Windows and Mac. Be sure to check out the “Video Tour”.

I support Google as much as possible; they’re my go-to brand for calendaring, emails, mapping/directions, image searching, photo storage/manipulation, and of course, web searching. And today’s news regarding Google Maps at gas pumps sounds pretty exciting to us techies. A net-enabled terminal for directions right at the pump? Nice. But after some more thought, I think I’m having doubts:

What will happen when there’s a line of cars around the block waiting on Grandma to print out directions to the Piggly Wiggly? Or the Griswold family mapping out all the stops of their week’s vacation? In 1997, Mobil spent a good amount of money introducing the SpeedPass, a device designed to speed up our time at the pump. But now it seems that I might be forced to wait for internet playtime to finish as the minutes tick away and my fuel tank empties.

And what about security? Google is a very responsible company, but how long until these terminals are hacked and I’m staring at … well … something questionable … as I pump my gas? Don’t get me wrong – that will be hilarious; but depending on the severity and dispersal of the exploit, it’s something that could potentially make Google look bad.

I can’t help but wonder if someone at Gilbarco was so excited about if they could, they never thought about if they should.

Geeks have been all in a frenzy lately about the recent court ruling in favor of the RIAA. It seems Miss Thomas was found guilty of sharing some music online and now has to pay various record companies $222,000, pending a likely appeal. This case was big news in the dork world because it was the first of its kind to actually go to trial. Up until now, the RIAA has been happy with out-of-court settlements. Jammie Thomas, however, decided to reject such a deal and instead put her faith in ambiguous digital copyright laws and confounding technical arguments. Optimistic, reasonable, and noble, but alas. So much for that.

What now? Sadly, I’m betting there will be no end in sight to the RIAA and MPAA strong-arming middle America into settling out of further potential litigation. Knee-jerk copyright laws will probably be passed with more thought to profits than innovation. Quality content in the theaters and on the radio will continue to decline. And .. hopefully .. more mainstream and independent artists will realize that times are changing and, amazingly, fans will pay for entertainment that isn’t insulting.