Sony has tapped Andrew Lack, President and COO of NBC to take
the reins of their music unit with the departure of Mottola.

Update on Sony

]... The electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed
] up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music industry
] executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels"

A bunch of articles this month on this... the one on Sony is
particularly interesting -- the interests of its electronics and music units are inherently in conflict.

Apparently, Sony is getting ready to unveil a new version of
their OpenMG DRM tech at CES; they want to get some groundswell
and support from the rest of the industry before Palladium
gets into full swing. dmv notes that Sony has not been
really successful at this in the past.

CD sales were down 11% last year. I'd really like to see the
real breakdown as to how much is due to Kazaa and friends,
how much is due to the economy and how much is due to the
industry's product being increasingly poor.

Things I'm reading or recently finished.

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland -- started this after Gravity's Rainbow
which is much less accessable.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow -- a total brainfuck

Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks -- at Decius' recommendation.

Barlow, The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's grand experiment in evolution -- I keep these in my aquarium

Phillip K. Dick, Minority Report (first volume of short fiction)

Phillip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Elderitch

Coulouris, et al., Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design
-- fairly standard text on the subject

Pease, Shostak and Lamport, Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults (ACM 1980) -- seminal paper on the distributed consensus problem.

Walter Piston, Harmony -- a canonical music theory text

Dolemite wrote:

] What the hell? Are we looking at a law to prosecute
] pre-marital sex in the near future? This is getting scarier
] every day, I just hope that enough people have the sense to
] kick out the current rehash of old administrations in 2004.

I've been saying for awhile now that the implicit position of
the religious right is that very simply, they are opposed to
people having sex. I have a little hope that when this position
is made explicit that it will be readily seen to be ludicrous.

Bertrand Russell has argued that christianity has been the single
biggest force opposing progress in western civilization over the
last two millenia and I tend to agree with him. It is a disease
of the mind and perhaps one day we will look on it as we look at
polio or smallpox today.

RE: Bush's drive for global abstinence

Decius wrote:
] ] "Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that
] ] all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and
] ] cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that
] ] leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the
] ] dust."

Rock on Ben!

RE: How to Ruin American Enterprise. By Ben Stein.

This is hardly news but I think sums up nicely why we need to
fight to keep telcos from merging with media companies.

Digital Robber Barons?

Decius and I were talking about this some last Saturday ... this
paper crystalizes a lot of the problems that OSS will have to overcome
to win on the desktop.

Usability and Open Source Software