Filed under Music by adam | February 12, 2004 | 2 comments
DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album· is great. Get it while its available, and spread the word.
Also check out the New Yorker· story on the making of the album: The Mouse That Remixed. Also, from EMI stomps Grey Album·:
So why did EMI yesterday demand that the handful of stores that were selling the album destroy it, and send Cease and Desist letters to Danger Mouse?
…
EMI rigidly controls all Beatles sound recordings for Capitol Records. Sony Music/ATV Publishing controls the publishing side. And both are, of course, founding members of Big Music whose avowed purpose in life is to make sure all music ‘products’ are the sole property of its members.
It’s good to see such a salient conflict between copyright and creativity. The more frequently this occurs, the harder it is to ignore the fact that copyright law so frequently works against its original purpose.
Filed under Politics by adam | February 12, 2004 | 0 comments
The Marriott Hotel in Manhattan Beach, California provides a host of services through the television in the rooms. These include “movies on demand” at $14 a pop and Sony Playstation 2 for $8 per hour. I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for Playstation unless: (1) someone else is paying their costs (business travellers); (2) their kids are driving them crazy; or (3) money is no object. It’s incredibly frustrating to be charged an amount totally unrelated to the marginal cost of providing a service, but maybe Marriott enjoys a price-insensitive clientele.
My favorite part was when I tried to use the wireless keyboard to access the menu of services. I got the following message:
A required DLL was not found: FILTERS.DLL was not found.
The wireless keyboard provided no way to cancel the error message. In fact, there was no way to make any selections on the menu in the background. All you could do was look at this clever Microsoft error message.
You would think that a simple “black box” type program like a menu of services served over a television would be pretty rock solid. But not when the television server is running Windows NT!
