I love this story
Excerpt:
“PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said on Friday. “
For fun I decided to jump on the RSS bandwagon and create a news aggregator page. I like the idea of consolidating news updates from sources of interest into one location. Sure, for years people have been claiming that web portals and other stuff would do all of this. In reality anyone with a website, some PHP skills and a couple hours can do this. You don’t have to be MSN or yahoo to harness all of this.
If anyone cares, I might make a custom news page that shows newsfeeds of interest to each user when they log in. Before that’s worth doing, I’d need a few more users of this site…
In any case it’s been fun to get back into some PHP coding. More and more I meet j2ee or Microsoft people who use PHP for their personal websites. Maybe there should be a support group for closet PHP developers.
NY Yankees 6, Boston 5:
We shouldn’t be surprised that neither Chicago nor Boston will be playing in the World Series this year. Blame it on curses, or whatever…
It would have been so great, to have 2 classic and traditionally underdog teams playing each other. At least this season’s NFL teams have some new blood in the lead. Let’s give it up for the Seahawks!
For everyone living in New York and Florida enjoy.
What would excite me, and reduce the demand of “illegal” music swapping is a completely new concept in audio sound recording… surround sound audio. Just as stereo, and then digital made revolutionary strides for music lovers, so could audio recordings with 4, 5 or more channels. Surround sound decoding (Dolby pro-logic, DTS, THX etc) is very pervasive, and quite affordable today. Even luxury SUVs have these setups, so why limit it only to video?
Imagine playing an audio DVD (or some other media) on your home surround sound system. In a stereo (2 channel) recording, a given audio track (suppose a lead guitar) can be panned across left and right channels. With more channels, that same track could be panned with N channels worth of variation.
With a 5.1 pro-logic setup we have: left/center/right front, left/right rear + subwoofer.
Imagine that guitar track being panned to the left AND rear. That would add an additional dimension of spacing to the audio sound field. The possibilities are vast, and recording engineers could have a new frontier to explore.
Personally, I’d be willing to spend close to $20 for an album recorded in a format like this. Also, just like DVDs, the data would be too large to pirate across the internet at the original quality. Additionally, a 4+ channel format can’t yet be compressed like MP3s… OK, eventually hackers would catch up – which is how it should be.
Consumers would have a new benefit not available with existing music recordings, which would boost sales. I strongly encourage the major recording labels and industry players to consider something like this. In the meantime the RIAA doesn’t want to improve value for their customers and are too lazy to come up with something better. We should all continue to swap music and hit them in the wallet until they realize their business model is obsolete. Somehow most everything else is market driven, music shouldn’t be any different.
