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I ran across a press release in Gizmodo today saying that the owner of the Rio brand is getting out of the portable music player business. I bought a Rio PMP300 in about 1998 (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere). I don't usually have strong nostalgia for electronic equipment, but this was really groundbreaking in its time - you could listen to 32MB of CD quality music while running. Definitely addictive.
Maxivista allows you to share monitors among networked machines (among other things). I haven't tried it yet, but it looks very interesting.
Princeton University has introduced a very knuckleheaded way to distribute textbooks electronically. I don't mind getting copies of books electronically, but a 33% discount is not nearly enough of a compensation for not being able to print or copy between computers. And they expire in 5 months?!? I've got textbooks that I still refer to on occassion and I graduated in the early 90s.
I do have some books that I've purchased in DRM and I'm happy with the value provided (even though you can print them). The last ebook I bought was six bucks vs. sixty-some for the paperback version. That's the kind of discount I'd expect for a DRM protected book - if I like it, I might buy the hardcopy anyway because it is easier to read and reference.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavs and general tech rich guy, has a great entry in his weblog about the insanity of the music industry. He is spot on with this: trying to protect music perfectly will fail. I know plenty of people who subscribe to one of the all-you-can-listen-to channels and rip the music off of the feeds (sure it takes real-time to do, but then you can share with your friends). If they drop the price of a CDs worth of music to $3 and made it easy to find on line, much of the piracy would disappear because it just wouldn't be worth it for people with jobs.
Also, and maybe more importantly, I'm probably not unique in that I tend to spend more on music once I get started buying it (I find something I like which leads to something I like which leads to something I like, etc.) However, the barriers to buying new music are too high at $10-15 per CD. What if I hate it? So, I would spend much more if music were cheaper than I will at $10-15 per CD. This is called price elasticity and it is an econ 101 subject - why don't the record companies get this?
I just noticed that you can't cut and paste a table directly out of Firefox into MS Word and have it nicely formatted, but you can do that in IE6 and it looks fine. Go figure...
