Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply


WSJ.com

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.

The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry’s salvation.

The Lazy Guide to Installing Knoppix on a USB Key


The Lazy Guide to Installing Knoppix on a USB Key | tuxmachines.org

Knoppix, the famous live Linux CD that practically started the live CD trend, needs no introduction to most people. One of the things that’s so great about it is that you can take it with you and boot to a familiar Linux environment on almost any modern computer, without touching the OS that’s already installed on it.

Of course, it can be even more portable when it runs entirely off of an inexpensive USB key. So let’s install it to a 1 GB USB key, and create a persistent home directory in which to store files. Only let’s do it the lazy way, and keep use of the command prompt to a bare minimum.

Yahoo to offer e-mail storage without end


Yahoo to offer e-mail storage without end – International Herald Tribune

Yahoo plans to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May.

The world’s biggest e-mail service said Tuesday that it would scrap its free e-mail storage limit of one gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos via e-mail.

Microsoft has a two gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.

“We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo, said in a telephone interview. “You can keep stuff forever.”

Hacking the Apple TV


Tutorial Ninjas » Blog Archive » Hacking the Apple TV

This guide will help you with the following:

* Disabling the Firewall
* Enabling SSH & VNC
* Playing xvid/divx encoded stuff
* Stopping Watchdog
* Running Applications(Firefox, Centerstage, etc)
* Installing Quartz
* Extra info.

What you will need:

* 1 Computer(pref. Intel Mac)
* a torx 10(for the case) and a torx 8(for the hard drive)
* A way to hook up a 2.5?’ hard drive to your computer(can be found at bestbuy or radio shack ask for a “2.5?’ hard drive enclosure”
* A method of SSHv1 into a box(linux and mac have built in, windows can use putty get Putty and pSFTP)

Xbox for your gun?


Xbox for your gun? | Technology | Reuters

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Police who have raided vice-ridden Mexico City neighborhoods in a push against drug violence hope to take guns off the streets by offering to swap them for computers and video-game consoles.

Launching the program Tuesday in the notorious inner-city barrio of Tepito, which police stormed last month, city police chief Joel Ortega said anyone who turns in a high-caliber weapon like a machine gun will get a computer.

Owners can swap smaller guns for cash or Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox video-game consoles under the plan.

Newly elected Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has moved quickly to restore order to the chaotic capital by going after well-known crime dens and clearing the city’s narrow streets of informal vendors whose stalls have blocked sidewalks for years.

New “paint” provides wireless network protection without encryption


New “paint” provides wireless network protection without encryption

Forget WEP and WPA; I’m switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently revealed paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks.

The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities.

“The use of EM-SEC Coating as an electromagnetic barrier for the containment of wireless networks has opened a new realm of possibilities for our company and for the future of wireless communications” said Robert Boyd, Vice President and Director of Technology for EM-SEC Technologies, LLC. “As hackers, identity thieves and even terrorists become more sophisticated in the methods they use to obtain information or inflict damage, this experiment confirmed EM-SEC Coating reduces the threat from electronic eavesdropping and blocks out electromagnetic interference for the protection of electronic data.”

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies


John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies – New York Times

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

Edwards Campaign Opens Second Life Office


GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » Edwards Campaign Opens Second Life Office

While not the first political hopeful to make an appearance in the MMO Second Life, presidential candidate John Edwards is the first to get a virtual campaign office.

Jerimee Richir, who goes by the SL handle Jose Rote, volunteered to purchase virtual land in Second Life, set up, and run the office as a grassroots effort.

Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation


Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation

Microsoft has built into Vista a function that allows anyone to extend the operating system’s activation deadline not just three times, but many times. The same one-line command that postpones Vista’s activation deadline to 120 days can be used an indefinite number of times by first changing a Registry key from 0 to 1.