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Can you sell music online without DRM?

By Anton Piatek, on May 27th, 2006%

This article on eMusic is quite an interesting read… If you have ever wondered if many companies sell music online that you can play on all your mp3 players (no DRM/windows media/AAC rubbish) then check out the article.

It has some glaring ommisions of course, most notably audiolunchbox who have the first 3 offspring albums among other mainstream music. Audolunchbox also sell only high quality unrestricted mp3′s so you can do what you want with your music. The big difference is that eMusic is a subscription model whereas audioluncbox is a purchase per track/album model. As it is all mp3 without DRM you can keep it all no matter what, but I am not sure if you are allowed to keep eMusic’s songs after you cancel the subscription – you’d have to check the details on their site (not that they can stop you anyway)

Leave a comment   Music

What powers the Xbox 360?

By Anton Piatek, on May 27th, 2006%

I know the article is old, but it still has some details of the Power-based chip for Microsoft Xbox 360

  • 3 identical multi-threaded PowerPC-based CPU cores operating at 3.2 GHz enhanced with specialized function VMX acceleration for gaming applications and high speed 128 bit vector unit
  • 1 MByte Shared L2 Cache with custom logic for high-speed data streaming for graphics and system applications
  • 5.4 Gb/s per-pin Front Side Bus (with an aggregated bandwidth of 21.6 GBs)
  • Highly configurable and programmable utilizing e-fuse technology
Leave a comment   Gaming, Technology

Birdworld photos

By Anton Piatek, on May 26th, 2006%

Well, I finally got them online… here are a few of my favourites, but there are several more good ones in the gallery

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Leave a comment   Photography

Shogun lives!

By Anton Piatek, on May 26th, 2006%

There seems to be something moving in The Dojo!!!

One comment   Misc

web2.0 and mashups

By Anton Piatek, on May 26th, 2006%

After a talk at work on the web2.0, I had a look at a couple of the mashups that were talked about. Real Time Satellite Tracking and WeatherBonk were both really quite cool. I am sure there are plenty more, but I thought I’d share these 2 with you.

(and thanks to Roo for the awesome presentation!)

Leave a comment   Internet, Misc, Technology

The RFID Hacking Underground

By Anton Piatek, on May 26th, 2006%

Wired has and excellent article tilted The RFID Hacking Underground and it is a really interesting read on RFID security problems.

I checked out the RFID lab at work recently and found that there is far more about RFID than I thought I knew. For a start there are several passive chips, most being the short range ones (several cm range). The new UHF chips work at a range of several metres, but are much larger in size.

RFID is booming at the moment because of the UHF chips long range, and the fact that the US and Europe have agreed on a common frequency to operate them on, so you can use one chip both sides of the Atlantic.

Work has a cool demo of a goods truck being loaded, and the truck actually tracks what is on/off the back of it. It will tell you when you have brought the wrong container on and should really speed up shipping of goods eventually (If you have seen the IBM goods tracking ad where the boxes are telling the driver he is on the wrong road, then you get the idea)

Leave a comment   Misc, My Job, Technology
 
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