Awesome favicon
I like the new favicon, it looks awesome. Any chance of an svg of it under a creative commons license to make some El-Reg wallpapers for KDE-look.org? Or an svg wallpaper of your new vulture logo made by yourselves?
Posts by Phil Antrobus
4 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2008
OMFG, what have you done?
Don't shed any tears for Pandora
Thursday 10th January 2008 19:32 GMT
Pandora and iPlayer easily available via proxy
last.fm provide a very similar service with UK licencing from the very organization that Pandora have stopped negotiating with.
last.fm have all the interested investors for a European internet radio station like this backing them which is why it can pay and why it'll be very hard for anyone else to muscle in on this biz.
British expats can get the iplayer by proxying internet connection through putty on windows or openssh on mac/linux (use the -D option) to a UK shell account and changing the settings (including DNS lookup to proxy end in about:config) for firefox. Works well for me and I am paying only 75p/month for a UK shell account with no bandwidth limit. Bit cheaper than when I was in the UK using my TV with licence!
The same would work with a US proxy for getting Pandora.
Lord Triesman on P2P, pop-ups and the Klaxons
Wednesday 9th January 2008 14:40 GMT
If you think it's worth paying for a peerage you'll pay for everything!
Lord Triesman doesn't have a clue, and the fact he has the title probably means he likes paying lots of money for rubbish Cds/Movies/Peerages too!
1) “if they cannot earn a living then these things will not continue” - I would like to see Hollywood shut down, and be happy never to see another Hollywood film. I did support 2 films in '07 by seeing them in the cinema – Ratatouille and Harry Potter, neither typical Hollywood shite and I hope to God my money won't be reinvested in Transformers 3!
2) “if you want the indie sector to have more vivacity” – indie music by definition makes no money, once an artist makes money from recorded music they are mainstream, not indie. Most artists always have and always will make most of their money perfoming live. I would like to bankrupt the major record labels, who get all the record money!
3) “Perhaps the technologies can pop up something on people's computer which when they're downloading says, "You don't really want to do this” – this can only be imposed irreversably on proprietry operating systems; I think this would be a great way to spur the rise of Linux and OSS ;)
4) Pandora failed because there was a more open technology with similar functionality at last.fm. last.fm compatability could thus be built into many other programs, so I among many others migrated, and last.fm has a healthy revenue advertising music to us by playing it at no cost to the end-user. Go last.fm
5) “Some things are better left free to use: if you try to protect the sequence of the human genome then the odds are you'll have less economic activity and less economic benefit” – yes, last.fm provides free music in the hope that we'll then buy some. The same happens with BitTorrent where I want to own the CD/DVD artefact for good content but without anyone able to see that effect because its taboo.
Free (both open and zero-cost) access to any digital content via P2P and its successors will not be killed off. Industry, government – put up with it and stop moaning, it'll lower your costs when you accept it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
