Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 7/26/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:7/26/2000; 5:26:40 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 7/26/2000
Msg #:19089
Prev/Next:19088 / 19090

Napster ordered to shut down 

DaveNet: The Thrill is Gone?

Will Cate: "Just came over the news, at 4:55 pm PDT. Rest in peace, Napster. Let a thousand little Napster seedlings grow."

Reports: News.Com, AP, Reuters.

Dan Gillmor: "And I hold no particular brief for Napster, the company. It has been quick to assert remarkably heavy-handed protection of its own intellectual property, as the Wall Street Journal noted today." Dan, this is important, the WSJ got the story wrong. Napster did not hold onto the protocol. It's openly documented and they've helped the cloners. This is central to the Journal piece, it reeks of a smear, and they got the facts wrong.

Scott Rosenberg: "Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here's a piece of software that cultivates people's taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity! "

"Patel said the injunction will go into effect at 4PM Friday."

At 7PM there will be a live webcast from Napster. (Did anyone listen to the webcast? Do you have a URL of the archive? I just get a recording saying it's over. Is it archived anywhere?)

Peter Lubin: "For twenty years I had been an Artist & Repertoire executive at the major labels."

In San Francisco today, Napster is in court, defending against a suit by the RIAA.

I sent a good luck card to the people at Napster and Hummer-Winblad thanking them for believing in music on the Internet.

If you love music, think good thoughts today, for the judge, and for the RIAA. It's still not too late for them to embrace music on the Internet.

Napster.Com now has a service status page.

WSJ: "The company may, through its rap anthem, appear to encourage a disdain for 'trade laws' where music is concerned, but it readily invokes those same laws when its own property is at stake."

The Journal article also says: "Some have tried to figure out the workings of Napster’s internal protocols on their own. One of them, David Weekly, a Stanford University student, put a version of them on his personal Web site. Soon, he received an electronic message from Napster demanding that he take it down."

This demands clarification. Whatever differences they may have had in the past, the Weekly site currently has the Napster spec. The spec is widely distributed around the Net. I asked Fanning and Kessler about this when I met with them last month and they said it's OK with them, and that they give advice on mail lists to Napster cloners.

AP: Court showdown for Napster.

News.Com: Napster trial won't end music industry headaches.

If you were the judge? 

Survey: Shut down Napster?

Joel on Passport 

Joel Spolsky: "Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world's largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it."

New.Com interview 

Kim Polese: "Our vision, putting it bluntly, is to be the Cisco of Internet infrastructure management. If you want to turn the Internet into a utility like water and electricity, you have to have a whole range of infrastructure and management processes."

Is it perfect? 

I may have just written the perfect Web page.

But it won't be this perfect for long. The marketing hype section will get filled in. Sorry sports fans!

We've got our name 

Thanks for all the great product name suggestions!

The best name was on the tip of our collective tongue. Too close to even see it.

For some reason the word Radio has always had a magic ring to it. I knew that someday Scripting News would be a radio station. (So will your site, if you want it to be.)

Radio radio radio. What's the root of the word? Radiate? Probably. A 1920s modernism.

"Come on honey let's go make some noise!"

"I'm going to be your number one, number one."

Anyway, the name of the product is here.

Yahoo!

ImageReady 

I've got ImageReady running. It's a new version so it totally sucks, almost everything I learned is out the window. I'm a graphics-impaired user. Oy I hate Adobe. Whatever. But I'm using it.

Now I can show you a screen shot of the new software. Note the queue is on the left. Those are the songs that are in my rotation right now. To take a song out just cut it. Copy-paste works too. On the right is my master playlist. It's got all the songs in it, categorized by artist. To add a song to the queue, just double-click. The next song to play is The Tide is High. I could change that by re-positioning the cursor. But I'm going to leave it right there because Blondie is so cooool.

Morning playlists 

Observation. I like to start my mornings with female vocalists singing about love. But as the morning goes on, I like to listen to black male vocalists. Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Jimmy Cliff, BB King, Gil Scott-Heron. They mostly aren't singing about love (or maybe it's love of self). It's still great stuff.

Is it cross-platform? 

Steve Ivy asks if Radio UserLand is cross-platform. Yes it is, but we're shipping for Windows first.

It's impossible to explain why, before the software is released, but I try anyway in this DG message.

Why does commercial radio suck so? 

Steven Spencer: "The first time I used Napster was something of a lightning strike, an epiphany; something that shattered my notions and created new thoughts. The world's biggest radio station. Only you're the program director."

Brad Neuburg: "Oh yeah, if the scheduling programs traditional radio uses are so great, then why does commercial radio suck so much? There are millions of settings to help 'modulate the mood', but commercial radio has managed to flatten out music into nothing!"

Today's song 

Chuck Berry: My Ding A Ling.



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