One Shot Design

In an article titled Is The World Ready For The Successor of the MP3? Wired.com reports about MusicDNA, a format developed by german firm BACH Technology. From the title it sounded like the article would be talking about a new audio file format. Disappointingly, the successor of 19 year-old MP3 turns out to be… MP3, with extended upgradeable tags.

The sales pitch is that MusicDNA would be reverse-compatible with current MP3 players, and the format would include upgradeable additional info like lyrics, album cover and newsfeed.

What’s worse, since MusicDNA gets information downstream from the labels, what tells us that the labels are not able to collect information upstream? That would be a good way for them to monitor the end users, whom I am sure would be thrilled to use anything that has a backdoor.

A lot of music library management applications now have the option to fetch song, album and artist info as soon as a file is played, not to mention scrobbling. Why not work along those lines and instead improve the performance of data compression? MP3 is by far one of the worst destructive compression formats.

Labels should make it easier for users to purchase digital music online. I am writing from one of the most economically dynamic countries on the European continent, and yet options are still limited from here. This is why I am still getting my music through purchasing second-hand CD’s on Amazon and ripping them… in OGG Vorbis.

For those of you who want to access their Facebook chat without a browser, Pidgin now features a plugin for that.

OSOR.eu has details about a decision by the French Directorate General of Public Finance to migrate the mail client towards Mozilla on 130,000 computers. The Directorate General of Taxes had been using IBM Lotus Notes; while the Directorate General of Public Accountancy used Microsoft Outlook. The decision to merge the two departments led to an assessment of different solutions to make both entities software compatible. The economical weight of licenses eventually led to adopt the Mozilla suit.

It took time for phone builders to realize that they would made big saving by adopting Android instead of reinventing the wheel with their own OS. Android has been around for a couple of years now, but it is finally gaining momentum: a dozen device are expected within the next 6 months, so the OS ever-broad user base might create enough momentum to convince developpers to embrace it.

As for Microsoft, Windows Mobile has recently been released, and I read that it still requires a stylus. I rest my case.

Following several cases of data irresponsibility, namingly government officials “losing” unencrypted classified information, the British Ministry of Defence compiled a document outlining how to prevent confidential information from being leaked to the Internet.
Problem is, that very document has just been leaked to the Internet.
Bummer!