Newsletter June/July 2002, Issue 56
Published by Sonaris Consulting, Felix Bopp, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- "Interactive TV"
- Resources: ArtsElectric, Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music
- Peer-to-Peer: XoloX
- Worth reading: < Eight Technologies That Will Change the World >, < Untangling the Future >
- Broadband Content Multicasting System
- Conferences & Events
Some evening, when the television listings are particularly depressing, you can just shoot the TV. Using a movie camera. Since creating a movie takes energy you don't have at the end of the day, follow the guidance of an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Arkansas. With a good camera and a bad TV you can create a wide variety of kinds images by having the TV show what the camera sees and pointing the camera at the TV. Two things create most of the effects: the angle of the camera with respect to the image on the screen, and the relative size of a pixel on the TV screen and the image of a pixel on the TV screen. To a lesser extent, lighting and images of other things, such as the side of the TV set, play a role.
http://comp.uark.edu/~cgstraus/expo.html
Sonaris supports IWA - the International Webcasting Association http://www.webcasters.org - http://www.webcasters.org.uk |
Resources
ArtsElectric
ArtsElectric, founded by Electronic Music Foundation president Joel Chadabe,
is a worldwide calendar, information center, and directory for new music
and the media arts. Its goal is to provide an easily accessible and up-to-date
resource for information about the most interesting music and media arts
events in the world. Event and artist information is provided to users
through: a regularly updated and dynamically searchable database; feature
articles focused on key people, projects, issues, and events; highlighted
mentions on important pages within the site; and a monthly email newsletter.
http://www.arts-electric.com
Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music
The TC on Computer Generated Music (TCCGM) addresses the interdisciplinary area lying between signal processing and artistic computer music, and is about the constructions of tools, software and hardware that can be applied to problems of computational music and musicology - an analogon to computational linguistics. The TC is for practitioners and researchers interested in projects that deal with computational aspects of music and musicology. It establishes a forum for the exchange of ideas, project results, and proposals through magazines and journals, workshops and conferences - up to the introduction of new media for publication. The main goal of the TC is the promotion of Computer Generated Music everywhere, including academia and research laboratories, to give graduate students and faculty members the opportunity to investigate new topics where the emphasis, instead on quantitative issues, is on qualitative problems that have to do with common sense, intuition, aesthetics - the ultimate challenge of contemporary computer science.
http://computer.org/tab/cgm/tc_cgm.htm
XoloX
is back
Dutch file-sharing developer is the first to operate
under an affirmative court ruling protecting the legality of peer-to-peer
(P2P) software
< AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, June 3 - Spurred by the recent Dutch Court of Appeals ruling that protects the development and distribution of file-sharing software, Netherlands-based XoloX B.V. has made a return to the peer-to-peer community. Once very popular in file-sharing circles, with more than a million users, XoloX discontinued development of their software last year due to the November 2001 Dutch court legal ruling against another Netherlands-based file-sharing company, Kazaa.
The court ruling held Kazaa liable for Napster-like copyright infringement ordering the company to shut down or face $40,000 in daily fines. Unlike Kazaa, XoloX does not operate a private user network, but connects to the public Gnutella network. On March 28, 2002, the Dutch Court of Appeals reversed the lower court's opinion. While the decision came too late for Kazaa, which was sold to an Australian firm, the ruling has paved the way for the current comeback of XoloX.
P2P Internet sites have been buzzing for weeks about the rumor that XoloX was returning. XoloX originally burst on the file-sharing scene last summer and quickly gained a big following due to its ease of use, powerful search results and unforgettable quirky name (pronounced Zo-locks). "We developed XoloX with three goals in mind: ease of use, reliability and speed," said Arno Steenbekkers, managing director of the newly resurrected XoloX B.V. and one of the original company's founders. "We borrowed AOL's market strategy of making a complex technology as simple as possible to use so that it would have mass-market appeal. We intend on bringing P2P file sharing to a legion of new fans that up to now have found other software applications just too difficult to use."
XoloX gained its reputation as innovators by being the first Gnutella client to offer multiple downloading and partial downloads, similar to its former countrymen, Kazaa. However, unlike the published media reports raising privacy concerns about the use of Kazaa, XoloX does not contain any 3rd party software, commonly referred to as Spyware or Sneakware. >http://www.xolox.nl