BRUCEB NEWS
Please Chat Amongst Yourselves During This Brief Intermission
My websites - Bruceb.com, Bruceb Favorites, and Bruceb News - are going to be spruced up during the next week or so. During the construction, there won't be any new articles or updates. When the dust settles, the websites will be exactly as dull as before, but with...
MICROSOFT RESERVES RIGHT TO HACK YOUR COMPUTER
Here’s one of those things that might be trivial, or it might be enormously significant. There’s no way to be sure – but this is not a time when I have a very high opinion of the...
TOSHIBA POCKET PC e310
I’ve been wrestling with more Palm devices than usual for the last few weeks. (Normally Palms are simple and troublefree, but they’re incredibly annoying when they go crazy and...
MEDIA JUKEBOX
Media Jukebox is the most heavily used program on my computer. If you’ve got more than a handful of mp3 files, it does a better job than any other program of organizing and...
SPAM
Suddenly the flood of unwelcome spam is at the top of everybody’s list. It’s so awful, so overwhelming and gross, that everyone assumes they’re being uniquely singled out. Trust...
RECORDING INDUSTRY SEEKING PERMISSION TO HACK YOUR COMPUTER
Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., whose district includes part of Hollywood, is preparing a bill that would let copyright owners, such as record labels or movie studios, hack into...
THE NEXT STEP IN PERSONAL COMPUTING
Here’s an important one. My mind is buzzing trying to guess the implications of this. This comes from an e-mail newsletter put out by Windows & .NET magazine, summarizing an...
ROYALTY RATES SET FOR INTERNET RADIO
You’ll recall that the recording industry appeared to have won a one-sided mediation to set royalty rates for Internet radio broadcasts. Rates were chosen that were far higher...
VHS STARTS TO FADE AWAY
If you've been holding off on buying a DVD player, the time has come to face facts: VHS is dead. You've already noticed the shift at Costco, always a reliable indicator - the VHS...
AUDIOGALAXY SELLS OUT
AudioGalaxy decided to sell its soul. It settled with the recording industry and agreed to start making a serious effort to filter out copyrighted songs. This permits it to avoid...
XO BANKRUPTCY
XO Communication filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings today, as expected. It’s intended to be a reorganization with no disruption in services. Covad Communications went...
RECORD COMPANIES: FEAR OF MUSIC
The recording industry continues its relentless campaign to prevent us from actually hearing any of its products played out loud. The latest is the proposal floated in a cover...
ANTIVIRUS VENDORS AND SLEAZY PRESS RELEASES
The news from McAfee is alarming: a new virus can infect .JPG picture files; potentially no file type is safe to exchange in e-mail; maybe we should never share .JPGs by e-mail....
NAPSTER AND ITS PROGENY
For those of you that want a refresher, here’s a perfectly nice short article about Napster’s rise and fall, the record industry’s horrible online offerings to date, and the...
FRY’S ELECTRONICS AND OUTPOST.COM
This isn’t new, but I just discovered that Fry’s Electronics acquired Outpost.com late last year and is running the Outpost.com web site. Fry’s is famous for low prices, huge...
XO, STARBAND, AND OTHER BAD NEWS
The extraordinary collapse of the telecommunications industry continues apace. XO Communications has been trying to engineer an infusion of capital from two lenders that would...