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Yesterday we had a town-hall QA session with the head of our company. As a part of this session, he extolled the benefits of the Grokster decision in terms of making people like Universities liable for what people do on their networks. Now, if I ever had an “Oh no, I joined the dark side!” moment, this was it.

In turn, I asked the question:

“We depend on Universities, specifically art and computer science departments, for the creation of innovative technologies and methdologies that enable our business practices to grow. So how exactly does stiffling innovation with Grokster help us? Can’t we find a way to protect our intellectual property while fostering innovation? Might the music industry step up as a research funding body?”

His response: “That is not my concern.”

Oh well. It should be. Grokster makes Universities liable for things people do on their network, specifically copyright violations, DMCA violations, etc. Putting the fear of litigation into the hearts of Chancelors is never going to help funding bodies have confidence in funding research or technology that might, even tangentially, fly in the face of copyright.

Art and technology operate at an intersection whos prime motive is the breaking of existing paradigms in the hope of finding new and interesting ways of doing things. Without the breaking, and the potential of breaking existing laws, etc, we wouldn’t have Google, nor P2P technology, nor Yahoo, nor video/audio searching algorithms, nor audio compression technology.

I can imagine a company, whether it be us or someone else saying: here is rights to a part of our catalog, we get first right of refusal of anything you do with it; have fun.

Innovation depends on the lack of fear of litigation, and it is up to the powers that have the prosecutorial impetus to allow that to happen.

This is an inspiring list. You know why? Every single person on this list has felt the guilt of “disappointing” their mother at one point in their life.

Mary Kate Olsen portends your death.

So it finally happened and the blogosphere is all abuzz. But I must wonder: why is it suprising?

To recap: Apple is going with Intel for processors after the G5/G4′s lifecycle is complete. This means that OSX will essentially run on the X86 architecture. Of course, those with any forsight knew that Jobs was planning for this contingency a while back. OSX was compiled for Intel with every major release, and I imagine that even the hardware guys have been maintaining separate specs for cases to accomidate ATX motherboards.

Well, contingency plans become business plans when the main plan falls through. IBM has a killer processor in the Power5. The problem is that it is so killer, that it can cook an egg. Basically the performance/watt ratio is not very good compared to Intel, which means that sticking a G5 in a laptop would be akin to sitting with a hotplate on your lap. My G5 tower has a radiator for fucks sake.

So Apple goes Intel, but in the WWDC keynote they left a lot of things out. In fact, it was a shitty keynote, as it really didn’t say anything. Just that “yes, we’re going Intel.”

They never said:

1) What processor?
2) What architecture (RISC, CISC, hybrid, 64bit?)
3) If it would be in the current cases/designs?
4) OpenFirmware still?
5) What about the Altivec stuff?

There is much not answered, which is not really what Intel does. Apple is very secretive when it comes to things, but not others. The fact that both Apple and Intel were vague makes me believe that Intel is working on something for Apple, possibly a modified 64 bit P5 or P4 with an Altivec to SSE bridge in it or something.

All I know though is that the Powerbooks desperately need more horsepower.

I imagine the next year will be interesting for Apple. They are going to have to pump up alternative revenue streams to offset buyer fear of current G5/970 and G4 based systems. That leads me to believe that we’ll see some sort of movie download service, an Airport Express for video, possibly a tablet or PDA and hopefully a portable video device. Apple has to offset revenue loss somehow, so I imagine they are sitting on some interesting things.

All in all, I think this is a good thing for Apple, as it’ll drive costs down due to increased competition and a more leveled performance benchmark landscape. That can only improve Mac performance, and development for the OS. In the end, we must realize that the Mac is the Mac because of OSX, not as much for the hardware. If the hardware runs things faster, cheaper and still with the pretty face, I’m all for it.

School is getting all Melrose Place, and I have absolutely no desire to be involved in it in any fashion. I keep humming the Bjork tune “There’s More to Life Than This” under my breath whenever I hear about it. In fact, if last Friday was the last day of school for my entire life, I’d be very happy. Very happy indeed. But it was not. Instead I have this, week 10 of my last quarter in higher education to get through. This includes crit on Tuesday, which shall be all “she ripped off her wig.” Joy.

I shall drink!

This weekend was a goi wedding, which was amusing to say the least. It is weird being in the only Jewish group in a room full of Orange County Republican Christians. I almost felt that in the middle of the festivities, the music would stop, eyes would turn our way and some sort of “intervention” would start. It was kind of surreal, in a fine way.

What I do love about Christianity vs. Judaism is that Christianity is all about feeling guilt about things, and hoping that in the end, you absolve your guilt and are accepted into something better than what we have here. Christians are all about Original Sin, the blood of the father, being forgiven, etc.

Judaism however, we operate under the assumption that we are the Chosen. It is assumed, that by being Jewish we are already granted salvation here on earth, kind of a “hey, well, this is as good as it is I guess” type of situation. Our guilt is not intrinsic to the religion, only our mothers. Jewish guilt is a matter of the fact that since the religion automatically assumes “Chosen” status, the only way to differentiate ourselves amongst ourselves is to strive for positions in which we can absolve the guilt of others in whatever way possible. Doctors, lawyers, and hell, even actors do this in some way.

And our mothers are always there to make sure we do it properly.

So Christianity has the Holy Trinity, and we Jews do as well: mother, grand mother (paternal), grand mother (maternal). And then that leads way to: mother, mother-in law and the grandmothers as a collective entity.

Oh to be Jewish, such guilt! But always with love and a lot of nosh.

So back to school now, this week is the final, final week. My thesis show is done, my written thesis is done (enquire within!), and I wrap up classes this week. Graduation is June 11th (which given the status of departmental mood should be fun). My thing right now: I just want it over, I want to move, start work and keep in contact with those that matter. And forget the rest.

It is rather funny that I came to school to escape the corporate world, and am leaving academia back to corporate with that same feeling of escape. In retrospect, I think it amounts to my dislike of power through stupidity, or the obfuscation of stupidity via the pomposity of assumed power. Both academia and corporate have it, one just pays you more to deal with it.

So June 13, we leave Santa Barbara and I’m kind of happy about that. The plans for world domination are in effect.

This weekend, Steve Jobs (his eminent greatness) announced that iTunes 4.9 shall feature support for the ubiquitous web “cool” technology known as podcasting. What exactly is podcasting you might wonder? Well, the god of podcasting himself (Adam Curry) created it as a method of leveraging “always on” connections to allow subscription based downloading of radio type content. That means its a melding of RSS syndication, audio files and those little white devices known as iPods. You subscribe to feeds, it downloads them regularly and puts them on your iPod for easy, on the go listening.

Quite cool.

Basically you can think of podcasting as distributed, time shifted and locative independent radio, without barrier to entry or any FCC regulation. For content producers, this is a wet-dream situation. It allows the creation of rich and informative audio content for “on the go” users without the need for any commercial interaction in terms of the now dying radio broadcast industry. No standards-and-practices, no five second delay. Just pure and unadulterated voice.

Of course that is part of the problem. Allowing the masses to use mass media is sometimes not such a great idea. Job’s called it the “Wayne’s World” of radio, and he has a point in that. Not in the sense that the import of the technology is over-stated (as it isn’t, anything that reduces hegemonic control can’t be over-stated enough). No, why that term from Jobs is correct is because just like Public Access (which Waynes World ostensibly was on), mass communication with the masses greatly increases the “noise” in signal to noise ratio.

But, if folksonomic and tagging tools like del.icio.us have taught us anything, it is that non-hierarchical, rhizomic (thanks Deleuze!) systems of content aggregation, while having high noise, do allow sufficient amount of complexity to discern signal from them.

What I expect from iTunes supporting PodCasting is the same thing we’ve seen in the blogosphere. I of course refer to that damn term The Long Tail. What this means is that like any power-law situation, you’ll end up with a handful of really active and authoritative pod-casts, with a long tail of secondary and unimportant pod-casts tailing back. This is exactly like any system dependent on user agency: a small number are connected to the vast majority.

So while podcasting will reduce hegemonic control, human nature will implement it again, just as it does in the blogosphere, social network situations and even folksonomic based tools (Flickr, del.icio.us, etc). This is not a bad thing, if anything it is a natural settling point for a new technology. What Apple supporting pod-casting on this level will do is make pod-casting a viable commercial medium (as my new employer already discovered), and in a sense, make it the logical and sensible step in one-to-many audio distribution.

So iTunes 4.9? A first step in a larger puzzle. Good bye Clear Channel Radio.