It’s my last day at Itron today. Thursday the movers come around and take away all my stuff, including the desktop PC, Friday my car is going onto auto-hauler heading down to sunny Sunnyvale, CA. Spokane is a nice place to live, but it’s time to try out something different.
Erin Thayer provides a good insight into the legality status of AllofMP3.com and similar Russian music services:
With the successful defeat of Grokster handed down by the Supreme Court it seems likely that free file-sharing services in the U.S. are likely to decrease. This void may be filled by quasi-legitimate foreign online music sites offering superior service at a fraction of the price compared to a download from popular legitimate U.S. sites such as iTunes. It appears that there is very little that the music industry players can do besides pressure Russia to change its copyright laws, and even if successful in doing this, it is likely to be a slow and laborious process.
New study claims coffee has health benefits:
Coffee not only helps clear the mind and perk up the energy, it also provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet, according to a study released Sunday.
The top Russian spammer, brutally murdered in his apartment in July, was killed by prostitutes, not irate spam recipients, eXile reports.
A bunch of Webcasts on video game development from Microsoft:
Learn a fun way to write in C#! Instructors from the DigiPen Institute of Technology (the first school in the world to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in Game Development) introduce participants to the concepts of video game production. Presenters demonstrate the key stages in developing a game engine through the creation of a top-down shooter game called “Star Trooper,” using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, a new development environment from Microsoft designed for beginner programmers. If you want to build the game yourself as you follow along, download Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and executable and source archives.
Forbes has the list on Y! Finance:
Computer Science Department of University of Virginia published a comparative study of security in Java and .NET in Portable Document Format. DevMktg blog on MSDN summarizes the findings saying that due to careful design process, .NET presents security advantages over Java platform in several areas.
Adi Oltean from Microsoft found that from looking at the source.
My sources from Moscow tell me that the court hearing for Universal Music vs. AllofMp3.com took place during the first week of August. Universal is either trying to get AllOfMP3.com to settle out of court or get the company shut down. No definite info yet, so stay tuned.