stivi writes “BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple’s recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher’s catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod’s AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. ‘Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.’”

Technorati tags: News, Multimedia

Source: Apple’s Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard

After several weeks of discussion the leaders of Compiz and Beryl have agreed that the two communities shall reunite. This decision is supported by both David and Quinn and represents the majority decision of the administrators and developers in each community. At this early stage not a lot has been decided, but these are the main points of the agreement:

 

Technorati tags: Software, News

Source: Compiz and Beryl reunited officially

There are two types of people on “Second Life”: Those who buy things and those who create the things that people like to buy. Tucson, Ariz., resident Shaun Hull falls into the latter. While residents pump millions of American dollars into clothing, land and other material possessions on the game, Hull — a Linux systems administrator who goes by Hiro David online — spends three to four hours a day holed up in his virtual home, building products on commission for eager “Second Life” consumers.

Source: Developer Finds ‘Second Life’ as Stressful as First

Mozilla Labs is working on the next generation of browser innovation, and it’s all about integrating massively popular social networking features directly into the browser. Mozilla Labs, a virtual research and development organization stemming from the Mozilla Foundation, is calling its latest project “The Coop,” and it comes from one of the most common uses of instant messenger services and social networking sites: sending people links to jokes, pictures, videos and interesting news stories.

Source: There’s a Coop in the Firefox

If you’re a long-time NetWare user, you might think you know everything Novell-ish. But the company looks a lot different these days than it used to, now that it is focused on Linux, and is claiming customers who never used NetWare. So here, for those of who remember NetWare fondly as well as for you who wouldn’t know NetWare from OS/2, are nine things we bet you don’t know about Novell.

Now here is some trivia that every geek should have in his or her arsenal, Baldy

Source: Nine things you don’t know about Novell

So you’ve been using Linux for a while now and have decided to take the next step. Whether you are looking for a performance increase, added hardware support or even just to enhance your geek cred, compiling your own kernel need not be a horrifying experience. Compiling a kernel has historically been a very involved and, at times, frustratingly hai

 

Technorati tags: Linux, Software

Source: The Newbies Guide to Compiling Your First Kernel