Music: Duke Frosh Receive a Welcome of a “Different” Kind

Duke

This week Duke University (Durham, NC, U.S.A) welcome their frosh with more than just the 2004 Frosh Week activities and the class schedule. Every first year student received a brand new Apple iPod (4G) 20GB, plus a Belkin’s Universal Microphone Adapter. Details of the project can be found on Duke University’s web site.

It is said, the Duke U project expensed an amount of USD500,000.00 from the discretion fund, which the university allocated for innovative technology. This money paid for the iPods, staff administrator and support of the faculties participating in the project. Of course, Duke did not pay retail (USD299.00) for the iPods.

According to the project, these iPods are not for the musical entertainment of the freshmen. They are to be used for recording lectures, language studies and course work from the participating faculties.

Apple also gave each student a USD10.00 gift certificate to purchase music from the customized Duke University iTunes Music Store.

I must say, Apple made a much bigger bang with this Duke Project than what RealRhapsody did with their 80% discount of their pay-per-listen service for students of University of California, Berkeley.

Time will only tell what these competitors will come up with next in this heavily competitive online music industry.

Thinest All-in-one Macintosh Ever

iMac

The latest iMac (2004) is the thinest All-in-one Macintosh ever produced by Apple.

This is also the fastest iMac ever produced by Apple since the its introduction in 1998; when Apple brought the world the candy colours Macintosh. Then it shock the world with the half-moon 360° movable LCD screen iMac. Apple later speed bumped the processor and up the size of the iMac screen to an unbelievable; for this class of computer, 20″ LCD.

Now, September 2004, Apple introduced a LCD panel with the computer built-in and a lightning speed PowerPC G5 processor that was previously only available in Apple’s top of the line desktop computers.

Aside from its quick IBM’s G5 processor, it also comes with 2 different LCD sizes (17″ and 20″ ) to choose from plus a full collection of connection ports (USB, Firewire [a.k.a. iLink, IEEE 1394]) you ever want.

iMac

  • • All systems come with 256MB of RAM with a maximum of 2GB occupying 2 SIMM slots;
  • • A choice of either a slot loading Combo (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) or Super Drive (DVD-R/CD-RW);
  • • A NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB, which is good enough for most graphic needs;
  • • An optical audio out so you can view your DVDs with true 5.1 Surround sound;
  • • Optional Bluetooth and WiFi built-in wireless connections.

With all this power and options starting at HKD10,300 to approximately HKD15,300, that’s a very good deal. With the built-in Bluetooth option you can take advantage of Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and with the built-in WiFi (802.11g/b) you will not have any wires to the iMac accept for the power cord.

If anyone wants a low cost machine this is definitely the one to consider; particular for those who do not need the convenience and portability of a notebook.

Alpine’s Solution for iPod Owners

A month and a half ago I told you about Dension’s “Ice>Link:iPod” and now Alpine has announced its own integrated solution for its line of audio head units.

Unlike the Dension solution, Alpine’s solution will only be compatible with Apline head units.

It will be available through Apline resellers in September 2004.

HP’s New iPod Tattoos

With HP’s launch of the new “Apple iPod by HP” (the result of an Apple HP partnership), it also announced the availability of “HP iPod Tattoos”.

To get to the list of HP iPod Tattoos, you will have to click on the lower left hand image of the center Flash image within the HP Digital Image web page.
HPiPod1

At this resulting screen you will see Flash movie animations of each of the available tattoos from HP. The images below are examples of the Vanessa Carlton album cover.

HPiPod2 HPiPod3

According to HP, there will be clear tattoo sheets available in which you can print your own designs. Of course this is another way to sell HP printers and HP Ink. They also mentioned that they are working with record companies to make available to consumers more album cover art.

For the die hard iPod lovers I think they may choose to stick to the clear tattoo sheet to avoid tampering with their beautifully designed white iPod.

Unfortunately, none of the material I read from HP mentioned the Macintosh. It even fail to mention that the Apple iPod by HP is “Macintosh compatible”. I will presume the required software to print to these clear tattoo sheets will be Windows specific software.

Also of note, at the time of announcement there do not seem to be “tattoo sheets” available for the iPod Mini.

I guess this is another opportunity for 3rd party to come in and fill the holes left by Apple and HP.

iPod & Your Car

IceLink

For many years, iPod users like myself had been fumbling with various devices that allow us to pipe tunes from our iPods through the car audio system.

These solutions had been a combination of cigarette lighter connector for power and then a separate device for the audio. The latter being either a wireless FM Tuner or a tape cassette adapter. These sort of solutions resulted in cords laid out on our vehicle’s console. Then when you park your car, like me, you will go through the ritual of unplugging everything from your iPod and then packing it way.

Now Dension has come to our rescue. The Budapest, Hungary audio supply manufacture has come out with the product they called “Ice>Link:iPod”.

The Dension products is available with different connectors for various car manufactures’ built-in and after-market audio manufactures’ audio systems.

It will also display the current playing track’s ID3 Tag information on your head unit. The amount of information displayed depends on the head unit being connected.

All in all this Ice>Link:iPod product is a very clean solution for iPod owners who happens to also be drivers.

The product is available now at Dension retailers around the world.

NTT’s Latest Advancement

Info-MICAEarlier this year (February 12, 2004) NTT (“Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation”), the Japanese telecom giant who brought us i-Mode, announced a memory media break through called “info-MICA”, which stands for “Multi-layered Imprinted CArd”.

This revolutionary invention may change the storage media industry forever. Basically what this is, is a cheap, light weight, durable, inexpensive to manufacture and high capacity storage medium.

Remember what CD and DVD has done for the music and movie industries, well this could be in line to replace the CDs and DVDs of our time.

Just to give you an idea what this can do, remember Tom Cruise’s movie “Minority Report” in 2002? Remember how the characters in the movie, particularly “John Anderton” [Tom], played the recordings of his family movies over and over again. Well think back to the media in which the recordings were stored. This clear plastic disc is what Info-MICA can be and will be.

At the moment NTT has achieved a 1GB storage for the media, they are hoping to reach the 10GB mark very soon.

At the moment the 1GB Info-MICA card is only the size of a 1 cent American stamp. By the time they reach 10GB storage, a full motion picture will be able to stored in this Info-MICA cards.

You may say, why do we need another storage media, given that we have so many Media Cards already. Possibly type for our digital camera, another for our DV (digital video) camera, yet another for our PDA and may be one more for the cellular phone.

Well, what makes a “high” capacity media card great are the following:

1. storage capacity

2. power consumption of the drive that reads the media

3. cost of manufacture

4. size

5. durability

6. last but not the least, given the paranoidal behaviours of the “media giants”, Digital Rights Management capability

Info-MICA does well in all of the above. Because the medium on which Info-MICA are made with, are just plastic wafers. Therefore, they are inexpensive to make and light weight. Due to the technology used, “thin film holography”, the media is relatively durable unless you snap it in half. Although, I think in theory, if you have all the pieces you may be able to tape it back together and it should still work.

Again because of the thin film holography technology used to etch the information onto the media, according to NTT it “tolerates fluctuation in light source wavelength and thermal expansion of the media”. Meaning it can use a pulsating laser to read the information on the card, plus tolerable to the varying temperatures that may cause the card to deform.

As for copy protection, according to NTT, “because this media uses hologram, high level of knowledge is required for the creation of the master. It is virtually impossible to physically copy the fine concave-convex pattern engraved on the plastic material.”. This solves the problems that the “media giants” have.

Well you may ask, why isn’t there more fan fare. The industry analysts may be skeptical, pointing to past storage media that came and gone, for example:

1. Sony’s MiniDisk

2. Zip/Jazz/Cip disk

Well the Info-MICA is quite a big leap in technology advancement compare to these two example, additionally it has the benefits that I mentioned above.

My only reservation is that Info-MICA is currently a “read only media for consumers. I hope that NTT will cooperate with other manufactures (particularly the personal digital appliance manufactures) to explore the possibilities of the Info-MICA technology further. So that consumers like myself can benefit from their hard work.

The Minority Report feature, at least for storage media, may be here sooner than we think.

Apple Done it Again!

Apple has done it again. The latest upcoming version of Apple’s Mac OS X is even cooler than the ones before. Some of the features of Tiger remind me of Apple’s old R&D project called “Knowledge Navigator”.

One of the coolest new [functional] feature is “Dashboard”. I can just picture all the new Widgets developers will be coming out with. One reason why I think Tiger is so cool is that it has elements of what SUN Microsystems has demonstrated with their desktop User Interface project called “Looking Glass“.

Dashboard

Looking Glass is the project to develop the next version of Solaris desktop some time down the road. Since Apple is releasing these features first, you know who is copying who.

Just by looking at the latest version of Mac OS X you can see the desktop User Interface to come, and it just may arrive sooner than you think if you’re fortunate enough to be using a Macintosh.

You can check out all the other features at Apple’s Preview site.

Apple Computers Futhers the Cause of WiFi Again

Back in 1999 Apple introduced the first affordable and easy to use WiFi (802.11b) solution to the average consumers with its Airport Base Station. Then it brought WiFi (802.11g) connection with its Airport Extreme Base Station.

Now Apple again doing its part in bringing WiFi or WLAN to as many individuals as possible with the introduction of Airport Express. See my short review in My Mac Forum.

Attempt Assassination in Taiwan

Today the president of Taiwan was shot during a pre-election day possession.

The attempt failed by just injuring the President and the Vice President.

It is the day before the Taiwanese election, and the current president is at a very close race with the opposition party head. There are already rumors that the president may have arranged this himself to gain sympathy votes.

I guess anything is possible, given the Taiwanese parliament is the only government where fights often break out during parliament sessions.

What have the world come to, just for a political win?

eNetworking

Yesterday I was introduced to a web site for business networking. It is called “LinkedIn.Com“, it is essentially a personal network like “Friendster.Com” and alike. The difference is LinkedIn requires referrals from individuals in the immediate network level, before one can contact someone else on subsequent network levels. Therefore, it is very similar to real life business networking, providing the necessary privacy one requires.