Category: Culture
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Sony joins the DRM-free crowd
It was about time! I had previously wrote here that Sony was now the last major music company not having announced any plan to offer its music catalog in MP3 format without DRM (without digital rights protection). This is about to change. Sony, like the other disc producers/distributors, finally figured it out: Consumers are actually…
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Warner is third to remove DRM with Amazon
We learned this week that Warner Music and AMazon are going to gang in in order to sell DRM-free MP3 files. This is the third music major to stop and listen to its customers who did not want to suffer the indignity and incovenience of this kind of digital rights protection. EMI and Universal had…
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Illusion of a perspective
Wrong perspective, optical illusion, mistake of the drawing hand? Along similar lines, more brillant, here is a cool graphical work from Daniel Martinez Lara and Kike Oliva. And, finally, the engraving from Escher that inspired one optical illusion and draws from the other’s principles.
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An 8-feet long scorpion
There was only a claw. It was dead for nearly 390 millions d’années. But this little creepie-crawlie was probably much more than 2-meter long. Anyway, it was only one of the most impressive guys arthropods of this era reaching these gigantic proportions only explainable by the fact that the harsh competition for survival did not…
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Online color thesaurus
Would you know what colour cerulean is? Or peach? Or spruce? Or watermelon? Or plum? Or rust? The HP online color thesaurus is a great way to identify these and to get the precise formal definition of such colours. You type in a name, and it will give you the color, similar ones and anonyms.
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Western Digital: audio/video police included
What could be the use of network hard disk drive of one Tera-Byte which would strictly refuse to serve files because there may be a risk of breaching licensing agreement potentially applicable to them? This is the question that potential buyers should ask before purchasing the Western Digital disc drives using WD Anywhere Access: WD…
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Handbook of animal anatomy (lions and others)
These images come from the classic works of the German veterinary anatomists, Wilhelm Ellenberger and Hermann Baum, and medical illustrator, Hermann Dittrich. The texts, from which these illustrations were derived, are works published in 1898 and 1911 through 1925, all entitled ‘Handbuch der Anatomie der Tiere für Künstler‘ which can be translated as “Handbook (or…
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No more music DRM
After EMI which decided to start pushing its music catalog in DRM-free MP3 format, others seem to be ready to go the way consumers wanted to. It is said that Warner and Sony are prepared to step back in front of the strong reaction coming from both the consumers and the distribution channel (most recently,…