Major Labels Unveil DualDisc

From a 8/25/04 press release:

DualDisc was officially launched today by a consortium of record labels including EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and 5.1 Entertainment Group/Silverline Records.

DualDisc is a two-sided disc made up of a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. In addition to a full album on the CD side, the DVD side provides the full album in enhanced sound (such as surround sound and/or DVD-Audio or LPCM stereo), and also includes a wide range of special features such as music videos, interviews, photo galleries, web links, concert footage and lyrics.

Although DualDisc creates a new music experience, it does not require new equipment. DualDisc is compatible with nearly any device that can currently play a CD or a DVD-whether a home stereo system, portable disc player, car stereo, game console or PC.

More info is available at High Fidelity Review’s DualDisc – The Hybrid CD/DVD Disc Part 1 and Part 2, including the patent war that may be looming. I don’t understand how they can say that DualDisc requires no new equipment, but it may have DVD-Audio content; many DVD players don’t include the technology required to play DVD-A.

Commercial Potential

A while back I was trying to find the name of one of the songs used in a Mitsubishi commercial. (It was Start the Commotion (video) by The Wiseguys.) Lots of fun sites were discovered:

AdTunes has a lot of good links to commercial advertising sites. Three of the better ones listing popular songs used in commercials are related: Inthe70s Music, InThe80s Music and Inthe90s Music. The site also has other trivia for each decade.

About.com 80s Music details 1980s era music used in television commercials, but it’s links to other music trivia is what really eats up the time. Songtitle.info features a list of music used North American TV commercials from 1996 and keeps adding to keep it current.

News From Abroad

I’m not making this up. This article is from Phuket Gazette:

High-speed bedmakers put to the test

Phuket, Thailand: Tuesday, July 27, 2004

PHUKET CITY: This year’s Hotelex Exhibition Food and Beverage Show, which will be held at the Royal Phuket City Hotel from August 12 to 15, will open with a thrilling “speedy bed-making” contest.

The novel competition, with 6,000 baht in prize money up for grabs, will get underway at 1 pm on August 12, marking the start of the four-day show…

What better city than Phuket? What better country than Thailand?

Windows XP SP2

If you have Windows XP, you’ve probably heard about Service Pack 2 being released. They don’t make it easy to find the support page, but you’ll probably need it: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;windowsxpsp2

Many software vendors are making updates to their programs to get them to work properly again, because the upgrade breaks a lot of stuff. MS’s page Using programs and hardware with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides lists of programs that either “behave differently” or “stop working”. They’re long lists that includes their own products, the major anti-virus programs, and much more.

Make sure you have a lot of spare time, especially if you use dial up connection: The total download size may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB. With a 50k connection speed, that’s 41,600 seconds, or about 11½ hours. I read that the upgrade installation can take between 30 minutes and two hours. That’s after the download is complete.

SP2 also makes web pages behave differently; it: disallows ActiveX, disallows Java and prompts for script running. Lots of websites use scripting for their pages. If it’s really doing what it sounds like, disabling javascript, there’s going to be a lot of sites that need to be rewritten and will lose their dropdown menus. I would guess that upwards of 25% of pages, including most major commercial pages, would have to be updated. Many, although not completely based on script, still use it in a couple of places.

I can’t wait to get my upgrade and watch things break!

I Is For internet

“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” writes Tony Long, Wired News’ copy-editing chief. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”

So what do we care? Wired produced the hardback book Wired Style in 1999. Although very out of date, it was the only guide of its time to cover a lot of the new terminology. This decision will (might?) influence a lot of writing.

In 2000 Wired magazine declared that the hyphen belongs in e-mail.

Personally, I never capitalized internet or web unless a spell check insisted for something being done at work. The move to email was recent, and Wired helped justify it: conventional wisdom [is] that “new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word.” Almost everyone knows what email is, and it’s about time it just became its own word.

A similar spelling subject was recently discussed (actually emailed) with a friend: edress, e-dress, eddress or e-ddress. The issue is slightly different because the ‘a’ was being deleted from address, so it’s no longer just two words being merged. There were, and are, no standards to check What Is Right, but a few semi-useful references did surface:

Atlantis Located?

Atlantis, the legendary island-nation whose existence has been debated for thousands of years, was actually Ireland, according to a new theory by a Swedish scientist.

link

Brainy History

Look up events by year, or pick a specific day and look up events, birthdays and deaths. Good long lists no matter which way you do it. Brainy History says that on this day in history: France performs nuclear test, Howard Stern drops out of NY gubernatorial race, John & Yoko begin recording “Double Fantasy”, Elvis Presley releases “Hound Dog” and Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden arrested in Fall River, Mass.

Oh yeah, and: US government collects its 1st income tax. Maybe not a great day to remember because of that one.

…Is Worth Overdoing

Retirement does strange things to some people. One guy has decided his hobby is to build a Stonehenge replica in his backyard using just rocks, wood and manpower. He’s currently moving and raising 10-ton blocks by himself with no ropes or pulleys. Put your mouse over any black pictures to start an animation.

Trippy Stuff

Of course there’s a lot more to be found, but I stumbled across these and the first one listed got me to spend time on the rest.

The rules are simple:  Stare and the screen, then look at your hand. I saw this a few years back and had forgotten how well it works.

See over 100 posters by the late Rick Griffin. His work included a lot of album covers, probably most recognizable in his Grateful Dead covers, as well as Zap Comix.

Visual Overdose, Energisers and other Crazy Images from Eyvind Almquist of Virtual-Exp Psy.

Java-Fuxation and many other trippy voyages from Entropy8zuper, the people who brought us Venus Trap

There’s a lot more LSD inspired/related links at Best Psychedelics in the World, which is where these came from. Some have cool graphics, some are historical, some are just pro-acid articles. Go for the graphics.