Business Week on the state of the music industry.

The music industry’s decline also coincides with the rise of new, compelling forms of entertainment, including DVDs, video games, and, of course, the Internet. Suddenly, the music industry has stiff competition for Americans’ entertainment dollar.

Why is it that enterprises with a monopoly (or close to that) whine like they had a divine right to your money when they don’t meet their growth objectives?

A realistic assessment of the music business’ troubles would help inform policymakers as they fashion proposals aimed at eliminating the illegal reproduction of copyrighted music. No one is arguing that piracy should be allowed. But it’s reasonable to expect that laws and rules designed to curb the practice be based on credible and truthful representations of the impact file-sharing is having on the music industry.

Nice stuff.

[via Hack the planet]

I knew it… I need (at least) another 128 MB. It used to be easy: app won’t launch: add memory (or lower memory allocation manually). Now with OS X and that fancy « modern memory management », you can launch all the apps you want until the machine gets so slow that you tune out of the UI and get hypnotized by sound of your HD trashing away.

So you need a program to help you figure out when you system is cheating and paging out your memory from RAM to hard drive (did I get the technical terms correctly here?) so you can go to your admin and say « see: I told you I needed more RAM ». Unless you have a cool admin who can read the « top » output months ago and say  » yeah, you need more RAM like I need more budget ».

This is a pretty interesting program. Do I Need More Memory, a utility that can help you to determine how much RAM you really need installed in your Mac (based on pageouts), according to your average use…

[ via Mr. Barrett]

Larry Lessig will speak at the opening of the World Summit on the Information Society PreCom 2: Visionaries Panel in Geneva on the 17th.

Cla will finally see who’s that person I’ve been talking about so much.

The theme will be The Future of the Information Society and the panel will be composed of H.E. Mr. Ion Iliescu, President of Romania, H.E. Mr. Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal, Professor Lessig and Jacques Attali.
The moderator being Maria Livanos Cattaui, Secretary-General ICC.