Snow Crash goes digital

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, one of my very favorite books, is now available in the Palm Reader eBook format at the Palm Digital Media website. The book’s price is right, at just $5.66. The Palm Reader software is available for Windows, Mac, Palm and Pocket PC. Needless to say, I bought and downloaded a copy of Snow Crash, and will re-read this “post-cyberpunk” classic as soon as I finish up another book. I also bought another Stephenson book, Digital Age, which I haven’t read yet.

Snow Crash introduced a fully realized, fully immersive virtual reality construct called the “Metaverse”. The book’s lead character, Hiro Protagonist, delivers pizza in the “real world”, but he’s a sword-weilding warrior in the Metaverse. Too cool.

More and more new and classic books are showing up in digital form. That’s a good thing (sorry, Martha).

Another great source of Sci-Fi and Fantasy eBooks — all for free — is the Baen Free Library. Check it out.

58 Cents Per Gigabyte

I bought a 120 gigabyte hard drive at Circuit City today for $69 after rebates. It’s a 7200 rpm Western Digital drive with 8 mb cache, packaged generically. When I got home, I checked the web site, and it is available online for the same price. Search on “HD1200JR” at CircuitCity.com. You’ll have to fill out and send in two $30 rebates, but cheap is cheap.

Direct product link here – may or may not work.

If you go to Circuit City, this is what you are looking for:

Is Napster Back?

Napster seems to be slowly revving up the buzz machine for its new legit online music service, to be launched later this year. Check out these Flash movies. I like episode 3. I’ve been keeping an eye on Napster since purchasing some Roxio stock a month ago – Roxio owns Napster.

More details on Napster’s imminent return.

UPDATE – Here’s a more recent piece on the return of Napster.

MSN Smackdown

It’s official: Microsoft will require a license fee for 3rd party programs that access the MSN Instant Messenger network. One such program is the Trillian IM client, which lets you consolidate your MSN, AIM, ICQ and other accounts in one program.

Didn’t Microsoft advocate open, accessible IM networks a few years ago, when AOL locked them out of the AIM network? Trillian (and the GPL’d GAIM, and probably others) are a move towards open IM standards, something Microsoft claimed to care about. Here’s what Microsoft had to say about instant messaging back then (1999):

“It is clear that AOL is more focused on its proprietary hold on the instant messaging space than what is right for consumers. Microsoft is still committed to providing the interoperability that consumers are demanding via an open-standards approach.”

Hypocritical? You decide.

Earthlink and Amazon Attack Spammers

EarthLink is suing two spam rings operating in the United States and Canada, accusing them of sending unsolicited email that has cost the ISP millions in lost employee productivity and bandwidth.

And….

Amazon.com has filed 11 suits against online marketers in the U.S. and Canada for using spoofed Amazon addresses when sending e-mail advertisements.

I hope more companies being harmed by unsolicited commercial email follow their lead. Spoofing email addresses for commercial purposes is fraud, in my opinion, and sucking up Internet resources with billions of unsolicited crap messages isn’t any better. Some of these jerks should be in jail and/or fined into bankruptcy.

The real problem seems to be the idiots who buy stuff from spammers. A response rate of 1 in 40,000 can make spamming profitable. Unfortunately, the ratio of morons seems to be higher than 1 in 40,000. Luckily I have Spam Assassin on my server, and custom email filters on my local machine to catch the few pieces of spam that make it through.

Huh?

I am missing something when it comes to RSS, and how it will supposedly replace email, which is apparently “dead” (or nearly so). RSS seems like a clean and useful new way of marking up text for viewing in a client (in this case, an rss aggregator instead of a web browser) or syndicating to other web sites. I don’t see RSS as ever being as useful for personal correspondence as plain old email, worms and all.

Email based on a new “spoof-proof” protocol would be welcome, but it has to be “push”. Using an RSS feed located at a url, how do you contact someone for the first time? In other words, how do you establish a relationship? Do you call them on the phone and ask them to check your feed for a message?

I can see how RSS based messaging might be useful, sort of like a persistent AIM or ICQ. But it won’t replace email.

Maybe I’m just being dense – it wouldn’t be the first time.

More dubious souls:

Digital Common Sense

The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty

New iPAQ – light and cheap

Hewlett-Packard has introduced a sub-$200 iPAQ PDA. The iPAQ h1935 has 64 megs of RAM and a 203 mhz processor. It runs the Professional Edition of Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC and weighs 4.37 ounces.

The newest iPaq sells for just $199.99 after $50 rebate. My anchor-like Dell Axim may be destined for eBay in the near future. The iPAQ 1935 is currently for sale at the HP store.

CD-R disks fail the test of time

Maybe recordable CDs aren’t the best place to archive our pictures, music and data files for posterity. A Dutch magazine, PC-Active, has done an extensive CD-R quality test. They found that many CDs recorded just twenty months ago were unreadable. CD-R media is supposed to last a lot longer than that – ten years or more. I wonder how the various DVD recordable formats stack up? I guess we will have to wait a while for a similar test of those disks.

I’m not sure what a good alternative for long term storage would be. Hard drives continue to get bigger and cheaper, so maybe an answer can be found there. Internet-based storage offered a lot of promise during the dot com days, but many of those efforts have folded, taking precious data with them. Yahoo! still offers 30 megs of free storage via their “Briefcase“, but I’ve never used it. Yahoo! briefcase is more of a short-term storage medium, anyways, useful for sharing pictures and files with family, friends, co-workers, etc.

Here’s more info at cdfreaks.com.

World’s Smallest Hard Drive MP3 Player

Toshiba claims its Gigabeat G20, scheduled for an early October release, is the world’s smallest and thinnest hard drive digital audio player.

According to a Toshiba press release, the G20 can record about 5,000 songs in MP3 or WMA format on the 20GB hard drive, and supports USB 2.0 for fast file transfers. The player has a rechargeable lithium ion battery, and can play for up to 11 hours between charges. The device measures 76.5×12.7×89.5mm and weighs 138g, smaller and lighter than the new Apple iPod.

No price has been announced yet, but the Gigabeat G20 will probably be in the same neighborhood as the iPods it will compete with.

MIT for Free

I just learned of the MIT OpenCourseWare project in Wired magazine. Basically, MIT is putting course materials online, including textbooks, lectures and midterm exams. The course materials are there for anyone with a web browser to use however they see fit (non-commercial uses, only). The pilot program has been running since last year, and the official launch is next month. Go here to check out MIT OpenCourseWare.