Andy TaylorLeave a commentUncategorized

No Starch Press has an interesting way to Market on File Sharing services

I normally don’t copy and paste “press releases” but thought this we an interesting story.

No Starch Press, publisher of geek books, is trying something interesting with file-sharing sites.
Recognizing that the book business is changing and that books end up on file-sharing sites within days of being released in electronic form, they thought they’d take matters into their own hands. The result? No Starch released their own “official pirate version” of two best-selling backlist titles, Leander Kahney’s The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. News of the release became a viral hit online, and there were over 11,000 downloads of the books in the first week.
“I’ve always felt that these two books should have sold many more copies than they actually have,” said No Starch Press publisher Bill Pollock, “but that they suffered from a lack of visibility. As four-color, coffee-table books, they were never released electronically and never appeared on torrent sites. So these two were good choices for this little experiment.”
Visibility online came swiftly. One of No Starch’s editors had shared 2GB of data from his home PC within hours of the initial upload. By the next day, The Cult of Mac became the #1 book on the infamous torrent site, The Pirate Bay. And a story about the experiment posted to TorrentFreak.com reached the front page of popular social news site Digg.
The truth of the matter is that the battle to stop people from posting copyrighted material to torrent sites is one that can’t be won. Beside the fact that No Starch Press sells PDFs without DRM (digital rights management) protections, anything that can be viewed online can be captured and pirated. Within days of its release, No Starch Press’s best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition, was scraped from an e-book site and posted to multiple file-sharing networks.
Of course, part of the reason for No Starch releasing these titles on P2P sites is political. As major organizations and ISPs work to shut down file sharing, No Starch aims to remind them that P2P has valid uses as well—even for traditional content providers. “File sharing itself, or P2P, is not a crime,” said Pollock. “It can be a great way for willing artists to share their work. That’s not to say that stealing copyrighted material is not a crime, and our actions are not in any way meant to endorse it.”

“If this experiment works, we’ll try more titles,” Pollock said. “And even if it doesn’t work, we may try more titles, if only to beat pirates at their own game.”

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S!ickLeave a commentUncategorized

reclaim freespace after installing Vista SP1

“…Windows Vista SP1 File Removal tool (Vsp1cln.exe)…you can run after you install SP1. This tool removes older versions of components that have been updated in SP1…you should run Vsp1cln.exe if you want to reclaim this disk space after applying SP1 and if you will not need to uninstall SP1…you cannot uninstall SP1 after you run this tool…%windir%\system32\vsp1cln.exe”

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Andy Taylor2 CommentsUncategorized

The Kitchen Sync

Laptop, meet the cookbook. The concept for the Kitchen Sync is quite simple, and brilliant. It’s a new generation of cookbook for your kitchen – the perfect melding of the recipes you can find online and the old-fashioned cookbooks that sit on your kitchen shelves.

As much as we love our tattered and spattered well-used cookbooks, we are turning more and more to the web for good recipes. We like the communal nature of the web and the ability to pick and choose recipes and mash them together as we go.

But how to bring them into the kitchen? We don’t like printing everything out, so our laptop has sticky keys and a flour-spattered screen – and now our lovely iPhone is also developing telltale signs of kitchen use.

Balmer’s concept invents a whole new kitchen appliance – a small, flexible, washable screen with a dock. You can download recipes directly and follow links to buy necessary products and see tips online. The Kitchen Sync brings new web recipes together with the old-fashioned coobook, with no need for laborious printing or sticky laptop screens and keyboards.
It’s wireless and very kitchen-friendly – our pick for the cookbook of the future! We’d like to confine our precious recipe books to the dining room table and let the real wear and tear take its toll on a flexible little tool like this.

This is still a concept, but as it won a prestigious design award already and Balmer is interning for Karim Rashid this spring, we hope that some affordable version of this goes into production soon. Good luck Noah!

Noah Balmer’s official website – Check this out for some more great kitchen design and products, as well as all the details on the features of the Kitchen Sync which we were just able to sum up here.

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Andy TaylorLeave a commentUncategorized

Hollywood producer set to make shows for Xbox

Microsoft, seeking to expand offerings on its Xbox 360 console, has reached an agreement with a company headed by Peter Safran, the veteran Hollywood producer and talent manager, to produce original shows for distribution on the system.
Through his Safran Company, Safran represents clients like the actor and producer Sean Combs (Monster’s Ball); the actor and writer Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding); and filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie). Safran founded the company in 2006 after leaving Brillstein-Grey Management.

Speaking by telephone last week, Scott Nocas, global marketing manager for programming of the Xbox Live entertainment service, said he expected similar deals to follow. “We definitely look at this as the first of many,” Nocas said.

In an interview at his office in Los Angeles last week, Safran said his first round of programs would all be scripted, as opposed to reality shows, and would probably run under 10 minutes. He said he planned initially to focus on genres, like comedy and horror, that appeal to the Xbox 360 audience, which is heavily concentrated from the ages of 14 to 34, and tends to be more male than female. The first shows are expected to be available to viewers by the fall.

Microsoft’s previous forays in digital entertainment include a 2-year-old initiative, MSN Originals, to provide original shows for the Web, and an ill-fated foray more than 10 years ago in which it poured about $100 million into Internet shows like the comedy “475 Madison,” about an advertising agency, then quickly canceled most of them.

“The Xbox is unique. It operates at a level outside of what we generally consider Web entertainment,” Safran said, referring to the system’s tight demographic base, which is defined by the appeal of signature games like the Halo series.

The new shows will be available exclusively via the Xbox 360 for a time, then may appear elsewhere, Safran said. Nocas said at least some of the shows would be supported by advertising.
Current programming on the Xbox 360 includes movies and selections from cable networks like the Sundance Channel and Spike TV. Viewers pay for access to films with points that can be purchased for cash or accumulated through activities on the system.

Nocas said that about 10 million people had signed up for the Xbox Live service. Roughly 18 million of the game systems have been sold worldwide, he said. The Xbox 360 is up against PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Wii from Nintendo in a hotly competitive gaming marketplace.
Safran is the latest in a growing line of Hollywood players who are seeking to tap into the digital entertainment market, where revenue still falls far short of that from traditional movie and television distribution outlets. Filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen and stars like Will Ferrell have recently become involved with Web-based companies like FunnyOrDie.com or 60Frames Entertainment.
Safran and Jake Zim, chief operating officer of the Safran Company’s Safran Digital Group, said they expected to recruit established filmmakers for their new productions, but did not plan to seek involvement by major movie stars.
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