Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 25th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

Going Cheap

TVs and DVD players cost 45% less, in real terms, than they did a decade ago; in the same period, the price of computers has fallen by 93%. High street prices have never been so low, but what kind of consumers do we become when we can buy a handbag for £3 - and then chuck it away? Andy Beckett on how the bargain boom changed the way Britain shops

It is a brilliant blue winter morning in Oxford. In the city centre, surrounded by golden stone walls and college battlements, the 125th and newest branch of Primark is open for its second day of business. A neat, middle-aged woman comes out of the shop with three full carrier bags. What has she bought? The woman gives a satisfied look. "All sorts. Baby clothes for my grandson ..." She pauses. "Well, handbags mainly, actually." She opens one of her carriers and offers a glimpse of a woven handbag in a pleasing pastel. How many bags has she bought? Her expression sharpens to something between guilt and mischief: "Nine." How much were they? "£3 each." But what is she going to do with nine handbags? Is she going to sell them? "No." She pauses again, as if the answer is quite obvious. "You never know when a bag is going to come in handy when they're £3 a time."

In Britain in recent years, as in other rich countries, many consumer goods have become deliciously, dizzyingly cheap. Since 1995, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the price of women's clothing has fallen by 34%, the price of a vacuum cleaner by 45%, of home audio-visual equipment by 73%, and of personal computers - adjusting the price index to take account of their improved capabilities - by a scarcely believeable 93%. Economists have struggled to find historical precedents for such plunging prices at a time of high consumer demand. "There is a strange conjucture: deflation and boom," wrote the veteran commentator Hamish McRae in the Independent on Sunday in 2004. "There has not been anything quite like this since the 1930s or ... the period 1870-1913," eras when prices fell despite growing consumer appetites.

And in those days there was no Primark or easyJet, no Zara or Ikea, no Book People, Matalan or TK Maxx; no supermarkets or factory outlets; no ubiquitous three-for-two offers; no instant price comparisons via the internet; no weekly women's magazines urging weekly wardrobe revisions; no just- in-time production, and overnight global distribution, and myriad factories humming in China.

"We're in uncharted waters," says Richard Hyman, managing director of the retail analysts Verdict Research. "This deflation is not cyclical. Our forecasts do not anticipate any major increase in retail price inflation ever again."

Hyman, like most adults in most wealthy societies, grew up in the late 20th century decades when inflation was a prominent, recurring anxiety. The public and politicians, and the media, often took rising prices to mean that things, in a cosmic or a very concrete sense, were getting worse. The implications of modern deflation may be equally large. Yet while the production of cheap modern consumer goods, and in particular its social and environmental costs, has justifiably received a lot of attention, the consumption of these products has been examined less. How is the era of the £3 handbag affecting our attitudes to possessions? Are we happier or less content with what we have? Are cheap goods liberating or imprisoning? And what - once we've bought them, and especially once we've finished with them - do we do with them all?

How we shop is the first stage in how we consume, and even a few minutes in the Oxford Primark tells you that shopping has changed. The sound is the first thing: a thick hum of conversation, almost at party volume, anticipation mingling with delight mingling with satisfaction; and the constant plastic clatter of clothes rails and hangers being rapidly rifled. Department stores during the sales sound like this, but not nearly as loud, and the Oxford Primark has opened in February with national consumer activity, according to the official figures, in an even deeper seasonal trough than usual. Yet the shop's plain interior is as busy as Harrods, with people in tracksuits and people in tweed, teenagers, pensioners, mothers and men with fashionable bags. And the Primark shopping baskets they carry are half the size of a beer barrel. In the old days, customers in clothes shops bought things in ones and twos; at Primark, they cater for people buying in dozens.

Many professional observers think this new shopping culture is a great improvement. Hyman says, "There's an American adage: the customer is king. In the UK, all it has ever been is an adage. Now, for the first time, it's reality."

Gareth Coombs of the Cambridge Strategy Centre, a retail consultancy, sees the social implications: "People used to define themselves as shopping at a certain level. 'I'm an M&S shopper.' It defined your place in the world. Those sort of rules aren't sustainable any more." Tamar Kasriel of the Henley Centre, the social forecasters, is blunter: "The idea that cheap goods are for poor people is totally history."

Cheap goods in themselves are hardly new. In fact, it is striking how long the retailers at the centre of the current British bargain boom have been around. Primark began trading in Britain in the early 1970s, TopShop in the early 1960s, and most of the supermarkets soon after the second world war. Resale price maintenance, which restricted by law the ability of shops to discount goods, was abolished in 1964.

Yet, for decades afterwards, more subtle limits on "the value sector", as it was a little dismissively known, endured. Britain being Britain, one of these was class. It is probably not a coincidence that the countries with the longest established cheap retail cultures are the ones with a strong current of social mobility and relative classlessness, such as America and postwar Germany and modern Ireland. In Britain, until the loosening of class structures during the 1980s and 1990s, things were different. "Cheapness had a connotation," says Gillian Cutress, editor of the Official Great British Factory Shop Guide. In 1985, when she started researching her first pioneering book on discount outlets, she quickly became aware that she was entering sensitive territory.

Cutress was an out-of-work zoologist living in Nottingham. She was a Londoner with a determined manner, an interest in factories, and a totally unsqueamish appetite for bargains then considered rare among the professional classes. The East Midlands, she soon discovered, was full of clothing and footwear manufacturers who sold off their seconds and surplus lines at big discounts to staff and people in the know. But these factory outlets were open only a few hours a week and were not advertised: "Many of the manufacturers wanted them to be kept quiet because they didn't want to upset the retailers [which they also supplied]." As Cutress drove round industrial estates asking nosy questions, she also discovered something else: "People made the assumption that our readers would be people with less disposable income."

This assumption proved wrong. "Our readership turned out to be people with time and spare money," says Cutress. Over the next 20 years, her guides got thicker and glossier and came to cover the whole country, selling more than 600,000 copies. More than that, however, they contributed to a slow but significant shift in British consumer thinking.

Until well into the 1990s, the idea that Britain was expensive and that there was little shoppers could do about it was widely held. "Rip-off Britain" became a frequent target for newspaper campaigns, but the solution usually offered was for the government to intervene or for consumers to stock up in the cheaper supermarkets across the channel. Yet while the controversy sputtered on, many shoppers were quietly finding new ways to avoid paying the full price. Factory outlets, like the low-cost airlines that started up in Britain in the mid-1990s, taught people that the price of goods was not written in stone but subject to context and, in particular, the balance of power between seller and buyer. "There is no guilt any more at being brutal about seeking the best price," says Coombs.

Instead of guilt, there is pleasure. As well as the money people save by finding bargains, Coombs and other analysts talk about the satisfaction felt by consumers when they "get a victory" over a retailer - and when they tell their friends about it afterwards. The latter activity, in a sure sign of its popularity, has recently acquired a would-be scientific label: "compulsive price disclosure".

But after you have bragged about your bargains you have to live with them. And at this stage you may become aware that cheap consumer goods do not always go with the grain of other current British social trends. "Over the last 10 years," says Hyman, "we calculate that women have doubled the average number of womenswear items they buy in a year." But over the same period, the cost of living space has been rising as fast, or even faster. One consequence, says David Mitchell, technical director of the Housebuilders' Federation, is that developers are "keeping new houses as small as possible to keep the price down". Meanwhile, planning regulations and the changing tastes of home-owners are filling these dwellings with ever larger and more numerous bathrooms, and more fitted kitchen appliances. The space left over for storage is shrinking accordingly.

"It is a worry," Mitchell says. "Eventually something's got to give between how much we own and how much space we live in."

The solutions may not be elegant. Garden sheds, he says, are growing in popularity, as cheap spaces for general storage rather than tools. "And some developers are making garages half a metre longer than they need to be so people can put stuff at the back." Many homeowners have already gone further: in a current article on outer-London suburbia, the sociologist Paul Barker notes that most garages have been given over to "household junk". The cars are parked in people's front gardens.

For people who have exhausted, or never had such hoarding possibilities, there is the modern self- storage industry. Until the mid-1990s, the idea of keeping many of your possessions in a locked room away from where you lived was largely foreign to Britain, and confined to bigger countries with more mobile populations, such as America. Now there are about 700 British storage facilities, says Rodney Walker, chief executive of the Self-Storage Association, and the business is expanding at 10% a year. "It is a local market in most cases," he says. "Customers live nearby." Does he think the take-off in demand has anything to do with the simultaneous boom in cheap goods? "You're not on the wrong track."

You could see all this hoarding as a sign of a growing attachment to possessions. But Coombs sees it as the opposite. "What was in the living room this year will be in the bedroom next year and in the junk room the year after," he says. Kasriel says the chance to sell to eBay has boosted much we buy. "You can tell yourself you have a sensible financial route out."

Unashamedly "disposable" cheap goods, you could argue, are turning us into traders rather than curators of our possessions. It is another victory for capitalism: we have internalised the unsentimental stock control of the modern retailer. Juliet Schor, an American economist and leading critic of the bargain boom, thinks this new form of ownership is less pleasurable than the old one. "The psychologically satisfying process of personalisation that occurs when products are acquired and retained, is truncated," she writes in a recent essay. "Attachment is briefer and there is the constant pain of divestiture [getting rid of things]." What individual possessions represent to us is, she says, "more externally driven" - by marketing and advertising - and "less under the control of the individual consumer".

Shoppers at Primark in Oxford are cheerier about all this. "I was brought up with thrift," says an elderly man with a cravat and a perfect white moustache. "Brought up not to buy anything unless the old thing was worn out. But three T-shirts for a fiver ..." He holds them up: "They look very good." His eyes sparkle: "This is incredible."

I ask the woman with all the handbags what she does when her cupboards get full at home. "I'll just have a clear-out," she says without hesitation. "Take stuff to charity. Chuck it away if it's broken." Another woman, prosperous-looking, who has bought a duvet, towels and T-shirts for her three children, says with a mildly troubled expression: "I know we live in a throwaway society. It's bad for the environment. It's wasteful. But at home, when we can't fit anything more on the clothes rails, I try and pass it to a collection for the third world." She says her family reaches this point "quite often".

Mending things is coming to seem old- fashioned. "The financial equation's changed," says Coombs. "The price of getting a DVD player looked at is probably half what it cost. And we're time poor. Why waste the time?"

On Tottenham Court Road in central London, the capital's traditional quarter for selling and fixing electronic goods, a man called Vic is living with the consequences of this shift. He has been repairing gadgets round here for 20 years, but his current premises feel less than permanent. At the back of one of the more downmarket shops there is a sign partly obscured by a cheap flat-screen television; through a nearby open hatch, there is a windowless room full of shelves and ailing camcorders where Vic works.

"Ten years ago, people started closing the local repair shops," he explains, with his trademark mix of patience and weariness. "But if anyone brought anything into a shop round here to be fixed, the shop would say, 'Go to Vic.' Now the shops say, 'Don't bother. Just buy a new one.'" He claims manufacturers are deliberately making disposable products: "They only last as long as the guarantee. So they can sell more rubbish. If the machine needs a part, you have to buy it from the manufacturer for £100, £200 - and we have to put labour on top. If I can't charge £50 [for that] I can't survive around here."

He says he can fix so many different gadgets that there will always be work for him. But in future, he believes, electronic handymen won't exist; there will only be specialists, mending the most expensive items. Everything else will be thrown out at the first hint of malfunction.

According to the European Commission, "Electro- scrap is the fastest growing waste stream [in the EU], growing at 3-5% per year", three times faster than domestic waste in general. In 2002, a European directive was issued requiring member countries to ensure the "re-use, recovery and recycling" of discarded electronic goods. Some retail analysts think the directive - especially its sections on the "financial obligations of producers" to be environmentally responsible, and on how "consumers will be able to take [discarded] products back to shops for free" - will have a significant effect on the cheap electronics market. But Britain and several other countries have yet to comply.

The harmful metals and chemicals in many electrical goods, and the difficulty of disposing of them, make the less palatable consequences of increased consumption obvious. The afterlife of discarded budget clothing is more ambiguous. Since 1990, the global trade in secondhand garments has grown tenfold. Clothes are collected in rich countries by charities and commercial traders, shipped to poor countries and sold by local stallholders. In some African countries, more than 80% of people buy secondhand garments, and it is the dominant source of clothing.

"Affordability is the key reason," concluded a report by the charity Oxfam last year, "[but] fashion and consumer preferences also seem to be shifting away from traditional, 'African'-style to more 'western'-style clothing." Oxfam also concluded that secondhand imports were likely to have played a role in the collapse of garment manufacturing in parts of Africa since the 1980s. The trade was tainted as well by "considerable customs fraud", which reduced government revenues across the continent. Yet the report identified considerable benefits too; hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in Africa were supported by washing, repairing, restyling, distributing and selling the clothes.

The charity's real worry is not the ethics of the trade but the quantity and quality of the garments nowadays. "Over the last seven years," says Barney Tallack, Oxfam's deputy trading director, "a greater proportion has been of cheaper quality." A T-shirt that costs £3 new can't be sold for much secondhand at an Oxfam shop in Britain. To make the same profit as before the bargain clothing boom began, the shop needs to receive, sort, clean and sell more garments. "We have to work harder," says Tallack.

At the cavernous Oxfam shop in Dalston, in east London, the most profitable in the country, the clothes rails are like crammed graveyards for discount labels: TopShop, Zara, Hennes, Old Navy, George Essentials. The bright clean colours of many of the clothes have barely faded; the garments look hardly worn. In the storeroom behind the shop there are three booths, each the size of several phoneboxes, piled with bags of clothing."They're usually almost filled to the ceiling," says the manager.

The diminishing returns yielded by discount clothing may also ultimately destroy the global secondhand trade. Such items deteriorate quickly, says Alan Wheeler of the textile recycling association. "People in Africa do not want to wear tatty clothes."

For all the pleasures and popularity and modernity of the bargain boom, a strong sense remains that it is too good to last. Even the Primark shoppers in Oxford share it. I ask the woman with the handbags if she thinks the prices of such things will stay this low for good. "No, I don't," she says. Buying nine handbags suddenly seems less like the confident exercise of a new consumer power and more like the nervy instinct of the old-style bargain hunter: never hesitate when faced with a special offer.

The frivolity of buying a £3 T-shirt can be overstated. For the comfortably off, money saved on cheap basic goods can be spent on luxuries. "Connoisseurship moves to other areas," says the social observer Peter York, such as house alterations and designer labels. "But for everyone else, cheap goods are simply affordable."

For a rich country, Britain has a lot of people who are short of money. One of them was the last person I interviewed outside Primark. She was 21, smartly dressed, and worked for Oxford city council. "I shop in cheap shops," she said. "The council doesn't pay enough and Oxford is an expensive place to live. My council tax is going up. The rent, the travel ..."

Since 1995, according to the ONS, average rail fares have risen 36%, the cost of petrol 63%, and the average council tax by 100%. As many goods have got cheaper, many services - particularly those which cannot, for now at least, be performed from countries with cheaper labour - have got more expensive. The ONS index of the overall cost of services is up by almost half over the past 10 years. Then there are university fees, the pensions crisis, unemployment swelling again, the frightening prices of gas and oil; Coombs characterises these contemporary financial pressures as "a vague rumbling in the background" of the lives of otherwise confident modern consumers. Kasriel provides evidence that the anxiety and the profligacy are sometimes linked: "In one of our focus groups last year, someone said, 'You used to save because you didn't know what was going to happen. Now you spend because you don't know what's going to happen.'"

Ethical and political considerations have yet to check this impulse significantly. Western consumers have known about the Victorian environmental practices, pay rates and working conditions of Asian manufacturing since at least the start of the decade. "Poor people [there] are subsidising the standard of living of consumers in the rich north," as Schor puts it. However, she continues,"The connection between labour conditions and price has not yet been made." Or it has been made by consumers, and then quietly put to the back of their minds. At Primark in Oxford, the shoppers all sounded genuinely concerned when I brought up the cheap labour issue, but they did not linger over the subject.

An even less pleasurable topic never came up at all: that there is a political as well as an economic world order that makes modern discount shopping possible. The overwhelming power of America, the lingering power of Europe and the other traditionally rich parts of the world, and recent economic history all play their part. Schor points out that the bargain boom began shortly after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s; in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, there was suddenly an increased supply of people prepared to work for very low wages.

It is hard to read a newspaper without realising that this balance of power between east and west is altering. In this context, the big questions about how we live with our cheap possessions and whether we really like them and what we do when we've finished with them may ultimately be dwarfed by an even bigger issue. "If other countries come to dominate," Schor says crisply, "We may be the ones producing cheap T-shirts".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/sto...html?gusrc=rss





In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory
Sharon LaFraniere

As Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its simplicity — three chords, a couple of words and some baritones chanting in the background.

But the saga of the song now known worldwide as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught with racism and exploitation and, in the end, 40-plus years after his death, brings a measure of justice. Were he still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it into one heck of a ballad.

Born in 1909 in the Zulu heartland of South Africa, Mr. Linda never learned to read or write, but in song he was supremely eloquent. After moving to Johannesburg in his mid-20's, he quickly conquered the weekend music scene at the township beer halls and squalid hostels that housed much of the city's black labor force.

He sang soprano over a four-part harmony, a vocal style that was soon widely imitated.

By 1939, a talent scout had ushered Mr. Linda's group, the Original Evening Birds, into a recording studio where they produced a startling hit called "Mbube," Zulu for "The Lion." Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda's youngest surviving daughter, said it had been inspired by her father's childhood as a herder protecting cattle in the untamed hinterlands.

"The lion was going round and round, and the lion was happy," she said. "But my father was not happy. He had been staying there since morning and he was hungry." The lyrics were spartan — just mbube and zimba, which means "stop" — but its chant and harmonies were so entrancing that the song came to define a whole generation of Zulu a cappella singing, a style that became known simply as Mbube. Music scholars say the 78 r.p.m. recording of "Mbube" was probably the first African record to sell 100,000 copies.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In the early 50's, Pete Seeger recorded it with his group, the Weavers. His version differed from the original mainly in his misinterpretation of the word "mbube" (pronounced "EEM-boo-beh"). Mr. Seeger sang it as "wimoweh," and turned it into a folk music staple.

There followed a jazz version, a nightclub version, another folk version by the Kingston Trio, a pop version and finally, in 1961, a reworking of the song by an American songwriter, George Weiss. Mr. Weiss took the last 20 improvised seconds of Mr. Linda's recording and transformed it into the melody. He added lyrics beginning "In the jungle, the mighty jungle." A teen group called the Tokens sang it with a doo-wop beat — and it topped charts worldwide.

Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung.

Mr. Linda received 10 shillings — about 87 cents today — when he signed over the copyright of "Mbube" in 1952 to Gallo Studios, the company that produced his record. He also got a job sweeping floors and serving tea in the company's packing house.

His eight children survived on maize porridge, known as pap. When they passed a grade in school, their reward was an egg. Two died as babies, one of malnutrition, said his daughter Ms. Nsele, now 47.

"Chicken feet and pap, chicken feet and pap," she said. "That was our meal for years and years."

When Mr. Linda died in 1962, at 53, with the modern equivalent of $22 in his bank account, his widow had no money for a gravestone.

How much he should have collected is in dispute. Over the years, he and his family have received royalties for "Wimoweh" from the Richmond Organization, the publishing house that holds the rights to that song, though not as much as they should have, Mr. Seeger said.

"I didn't realize what was going on and I regret it," said Mr. Seeger, now 86, adding that he learned only recently that Mr. Linda received less than the 50 percent of publishing royalties Mr. Seeger says he was due. "I have always left money up to other people. I was kind of stupid."

But where Mr. Linda's family really lost out, his lawyers claim, was in "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a megahit.

From 1991 to 2000, the years when "The Lion King" began enthralling audiences in movie theaters and on Broadway, Mr. Linda's survivors received a total of perhaps $17,000 in royalties, according to Hanro Friedrich, the family's lawyer.

A lawyer for Abilene Music, the publishing house for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," did not return repeated calls for comment.

But Owen Dean, a South African copyright lawyer who also represents the family, said the amount was a mere pittance compared with the profits the song generated.

The Lindas say they knew no better. Ms. Nsele said she remembered hearing her father's tune on the radio as a teenager in the 1970's and recalled: "I asked my mother, 'Who are those people?' She said she didn't know. She was happy because the husband's song was playing. She didn't know she was supposed to get something."

Indeed, few people knew until Rian Malan, the South African author and songwriter, documented the inequity in 2000 in Rolling Stone magazine. In a telephone interview this month, Mr. Malan said he was stunned "by the degree to which everyone was relying on the Lindas never asking the question" of why they were paid so little.

Mr. Malan's article embarrassed several major players in the American music industry and brought both Mr. Friedrich and Mr. Dean to the family's defense.

The Lindas filed suit in 2004, demanding $1.5 million in damages, but their case was no slam-dunk. Not only had Mr. Linda signed away his copyright to Gallo in 1952, Mr. Dean said, but his wife, who was also illiterate, signed them away again in 1982, followed by his daughters several years later.

Ms. Nsele contends the family was hoodwinked by a South African lawyer, now deceased. Mr. Friedrich said the lawyer appeared to have worn two hats, simultaneously representing the family and the song's copyright holders. In their lawsuit, the Lindas invoked an obscure 1911 law under which the song's copyright reverted to Mr. Linda's estate 25 years after his death. On a separate front, they criticized the Walt Disney Company, whose 1994 hit movie "The Lion King" featured a meerkat and warthog singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Disney argued that it had paid Abilene Music for permission to use the song, without knowing its origins.

But for a company built on its founder's benevolent image, the case "had all the makings of a nightmare," Mr. Dean said — a David and Goliath story in which Disney raked in profits from the song while Mr. Linda's children toiled as maids and factory workers, lived without indoor plumbing and sometimes had to borrow from their lawyer for food.

In February, Abilene agreed to pay Mr. Linda's family royalties from 1987 onward, ending the suit. No amount has been disclosed, but the family's lawyers say their clients should be quite comfortable.

A representative for Disney would not discuss the circumstances behind the lawsuit, but the company said in a statement that Walt Disney Pictures had licensed " 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' in good faith" and was pleased that the litigation had been resolved "to everyone's satisfaction."

Some injustices cannot be redressed: in 2001, Mr. Linda's daughter Adelaide died of AIDS at age 38, unable to afford life-saving antiretroviral treatment.

"I was angry before," said Ms. Nsele, who, as a government nurse, is one of the few of Mr. Linda's descendants who is employed. "They didn't ask permission. They just decided to do anything they wanted with my father's song."

"But now it seems we must forgive, because they have come to their senses and realized they have made a mistake," Ms. Nsele said. "The Bible says you must try to forgive."

"Not 'try,' " her 17-year-old daughter Zandile corrected. "It says 'forgive.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/in...a/22lion.html?





iPeas in an iPod

The Sizzle and Pop of Radio Cooking
Kim Severson

TALMA GUY runs long-haul trucks out of Jacksonville, Fla., with her husband, Roger. To pass the time, they used to listen to political rants on talk radio or music on CD's.

Then they fitted the cab with a satellite radio, and Mrs. Guy discovered cooking shows.

"I could listen to them go on all day and all night," she said.

One day, she got caught up in a show called "EatDrink" on Martha Stewart Living Radio. The subject was chicken roasting, something Mrs. Guy had long abandoned after too many dry birds.

Encouraged by the conversation and a guest's admonishment to always use a meat thermometer, Mrs. Guy thought she'd give it one more try. The minute she got off the road she sent an e-mail message to the host, Lucinda Scala Quinn, asking for an in-depth tutorial on meat thermometers. She got an answer the next day.

"It's not like TV, where there's a celebrity chef and you feel like you could never get through to them," Mrs. Guy said. "I feel like the people on the radio, I know them."

In a world of glossy food magazines, $50 cookbooks and television hosts who seem to care more about make-up than marinades, a quieter, cheaper and decidedly more old-fashioned way to explore cooking is getting new play. Driven by inexpensive podcasting equipment, the freedom of the Internet and a nation obsessed with what it eats, food broadcasting is more democratic than ever.

At the top of the market is the polished work of the Kitchen Sisters, a pair of Bay Area women whose National Public Radio series "Hidden Kitchens" this year became the first piece of food journalism to win a duPont-Columbia Award, widely considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.

At the bottom with a bullet are hundreds of food podcasters, whose ranks have been growing in number and quality almost daily. Since the summer of 2005, when Apple first offered an organized way for people to file and find podcasts, the company's list of free food-related shows to which listeners can subscribe has grown to more than 300.

The rank of podcasters includes chefs and food journalists, among them The Times's restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, and its wine critic, Eric Asimov. General Mills and Sub-Zero produce podcasts to build their brands and sell products. But the real action is among podcasters with not much money or technical expertise but plenty of passion.

AMATEUR food podcasters are filling computers with the practical, the boring, the delightful and the strange. Shows range from the dull but smartly organized "Wine for Newbies" to the political rants of the Vegan Freaks. The Lunch Lady has a cultish following of people who call in to hear her recorded readings of the daily lunch menu at a Northern California convalescent home — embellished with some freestyle song and folk wisdom. She has now moved to podcasting. On "Girl on Girl Cooking," listeners recently learned how to make a hot drink from shaved Scharffen Berger chocolate in a homey show that felt a lot like hanging out at a friend's apartment.

"Sometimes I think it is a whole backlash to the Food Network stuff," said Sally Swift, a radio producer who founded the radio show "The Splendid Table" with the host Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

The show, which began a decade ago on Minnesota Public Radio and has a devoted fan base among the food elite, has doubled its audience in the last five years. The number of stations that carry the show has grown by 72 percent.

Fans of the medium say that radio taps deeply into one's food memories, feeding directly into the brain in a way the written word can't. Where television cooking evokes a sort of slack-jawed passivity, radio requires the listener to hear the sizzle of butter and bread on a griddle and conjure the sight and smell of a grilled cheese.

Television might be the superior medium for actual cooking instruction, but radio fans say it's easier to cook and listen than it is to cook and watch.

"You know how you feel like in your living room and your friends are over and you just have that easy vibe? That's what radio feels like to me," said Ms. Quinn, who was food editor for Martha Stewart Living Television before becoming the host of the "EatDrink" radio show on the Sirius satellite network, which announced earlier this week that it had 4 million subscribers.

The current interest in radio has been primed by the niche community building on the Internet, where one can discover other lovers of hibiscus or create friends simply by posting a photographic record of recently consumed bowls of ramen.

"Food radio nowadays gives you that access you learned to have from the Internet but with the live interactiveness of TV," Ms. Quinn said. "It can be a private experience but it also is a public one."

She recalled a recent show where Peter Hoffman, the chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant in Manhattan, was the guest. He explained how to break down a pig carcass, which prompted a caller from Texas to ask how to get the gaminess out of the wild boar her husband liked to hunt. A listener in Northern Canada called to suggest she soak the meat in buttermilk.

THAT kind of exchange is reminiscent of the radio homemakers of the late 1940's and 1950's, who shared recipes and household tips with listeners in small towns and rural areas. Some versions of those old-fashioned recipe-sharing broadcasts are still going strong, particularly in the Midwest, home to shows like the Open Line exchange on WMT in Iowa.

Technology is moving that kind of longing for connection to new audiences, said Michael Straus, who in 1999 began broadcasting the "Beyond Organic" show in the small town of Point Reyes, Calif. He now uses a mix of e-mail, audio streaming, podcasting, satellite radio and small broadcasting stations to distribute the show, which blends food, the environment and politics.

Steven Shaw, one of the founders of eGullet, a popular food Web site, this year began broadcasting eG Radio. The shows, which are largely interviews with chefs and restaurant profiles, are possible only because equipment that can take sound from someone's dining room to a Web site became cheap and easy to use.

"With $1,500 of equipment and a few hours of training we can do something that to an amateur listener is the equivalent of NPR," Mr. Shaw said. And, he said, chefs might not have the skill to write about their craft, but they can easily spend an hour talking about it.

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, rely on the same tools they started with when they began working together in 1979: hand-held microphones mixed with shoe-leather reporting.

For the pair, who along with the producer Jay Allison created the series "Lost & Found Sound" and later did an audio history of the World Trade Center for NPR, food turned out to be a rich conduit for telling American stories.

Their latest project, "Hidden Kitchens," which also became a book, takes listeners deep into back street, out-of-the-way places where people cook. The idea came to Ms. Nelson when she was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco and discovered that the city's Brazilian cab drivers liked to eat at a secret temporary night kitchen near a cab yard.

They opened a phone line and collected stories of hidden kitchens across the country. Among them were tales few could have imagined, like how the George Foreman grill became an unexpected kitchen for homeless people, and the saga of the women known as the Chili Queens of San Antonio.

They also found Robert King Wilkerson, known as King, who created a clandestine kitchen during his 31 years in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. He went in for robbery, but his supporters say he became a political prisoner after he joined the Black Panther party.

At Angola, he learned how to make pralines using a soda cans for a pot and scraps of paper for fuel. He's out now, speaking out about prisoners' rights. And he's selling those pralines, which he calls "freelines."

Radio brings an intimacy to his story that requires a commitment of both imagination and emotion. Mix that intimacy with food, and the story becomes instantly accessible.

"If King was a guy talking about prison, no one would have listened," Ms. Nelson said. "The pralines are the way in."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/dining/22radio.html?





Food From the Geek Isles
Jack

For those of you more comfortable with traditional cooking shows, like the ones on TV, check out the first episode of Ctrl+Alt+Chicken. If I couldn’t get all the way through it it’s either because I’m no gourmand, or it sucks. Your call.





Moon, June, Spoon…ah…

Radio Host Fired For Using Racial Epithet

A St. Louis radio station quickly fired a talk show host for uttering a racial epithet as he talked about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his morning show Wednesday.

Dave Lenihan apologized on the air immediately after making what he said was a slip of the tongue. KTRS president and general manager Tim Dorsey agreed the remark was accidental but said it was nonetheless "unacceptable, reprehensible and unforgivable."

Lenihan had been heaping praise on Rice, who has frequently said she aspires to run the NFL one day but has more recently ruled out seeking to replace retiring Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

"She's been chancellor of Stanford," Lenihan said on the air. "She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that."

He said he had meant to say "coup" instead of the racial slur.

KTRS listeners soon began calling the station to complain. Twenty minutes after the utterance, Dorsey went on the air to apologize to Rice and KTRS listeners.

"There can be no excuse for what was said," Dorsey said. "Dave Lenihan has been let go. ... There is enough hate. We certainly are not going to fan those flames."

NAACP chapter president Harold Crumpton commended Dorsey for his swift action.

Reached at home, Lenihan said he was still trying to figure out what happened and was drafting a letter of apology to Rice. He said he never uses the slur he uttered and thinks Rice is "a fantastic woman."

Lenihan, formerly a drive-time host at WGNU radio in St. Louis, had been at KTRS for less than two weeks.

"It was my dream job," he said. "Ratings were going well. It kind of stinks."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/...st-fired_x.htm




BiTtorrent 101: The Complete Guide to Filesharing
David Kidd

This feature story appears in the April 2006 issue of PC Authority magazine.

Few technologies have had a more sordid past than peer-to-peer networking. The Napster revolution in 1999 created an unstoppable crusade from users that wanted to share files, and copyright holders trying to prevent it. But like a multi-headed hydra, with each court battle that shut down one network, another would spring up, and we now have more choice than ever to share files. Copyright infringement may be its main use at the moment, but it's an ignorant assumption that piracy is its foundation. People want to share information, and they want to use the technologies available to them to do it.

And they will. Strings of lawsuits later, and P2P is showing no signs of decline. It currently accounts for more Internet traffic than any other medium, and businesses are trying to harness its power to distribute content faster, cheaper, and wider. Piracy is still rampant, but peer-to-peer is now entering a new phase of maturity, where private, secure networks are helping groups connect together, and technologies like BitTorrent have revolutionised the way files are distributed.

P2P now offers more ways for people to connect than ever before. While Napster dealt a healthy blow, and Kazaa made a slight detour, the future of P2P is brighter than ever. This feature looks beyond the teething problems and examines the future of P2P networking, the latest networks, and how you can make the most out of the original bad boy of Internet.

Power to the people
At its core, the Web has always been peer-to-peer. The fact that any individual with an Internet connection, a PC and HTTP server software can throw up a site contributed significantly to the exponential expansion of the Web, and the Internet as a whole. But while the early web featured interconnected, distributed nodes (web servers), it was still based on a traditional client/server system, rather than the P2P networks around today.

The first mainstream P2P services used a combination of interconnected nodes (or peers) and centralised tracking servers. These servers aren't involved in the file transfer, rather they act as 'matching' services to connect one node to another. The most well known network to use this strategy was Napster. Napster was predominantly a music sharing network, which hosted a server to track users and files. Even though the actual process of file swapping was happening between the nodes, Napster's involvement led to its eventual demise where it was ordered to pay several millions of dollars to copyright holders. Only recently, after being acquired by Roxio, has it relaunched into a legitimate business.

But far from stymieing the use of P2P networks, it initiated increasing interest in filesharing, driving the creation and use of decentralised networks which do not need a centralised server to function. When a node connects to a decentralised P2P network, it will often connect to a small number of nodes that are (hopefully) online. Each node that it connects to is also connected to its own list of other nodes, and so on until, in theory, each node can form a link to every other node.

To search for a file, a request is sent out to only those nodes that have a direct connection, and the request is subsequently 'passed on' to other nodes on the network. By not having a central point of failure, this can keep the network always up and running. However, searching for files can be slow as the user waits for all nodes on the network to return the results.

All networks around now use either centralised or decentralised formats, and often a combination of both.

The old school crew
Since the downfall of Napster in 2001, new networks sprung up to fill in the gaps, with FastTrack, Gnutella and eDonkey being the most popular. The FastTrack protocol lies beneath services like Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh, and relies on certain clients acting as supernodes to speed up file searching. Kazaa is the most recent to hit the headlines, after an Australian court found that the owners knowingly allowed its customers to trade copyright files. The upshot is that Australians can not officially download the client from the Kazaa website.

The eDonkey network uses dedicated servers to track and locate files, rather than relying on supernodes. eDonkey is a massively popular service, and according to research firm CacheLogic, is the most popular method for trading video files.

Gnutella takes a slightly different tack to eDonkey and FastTrack by delivering a pure, decentralised network. It was originally developed by Nullsoft developers, Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Winamp fame. While Nullsoft was working under AOL, the pair released Gnutella without AOL's knowledge. AOL subsequently canned the project, but the software (and source code) had already been downloaded in the thousands. Without a centralised server, the network can't be shut down -- once it's up, it's up.

Looking beyond the major players, there are many more networks lurking in the background. Some, like MP2P are exclusively used for music, and others will restrict clients from connecting unless they offer up a library of files to share. The net effect of the many networks, each with their strengths and weaknesses, provides a collective mesh of peers where you can find anything you want.

But is this just an industry built on copyright infringement? As a whole, few would argue that these networks didn't facilitate illicit filesharing. You could even take it a step further and suggest that these networks not only rely on it, but were created because of it -- something that the court house dramas over the past few years will attest. But if we look past the rampant piracy, there's a whole new world of legitimate P2P brewing out there.

It's raining bits
One of the most significant moments in Internet history is when lone programmer, Bram Cohen, unleashed BitTorrent in 2002. Prior to BitTorrent, if you wanted to distribute a large file you'd likely be charged through the nose in bandwidth, and the more popular the file, the more demanding the load on the server. Consequently, you either have an expensive server farm to keep up with demand, or your server would crawl to a stop as it tried to fulfill the many requests.

BitTorrent changes that by turning the process upside down. By using the bandwidth of each person who wants the file, rather than a series of one way client connections to a single server, popular files are distributed faster and cheaper. That a file could be better distributed with more people was an absurd notion five years ago, but for those that deal in large files, it's now an indispensable distribution method.

In order to start downloading with BitTorrent, you first download a very small file with a .torrent extension. The tiny files contain information about the original file, as well as the location of the tracking server. When the .torrent file is loaded into a BitTorrent client, the client contacts the tracker discover which peers have the data you need. Once you've started collecting data packets, the tracker will then let the other peers know, who'll then start asking you for data. The net result is that no matter how many users are after a file, there's little chance of a bottleneck forming -- and with more users, you'll often get a faster connection. Of course the reverse is also true, where an unpopular file will often be slower than a dedicated server, due to the lack of peers to download from.

Another distinction is its use of the web as a searching tool, where other P2P programs require direct searching of the shared files of other peers, or accessing a designated indexing server. Few search engines can compete with the speed of a Google search, and this a major strength of BitTorrent.

Given its advantage in distributing large files, the most common file types winging their way around BitTorrent networks are videos, games and software packages like Linux distributions. It also has a place in commercial online distribution services, with Cohen himself having been brought into Valve to work on its online distribution service, Steam.

Despite its uses in distributing copyright media, which constitutes the majority of BitTorrent downloads, its robust system makes it ideal -- and in some cases necessary -- for any type of large media. This alone helps BitTorrent attain an air of legitimacy, letting it stand apart from the pirate havens of classic P2P networks.

The new breed
Today, there's more choice than ever with P2P. If you're not interesting in jumping into the wild world of Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent, you could take a look at the latest crop of applications that let smaller, like-minded groups share files in private. Specialised services are starting to pop up which let you trade, for example, just photographs, with Pixpo (www.pixpo.com) being an example. These services effectively turn your PC into an image server that lets you invite others to view or download your collection, without going through a central server.

In addition to individual files being passed among users, businesses can take advantage of P2P to collaborate on group tasks and share files among designated users. This can be a quicker, one-stop solution compared to the traditional use of VPNs, email and attachments. Groove Virtual Office (www.groove.net), for example, combines filesharing, instant messaging, and typical workflow management tools. Additionally, it not only cuts down on the amount of large emails passing between a group, but it also reduces bandwidth by only transmitting the changes made to a file, rather than the whole file itself. Groove is a good example of how a P2P backbone can be customised to different applications.

But to really get a sense of how far P2P has come, applications like Qnext, WASTE and Grouper shine as examples of all-in-one filesharers. In essence, these apps forego the larger world of P2P, instead focusing on private groups. Qnext (www.qnext.com), for example, not only lets you share files, but it bundles in private IRC chat rooms, remote desktop access, and even access to your MSN, Yahoo! or other instant messaging account. WASTE (http://waste.sourceforge.net) takes another approach entirely, offering heavy dollops of security rather than focusing on too many features.

With this recent flood of legitimate applications employing P2P technologies, and with Internet bandwidth being chewed up more and more with filesharing, the future is certain. While traditional uses of P2P networks have been dominated by the swapping of large scale, pirated content, applications like WASTE, Qnext and Grouper suggest many users are interested in sharing personal files with smaller, private groups.

The future of P2P networking
In August 2000, Intel's Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger had this to say: 'The power of this model would be very significant and complementary to the business models we've seen emerge. Out of this early momentum, this technology foundation, we'll make a very bold suggestion today. That peer-to-peer computing could usher in the next generation of the Internet, much as we saw Mosaic spark the last.'

The key point here is not so much Gelsinger's prediction, but that business models would adapt to P2P technologies. Few could deny the immense power of technologies like BitTorrent as a distribution method, and private networks are opportunities to target like-minded groups of people. Games will be first off the block, with Steam and Blizzard already distributing their large, highly demanded files to thousands of users every day. In addition, software makers are already starting to offer torrent files of their applications to reduce bandwidth costs. Furthermore, there are many legal places to download files from. Legal Torrents (www.legaltorrents.com) is one example that lists media released under a Creative Commons license, which promotes sharing.

But what's really exciting is the potential use of P2P technology to form the backbone of television and video distribution to a wider audience. Warner Bros has recently announced it will launch a P2P service in Germany, recognising the need to combat piracy by providing a legal alternative, that's just as easy to use an open filesharing network. In the UK, the BBC has talked about introducing P2P technologies to distribute its online video archive to an Internet audience.

Ultimately, this is just scratching the surface of P2P. If the cost of distributing all forms of digital media is no longer relative to demand, then there's no limit to the size of the audience that content makers can reach. The proportion of illicit copyright material traded over networks will soon diminish as legitimate uses tap into its power. And for the millions of interconnected PCs out there - we'll never be too far from what we need. To say P2P is back with a bang is an understatement. It's about to go supernova!



The next step
The PCA labs team has rounded up the best Torrent clients to help you choose the best way to do your downloading. Be sure to read this to get the most benefit from Bittorrent!

In addition, the labs team has tested the very best Private file sharing applications. These allow you to create a private internet network with friends and colleagues for sharing files quickly and securely.

PCA Labs:

Torrent clients
[url=http://www.pcauthority.com.au/lab.aspx?CIaLID=132Private file sharing[/ul]

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article....CIID=35843&p=1





How To Create A Torrent?

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. I have “a lot of” friends who know how to download torrents, but when they need to send me their latest 200MB vacation picture collection, they ask me to “get on msn”.

It’s not that I have anything against msn (allthough the file transfer sucks), but why don’t just use bittorrent? Especially if you want to send something to more than one person because then you can share the bandwith.

So how do you do this? Well it’s very simple. Open your favorite bittorrent client and do the magic trick:

file > create torrent

…..

That’s all? Well almost. All you need to do now is put in the tracker info nad tick some boxes. This can differ somewhat from client to client but it all comes down to the same thing.



µTorrent

1. File > Create new Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Trackers: This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

4. Do NOT tick the private torrent box (unless you’re using a private tracker)

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends



Bitcomet

1. File > Create Torrent (or CTRL + M)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Select “enable public DHT network” from the dropdown box
This way you can be your own tracker if the public tracker goes down.

4. Tracker server and DHT node list
Again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends



Azureus

1. File > New Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Tick “use an external tracker”.
And again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

3. Select single file or dicectory, click NEXT and point to the file or directory you want to share, and click NEXT

4. Do NOT tick “private torrent”

5. Do tick “allow decentralized tracking”

6. Save the torrent and send it to your friends

Happy sharing. Note that you don’t need to upload the torrent to a website or a tracker. This means you control who gets the file and who doesn’t, and it won’t be visible to others!.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-create-a-torrent/





TV Here, There, Everywhere
David Pogue

IN the olden days, Americans gathered in front of the television sets in their living rooms to watch designated shows at designated times. You had a choice of three channels, and if you missed the broadcast, you'd feel like an idiot at the water cooler the next day. Quaint, huh?

Then came the VCR, which spared you the requirement of being there on time. Then cable TV, which blew open your channel choices. Then TiVo, which eliminated the necessity of even knowing when or where a show was to be broadcast. What's next — eliminating the TV altogether?

Well, sure. Last year, a strange-looking gadget called the Slingbox ($250) began offering that possibility. It's designed to let you, a traveler on the road, watch what's on TV back at your house, or what's been recorded by a video recorder like a TiVo. The requirements are high-speed Internet connections at both ends, a home network and a Windows computer — usually a laptop — to watch on. (A Mac version is due by midyear.)

Today is another milestone in society's great march toward anytime, anywhere TV. Starting today, Slingbox owners can install new player software on Windows Mobile palmtops and cellphones, thereby eliminating even the laptop requirement.

On cellphones with high-speed Internet connections, the requirement of a wireless Internet hot spot goes away, too. Now you can watch your home TV anywhere you can make phone calls — a statement that's never appeared in print before today (at least not accurately).

Now, if you don't travel much, and even if you do, your reaction to this statement may well be, "So?"

Sure enough, the Slingbox has always been intended to fill certain niches. It's for people with a fancy satellite receiver downstairs in the living room, but who want to watch upstairs in bed before retiring. It's for the hotel-room prisoner who wants to watch a movie on a TiVo at home, having realized that it's cheaper to pay $10 for a night of high-speed Internet than $13.95 for an in-room movie. It's for the traveler who wants to keep up with his hometown news while away.

And if you have friends who can't see the big game because of a local broadcast blackout — really, really good friends — you could even let them download the free Slingbox player software and watch your local broadcast, though the Slingbox folks don't endorse this last use.

Now that all of this is available for cellphone viewing — with no monthly fee — well, the mind boggles.

THE Slingbox itself is truly eccentric-looking. Picture three squares of chocolate broken off a Nestlé bar, cast in silver and blown up to 10.6 by 1.6 by 4 inches. ("It's supposed to be an ingot," a spokesman corrected me.)

For most people, setting it up is a 15-minute prospect, according to the company. An Ethernet cable connects the Slingbox to the router on your home network. ( Wireless networks aren't fast enough to handle the Slingbox's video reliably. If there's no Ethernet jack handy, Sling will sell you a $100 Powerline adapter, which you plug into an electrical socket; it makes the electrical wiring of your house part of your network.)

Another cable connects a spare video recorder or TV output to the Slingbox itself. It has inputs for RCA and S-video cables; you can switch between sources from the road. A third cable is designed to control the channel-changing and other functions of your recorder or cable box; it terminates with two so-called infrared blasters, which are meant to be taped in front of the infrared "eyes" of your TV equipment.

But suppose you're not most people. Suppose you're a newspaper reviewer with bad karma and a router that Slingbox doesn't recognize. In that case, setting up a Slingbox can be a more time-consuming ordeal. Anyone still puzzling over the phrase "the router on your home network" might be in trouble, too.

Once the setup is done, though, and once you've installed the necessary software, your PC's speakers burst to life — and there, on your computer screen, is whatever's on TV right now. By clicking a photographic on-screen representation of your actual remote control, you can change channels, see what's available to play on your TiVo, pause or rewind, or even tell the TiVo to record something. All of this works equally well at home (across the network) and on the road (across the Internet), although your components at home take a couple of seconds to respond.

(Unless you've bought a cable splitter, changing what's on the TV screen from the road also changes it at home, which could alarm anyone who happens to be watching TV in person at the time.)

The sound is excellent — and at home, viewed across your home network, so is the standard-definition video. Viewed away from home, the video is only O.K. There are blotchy patches here and there, not to mention periodic temporary freeze-ups; all of it depends on the Internet connection speeds at both ends. The video resembles a VCR recording, which is still perfectly fine for talk shows, reality shows, game shows and movies where sweeping visuals and special effects aren't the main attractions.

Once that's all running, you can embark on the next adventure: tuning into your Slingbox from a palmtop or cellphone. This task involves downloading and running another installer from slingmedia.com — free to Slingbox owners until April 26, and a one-time $30 payment thereafter.

At that point, you can use tiny tappable on-screen controls to tune in to your home TV and video recorder, and control all their functions, just as you can with a laptop. The Slingbox can direct its video to only one gizmo at a time, however; you can't watch on your cellphone while someone else is using a laptop.

Once again, all you need is high-speed Internet access. For PocketPC palmtops (like the HP iPAQ and Dell Axim), that usually means finding a Wi-Fi hot spot in a hotel, airport or coffee shop. Life is even easier if you have a cellphone with a $60-a-month high-speed cellular data plan like Verizon's EV-DO network (Palm Treo 700w, Samsung i730, and so on); in that case, you can tune in from anywhere in the 100 major cities with coverage. You can kill time watching your own TV while in cabs, friends' houses and the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The mobile Slingbox player also works over Bluetooth or U.S.B. connections to the Internet, meaning that you could watch on your palmtop over an Internet signal provided by a nearby laptop. But that's sort of pointless — if you have a laptop, why not watch your TV on it and enjoy the much bigger screen?

On the small screen, the video once again has perfectly adequate VHS quality. If the Internet connection is very slow — for example, if your cellphone is outside those 100 cities covered by EV-DO — you can opt for "slide-show mode" (one frame of video a second, accompanied by full audio).

On the pocket player, Sling Media has yet to fashion photographic remote-control replicas for all 5,000 different TV components offered by the laptop version. Still, the most important buttons are all available as generic rectangles; they appear when you tap the right "soft key" on your palmtop or phone. Keyboard shortcuts are available for most functions, too: to control a TiVo from the Treo's thumb keyboard, for example, you can press R for record, P for play, F for fast-forward.

The Slingbox isn't the only video-to-go option, of course. TiVoToGo, the iPod TV store and Archos pocket players all let you carry TV shows and movies on your travels — but only if you record material and transfer it before the trip. Orb (orb.com) is free and also works with some cellphones, but gets its video from a PC with a TV tuner card, not from your actual TV and video recorder. And, of course, your cellphone company will be happy to sell you short TV shows — a canned selection of their choosing, not yours — if you're willing to pay a monthly fee and watch exclusively on your phone (not your laptop).

The Slingbox and its simple, satisfying new cellphone/palmtop player join those portable personal-video options. It seems clear that along with traditional TV schedules and traditional TV channels, the next victim of high-tech progress may be the traditional TV couch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/te...s/23pogue.html





Movie Review

James Bai's 'Puzzlehead' Depicts a Love Triangle With a Twist
Jeannette Catsoulis

"Puzzlehead" plays out in a bleak and barren future where people have become so scarce that the only permissible use of technology is for repopulation. Fudging this rule somewhat, a lonely scientist builds a robot companion, an exact likeness of himself down to the bouffant hairstyle and lovelorn memories (Stephen Galaida plays both roles). He calls his creation Puzzlehead and trains him to play chess, clean house and spy on Julia (Robbie Shapiro), the pale, jittery salesgirl whom the scientist has been secretly coveting.

Once Puzzlehead has glimpsed Julia, his vacuuming and dishwashing no longer hold the same appeal; and as man and machine compete for the same, increasingly bewildered woman, their struggle escalates until only one of them will be left standing.

Written and directed by James Bai, "Puzzlehead" maintains a delicious tension between narrative wildness and compositional discipline. Mining the Frankenstein myth and finding psychosexual gold, the movie creates a love triangle that seems to share a single disturbed personality. The cannibalistic themes and low-budget sci-fi grunginess may recall Darren Aronofsky's "Pi," but Mr. Bai's camera is more patient and his energy more slow-burning. Filled with harpsichord music and Freudian passions, "Puzzlehead" reveals the selfishness of creation with style, originality and the understanding that even a tin man can have a heart.

Puzzlehead

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written, produced and directed by James Bai; director of photography, Jeffrey Lando; edited by Miranda Devin; music by Max Lichtenstein; production designer, Jessica Shaw; released by Zero Sum Productions. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Stephen Galaida (Puzzlehead/Walter) and Robbie Shapiro (Julia).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/03/2...es/23puzz.html





"Impertinent and Presumptuous"
Michael Geist

Pollara, the company that has conducted several surveys on behalf of CRIA (including the CRTC submission), has posted a lengthy 11 page response to my original blog posting (a comment brought the response to my attention as I was unaware of it until this evening). Pollara suggests that my statements are "misleading, incorrect, and inconsistent." The company adds for good measure that my intervention is "impertinent and presumptuous" and that it hopes that it won't "distract us from the serious business at hand."

People can read the memo as well as the original data and judge for themselves (as well as the growing news coverage from CBC, Marketwatch, and Stereophile). I'd offer the following comments in response:

· I noted the Pollara data found that P2P sources constituted only one-third of the music on people's computers. Pollara argues that this only reflects the music on their hard drives, not their downloading activity. I frankly don't understand their complaint here. They didn't ask about downloading activity, they asked about the source of music on their computers. If they were to ask about all their music (online and offline), I suspect the number would be even lower as many users might well have more CDs that they have not digitized.

· Pollara seems to step out of the role of pollster in their memo by regularly offering what amount to legal opinions on music copying. At page three of the response, they lump together P2P downloading, sharing with friends, and copying CDs that might not be their own. Perhaps Pollara is unaware of the private copying user right that exists under current Canadian law that has generated more than $140 million for artists and the industry which specifically covers much of this copying. This is not, as Pollara suggests, "unpaid-for-music" but rather copying that is well compensated.

· Pollara misleadingly recharacterizes some its own questions. For example, it points at page six to a question on whether the person had ever acquired a CD with songs downloaded from a file sharing service such as Kazaa. This is then inaccurately presented as "Ever Purchased or Received a CD That Contained Illegally Downloaded Tracks". One might say that Pollara should stick to polling for its paying clients like CRIA rather than offering up its opinion on the legality of P2P in Canada.

· Pollara takes issue with my characterization of its data that 75% of those polled have purchased songs that they downloaded. Apparently, they believe that the number of purchases should be higher given the amount of downloading, though it is hard to see how they've divined that from the questions they asked in this survey.

· Pollara suggests that I show an "egregious lack of consistency" by stating that the purchasing habits data is inconclusive given that it showed that 28% said they purchased more, 35% said they purchased less, and 37% said they didn't know. I think this is a fair characterization since the 7% difference between more and less purchases is offset by the largest number of 37% who don't know. That leaves the matter inconclusive in my view. Of course, Pollara chooses to step outside its own data by trumpeting CRIA stats to support a different conclusion.

· Pollara notes that I chose to ignore the responses of Canadians attitude toward copyright and downloading. I did not comment because these questions are embarrassing. As noted yesterday, the percentage of those in favour of meeting international standards dropped by 28% in two months. The reality is that most people being polled (and apparently doing the polling) are not copyright experts and relying on such responses only serves to diminish the credibility of those seeking to do so.

· Finally, Pollara wonders aloud why I didn't cite CAB response. The truth is that there are 180 responses and I haven't read them all. Moreover, it was the CRIA data that immediately attracted attention since it included detailed survey data which typically is not released to the public. If Pollara has reviewed all the submissions, however, I suppose one might ask why didn't they mention the submission from Fading Ways Records who have found that P2P has increased the sales of their artists. At the risk of being presumptuous, given this memo, I think that answer is obvious.

Update: CopyrightWatch comments on the Pollara response with a helpful list of what the polling company might have asked.
http://michaelgeist.ca/component/opt...omment_view,1/





Russian Software Developer Beats Pirate in Boxing Ring
MosNews

An employee of Cognitive Technologies computer company has beaten a man who was selling the company’s software illegally.

Manager of the company’s software department, Andrei Smirnov, offered to fight the dealer in a fitness center. He defeated the computer pirate 24-16 in three rounds, lasting three minutes each. The dealer’s name was not revealed, News.Ru web edition on high technologies reported on Thursday.

In February, Smirnov saw the dealer selling CDs with his company’s software at a computer market without a license. Smirnov demanded that the dealer stop the illegal sale. A scuffle broke out, but they were stopped by the guard. After that, the pirate expressed a wish to continue the fight in the street, but Smirnov suggested a fitness center.
http://mosnews.com/news/2006/03/23/beatpirate.shtml





Alizee Est Bien Chaud
Exaton

Take this video in particular, for example. Gotta have some reason to love France... And my God guys, you should understand the lyrics... It's all about her relaxing in a bubble bath, her soft skin, etc. (not kidding). See that "2" logo in the top right ? That's France 2, the most important public channel (and in this country the public channels are neck to neck with the private ones for popularity). Still not kidding.

Now for the less jowful news. I happen to live in France, as you might have gathered, and I'm a bit surprised by the international analysis of the DADVSI law (since that's it name) that indeed got through Parliament tuesday evening.

The fact is that the government has :

· legalized DRM,

· set up a standard parking-ticket style fine for downloading pirated stuff and another for making content available to others (38 and 150 euros respectively, about 45 and 180 USD),

· decided that P2P software makers were liable to pay 300'000 euros and spend 3 years in prison,

· given up on the "monthly subscription to be allowed to download legally" deal, under pressure from the local RIAA associates that forced a vast majority of artists to back them,

· completely forbidden copying of a DVD, even as a personal backup,

· and simply required that DRM'd files be interoperable, which is where Apple's beef is.

I'm very flattered by all the positive light this is being shown in internationally, it's not every day the world has nice things to say about this country, but I must point out that IT enthusiasts over here are miserably decrying this law, and would probably be in the streets themselves if they weren't already chocablock with students demonstrating :-(

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/03/22/2117258.shtml

















Until next week,

- js.


















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