CD Baby milestone – US$10 million paid to artists!

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I don’t usually put press releases up here, but this is something I believe in, and it’s good news for music and musicians!

CD Baby is an independant on-line store selling CD’s directly from independant music artists.
There are no distributors involved, the musicians send their CD’s to CD Baby and they sell direct to the public.

They’ve just announced that they’ve now payed over US$10 million to artists from the sales of their CD’s as well as from their deals with people like Apple’s iTunes.

While record labels are blaming piracy for a lack of sales, music sold through CD Baby has almost doubled every year for the past six years. “It’s easier than ever for music fans to find great non-mainstream music,” says CD Baby founder Derek Sivers. “So what’s reported as a sales decline for a huge pop star is actually a sales boost for the less-famous but more-talented musicians of the world. We sell thousands of CDs a day by artists you’ve never heard, but will love when you do.”

Their “about” page says:

Current Numbers:

  • 74,654 artists sell their CD at CD Baby.
  • 1,254,336 CDs sold online to customers.
  • $10,047,762.14 paid to artists.

All pretty impressive!

Donna has her CD “Nobody Nowhere” with them. They’re nice friendly people who are doing the right thing by making it simple for independant artists to sell direct to the public.

Read on for the press release.
Continue reading →

Amusing Disclaimer

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From the front page of the website of the Australian satirical magazine Chaser who do the occasional forays into TV with CNNNN and “The Chaser Decides”.

There’s a lot more than just this quote there. 🙂

If any part of The Chaser causes disagreement between you and any other person, the editors recommend that disputes be resolved without recourse to violence. If a dispute concerning a Chaser article cannot be resolved without physical aggression, combatants are advised to fight only at locations that have valid and paid-up public liability insurance and/or in playgrounds administered by the Department of Education or other public body. Fights should be conducted in the presence of a qualified referee and with medical help readily available. No biting, scratching, blows below the belt or nipple cripples.

Cassini-Huygens almost went badly wrong

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The IEEE Spectrum Magazine is reporting that the Huygens probe would not have returned data to Cassini when released to probe Titans atmosphere.

None of the participants from the manufacturer through ESA to NASA realised this could happen, partly because the Italian manufacturer saw JPL as a rival and wanted NASA to sign an non-disclosure agreement to protect their proprietary design, which NASA refused.

Disaster was averted when Claudio Sollazzo, Huygens’s ground operations manager at the ESA became uneasy about this not being tested, and asked Boris Smeds (also of the ESA) to investigate. He finally persuaded NASA to relent and allow the test and demonstrated that Cassini would not understand the signals that Huygens sent because of the doppler shift as it accelerated away due to Titans gravity.

Returning Chinese Satellite Destroys House

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The ABC is is reporting that a Chinese satellite destroyed a home in Sichuan Province last Friday.

Apparently Chinese space experts said “The landing technology of our country’s satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this,” – so in this case did they have something against the person who owned the house ? Or maybe it was an extreme practical joke ?

I wonder what the insurance company would say..

Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up & Windows for Warships

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Found via Alec Muffett’s blog, Southern California’s air traffic control system failed due to a Microsoft Windows problem causing at least 5 near misses and leaving 800 planes airborne with no contact to ATC in mid-September.

Just to make you more depressed, read how the UK’s new Type-45 destroyers are being fitted with “Windows for Warships” (from the Risks Digest) – a chilling new turn for the blue screen of death if it goes wrong, which it has plenty of opportunity to according to the report.. There is another report on this over at the Register.

Windows Security Nightmare

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The BBC is reporting that Symantec say that 30,000 Windows PC’s are being recruited into spam and virus spreading networks each day which is a massive increase from 2,000 a day 6 months ago.
Computer Weekly is also reporting a security hole in Microsoft Word (2000 and XP) which will let people run code on your machine. This does not yet have a fix.


So, if you must use Windows, make sure you keep your machine up to date with patches from Windows Update and Office up to date with OfficeUpdate, switch from Internet Explorer to a more secure browser like Firefox or Opera, use a personal firewall like ZoneAlarm and install a good virus checker and keep it up to date!
Oh, and don’t forget to clean out spyware with a program such as AdAware.



Of course if you don’t have to run Windows then you can think about switching to Linux, I’d suggest looking at a distribution like Ubuntu, Mandrake or Fedora.



You can even try out Linux without installing it by running it from a CD using the Knoppix boot-CD.


Don’t be part of the problem.

Beautiful Mars 360 Degree Panoramic Photo-Mosaic

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SpaceRef has a story about NASA releasing an amazing panorama of the Columbia Hills on Mars. The full size version gives me an amazing feeling of “being there”, something that you don’t get from the normal photos. The panorama gives you the freedom to virtually spin in a circle and see what’s out there.

They’ve also got an interesting article about Max Faget, who just died, the man who designed the “escape rocket” (the Launch Escape System) on top of the NASA Mercury and later launches.