General: October 2004 Archives
Michelle Delio of Wired reveals the secrets of Sun Studio's signature sounds as well as the link between music and geeks.
We have our own recording studio at Tipperary Institute and the digital mixing desk that we use can trace its ancestry back to those early days of recording. The technology we use is just the latest generation/evolution of recording music. The same way the IPOD is the latest way of listening to and storing music.
![ips_zoolearn_ipodfront[1].jpg](http://www.irishsilicon.com/archives/ips_zoolearn_ipodfront[1].jpg)
You are looking at the limited edition of the U2 IPOD. The styling reflects the dominant colors on U2's new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Expected in November 2004).
A number of fans have complained in the Irish Media about the fact that U2 have sold out to a corporate entity. But as one hot press music journalist pointed out its not Shell or McDonalds. Instead its an innovative music company that promotes the legal distribution of music.
The IPOD will come preloaded with U2's new album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb". U2 have released their single from the album titled "Vertigo" its currently number 1 on the itunes chart, it is yet to be released to the tradtional markets. (early November).
I am sorely tempted to put this on my Dear Santa letter.
According to a number of sources including siliconrepublic.com Compustore the Irish PC superstore has gone into voluntary liquidation. Staff turned up at a number of branches on saturday to find that they were closed.
Compustore has 13 branches across Ireland according to the website, a number of these stores are run on a franchise basis so it unclear at the moment as to what will happen to these stores. At the time of writing this article it was still possible to shop online at http://shop.online.ie/shop/compustore/.
Boing Boing brought this video clip to my attention.
The Republican National Convention is condensed down to their utterances of the phrases "September 11", terroroim etc. Its easy to see that are trying to distarct the voter from the key domestic issues.
The Irish Farmers Association which is one of the two main farmer representation bodies in Ireland has reached an agreement with the wind farm company Airtricity for the group purchase of electricity for farmers.
150 farmers have agreed to switch their electricity supply to Airtricity, the reason for this switch is a saving of between 5% and 10% on their electricity costs.
At Tipperary Institute our Sustainable Rural Development department is involved with a number of key projects in the area of Biomass, wind energy. In Tipperary a number of wind turbines have been erected and more are on the way.
Slashdot had a link to this site, this text was published by ACM's SIGCSE in the June 2004 issue of Inroads, the SIGCSE bulletin.
The advice is actually bad advice such as
Ignore error messages
Don't stop to think
but it does impart a few important lessons
I grew up watching Thunderbirds and stingray on t.v. The somewhat quirky movements of the marionettes was endearing and enthralled a generation.
The creators of south park have now payed homage to this genre by releasing a movie called Team America. From viewing the trailers and outtakes I would classify it as Thunderbirds meets Austin Powers. :-)
Wired have a report about the investigatiion into the genesis probe crash. The probe was supposed to launch parachutes so as to slow its descent and stunt pilots in helicopters were standing by to catch the probe.
An investigating board says the capsule was doomed by faulty engineering drawings that were done backward. The drawings led to incorrect placement of switches that were supposed to detect Genesis' re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
30,000 irish soccer fans descended on Paris for the international world cup game on Sat the 9th of October. They left behind a host of worried Mammys, wives and partners as they couldn't be contacted due to the roaming service experiencing a melt down.
It must have seemed strange to these stalwart users of communication technology that they couldn't text home the game play by play, or annoy their friends with pictures of their pub crawl around the Moulin Rouge.
For the older fans it probably brought back memories of Euro 88 and italia 90, ringing home once every few days to confirm that you were alive and that the "crack was mighty". This new found freedom was however only a brief respite until they got home.
At Tipperary Institute we have a number of Dell laptops that have 17inch screens. They may be nice to look at but to carry them around is a different story entirely.
I am not surprised by the article on engadget.com
that sales for 17 inch laptops are slow.
We had a discussion in our office about this and a light weight 12 inch laptop running linux turned out to be the most popular choice.
If we want a 17 inch screen we'll stick to our desktops.
