rush

Stacks of wax from the backs of the racks

My brother and I used to walk up to our local drug store and buy LP records from a rack next to the candy bars. One day he bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and I bought the live Rush album Exit Stage Left. When we opened them, I became jealous of the stickers and posters in Dark Side, so we arranged a trade, which seemed fair because the Rush record had two LPs in it. He became a Rush fan, I became a Floyd fan, and the rest of our lives followed from that fateful decision. (… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 682: The murder of CableCard

EPISODE 682

Web creator rejects net tracking http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7299875.stm

BT confesses lies over secret Phorm experiments http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/17/bt_phorm_lies/

Yahoo Buzz is a game-changer for social media http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ yahoo_buzz_is_a_game_changer.php

Google says Microsoft’s Yahoo buy might hurt Internet http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/ idUSPEK15292020080317

Flickr Video beta due in April http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9895044-80.html

Firefox 3 goes on a diet, eats less memory than IE and Opera http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html

LimeWire digital music … Read more

Rush wants Apple's Time Machine to back up e-mail

Rush Limbaugh provided a little more detail Wednesday on the Mac issues that have been driving him batty (yes, more so) since he upgraded to Leopard.

The bombastic radio host has been a Mac user for years, but on Tuesday he complained on his show about issues with six Macs that he runs on a network, without providing any details. The story made its way around the Mac community to a mixture of curious and hostile responses, and now Limbaugh has outlined his two main beefs.

The first one is the Back to my Mac feature introduced with Leopard isn'… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 661: We'll help you, Rush!

EPISODE 661

Limbaugh appeals to Apple's Jobs for help

Even the rich and famous can't always depend on their megaphones for technical support.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is having trouble with his four Mac Pros, which he recently upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.2. Apparently he's having some sort of issue with Leopard that he thought would be fixed with the latest update, but it wasn't, and Limbaugh joked about making a personal appeal to Apple CEO Steve Jobs for technical support.

Limbaugh posted a transcript of an exchange from his Tuesday show concerning the Leopard update. "I've been having two … Read more

Is audio compression a good thing?

How come modern rock recordings seem to be so relentlessly loud? Essentially, the answer comes down to the misuse of compression, a technique by which the peaks and valleys of volume in a recording are electronically leveled out.

There's a popular YouTube video circulating that gives a pretty simple explanation. After a recording is finished but before it's mastered to CD, engineers use electronic tools to increase the volume of the entire recording, then squash out any peaks over a certain level. The result is a really loud CD that is supposed to stand out to radio programmers … Read more

iPhone audio codec

Hardware geeks are gleefully prying their new iPhones apart to see what's inside them. Given the topic of this blog, I'm naturally most interested in the audio components--how does thing sound?

According to this breakdown by Semiconductor Insight, reported by EE Times, the iPhone uses the same hardware audio codec from Wolfson as the last generation of iPods, meaning it should sound similar. However, Wired's review suggests that the audio doesn't go as loud as most iPods, particularly the Shuffle, which could be a real problem if you listened to a lot of Rushover headphones … Read more

Mimeo combines print and planes

Mimeo.com CEO Adam Slutsky wants to build a pile of paper to the stratosphere. New York-based Mimeo is achieving growth in a market--document printing--that's supposed to be dying. In 2005, the company, which specializes in online orders, printed more than one million documents on behalf of its clients. If piled up into a stack, the 2005 output would have measured 65,000 feet into the air. "That's 45 times the size of the Empire State Building," Slutsky said. The company, still private, pulled in about 40 million in revenue last year and is profitable. This … Read more