innovations
MP3 is currently synonymous with Internet audio, but few people realise that it’s actually a proprietary standard. Not one that its owners – Fraunhofer et al – have been charging for till now, but proprietary nonetheless. That doesn’t mean that you as Ms Average User are likely to find a bill in the post tomorrow. But it does mean that companies like MP3.com may find themselves suddenly saddled with additional costs that they may have to pass on to … guess who? Fortunately the knights in shining white armour have arrived before we even knew we needed them, with the wackily named Ogg Vorbis, a new standard for digital compression and decompression of music. Their product is still under development – but it’s very definitely open source. That means free, as in free speech, but also as in free beer, to paraphrase an open source guru. Read about it at www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/
In the meantime … fancy listening to a blast of your favourite MP3 tracks on your home entertainment system? Korean manufacturer Scan has added MP3 playback to its debut DVD player. Not only will the R2 000 Scan SC-2000 spin your favourite movies and top CDs, it will also playback MP3 files stored on a CD-ROM. The player’s on-screen display will also give you details of the MP3 tracks. Expect to see MP3 playback featured on other DVD/CD players in the near future, most notably from Philips. www.scan.co.uk
Ever wanted to change your favourite website into another language? Go to rinkworks. com/dialect, type or paste in the address of your favourite website and – stone the crows – it is translated into cockney.
If the US presidential race actually manages to hold your attention, here are a few sites to spread it across. The Al Gore official site is at www.algore2000.com and George W Bush lurks at www.georgewbush.com. The Reform Party, or the remaining bits of it, hang out at www.reformparty.org. There’s a US interactive town hall at the brilliantly named www.e-thepeople.com. Meanwhile, even die-hard Republicans might get a kick out of parody site www.gwbush. com, while the bandwidth-blessed can watch Gore’s gaffes on video at www.mediaresearch. org/news/goregaffesvideo.html
Bored with your wireless application protocol (Wap) phone working only spasmodically? Try a simulation on a web page instead. One of the best is www.gelon.net. It has a “wapalizer” which reproduces a Wap phone on screen by fetching pages from websites and converting them into Wap pages. For a large directory of Wap sites go to mfinder.cellmania.com/ and click Wap under “reference”, then double click on any entry to test it on the wapalizer. Another site (Wapland.com) contains news, reports, searches and reviews.
ENDS