One month, three weeks and five days might seem like an awfully long time to the digerati. But that’s how long it took between Steve Jobs publishing his "Thoughts on Music" and EMI’s announcement this week that it is going to offer downloads without digital rights management (DRM).
There’s a kind of concept car taking shape on the internet. Far from the glare of the motor show is a car called the OScar. A concept car with a twist, OScar is being developed by a loose tangle of car designers, engineers and programmers — most working in their spare time — out to challenge the might of the big car makers.
The padlocked freezer at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village attracts little attention from the tourists who throng to the park each day. Most are more interested in the bloody spectacle of tigers savaging live cows, the monkey bicycle race or the highwire displays by bears and goats.
The vast majority of songs on filesharing systems have been in the MP3 file format since Napster propelled the idea of digital music into the market in 1999. But that could change over the next decade. Files encoded in the better AAC format could become more popular, as people start to share unprotected songs bought from Apple’s market-leading iTunes Music Store.
The news that his prophet had been apprehended and beaten up by a mob came as a grave setback for Moeka the water-snake. Things had been desperate for some time, and the word on the riverbank was that Stabby, the micro-lender from Brakpan, had run out of patience.
American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose works blended science fiction and black comedy built on his experience as Nazi prisoner-of-war, has died at the age of 84, his publisher said. Vonnegut was best known for <i>Cat’s Cradle</i>, <i>Breakfast of Champions</i> and <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i>.
The two-day meeting of the South African Reserve Bank’s monetary policy committee on Thursday decided to maintain the repo rate at 9%, in line with expectations. The prime overdraft rate thereby stays at 12,5% and this decision means the current tightening cycle remains at 200 basis points since it began in June last year.
First there was the furore over their capture. Then the backlash when released. But no drama is ever complete without an accompanying movie, and on Wednesday Iran beat Hollywood to the mark by pledging to recount the entire 13-day affair in a film.
Johnnic Communications (Johncom) has announced that it is separating into two business entities – Johncom and a new subsidiary, OpCo. The new company will now hold 100 percent of all of Johncom’s directly-held media and entertainment assets
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has officially withdrawn all radio advertisements of the Tshwane Metropolitan Council that refer to Tshwane as the capital city. The SABC’s policy manager, Fakir Hassin, undertook in writing to the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw the advertisements with "immediate effect".
"Will the political machine of Zimbabwe’s de facto one-party state enable President Robert Mugabe yet again to outfox everyone as he fights his last battle for power ahead of the watershed elections in 2008? Or will what he himself calls the "Mugabe way" finally make way for a peaceful and democratic solution?" asks Jonathan Moyo.
Damp ceilings, cracked walls, bad plumbing and shoddy bricklaying are among the structural defects plaguing the owners of about 2Â 500 low-cost houses across the Cape Peninsula. Poor workmanship has been blamed for the defects, the Local Government Research Centre reports, and it will cost about R35-million to repair the damage.
Lazarus Zim has resigned from the board of Telkom with immediate effect, the fixed-line telephone operator announced on Wednesday. This is in light of his commitments to the recently announced Afripalm and Mvelaphanda Resources black economic empowerment (BEE) transaction, which is set to alter South Africa’s BEE landscape.
The offer by South Africa’s second national telecommunications operator, Neotel, to purchase Transtel Telecoms, the commercial telecommunications arm of Transnet, has been accepted in principle by Transnet, the company said on Wednesday. The proposed transaction brings with it revenues of more than R400-million a year for Neotel.
Russia is preparing its own military response to the United States’s controversial plans to build a new missile defence system in eastern Europe, according to Kremlin officials, in a move likely to increase fears of a Cold War-style arms race. The Bush administration says the bases are designed to shoot down rogue missiles fired by Iran or North Korea.
With the Castle Premiership all but wrapped up, the real battle in South African football at the moment is in the promotion play-offs in the Mvela Golden League. Looking at some of the clubs involved in the race to join the elite, one has to wonder whether there should be more stringent criteria imposed on who exactly can own football clubs in this country.
Wrapped in the Iraqi flag and chanting anti-American slogans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia snaked into the holy city of Najaf on Monday for a protest rally to mark the fourth anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein and to demand the ejection from Iraq of United States and British troops.
Tumi is a sassy, switched on woman who is taking steps to ensure her financial future. She has been focusing on getting debts under control, but now she wants to upgrade her car. This month, Thereza de Quintal, business development manager of Sanlam Financial Advisers, explains the financial implications to Tumi.
My dad has been paying money into a retirement annuity for a number of years and he turns 60 in April. He now has the option to either leave the funds for another five years, transfer them to another fund, or take the tax-free cash and leave the remaining balance or transfer to another fund.
Perhaps it was inevitable. When two leading internet pioneers came together this week to propose a set of guidelines that would filter out offensive and abusive comments from blogs, they were met by a torrent of offensive and abusive comments.
Dear delegates to the 52nd national conference of the ANC, This December you will be discussing issues of paramount importance for all South Africans. Allow the Afrikanerbond to raise some issues that we believe are necessary to ensure that the miracle of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s "rainbow nation" does not fade.
A dentist was barred from his practice when he was found guilty on Thursday of urinating in a surgical sink and using sterilised dental instruments on his ears and nails. Alan Hutchinson, a 51-year-old father of three, was erased from the dental register after a medical tribunal found him to have acted in an inappropriate and unprofessional way.
A Croatian activist on Friday completed a 24-hour stay in a chicken cage in a central square in Zagreb to urge people not to eat eggs on Easter Sunday. But one man attempted to scramble the stunt. He showed up with a bag full of eggs and bombarded the caged man and other activists before police stopped him.
The ashes of 11 people were scattered off a small island about 1,6km from downtown Hong Kong as a new burial-at-sea scheme went into operation in the space-scarce city, the government said on Sunday. Family members and religious ministers took to the high seas aboard a specially decked out boat for the burials on Saturday.
French rapper Xiao-Venom Blackara, better known in his quartier as XV, is a busy man this weekend. He has two pressing tasks: organising his first major concert and mobilising his neighbours and friends for the presidential elections in two weeks. That the two events will take place within a few days of each other is no coincidence.
A cut in United States interest rates before the summer looked less likely on Friday after a sharp increase in the number of jobs created last month. Employment figures for March showed the US economy added 180 000 jobs, compared with forecasts of a 130 000 increase.
"Check this out. Amazing!" It took just a brief sentence, and after those four words a revolution followed. The first entry on <i>Scripting News</i> effectively ushered in the first blog 10 years ago. In the intervening years, these online diaries have been touted as the future of media, labelled "pathetic drivel", and caused court cases, prison sentences and international incidents.
As we publish yet another Mugabe-dominated top 10 news reports for the week, it’s clear that the crisis in our neighbouring country remains high on the agenda of our readers.
The roles played by South Africans in the Great War in East Africa and Europe’s War in Africa. David Smith reports.
One of the biggest financial concerns for anyone who has reached retirement age is whether the increases in the amounts that they receive from their retirement fund or annuity will keep up with inflation each year. Not so for the 135 000 South Africans who receive a pension via Old Mutual Corporate’s annuity policies.
More than 70 people were injured on Thursday when a train carrying hundreds of rush-hour commuters hit the rail buffer of a Paris station, firefighters said. The driver was held for questioning by police after the nine-carriage train carrying 600 passengers struck the buffer as it pulled into the Gare de l’Est station, in eastern Paris.
At an awards ceremony at Johannesburg’s Summer Place in Sandton on Wednesday night, television producer Bronwyn Nielsen won the 2006 Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year award. Nielsen, who produced a programme for <i>Carte Blanche</i> about South Africa’s high telecommunications costs, also toppled the competition in the television category.