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Ferry 'cross the Lethe: A new album from Bryan Ferry? in 2002? On "Frantic," the sheen on Ferry's croon has cracked a bit -- with age, or disuse, or pain, I don't know. But it's becoming. The perfection of his "Avalon"-style gloss was seductive but barren -- a sort of vocal embalming had taken place. Here he sounds battered, but alive and kicking back, with a mixture of Dylan covers, dance numbers and old Roxy Music-style extravaganzas. I think it's his best work since "Siren."
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Twilight of "open computing"? This little sentence was in John Markoff's Thursday N.Y. Times piece covering Microsoft's .NET summit:
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Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending.
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It had folks on Slashdot scratching their heads, wondering whether this was a trumpet blast against open-source software development (which would have been odd at the same time Microsoft was sealing a deal to bring the open-source Apache web server into the .Net tent) or a warning to file-sharers that the boom is about to be lowered on their heads (which might make sense during the same week that Hollywood-friendly congressmen introduced a bill making it legal for copyright holders to hack into your computer to see if you've been naughty).
The statement is in fact opaque. I'd guess that Microsoft is trying to say, "The free-for-all that began with the Internet boom is over -- everybody better get used to paying more for everything digital from now on." Which is probably, whether we like it or not, an accurate description of reality. The troubling thing, for Microsoft and everyone else in the technology business, is that the free-for-all also caused the Internet boom. It was the "free exchange of digital information" that enable the amazing growth rate of the '90s, along with all the sales of hardware and software. Cutting it off may be what the holders of intellectual property rights (which includes both "content" publishers and software companies) want. Cutting it off is also a recipe for stagnation and loss.
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