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BBC News reports on net neutrality and what Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, has to say about it. “What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web. Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring”.

It does worry me that the roll out of digital cinema around the globe could contribute negatively in the long run to the net neutrality issue. I’d hate to look back in 20 years and think that I played a part in breaking the web. Dave Winer says that the dark nets are already here, and he’s right of course.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I am on a Redhat course this week which is pretty much taking up all my time. It’s linux 9 to 5 and then revison till midnight as soon as I get home for the exam which is on Friday. Exams aren’t much fun and my brain is starting to melt.

DCinemaToday: “Doremi Cinema has been selected by Deluxe Digital Cinema, Capital FX and EFILM London to provide its DMS-2000 DCI 1.0 JPEG2000 mastering station for encoding movies in 2K and 4K formats. The purchase also includes two Doremi DCP-2000 DCI JPEG2000 digital cinema servers”. I’ve been so busy I totally missed this press release. The Doremi server is in the building and hopefully I shall be able to play with it very soon.

Scott Kirsner: “My working thesis about the visual effects business is that, despite the growing number of big-budget movies relying on computer-generated imagery, the ability of “blue chip” visual effects firms (such as ILM, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Digital Domain, and Rhythm + Hues) to command premium prices will drop”.

Screen Digest: “On the back of the Hollywood studios releasing their technical specification for d-cinema in June 2005, there was explosive growth in the number of d-cinema screens globally during the second half of last year, with numbers doubling in a six month period”. Their report is pretty pricey at $2475 for print and get this, $4950 for an electronic copy.

Great superb article in CNNMoney about John Lasseter: “We have this precious entity that is Pixar. It’s like a living organism, like we had found out a way to grow life on a planet that had never supported it before. We wondered if a deal like this would ruin it all”.

Hollywood Reporter: “George Lucas has Industrial Light + Magic, Peter Jackson has Weta, and now Michael Bay has Digital Domain”.

The BBC is in Second Life: “The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties”.

Skype has announced free landline and mobile calls for people calling within the US and Canada. I wonder what this means for the net neutrality issue. Surely the big telcos aren’t going to like this. Will they start sniffing for VOIP packets? We shall have to wait and see.

Steve Garfield has an amuzingly geeky picture of himself inside second life, inside real life. Far out.

Mark Nelson: “Sony has caved in to the dominance of the iPod and started supporting AAC”.

Finally it feels like summer is here! Woohoo.

Another interesting offering from the Google camp with Google Trends. You can see the growth of terms like podcast or blog. It “analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time”.

I guess people have been searching for digital cinema for a while now and if you believe the stats then it looks like people have been searching for me too.

CNNMoney: “Silicon Graphics Inc., a struggling maker of high-performance business computers, Monday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a round of restructuring measures failed, sending its shares plunging”.

Paul Kedrosky: “The PC companies nuked DEC and the minicomputer companies, and then Sun blew up SGI (sort of), and now Google is giving Microsoft fits. It’s very rare, however, that one of those incumbents successfully fights back, making Schwartz’s job at Sun look tough, and making the Microsoft’s struggles with Google all the more painful”.

The press release from SGI.

NewYorkTimes: “Warner Brothers plans to announce today that it will make hundreds of movies and television shows available for purchase over the Internet using BitTorrent software”.

The Warner Bros Bit Torrent news makes the top of Techmeme.

Computer Graphics World: “TruePlay works online to allow multiple participants to join the same 3D space. It can also be used in conjunction with trueSpace7, Caligari’s flagship real-time collaborative 3D authoring technology, to allow participants to not only view and share information, but also to create, manipulate, and edit 3D objects in real-time within the shared virtual workspace”.

If the current trend with massively parallel multiplayer online games such as Second Life, Entropia and World of War Craft continues then being able to collaborate in 3D space over the internet is going to be huge. Currently in these virtual worlds it is the programmers that rule, and often make all the money. Imagine what will happen when VFX artists start venturing in there. I’m sure there is lots of money to be made.

Adam Curry is looking for “animators, scripters and people involved in machinima” to work with him on making some cool stuff for second life. Sounds like its for money too. I heard this on Thursday’s DSC while on my way out to the final day of my Redhat course in Guilford (after I’d written the previous two paragraphs..funny how things go). Sounds interesting to me. I can think of quite a few great people who might be interested.

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.