Cool Tech Reviews

Microsoft’s new Vista operating system may only be getting lukewarm reviews, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some useful new features. James Kendrick describes how Vista shadow copies saved his bacon when he accidentally deleted a bunch of notes he had taken with Microsoft’s OneNote application:

Reader Ryan Kabir left a comment and sent me an email with the two words that I’ll never forget– Vista’s shadow copies. OK, that’s three words but you’ll have to forgive me as I am as giddy as one can be without chemical influence. Ryan’s comment pointed out correctly that in Vista, shadow copies are activated by default (at least I didn’t specifically enable them) which means the OS saves snapshots of user files when they are modified. I’ve just spent 30 minutes, the most fun I’ve had in a good while, recovering EVERY SINGLE OneNote file that had been overwritten. Every. Single. File.

Vista and Ryan have come to my rescue and I am now grinning like the village idiot with all of my notes back where they were before catastrophe struck. Big shout out to the Vista team for putting shadow copies into the OS for just such an emergency.

Backup is easily the most important thing that most people never do for their computers and I am as guilty as everyone else. Vista shadow copies are a great idea for protecting yourself against user error, but you still need something external to protect you against hard drive crashes or the like. Some suggestions on that will be upcoming in a later post.

The greedy folks at the record companies are still doing their best to kill the golden geese:

On Friday, which is generally accepted in public relations circles as the best day of the week to release controversial news, the United States Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for webcasts, effective from 2006 to 2010.

The board ignored the arguments of the International Webcasting Association and other webcasters, and apparently simply endorsed the proposal of the RIAA-associated SoundExchange royalty organization, which represents the major and some indie labels.

Follow the link for the details on the new rates, but the bottom line is that “the rate would render Internet radio unsustainable, or at the very least, more ad-laden than terrestrial radio” and that’s before the songwriters get their cut.

The situation looks grim for webcasters large and small. Even tiny sites would owe the minimum of $500 per channel per year, which could also have implications for webcasters who provide customized radio stations, since the CRB does not define whether those would each constitute a “channel” (whatever that is). Webcasters have a 15-day period to ask the CRB to rehear arguments.

As an example of the customized approach, there is Live 365 Internet Radio which allows individuals to program their own personal “stations.” I suspect there won’t be too many of them left if this decision holds up. Of course, it only applies to music, so I guess we can expect unlimited amounts of amateur talk radio, if anyone cares.

There are many more details and a FAQ at the Radio and Internet Newsletter.