News written by Jari Ketola (December, 1999)

Apparently Singapore has decided there are now 32 days in December. Atleast according to their Webcam.

Even though it''s not year 2000 in Europe yet, you can already see the effect it has on Swiss watches.

According to the page:
Current time in Auckland, New Zealand is:
Saturday, January 1, 19100 - 02:56:06

Santa Clara County Judge William J. Elfving rejected the DVD Copy Control Association's request for temporary restraining order on DeCSS distributors.
The gallery at the courtroom reportedly loughed out loud, when the plaintiff's attorney claimed that DeCSS was only made for promoting piracy.
Read the full story and coverage at SlashDot.org

Yesterday (12-27-99) the court in Göta, Sweden decided that "it is legal to have links to pirated music on a homepage in Sweden if the links are to a server in a country where it isn't illegal to pirate music." Earlier this year in Skövde, Sweden, a teenager was charged for linking to pirated MP3s. The charges were dropped mostly because the prosecutor could not convince the court that most of the links pointed to US servers.

Below is an excerpt from an e-mail received by Slashdot.org from Robert Jones (Devzero.org):
"I have just received an email which I think will be of interest to many Slashdotters. Apparently, the DVD CCA [Copyright Control Association] has applied for a restraining order against myself and approximately 70 others to keep us from distributing 'any proprietary property or trade secrets relating to the CSS technology'. The hearing will be at 'the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, State of California, on December 29, 1999, at 8:30 a.m.' This will probably result in the bastards silencing us, but what can you do? If this goes through, I will never purchase a DVD player using current technology."
Related links:
DeCSS v1.21b
Slashdot.org
Devzero.org

A site dealing with DVD playback on various Nvidia cards has been opened at NvidiaZone.cjb.net. The site contains tips and FAQs for getting the best DVD acceleration from an Nvidia board, getting full-frame TV-playback without black borders etc.
Definitely worth checking out, if you are an Nvidia user!

InterVideo, Inc.announced today that its highly acclaimed software DVD player, WinDVD, had passed Microsoft's new test requirements for a Windows Hardware Quality Labs logo for Windows 2000 on a Dell Dimension system configured with the Nvidia GeForce 256 graphics. WinDVD is the first software DVD solution to be granted Logo status by Microsoft on the new Windows 2000 operating system.

Trap Door, an "Intergalactic Bump" band with 12 members, will be releasing their second album on MP3.com. The album is called Conscious and it will also be released as a Digital Automatic Music CD, which will contain the songs in MP3 format in addition to regular audio CD tracks.

After the impressive DVD player sales of last week (over 123,000 units sold), the total number of players sold in the U.S. marketplace climbed over the 5 million mark. The sales next week will be probably even higher what with last minute christmas shopping and all. Next week there will be more DVD set-top-boxes in U.S. than there are Finns...

Online survey at DVDTalk.com revealed, that the amount of coupons are the number one factor, when choosing an online store to purchase DVD movies from. Coupons were concidered more important than, for instance, price, customer service and order fulfillment.
Check out the full survey results at DVDTalk.com

The highly publicized return of Sir Paul McCartney to Liverpool's famous Cavern Club will be broadcast live by MCY.com. Sir Paul's first-ever cybercast will be available at www.mcy.com live on Tuesday, December 14 1999 at 3:00PM (EST). The webcast will also be available on-demand 18 hours after the event.
Sir Paul and his band, David Gilmore and Mike Green on guitars, Ian Pace on drums and Pete Wingfield on keyboards will be performing rock & roll from his latest album Run Devil Run, and playing songs by Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and other of his influential heroes.

Lyra announced that it would be adding support for MusicMatch Jukebox, the popular personal jukebox software running on Windows 9x/NT/2000 enviroments.
"MusicMatch Jukebox brings RCA LYRA customers the richest multimedia music experience with exceptional management of tagged cover art, lyrics, notes, and support for the popular Microsoft Windows Media format. One of the great advantages of the LYRA is that you can upgrade the software at home, so that you're not missing out on the latest advancements," claimed Jeff Scott from Thomson Advanced Audio who also added that; "Thomson is able to offer this flexibility because we're using a Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processor (DSP) that makes it easy for the consumer to upgrade the LYRA from home."
Users that have already brought a Lyra player will be able to switch over to MusicMatch to manage or organize their collection of digital audio, from their own personal stock.
Only a couple of days earlier MicroSoft announced a deal with Thomson Multimedia in which Thomson agreed to use the Windows Media -format in their audio and video products...

Audiohighway.com today announced that it has begun offering a service that allows its users to create and customize theird own free "rich media" Web sites. Using Homestead.com's easy-to-use drag & drop front-end the users can fill their 24MB of server storage space even without prior knowledge of Web-related programming.
"Users will be able to post a variety of content including MP3 files. These free Web sites also provide the company with new advertising opportunities," said Nathan Schulhof, president and CEO of audiohighway.com.