Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

I was randomly surfing YouTube today when I came across a new form of music - produced by computer hardware. Of course, computers have played a central part in modern music for some time now, but never before has “electronic music” been taken so literally:

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Well finally, Clinton (or at least her campaign) have admitted defeat and thrown in the towel. The long hard battle to become Democratic Candidate is over and Obama has clinched it. The next thing on Obama’s list is probably picking his running mate - his Vice President if he ends up winning.

Personally, I think picking Clinton for this would be a bad idea. An online petitionкомпютри втора употреба calling for Obama to make her his Vice President in the campaign has started and there is definitely plenty of support for this. However, would Obama want to pick a candidate who could possibly overshadow him in the campaign or at least prove as popular as himself? What about all of the comments that have passed between them? (Remember: “shame on you Barack Obama…”).

It would make sense for Obama to pick a candidate who reaches out to groups of people where he isn’t very popular himself - typical Blue Collar workers and Latinos for example. Clinton is strong in these areas. But at what cost? The Clinton crowd and the Obama crowd are quite different and after such a bitterly divisive campaign, would they, or could they, just “kiss and make up”? I don’t think so. In my opinion, Obama should pick a candidate who is popular with Latinos and Blue Collar workers in a similar way to Clinton is, but that it shouldn’t be Clinton herself.

It seems like the race to be Democratic candidate is now over - Obama is still gaining ground on Clinton and every day, more super delegates rally behind him. The chances of Clinton winning are almost impossible now - the focus moves from the Democrats to the overall Presidential race.

Below is a video I found of McCain blatantly lying to news reporters on a number of topics - is this who we really want to be US President?

Thanks to Alexanderthegreat for finding the video.

As some people will know, I’m a moderator at Webmaster-Talk, a comprehensive webmaster forum. Recently, Earners Forum, an online community for individuals who were earning money online, merged with Webmaster-Talk. The merge will mean new content for Webmaster-Talk, lots of new members and masses of new expertise that we didn’t have before.

The forum has now opened a celebratory contest with prizes including a Macbook Air, iPod touch and a Nintendo DS. 5 lucky winners will get these prizes by collecting the most points - you get 10 for just signing up, 2 per post and an incredible 200 for submitting articles.

The contest will be open for another 32 days, after which 5 winners will be announced. Good luck!

Well this is going in a category called “Bi-weekly websites” although it seems that I never post often enough to this category to justify the term “bi-weekly”.

Anyway, we’ve been using a new website at college called How The Market Works - it’s definitely worthy of it’s name. Not only does it explain the basics of the stock market in easy-to-understand language, but it has a really really fun stock market game where you invest in real stocks and make or lose virtual money (Believe me it’s addictive).

Well it’s something I definitely missed, but Amazon has announced that it’s DRM-free music store is going global this year. This is of course fantastic news for regular computer users like you and I!

Amazon has got a number of major labels involved including EMI, which is likely going to cause a massive headache for the likes of iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music and other download services that rely on DRM (Digital Rights Management) to theoretically stop users from sharing music illegally. DRM however is widely criticised because it also stops the user from moving music between his own devices - i.e. from one computer to another, or between different MP3 players and computers.

Is this an end to DRM entirely? We’ll have to wait and see

I site I managed to find recently through Google was the Web 2.0 validator.

For those unacquainted with the term, “web 2.0″ is a term used to describe the new internet, following the recovery after the .com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s. The only problem is that no-one actually knows exactly what “web 2.0″ really means - some people think it’s about design, others about new technology (i.e. AJAX), community-based websites or a mix of them all. It’s simply become a buzzword and there are a number of running jokes in the tech industry about it.

Back on track, the web 2.0 validator tells you whether you’re site is 2.0 or not! In their own words: “we’re the dot in web 2.0″!

This sites results are as follows:

The score for http://www.danlprice.co.uk is 10 out of 66

• Uses Cascading Style Sheets? Yes!
• Attempts to be XHTML Strict ? Yes!
• Actually mentions Web 2.0 ? Yes!
• Uses Semantic Markup? Yes!
• Refers to web2.0validator ? Yes! (Woohoo!)
• Uses the “blink” tag? Yes!
• Appears to have Adsense ? Yes!

Wow, I’m so 2.0….

It’s official. YouTube is now so popular, that even Her Royal Highness, the Queen of the United Kingdom has got a YouTube channel. Both old and new footage (including this years Christmas speech) has been uploaded.

According to a recent development with PS3 processor chips, hackers may well soon be able to hack 8-character passwords in a matter of hours.

This is certainly a startling development. Personally, I had no idea that PS3 CPUs were even this powerful anyway - supposedly much more powerful than a regular home computer when it comes to processing power.

However, this development won’t affect my choice of games console! For those not in the know, I hope to very soon be getting an Xbox 360! Might be a while off yet though…