Old rockers inevitably end up exploring or returning to the roots of music and as such the Americana “movement” continues to grow. On Tuesday Mark Knopfler's third solo effort was released. Titled The Ragpickers Dream, Mark continues to explore songwriting and guitar wizadry inspired by his work with Chet Atkins and The Notting Hillbillies.
Brothers.
It's interesting to note that Dire Straits was founded by Mark and his older brother David. But after three albums, David left the band to pursure his own creative endeavors, while Dire Straits went on to much greater success without him. But who grabbed the domain “knopfler.com“? And who is a successful dot-com tycoon? David started the UK Mac news website MacLink So Mark's new CD is out and David's CD has been released to most of the world except the United States; but we should see it in stores and online sometime in November. A Mac fanatic, David's site has quite a number of computer based links, in addition to his creative expressions in art and music. Mark, on the other hand is self-described as lazy and a TV addict — especially sports.
Big Business
Well my old company (the one I co-founded) and current nemesis — its preferred investors — are up to funny business as they've decided to use their preferential and voting rights to make a deal that would allow them to control 90% of the company while diluting the original founders to the point of making their shares worthless. It's dirty pool. Big business. And perhaps perfectly legal. So is taking candy from a baby, though. This story has yet to end.
Jaguar
It's been more than a week on OS X 10.2 and fully committed as a .Mac subscriber, I'm excited about most of the improvements. And I'm fully operational using the public beta of iSync and have moved off of Entourage to Mail.app, iCal and Mac OS X's Address Book. Though I think iChat's text entry area is much to small, I'm having authentication problems and overall the Mail.app while very nice to look at, it's tough getting used to some of its deficiencies such as moving forward and backward through message lists without going back to the mailbox, moving a nested mailbox to a non-nested mailbox is awkard and clumsy. And adding invitees to iCal is not intuitive. But it's publishing and subscription capabilities are amazing. This whole integration will only get better.
The widely reported outages and service deficiencies and overall controversy of the .Mac service surely makes one wonder if Apple's dip into the world of — wait didn't we used to call this business model ASP — what happened to ASP's? — will be successful
