Slashdot

Sorry about this, but Slashdot was crushing our server. We would very much appreciate it if you could select a random day next week and come back and check out Indy. Feel free to ask questions below or in the main slashdot comments, we will try to answer them as best we can. In the meantime here is the text of the front page on the site -

Indy is a music discovery program that learns what you like, and plays more of it. And it's free.

Indy makes it easy for you to find great new independent music. Just download Indy and double-click: as it plays songs, you rate what you hear. Indy quickly learns what you like and gets really smart about sending you more music you'll like. Let Indy help you find your place in the collective conciousness as you help other people find theirs.

DOWNLOAD NOW - Windows 98/2000/XP

Latest News
19th April, 2005, Build 3 Released - Read more...

Why Indy Rocks
You aren't just a target market - Indy can help you find your own path to the music you like. There are tons of great bands out there that don't have big labels promoting them; Indy helps you find them. And once Indy downloads a track, you can add it to your music collection, listen to it whenever and wherever you want. For musicians, Indy gives you a chance to reach a whole new audience that's excited about what you're playing. Best of all, it's free for everyone!

How Indy Works
Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you'll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don't like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same song, Indy guesses that you'd probably like other music that they enjoyed. As you rate more songs, Indy will gets better and better at picking songs that you'll really enjoy.

Indy contains no adware or spyware.

Some people pointed out that one of the nice things about /. is that they could immediately see when my blog had been updated.

To address this problem, my new blog can now send email notifications of updates. To receive these notifications, please sign up to this mailing list, or follow the link in the sidebar of my new blog.

After many months of using Slashdot as my primary blog, I eventually decided that I could no longer put up with its various limitations. As a result, I have moved back to running my own blog software. You can find my new blog here, complete with various RSS feeds so that people can keep up.

I read this essay by Jonathan Schwartz, President of Sun Microsystems, and was rather disappointed by his slavish support for the existence of software patents. In it he repeats the thoroughly discredited and naive argument that more IP is better because IP means innovation, and thus we need software patents. Not in my wildest dreams could this have been followed, just a few days later, by this, Kodak winning a suit against Sun in which it alleges that Java infringes on some of their patents (all of them classic examples of what is wrong with patent law), and now they want half of Sun's operating profit from 1998 to 2001!

Hey Jonathan, why did Sun need to steal Kodak's precious intellectual property - and if you didn't, perhaps, having experienced the wrong end of US patent law, you can reconsider your position on software patents?

Just wrote a letter to the UK's Home Secretary (who is responsible for immigration):

Dear Home Secretary,

It is well known that the United Kingdom is keen to attract skilled workers to the UK, particularly those involved in the software industry.

The United States is poised to pass legislation, known as the "Induce Act", which will dramatically increase the risk of innovation in the software industry in the United States. If passed, this legislation is likely to prompt a large number of the United States' most talented software engineers to consider relocation to another country.

The United Kingdom is well suited to provide an alternate base for these displaced software engineers, where their innovations may benefit the UK's economy, not to mention the economy of the European Union.

My question is whether the UK government has made sufficient provision for displaced American innovators to migrate here given the hostile environment they may soon face in their own country. It is my belief that the United Kingdom can only benefit from the influx of talented software engineers from the United States, and should minimise any barriers to their migration here.

I await your response with much anticipation,

Kind regards,

Ian Clarke
Cematics Ltd.