Sony announce new, improved MiniDisc. Remember those? Well, the new ones will be able to hold 30 hours of sound, and to store video. Of course, since Sony is beholden to the copyright industry, the format will be crippled from birth; you won't be able to mount one as a disk (as you can do with, say, an iPod) and copy files to or from it, as that would allow the user (who, by definition, cannot be trusted) to steal music. The best you will be able to hope for is something like "NetMD", a deliberately proprietary, crippled and nonfunctional protocol running over a USB cable and allowing you to laboriously check in/out some media, and only if you run Windows too. And don't even think of a USB/FireWire/IDE MiniDisc drive, as there's no way such a threat to global economic stability would ever be allowed to see the light of day. In any case, it doesn't sound like the New, Improved MiniDisc is going to do much to threaten the supremacy of MP3 players/recorders (including the upcoming mini-iPod).

(MiniDiscs? Yes, I remember those. I've even got a MD recorder gathering dust somewhere. I haven't used it at all since getting my Archos Jukebox Recorder.)

Meanwhile, the same section of The Age has a press release article about Personal Paint coming out for AmigaOS 4.0, just in time for the Amiga to reconquer the computer world. Personal Paint is supposed to be "a mainstay of the application base for the Amiga platform", though it's the first I've heard of it; wasn't Deluxe Paint the most popular Amiga application throughout that platform's working life?

Posted by: Bowie | http://realkosh.weblogs.com/ | Thu Jan 8 00:04:46 2004

The number one thing I hate about my minidisc recorder, and is fast making it almost useless, is that it takes 70 minutes for me to "transfer" 70 minutes of audio off it. I know it's digital, I know it can't be hard to allow fast transfer. It's the only think I'd want from a new minidisc format. I don't even need any more room, 74/80 minutes is heaps.

Posted by: steve | http:// | Thu Jan 8 00:38:25 2004

deluxe paint iv I believe it was... although dpIII was pretty popular also.

i lurve my md... fantastic for on the spot recording.

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com/ | Thu Jan 8 00:48:07 2004

Actually, hasn't Sony Electronics has kind of grumbled with its subsiduary Sony Music? Since one would like to sell more gear, and the other would like to sell more music, it probably comes down to which is more profitable...

Posted by: threeze | http://neuralvoid.com | Thu Jan 8 03:16:10 2004

Personal Paint was uber popular in Europe (it came out about the time of DPaint IV) and has been the only commercial paint program to last through all the failed attempts to rebirth the Amiga. I haven't used it in years, but I remember I used to use it to resize PC .jpg's to be used as DPaint .iff's.

Posted by: John | http://www.linkworthy.com | Thu Jan 8 21:54:45 2004

I liked Newtek's Digi Paint 3 more than EA's Deluxe Paint 4. Deluxe Paint 4 was much stronger with animation and I think it was the more popular one here in the US.

Posted by: steve | http:// | Fri Jan 9 00:59:48 2004

deluxe paint iv was definitely the most popular art/graphics package for the amiga in australia... personal paint i can only ever remember hearing of occasionally, whereas dpaint was quite common.

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