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Complex financial planner

J and L Financial Planner Professional is a powerful program that allows users to predict how certain financial events will affect them in the future. Although the program is jam-packed with features, its overwhelming interface makes it a little hard to get used to.

The trial version of the program allows users to view a sample account, and the first screen of the interface shows three graphs representing net worth and incoming and outgoing funds. The rest of the interface is cluttered with tabs, buttons, and drop-down menus. Users need to take a deep breath and resign themselves to clicking … Read more

Can authorship be social?

Is music modular enough to make music production social, Linux style? Minimum Noise, premised on the idea that music creation can be crowdsourced, thinks so, but I doubt it.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch gives Minimum Noise the benefit of the doubt, then suggests it is unlikely to work. It's not hard to guess why: creativity is rarely a social activity, at least, not in this way. Creativity is an individual's response to the world.

This is not to say, however, that individual responses couldn't be aggregated into a complete work, as Minimum Noise seeks to do, and … Read more

How's Universal Music boosting digital revenue?

A flood of red ink continues to threaten to swamp most of the major recording companies. The exception appears to be Universal Music Group, the largest of the majors.

Last week, UMG said that revenue grew by 3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2008 on a constant currency basis to $3.97 billion. Compare this with some of UMG's rivals. Warner Music Group reported a $9 million net loss for the third quarter. At EMI, in the first year with new owner Terra Firma guiding the label, it has lost more than $1 billion.

So what'… Read more

The 404 148: Where MTI is livid and covered in toilet paper

Mark is finally back from his 10 year sabbatical, so we have him on as a guest on today's show to talk about the much deserved practical joke we pulled on him (see post below). He also gives a shout out to Papa Licea and tells us a few stories about his trip. The rest of us get into a rather heated discussion about RoboCop and Batman, give a public service announcement on child abuse, reminisce about a time not so long ago when we worked for pennies, and daydream out loud about all the sinister things we could … Read more