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Blood of the Dragon In the time of the ancient gods, dragons ruled the skies and kingdoms rose and fell at the end of a sword. Legendary quests beckoned with the promise of danger and glory, and only a brave few dared to answer the call. For honor and vengeance they ventured forth with steel and sorcery to combat the merciless legions of darkness. For it was said that those who answered the call were possessed of the warrior spirit, and the blood of the dragon flowed through their veins.

Joseph Vargo and William Piotrowski have composed an epic soundscape of powerful orchestrations, chanting choirs, mystical melodies and medieval minstrel songs that sets the perfect mood as you traverse dark kingdoms ruled by wizards and warriors to battle alongside barbarian hordes, elven mages and knights of legend.
Customer Review: D&D extraordinaire
Techniclly, you don’t need a soundtrack to play Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe a “Lord of the Rings” Monopoly game. But asuming you WANT one, then Nox Arcana’s latest, “Blood of the Dragon,” is an excellent option — majestical, fantastical, gothic, and geeky.

It opens with fantasy-rock flourishes, steam hissing, and a chorus of powerful choirlike voices. Very “Lord of the Rings.” Then a deep voice says very solemnly: “In a time of the ancient gods, dragons ruled the skies. Kingdoms rose and fell at the end of a sword. Legendary quests beckoned with the promise of danger and glory, and only a brave few dared to answer the call…”

That more or less sets the tone for the rest of the album: Nox Arcana keeps up that high fantasy feel throughout, flavoured with some Celtic sounds. Bagpipe stomp, eerie haunting medieval ballads, shimmering ethereal pop urgent, urgent strings and ominous “Dark Lord” music, darkly intriguing gothic music, frightening fantasy war-march, and new-age balladry.

Nox Arcana has already tackled ghosts, vampires, angels and even sinister Christmas. It’s about time that they got to the whole D&D-music style, and they pull it off quite nicely — atmospheric and heavy, but the guys know when to lighten the mood with some more ethereal songs, and that not every song should be a hard-rocker about a battle — there are magical moments as well.

In fact, this is sort of a story album, although the story is more or less yours to fill in. Nox Arcana uses heavy percussion, gongs, some well-played bagpipes, harp and hard strings to add intense atmosphere to all of these, and listeners can easily imagine what they represent — a nighttime chase, underground searches, a misty lake, a beautiful palace, evil armies attacking a castle, or even…. yes, a dragon.

“The Siege” is the pinnacle of this, since it actually sounds like a battle — war horns, ominous chants, stamping feet. Then the album really takes off, right up to the rousing, inspiring finale “Eternal Heroes” — it’s up to the listener what has happened, but the rousing feeling of it is clear.

Steeped in atmosphere, and rich with solid instrumentation, “Blood of the Dragon” is a must-have for D&D and/or fantasy geeks.

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The high-stakes, but still under-the covers battle by IBM to take over Sun Microsystems is still in play, but IBM may be rethinking what it is willing to pay for the enterprise vendor.The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported today that IBM has dropped its offer to $9 to $10 a share, below its previously discussed price of $10 to $11.[ Special report: IBM in talks to buy Sun. ]What may be affecting IBM's offer is the potential delay due to regulatory oversight that the deal may bring.If IBM takes control of Sun, it also gains much of the Unix server market. IBM has more than a 37 percent share of Unix servers, and Sun, at No. 2, has just over 28 percent of the market, according to IDC.Unix servers are heavily used in the high end of the market, where IBM is already strong, thanks to its mainframe business, and that is just one area that could prompt antitrust regulators to examine this deal.The decision will also have major implication for users. Both companies have been in a lock-down about what a merger might mean and what technologies might live and die, but a merger could mean bad news for Sun's Solaris operating system, according to Paul Otellini, the president and CEO of Intel.At a recent company question-and-answer session, a transcript of which was filed with the SEC, Otellini warned that Solaris and Sparc are "likely to see EOLs over time through the IBM acquisition," he said. EOLs stands for end of life.Otellini said he saw no strategic reason for IBM to maintain Solaris and its Sparc processors "except to attempt to convert the very large Sun Sparc Solaris base to power" IBM. "I think that would be their most likely strategy as part of this," he said.Intel has reason to be concerned about Solaris — the company has a lot invested in the operating systems, said Herb Hinstroff, Sun's director of datacenter software business management.Intel has "very large teams" that "are spending a whole lot of energy on Solaris," Hinstroff said in an interview this week. Intel is the No. 2 contributor — after Sun itself — to the Solaris code base, he said.Hinstroff noted that during the same session, Otellini also indicated that he wanted to see Sun remain independent. Otellini's transcribed words on that point: "I'd rather have Sun be independent I guess."Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate

Adobe, Nokia outline planned ventures at Web 2.0 show
Officials from Adobe Systems and Nokia emphasized endeavors in the application design and form factor spaces in presentations at the Web 2.0 Expo conference Thursday in San Francisco.Touting a linkage between application developers and designers, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demonstrated the company’s planned Flash Catalyst product at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco. Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president at the company, cited planned form factors for mobile devices, which included a wearable wristband unit. He also hailed location-based services and the planned Ovi applications store, set to debut in June, that will bring applications to consumers.[ In other mobile news, Blackberry launched an on-device apps store. ]Flash Catalyst currently is in a beta release phase but is due soon, Lynch said. “We can enable people who do design to express not only what an application should look like but how it should feel to interact with,” Lynch said. Users can import a design from a picture, such as from Adobe Illustrator, bring shapes into Catalyst, and turn them into the beginnings of an application. Lynch also noted Adobe this week combined APIs in the Flash platform with Facebook.At Nokia, the company is eyeing location-based services that will require a mobile computer-like device that marries “virtuality with reality,” Vanjoki said. “Nokia has a big lead in this development,” he said.Users, meanwhile, will see new form factors for wireless devices, such as an ear device or a wearable device similar to a bracelet, and some devices even will be self-cleaning.Conference attendees on Thursday also heard from Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunligtht Foundation. “Our goal has been really to use the Internet to catalyze greater openness and transparency in government,” she said. Within government, officials claim to be in favor of transparency, but there are not a lot who really understand technology, Miller said.Government spending on information projects was questioned by Miller, who cited a new government Web site called recovery.gov that reportedly will cost $86 million to create. “I suspect there’s a way to do it a lot cheaper,” she said. “That figure is dumbfounding to me.”

Linux, Windows Server both hit by economy
An industry analyst forecast has Linux shipments slipping a bit more percentage-wise than Microsoft’s Windows Server, but Microsoft is feeling the pain of the economy, too, said an analyst who worked on the report.The IDC quarterly forecast of worldwide x86 server OS shipments for the year 2009, released last month, has Linux declining year over year by 16.1 percent, from 1.747 million shipments last year to nearly 1.47 million in 2009. Windows Server is slated to drop by 12.8 percent, from 5.75 million units in 2008 to about 5.016 million units this year, the syndicated report stated.[ When it comes to server OSes, it’s a tight two-horse race. Or is it? Check out the Windows-vs-Linux server face-off. ]However, this news of Linux’s greater slippage on a percentage basis is not much consolation for Microsoft, stressed analyst Matthew Eastwood, group vice president for enterprise platform research. “It’s not exactly a great story for them, either,” he said.”We’re projecting the market to decline for everybody,” down double digits this year, Eastwood said.The reason Linux might slip a bit more than Windows Server is that large datacenters running Linux have felt the effects of the market slowdown and are pulling back on installations, according to Eastwood. With Windows, many customers are on enterprise site licenses and deploying Windows does not cost any extra.Overall, x86 server shipments are expected to drop 13.5 percent, including other shipments besides Linux and Windows Server. IDC’s forecast, which was not vendor-sponsored, is compiled region by region, with IDC looking at economic data around gross domestic product growth.The IDC findings do not conflict with a recent Novell-sponsored IDC report that said the down economy was driving an uptick in Linux evaluation, Eastwood said. “In the short term, Linux is down as is Windows. But over time, we believe Linux will continue to grow,” as will Windows, he said.

IBM, Mayo form open source health IT consortium
Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic have launched a new open source consortium focused on natural language processing (NLP), in an effort to help doctors share diagnosis and treatment information.The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium, announced Thursday, will focus on technology to allow for large-scale data aggregation, allowing doctors to mine medical records in their specialties to find similar cases to study before making difficult diagnoses or before determining treatment.[ InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz asks: Can IT solve the electronic health records challenge? | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]Doctors will be able to review any physician notes on similar cases, but no personally identifiable patient information will be available in the database, IBM and Mayo said.With the launch of the consortium, the two organizations have released two projects under open source licenses, one focused on clinical notes and one on pathology reports. The consortium is using the Apache license, version 2.0.The organizations are inviting others to help develop NLP tools. "By making it an open source initiative, we hope to enable wide use of these NLP tools so medical advancements can happen faster and more efficiently," Dr. Christopher Chute, a Mayo Clinic bioinformatics expert and senior consultant on the project, said in a statement.Two other health care organizations, Seattle Group Health and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, plan to participate in the consortium, and other participants are welcome, IBM and Mayo said.As more health care providers adopt electronic health records, it will become increasingly important to be able to search those records, the organizations said. Mayo and IBM have developed a system for extracting information from more than 25 million text-based clinical notes based on IBM's open source Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, they said.The two organizations have also developed a system to extract cancer diseases characteristics from pathology reports, allowing for the computation of cancer stage."Large-scale information extraction from the clinical narrative is a vital component in advancing translational research and patient care," Guergana Savova, a medical informatics specialist and Mayo's lead on the project, said in a statement. "It 'unlocks' the clinical textual data that resides in huge repositories. Such technology would allow for large-scale data aggregation, analyses and usage — just imagine the power of data from millions of patients."The organizations have not yet determined what NLP projects to work on next, an IBM spokeswoman said. "The goal is to first get feedback from participating institutions on the initial project, and then expand," she said.

Messages To Awaken YourSelf.
Inspiritual/Self Help messages to enliven your spirit and mind toward greater peace, fortitude and joy in your life. Messages To Awaken YourSelf. – Grief can be overwhelming. A death, separation of loved one, etc. can cause tremendous grief. What is the remedy? A Dirty Day & the Dark Night Some days are simply dirty. […]

Messages To Awaken YourSelf.
Inspiritual/Self Help messages to enliven your spirit and mind toward greater peace, fortitude and joy in your life. Messages To Awaken YourSelf. – List of films in the genre, with brief synopses and partial cast lists.Calendar, news, history, director biographies, ensemble pages, vacancies, mailing list information about their open annual events: the Tuba-Euphonium …Organisation […]

Signed up for FlashForward
I’ll be going to FlashForward in S.F. this year. It’s been a while since I’ve been to FlashForward so I’m looking forward to it, and I’m curious to see how the new single track format works out. My prediction is that it’ll work out great because the “networking” aspect of the conference will be emphasized and .. well.. given the economy there will probably be a lot of networking going on. I can’t wait to see the wild stuff people are working on with all of the new features in Flash/Flex/Air. The last time I went to a FlashForward I

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