eJamming, which makes software that enables people to practice music together if their instruments are Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)-enabled, is announcing a service that works for non-MIDI instruments too: drums, guitars, voice, violins, etc. The idea is to let musicians practice together even when they can't get together physically, or to let students and teachers work together remotely.
There are really interesting technical challenges to making this work. Not only do you have to transmit very high quality audio, but you have to do it with extremely low audio latency. The eJamming founders, Alan Glueckman and Gail Kantor, told me their audio processor and peer-to-peer technology solves these issues, and they're going to demo their new product on Wednesday at the Demo '07 conference.
But eJamming can't break the laws of physics or go faster than the network it's running on, and it's the first online service I've heard of with geographic constraints. Even with a fast connection, Glueckman and Kantor don't recommend the service for people separated by more than a few hundred miles.
Glueckman says he had his cousin, Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer, in mind when he built this product. The idea being that Aerosmith can still have rehearsals when one or more band members are out of town. Kramer hasn't yet tried the product, Glueckman told me. I also ran this idea by my wife, who plays in a string quartet. She scoffed at it, since so much of performing, rehearsing, and teaching, she said, depends on subtle visual and personal cues that can't be transmitted over a network. The eJamming team hopes to add video to the product at some point.
I can see this working, though, for occasional rehearsals and for informal jamming. There's also a social-network angle to the service, which helps musicians find each other.
The service will go into beta in a few weeks. However, the cost of the service may limit its uptake: It's $15 a month. Per band member. That means a four-member band will have to shell out $720 a year to use it.
Are you a musician? What do you think of this idea?
By the way, at last year's Demo, iGuitar showed off a cool USB guitar [see video].
In other Demo 07 news from CNET's Webware blog: Eyejot launches a simple video e-mail service; and Trailfire shows off more-evolved Web stickies.
Nonetheless, a few days ago (edit: someone who pretends to be) Dependent records’ CEO Stefan Herwig decided 
Between 2004 and 2006, Geremi Adam, delighted the movie piracy scene with some of the highest quality 
The next time you’ve got four days straight of nothing to do, go ahead and pick up The Cure for Insomnia. Unfortunately, Amazon.com doesn’t seem to carry it…I guess they’re still recording the director’s commentary.
Finally we get to a film with a plot! The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple is a Chinese silent film directed by Zhang Shichuan. The film is based on a novel that was based on a newspaper series (that must have been based on something else). It tells the story of rescuing a commander trapped in the Red Lotus Temple – a temple tricked out with lethal traps like fire-spitting Buddhas and spiked floors. Sounds kind of like my dream house.
If you’re just itching to watch one of these notoriously long movies, you can get War and Peace 
If we think it’s hard for a public figure to be openly gay these days, imagine what an uproar even mere rumors would have caused in 1926. Valentino’s first wife, Jean Acker, was a lesbian who admitted she only married him to save her career. He wasn’t aware of her sexual orientation until she locked him out of their hotel room on their wedding night and fled to her girlfriend’s house. There were lots of rumors that his second wife also preferred women and that he was a homosexual who kept marrying lesbians so he didn’t have to consummate any marriages (neither rumor was true). It was suggested that he had relationships with at least five other actors. Journalists were constantly saying he was effeminate based on his style of clothing and hair. He took great offense to this and even challenged a reporter when he noted that a vending machine in a men’s bathroom in Chicago was dispensing feminine pink talcum powder and blamed it on Valentino’s influence. Valentino challenged him to a boxing match (the journalist declined). Supposedly when he was suffering from a perforated ulcer on his deathbed in 1926, Valentino asked the doctor if he thought he was a Powder Puff. The doctor is said to have replied, “No, sir, you’ve been very brave.”
William Edward Hickman terrorized L.A. in 1927 and 1928 when he kidnapped the daughter of a prominent local banker, Perry Parker. His method was scarily simple: he waltzed into the 12-year-old’s junior high school and told the administrator that Perry was ill and wanted to see his daughter. The administrator probably should have realized something was up when Hickman a) didn’t know that Parker had twin daughters and b) didn’t know the names of either of them. Nevertheless, the administrator handed over Marion for some reason. Hickman demanded $1,500 in ransom money, which he promptly received. Instead of sending Marion home safe and sound, though, he returned her minus her arms and legs and internal organs. Police caught him a week later and Hickman was executed in October, 1928.
Peg Entwistle was an actress whose career wasn’t going so hot. In fact, her life really wasn’t going so hot. Her widowed father was killed in a traffic accident shortly after the two of them immigrated to America from Wales. His accident left her completely broke so she earned money by working on Broadway. Unfortunately, the Great Depression hit and people could no longer afford to spend money on extras like the theater. Peg started drinking heavily and headed to L.A. to pursue acting in April 1932. She received a role in the movie Thirteen Women, but her screen time ended up getting drastically cut. Right around this time, RKO Pictures decided not to renew her contract and didn’t even invite her to the September premiere of Thirteen Women. The night of the premiere, she told her uncle (whom she was living with) she was taking a walk. She headed for the famous 50-foot Hollywood sign (which still said Hollywoodland at the time), folded her coat, placed it on the ground next to her purse, climbed the maintenance ladder of the “H” and jumped. Her body was found two days later; sadly, her uncle said that the day she was found, a letter arrived offering her the lead role in a stage production. Her character would have committed suicide in the final act.
Mary Astor might be one of the first child stars to be taken advantage of by her parents. When she was only 14, she started making movies with some big name people, including John Barrymore, and earned $500 a week. She moved from Paramount to Warner Brothers to Fox, who increased her salary to $3,750 a week. Her parents bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and lived the good life on Mary’s money. She escaped her parents when she married Kenneth Hawks in 1928, but the happiness wouldn’t last long: he was in a fatal plane crash in 1930, just about the time her movie career started going under because her voice didn’t translate well to “talkies”. She had a nervous breakdown and ended up marrying the doctor who attended to her.
Everybody knows about Gable and Lombard, but Gable and Young? Yup. Loretta Young and Clark Gable had an affair in 1935 while they were filming Call of the Wild, despite the fact that Gable was married to Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham (say that 10 times fast). Loretta disappeared to Europe to have the baby quietly; nineteen months later she showed back up and said she had adopted a daughter, Judy. When the baby got older, it was very clear that she looked exactly like Loretta Young with Clark Gable’s ears. It wasn’t until 1958 that Judy confronted her mother, who, after throwing up, admitted that Judy was Clark Gable’s daughter. Prior to Gable, Loretta had an affair with Spencer Tracy.
Poor Frances Farmer was in and out of mental hospitals so often, she’s like the original Girl, Interrupted. In 1936, after only a year with Paramount, she had top billing in two B-movies, had married actor Leif Erickson and was cast in her first A-list movie opposite Bing Crosby. She began to get frustrated that she wasn’t being cast in challenging roles, only “pretty girl” roles. By 1939 she was becoming known for her erratic behavior and excessive drinking. She and Erickson divorced in 1942 (he remarried the same day). She was arrested a few months later for driving with her headlights on in a war-time blackout zone. Police suspected she was drunk and put her in jail overnight.
Former New York debutante Gene Tierney became incredibly successful on Broadway by the age of 20. She soon found herself in roles opposite Rory Calhoun, Rex Harrison, Tyrone Power, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. It was Bogart who discovered how deep Gene’s mental problems ran while they were filming The Left Hand of God in 1953. He encouraged her to seek help, so when the movie wrapped she was admitted to Harkness Pavilion in New York and then the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., where she received 27 shock treatments. It was too much for her and she tried to escape the asylum, but she was caught and reinstitutionalized. She tried to commit suicide in 1957 by jumping off of a ledge but was stopped just in time. It was thought that her bipolar disorder was triggered when she gave birth to her first daughter, who was born deaf, partially blind and had some mental handicaps. Tierney’s close friend Howard Hughes saw to it that her daughter received the best care possible. Although she never admitted to an affair with Howard Hughes, she did have affairs with John F. Kennedy and Tyrone Power while separated from her husband, Oleg Cassini (one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite designers).
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