If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.

The service will use the “peer-to-peer” network, which contains not just hit songs but rarities and live tracks from the world’s leading artists.

Nor is a lack of compatibility with the iPod player expected to put fans off. Apple is unlikely to allow tracks downloaded from its rival to be compatible with iPods, but, while the iPod is the most popular music player, it has not succeeded in dominating the market: sales of the iPod account for 50 million out of 130 million total digital player sales. Qtrax has also spoken of an “iPod solution”, to be announced in April.

Qtrax files contain Digital Rights Management software, allowing the company to see how many times a song has been downloaded and played. Artists, record companies and publishers will be paid in proportion to the popularity of their music, while also taking a cut of advertising revenues.

The Qtrax team, which spent five years working on the system, promised a “game-changing” intervention in the declining recorded music market when the service was presented at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes.

The singer James Blunt gave Qtrax a cautious welcome. “I’m amazed that we now accept that people steal music,” he said. “I was taught not to steal sweets from a sweet shop. But I want to learn how this service works, given the condition the music industry is in.”

Qtrax, a subsidiary of Brilliant Technologies Corporation, has raised $30 million (£15 million) to set up the service, which is available in the US and Europe from today. Allan Klepfisz, president of Qtrax, said: “Customers now expect music to be free but they do not want to use illegal sites. We believe this . . . has the support of the music industry and allows artists to get paid.”

Ford, McDonald’s and Microsoft are among the advertisers signed up to support what is thought to be the world’s largest legal music store. The service says that adverts will be nonintrusive and will not appear each time a song is played. As with iTunes, customers will have to download Qtrax software. They will own the songs permanently but will be encouraged to “dock” their player with the store every 30 days so it can gather information on which songs have been played.

Jean-Bernard Levy, chief executive of Vivendi Universal, said the crisis in the music industry had been overstated despite EMI’s radical cost-cutting. He said: “Look at Universal – we have double-digit profit margins. But we would like strong competition from the other major record companies to help the industry grow.” Universal has poached the Rolling Stones from EMI and Mr Levy said that others could follow as thousands of staff and artists are made redundant.

On the appearance of Qtrax, Mr Levy gave warning that the lack of compatibility between competing digital music players was as big a problem as file-sharing. And Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, said that the sound quality of MP3 downloads was becoming an issue for bands and fans. “There is a growing consumer revolt against online audio quality,” he said.

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs. With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks. The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available. The service will use the “peer-to-peer” network, which contains not just hit songs but rarities and live tracks from the world’s leading artists.

Nor is a lack of compatibility with the iPod player expected to put fans off. Apple is unlikely to allow tracks downloaded from its rival to be compatible with iPods, but, while the iPod is the most popular music player, it has not succeeded in dominating the market: sales of the iPod account for 50 million out of 130 million total digital player sales. Qtrax has also spoken of an “iPod solution”, to be announced in April. Qtrax files contain Digital Rights Management software, allowing the company to see how many times a song has been downloaded and played. Artists, record companies and publishers will be paid in proportion to the popularity of their music, while also taking a cut of advertising revenues. The Qtrax team, which spent five years working on the system, promised a “game-changing” intervention in the declining recorded music market when the service was presented at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes.

View: Full Story @ The Times Online

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

If you’re not a web developer, the details of this blog post probably aren’t all that interesting for you. I’d like you to know that we’re building IE8 for many different customers (consumers, web service providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, web developers, and others), and we’ll cover more details of the non-developer oriented work (e.g. user experience, reliability, security, etc.) in other posts in the future, after MIX.

While web developers will immediately recognize what Acid2 means, I want to step back and offer some context for other readers of this blog who may not be familiar with web standards. Briefly: Acid2 is one test of how modern browsers work with some specific features across several different web standards.

At first glance, this test seems simple. I think it actually offers a view into the subtle and complex world of web standards in a number of ways. Showing the Acid2 page correctly is a good indication of being standards compliant, but Acid2 itself isn’t a web standard or a web standards compliance test. The publisher of the test, the Web Standards Project, is an advocacy group, not a web standards defining body.

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

The key goal (for the Web Standards Project as well as many other groups and individuals) is interoperability. As a developer, I’d prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers. Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work.

With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7’s CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We’ll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle.

Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video.

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better. We will have a lot more information available at sessions at MIX08 and will release a beta of IE8 in the first half of calendar 2008.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean’s theme, I’d like to talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals.

I’ve been on the IE team for over a decade, and I’ve seen us apply the “Don’t Break the Web” rule in six different major versions of IE in different ways. In IE 6, we used the DOCTYPE switch to enable different “modes” of behavior to protect compatibility. When we released IE 6 in 2001, very few pages on the web were in “standards mode” (my team ran a report on the top 200 web sites at the time that reported less than 1%) – few people knew what a DOCTYPE was, and few tools generated them. We used the DOCTYPE switch in IE6 to change the box model to comply with the standards and enable developers to opt-in to the new behavior. We’d already seen so much content written to IE5.x’s non-standard interpretation of the CSS2 spec that we couldn’t change it without causing a slew of problems.

In IE7 we made a lot more changes to improve IE’s standards compliance, particularly with CSS. We limited these behavior changes to IE’s “standards mode” only, and we expected that this would help limit compatibility problems as it had in the past.  Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly to us, this wasn’t true; many of those changes made IE incompatible with content that was already part of the web. It turned out by the time IE7 shipped in late 2006, roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. Many of those sites had been “opted in” to standards mode by a tool that generated their content; many of them had probably been hand-coded by someone who was trying to do the right thing, and make their HTML code valid according to the W3C. Regardless, users of those sites expected them to keep working the same, even when they downloaded a new version of IE.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser? The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. Web developers expected us, for example, to maintain our model for how content overflows its box, even in “standards mode,” even though it didn’t follow the specification – because they’d already made their content work with our model. In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had “fixed their content” for IE. Sites didn’t work, and users experienced problems.

In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way.  Because sites expected IE6 behavior, the DOCTYPE switch failed to protect compatibility in the real world when we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant. We realized that “Don’t Break the Web” should really be translated to “Don’t change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed.” (Of course, for content that is developed to a later standard that isn’t deployed yet, you can expect different things.)

With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem.  I can’t give them enough credit for this work; it’s tough to step into the shoes of a browser vendor that ships to half a billion users to figure out what the best thing to do is, when you really just want to sit down and write code to the standards. We started from a simple statement of “enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.” I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn’t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers.  At the same time, we can’t break the web experience on current sites for users like my mom, even for as good a reason as improving standards compliance.  With all the great styling and layout changes we’re working on in our new engine for IE8 to be much more standards compliant, that’s a lot of potential breakage. (More details in the near future, but the Acid2 announcement gives you some idea.)

We realized that the model for web development was really “write to the standard, then test against and fix problems in the most popular browsers.”  This meant that the web developer had one crucial piece of information we could make use of – what version of IE they had tested against, and after much discussion in the WaSP-MS task force, we ended up with a <meta>-based “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy.

Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force wrote an article detailing where we ended up that was posted on A List Apart today; I highly recommend reading it for a different perspective. I’ll summarize, though, that:

   1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
   2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
   3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article.

We believe this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content. We also think this approach allows developers to opt in to standards behavior on their own schedule and as it makes sense to them, instead of forcing developers into a responsive mode when a new version of IE has different behavior on their current pages. I’m excited by all the standards work we’re doing in IE8; I’m even more excited that we won’t cause a lot of compatibility problems for our users and web developers.

Chris Wilson
IE Platform Architect

Microsoft Corporation has announced second quarter records for revenue ($16.37 billion, a 30% increase over last year’s period), operating income ($6.48 billion, a 87% increase) and diluted earnings per share ($0.50, a 92% increase). During the quarter, Microsoft rolled out new consumer focused offerings such as Windows Home Server, new versions of the Zune media player and the next generation of Windows Live Online Services. Sales to business customers remained brisk in the quarter with Microsoft Business Division and the Server and Tools business each experiencing double-digit revenue growth rates over the prior year and together increased revenue over $1 billion versus the comparable quarter last year.

“We are in the midst of another strong year with great momentum heading into calendar year 2008. We continue to see healthy demand from both businesses and consumers in the United States and our growth in emerging markets is especially strong. Looking across Brazil, Russia, India and China, our field revenue reached a combined growth rate over 65% this quarter. As we look ahead, our Windows Server 2008 launch, with our virtualization solution, will further our quest to bring exceptional value to our customers,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft.

Every life has many endings, and so does every TV show. With last week’s sad death of actress Suzanne Pleshette, both came into strong focus. Shows that are lucky enough to last into a final season - and know it - often try to go out with a wrap-it-all-up, what-happens-to-the characters kind of finale that few programs get a chance to do.

Most are cancelled before the writers - when they’re not on strike - can wrap everything up. And some get a big goodbye, but don’t live up to the hype - like “Seinfeld”, “Friends” or “Cheers.” Others, such as “Third Rock From The Sun” or “Frasier”, are satisfying but hardly history making.

But sometimes, there are magical moments, when a beloved series gets to leave on its own terms, before the axe falls. With the late Ms. Pleshette in mind, here’s a look at a completely subjective list of the greatest TV farewells in history. Some will surprise you. Others you will never have seen on a list like this before. And a few you’ll violently disagree with - although chances are, the top two are the same in just about anyone’s TV guide.

Your comments - and no doubt, your extreme objections - are invited at news@citynews.ca.

We begin with an honourable mention.

Howdy Doody (1947-1960)

Why is this ancient kid show bubbling under the top 10 of the fabulous famous finales? Because for many baby boomers, it was the first televised farewell they ever saw, and those who did will never forget it. For more than a decade this puppet show - so popular it spawned a Canadian clone and merchandise ranging from clothing and hats to books and bed sheets - became the first truly big children’s show on TV.

From 1947 until one unforgettable day in early September 1960, the character of Clarabell the Clown never spoke a single word on the series. But on the last episode, it was revealed he was going to make a very special announcement. As the cast and crew gathered up their belongings to move away from Doodyville, time was running out, and the clown still hadn’t said anything. With just seconds left in the broadcast, host Buffalo Bob exhorted the jokester to reveal his surprise.

At which point a drum roll sounded, the camera zoomed in on his face and Clarabell uttered the only words he ever would on screen. As a tear rolled down his cheek, he said simply, “Goodbye kids.” Then the screen and the legendary show both faded to black.

10) Cop Rock (1990)

Maybe the worst show with the best final ending. This was a rare Steven Bochco (”Hill Street Blues”, “La Law”, “NYPD Blue”) flop, in which the police and criminals would break out into song several times in the middle of each program. It was quickly cancelled, but not before Bochco managed to work in a surprise ending. About 54 minutes into the last episode, one of the characters starts talking about how the show has been cancelled - and then everyone breaks into a chorus of the Roy Rogers theme, “Happy Trails To You, Till We Meet Again.” The show and its surreal ending have rarely been seen since, much to the relief of critics who roundly condemned every episode.

9) The Prisoner (1967-1968)

One of the strangest and most cerebral single season TV shows in history. Patrick McGoohan played a former spy (assumed by many to be his character John Drake on the previous Danger Man/Secret Agent Man series) who resigned suddenly without explanation. He was kidnapped and exiled to a mysterious ‘village’ until he’d spill the secret behind his actions. But “Number Six” steadfastly refused to reveal the reasons, and the show became an allegory about the individual against society. In the final convoluted but still fascinating 17th episode, Six’s quest to find out who Number One is, is finally realized - the person he’s been battling all this time appears to have been himself.

The finale ends with him going back to his London apartment, followed by the mysterious butler from the Village and the telltale automatic door opening - a prisoner still?

An exceedingly strange ending to an exceedingly strange show, but one they would eventually give college courses to study.

The Wonder Years (1988-1993)

For half a Wonder-ful decade, this series waxed nostalgic for a more innocent time, when first kisses and zits were the thing you had to worry about most. But in the final episode, Kevin Arnold (narrated as an adult to perfection throughout the entire run by Daniel Stern) finally revealed what happened to all the characters, only to conclude with “after all these years, I still look back, with wonder.”

The voice of his own son is then heard asking him to play ball outside, to which he replies, “I’ll be right there.”

7) St. Elsewhere (1982-1988)

The most creative doctor show in history had an ending reviled by viewers and critics. Yet those who had a deep seated appreciation for its unorthodox approach to TV (including hidden in-jokes and references to the TV industry sprinkled throughout its clever dialogue) should have expected nothing less.

In the last episode, St. Eligius Hospital is slated to be torn down and the doctors relocated. Suddenly, the building starts to shake, but not in the way you’d expect from a demolition. The scene suddenly switches to a cheap apartment living room, where one of the chief physicians enters wearing a hard hat and speaks to another who died in a previous episode, as he reads a newspaper.

Both watch the younger man’s autistic son as he stares at and shakes up a snow globe with the hospital inside it. “I just don’t understand this autism thing, Pop,” the former Dr. Westphall tells his Dr. Auschlander-turned-father. “He sits there all day long in his own little world, staring at that toy. What’s he think about?” The implication - the entire series was in his imagination.

Viewers were aghast but in retrospect, it was the perfect finish for a show that specialized in irreverence.

6) Six Feet Under (2001-2005)/The Sopranos (1999-2007)

Most will complain about lumping these in together and only reaching number six. But both were on the same cable network and both enjoyed an incredible reputation for quality. In the former, the finale shows how all the main characters associated with a funeral home eventually die, a fitting ending to their profession, their lives - and their show.

In the latter, the screen goes to black right before an apparent whack, leaving hundreds of thousands of viewers screaming at their cable company. The show stopped at that point, with the final moments of mafia kingpin Tony Soprano and his family forever frozen in mystery.

5) The Fugitive (1963-1967)

This show, based on the real life murder case of Dr. Sam Sheppard and later made into a big budget blockbuster starring Harrison Ford, concerned the plight of Dr. Richard Kimble, who was convicted of killing his wife despite knowing a one-armed man did it. He escaped and went on the run for four seasons, always followed by the detective who originally caught him hot on his heels. And then came August 28, 1967, “the day the running stopped”, as intoned so dramatically by the show’s narrator, William Conrad.

Kimble finally managed to catch up to the real killer and they fought it out on top of an abandoned amusement park tower, resulting in the murderer’s death and a long awaited exoneration. It was the highest rated episode in TV history up to that time, attracting more than 30 million viewers - or about 70 per cent of everyone watching television.

4)  M*A*S*H: Goodbye, Farewell And Amen (1972-1983)

It seems only appropriate that this show should follow the one before it, because it smashed the former finale’s viewing record. After 11 years - far longer than the actual Korean War lasted - the TV series M*A*S*H* signed off with a 2½ hour finale that culminated in B.J. Hunnicutt refusing to say goodbye to his bunkmate Hawkeye. But as the latter surgeon’s chopper lifted off from the 4077th for the last time, he spotted a final message written in the stones below: “Goodbye,” it read.

The episode wasn’t the best one in the series’ storied history, but it was hyped so highly that it became the most watched regular non-sporting event in the history of the medium, attracting an astounding 106 million eyeballs - or 77 per cent of the TV audience, a feat likely never to be repeated.

3) The Odd Couple (1970-1975)

An ‘odd’ choice for the bronze? Maybe, but rarely has a show’s ending ever been so satisfying, so hilarious and so consistently true to the characters it depicted. After years of trying to get his wife back, Felix Unger finally gets Gloria to agree to remarry him. In the final episode, his roommate Oscar Madison endures countless threats that may force the cancellation of the reunion - and his chance to finally rid himself of his pesky housemate.

Felix and Oscar’s dreams are both realized and it comes down to an astounding final scene between the two that neatly sums up both characters before they were sent off into rerun heaven. Felix thanks Oscar for taking him in and curing him of his neurotic ways, then salutes him by overturning a garbage can on the floor in his honour.

Oscar then tells him he’s going to return the favour by cleaning it up. The two shake hands and Unger leaves to resume his old/new life. After a beat pause, Madison looks down at the mess and shrugs. “I’m not going to clean it up,” he says, disgust in his voice. He walks off frame for good.

As the audience applauds, Felix opens the door to the apartment he called home for five seasons and begins to put the garbage back in the can. His final pronouncement ends the series: “I knew he wouldn’t clean it up,” he scoffs, as the scene - and the series - both fade to black.

2) The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977)

The gold standard of finales and a program considered by many to be one of the greatest endings of all time. The new owner of WJM-TV has a choice to boost the ratings: keep the staff and fire incompetent anchor Ted Baxter or leave Ted alone and get rid of everyone else. He chooses the latter and in a final scene mixed with equal amounts of tears and laughter, the characters and the actors both say goodbye to each other, with a group hug that involves them moving together in unison around the newsroom.

Mary Richards (and Mary Tyler Moore) thanks them for being “her family” and they all troop out singing the First World War song, “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary”, the way Ted bid them farewell on their last newscast together. Mary then returns and turns off the lights, ending one of the greatest shows - and finales - in broadcast history. The episode would take the Best Comedy Writing Award at the following year’s Emmys and remains one of TV’s most memorable half hours. 

There was one last scene which has sadly been replaced in the rarely seen reruns of the show. In the final credits, Mary is seen introducing the “finest cast in the world”, who bring her flowers as they take their last bows and she breaks into tears.

1) Newhart (1982-1990)

Regardless of how you rate the others on this list, few will dispute this as the greatest single TV farewell in the history of the medium - which brings us full circle back to the late Suzanne Pleshette, who was such an integral part of it.

The show concerned an author-turned-Vermont inn owner named Bob Loudon, who was surrounded by an oddball assortment of characters. In the history-making last episode, a Japanese mogul buys out the entire town, with plans to turn it into a golf course. Bob refuses to sell and eventually gets hit on the head by a golf ball, causing him to lose consciousness.

When he wakes up in a darkened bedroom, he nudges his spouse and starts to tell her about this ’strange dream’ he had about living in an inn, and the odd characters that populated it. And when his wife turns on the light, the audience goes bananas - it’s Emily Hartley, Newhart’s wife from his previous series in which he played a psychologist.

Everything, right down to the bedroom furniture, is the same. And it’s Bob Hartley who speaks. “Well, I was an innkeeper in this crazy little town in Vermont,” he tells her as she stares at him dryly from the other side of the bed. “Nothing made sense in this place. I mean, the maid was an heiress. Her husband talked in alliteration. The handyman kept missing the point of things. And then there were these three woodsmen…”

Pleshette turns to Bob and in that famous gravelly voice tells him that’s the last time she’ll let him eat Japanese food before bedtime.

The surprise factor, the originality and the fact they managed to keep the big secret hidden from a nosy press and adoring public until the show aired justifiably makes it the unanimous choice amongst most critics as the most amazing TV finale of all time.

In a close and bloody box office battle, the bumbling warriors of the spoof Meet the Spartans edged out aged mercenary John Rambo of the franchise flick Rambo to win the weekend box office by a tight margin of just $575,000, according to Sunday’s estimates. Meet the Spartans grossed $18.725 mil while Rambo brought in $18.150 mil, but we’ll have to wait for the final numbers to come out on Monday before officially declaring a winner. Still, this is good news for both films — well, good news for the Greek fighters and really good news for the Vietnam vet.

Meet the Spartans came in almost exactly where most predictions (or at least mine) said it would, for its $18.7 mil gross is in line with both the $19.1 mil that Date Movie earned in early 2006 and the $18.6 mil that Epic Movie banked on this weekend a year ago. Troubling, however, is that the movie’s CinemaScore was a terrible C- (coming from a crowd that was, not surprisingly 58 percent male and three-quarters under the age of 25), which means that while it may have won this week’s battle at the box office, it probably won’t have the stamina for a longer war.

Rambo, however, might. The antique action flick, which was written, produced, and directed by star Sylvester Stallone got a nice A- CinemaScore (its audience was mostly older males, duh). While the film’s predecessors in the Rambo franchise came out so long ago (the last one debuted in 1988) that any box office comparisons are moot, it is worth noting that this movie’s $18.2 mil opening compares quite favorably with the $12.2 mil debut of Stallone’s last character resurrection, 2006’s Rocky Balboa. And, actually, forget about character resurrections, Stallone may just have resurrected his whole career with this debut: It is the biggest he’s had as a lead star since Rocky IV banked $20 mil on its first weekend back in 1985 (again, not a totally meaningful statistic since that was during, like, the Cold War, when movie tickets cost much less and a premiere of, say, $8 mil was considered big). So while many may have rolled their eyes and even laughed at the news of a new Rambo movie (yep, guilty as charged), Stallone likely made the right decision to do it.

The weekend’s other major matter to report came two notches below, past 27 Dresses‘ nice $13.6 mil second-weekend take at No. 3. That’s where we find Cloverfield, all bruised and battered in fourth place, with a $12.7 mil gross — a whopping 68 percent decline from its record opening last weekend. Now, this was to be expected, considering the fact that the movie’s most ardent ticket buyers checked it out on opening weekend, and many reported that they didn’t love it. But were we in the press too soon to suggest that a sequel may already be in store? Perhaps. Then again, you’ve got to imagine that, with a two-week domestic take of $64.3 mil, the folks at Paramount have to be pleased with their initial $25 mil production-budget investment. What’s more, Cloverfield did beat out the two other new releases: Untraceable rounded out the top five with an unsurprisingly underwhelming $11.2 mil, while How She Move (No. 12) was a non factor, earning just $4.2 mil.

As for the movies that were nominated last week for the Best Picture Oscar, Juno (No. 6) fared best, banking $10.3 mil to push its cumulative gross over the $100 mil mark (it was the 28th and probably last release of 2007 to break the nine-figure barrier). Juno is, after all, the only blockbuster of the group, though most of its rivals saw nice bumps: There Will Be Blood (No. earned $4.9 mil; Atonement brought in $4 mil (a slight 14 percent drop, the only decline within this elite group); No Country for Old Men grossed $2.5 mil; and Michael Clayton racked up another $2.1 mil.

And on another historical note, Alvin and the Chipmunks reached the $200 mil plateau, just as National Treasure: Book of Secrets did in the middle of last week, making 2007 the first year in history to boast 11 such releases. (The previous champ, 2005, had eight $200 mil domestic earners.)

Amidst all this success, then, it’s no surprise that the total box office take was up nearly 21 percent from the same frame a year ago. And that’s a number that won’t change much, even if the rankings of the movies do wind up switching around a bit when the final figures are released tomorrow. Be patient, people; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Christian Brando, the troubled son of late actor Marlon Brando, has died in a Los Angeles hospital, according to published statements by Brando family representatives. He was 49 years old.

Brando died early Saturday morning, according to a statement by David Seeley, an attorney representing Marlon Brando’s estate.

“This is a sad and difficult time for the family,” Seeley said in the statement, published by The Associated Press.

TMZ.com recently reported that Brando had been admitted into Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center Jan. 11 with an undisclosed illness and was in the facility’s intensive care unit. The New York Post reported today that Brando was suffering from pneumonia.

The People magazine Web site today quoted his ex-wife, Deborah, as saying that he was in a coma and on a ventilator when he died.

“His body was totally compromised,” she told the magazine. “He’d lived so hard. … This is just so sad.”

The roller coaster that was Christian Brando’s life began even before he was born, as his famous parents — his mother was tempestuous actress Anna Kashfi — married just around the time of his birth, then parted acrimoniously less than two years later. That set off a lengthy custody battle that was resolved in Brando’s favor when the boy was 13 years old.

Christian, the oldest of Brando’s 11 biological and adopted children, grew up in both Los Angeles and Tahiti, where his father owned an island and later sired several half-siblings for Christian. Among them was a beautiful but unstable half-sister, Cheyenne, with whom Christian was close.

In 1990, when she was 20 years old, Cheyenne confided to him that her boyfriend, Dag Drollet — father of her unborn child — had been physically abusive to her (though that was never substantiated). Soon afterward, Brando shot Drollet dead in his father’s mansion on lofty Mulholland Drive, sparking a media frenzy.

Cheyenne was immediately whisked away to a hospital in Tahiti, and was not made available to testify at legal hearings before Christian’s murder trial. He ended up pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served six years and was released in 1996.

Cheyenne commited suicide in 1995. Her son, Tuki, is being raised in Tahiti by her mother, Tarita.

Once released from prison, his notariety faded, Brando seemed to live a quieter life — though not for long. When Robert Blake’s wife, Bonnie Lee Bakely, was murdered in Los Angeles in May, 2001, Blake pointed the finger at Brando, saying that he was dating Bonnie Lee at the same time, had made threats against her and was the father of a child she gave birth to in June 2000 (she had named the baby girl Christian Shannon Brando, though the child was renamed Rose Blake after a paternity test proved that Blake was the biological father).

PARK CITY, Utah — Nothing went as planned this year at Sundance. The buyers sat on their hands till mid-festival. The wallflower films were crowned prom king and queen, and the premiere films with the cool people faced shrugs of indifference.

Star-studded films were left without distribution, including father-son pairing Tom and Colin Hanks in The Great Buck Howard, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in the crime-scene comedy Sunshine Cleaning, and Paul Giamatti’s rocket-pack entrepreneur comedy Pretty Bird.

MORE: All-access pass to Sundance

WINNERS: Who won?

The only thing that was business as usual: There were a fair number of quality films, but the frenzy for parking spots and dinner slots seemed to consume more attention.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: China | HBO | Stars | Documentary | Yangtze

Still, some movies did walk away with deals. In the end, though, that is perhaps not the most important thing, as festival founder Robert Redford says, “Over the years, what happens is the films that come through and get the word of mouth … that’s the best PR and marketing there is.”

Among films that emerged from Sundance with distribution and which eventually may show up in theaters near you:

•Hamlet 2. Stars British comedian Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) playing a Tucson high school drama teacher staging a cracked sequel to “Shakespeare’s bummer.” Focus Features purchased for distribution for a reported $10 million, near the festival record.

•Up the Yangtze. A Canadian-financed documentary by Chinese director Yung Chang that examines the impact of China’s Three Gorges Dam on the place where Yung’s grandfather grew up. Zeitgeist Films plans to release it in April.

•Frozen River. By first-time director Courtney Hunt, it tells the story of two women in upstate New York: one white working-class, the other Native American. They sneak illegal immigrants in from Canada who want a piece of the American Dream, which has collapsed for the smugglers. The film will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.

•The Wackness. Writer/director Jonathan Levine’s story of a wacked-out, drug-gulping shrink (Ben Kingsley) who trades therapy sessions to a high school drug dealer (Josh Peck) for pot. The odd couple goes out on the town, carousing at night, and by day pushing the kid’s weed. It was bought by Sony Pictures Classics.

•Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Marina Zenovich’s documentary about the famous 1977 rape case that led Polanski to flee Hollywood for Paris. HBO purchased domestic distribution.

•The Black List: Volume One. A documentary by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, List features the likes of Chris Rock and Sean “Diddy” Combs talking about the black experience in America. The film was bought by HBO.

•Choke. Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston and Kelly Macdonald star in the adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel about a guy (Rockwell) who fakes choking to scam those who try to save him. The film went to Fox Searchlight.

A revamped online file-sharing service that promised to offer unlimited, free music downloads from all the major record labels hit an apparent snag Sunday after one denied it had given the service permission.

Qtrax touted in a press release Sunday morning that it was the first Internet file-swapping service to be “fully embraced by the music industry,” and boasted it would carry up to 30 million tracks from “all the major labels.”

New York-based Warner Music undermined that claim, declaring in a statement that it “has not authorized the use of our content on Qtrax’s recently announced service.”

Universal Music Group and EMI Group PLC later confirmed they did not have licensing deals in place with Qtrax, noting discussions were still ongoing. A call to Sony BMG Music Entertainment was not immediately returned.

Music services such as Qtrax must secure licensing agreements from the record companies, which own the rights to master recordings, and music publishers, which control the rights to song compositions. Each of the major recording companies also operates music publishing units.

Allan Klepfisz, Qtrax’s president and chief executive, acknowledged Sunday that the deal with Warner Music had not been signed, but said he expects to reach an agreement on terms “shortly.”

“With everybody else, we have agreed on all terms,” he added, noting that in some cases, deals had yet to be formally signed.

Qtrax had been scheduled to make its online debut on Monday, a day after its splashy coming-out party at the annual Midem music business conference in Cannes, France.

The development marked an inauspicious start for Qtrax, the latest online music venture counting on the lure of free music to draw in music fans and on advertising to pay the bills, namely record company licensing fees.

The service was among several peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that emerged following the shutdown of Napster, the pioneer service that enabled millions to illegally copy songs stored in other music fans’ computers.

Qtrax shut down after a few months following its 2002 launch to avoid potential legal trouble.

The company said it latest version of the service still lets users tap into file-sharing networks to search for music. Downloads however come with copy-protection technology known as digital-rights management, or DRM, to prevent users from burning copies to a CD and calculate how to divvy up advertising sales with labels.

Qtrax downloads can be stored indefinitely on PCs and transferred onto portable music players, however.

The company also promises that its music downloads will be playable on Apple Inc.’s iPods and Macintosh computers until April 15. That’s unusual, as iPods only playback unrestricted MP3s files or tracks with Apple’s proprietary version of DRM, dubbed FairPlay.

In an earlier interview, Klepfisz declined to give specifics on how Qtrax will make its audio files compatible with Apple devices, but noted that “Apple has nothing to do with it.”

Apple has been resistant in the past to license FairPlay to other online music retailers. That stance has effectively limited iPod users to loading up their players with tracks purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, or MP3s ripped from CDs or bought from vendors such as eMusic or Amazon.com.

Phone and e-mail messages left for Apple on Sunday night were not immediately returned.

Rob Enderle, technology analyst at the San Jose-based Enderle Group, said he expects Apple would take steps to block Qtrax files from working on iPods.

Last fall, the company issued a software update for its iPhones that created problems for units modified by owners so they would work with a cellular carrier other than AT&T Inc. As a result, some modified phones ceased to work after the software update.

The move prompted antitrust lawsuits on behalf of some consumers.