beatnik

A beatnik was a WWII or Korean War veteran educated on the US GI Bill, and devoted to be-bop jazz, drugs (heroin, cocaine, and marijuana), art appreciation, Zen Buddhism and a "Continental" lifestyle including gourmet cooking, mineral water, espresso coffee and compact cars. Funny, none of this applies to Kerouac, Ginzburg or Burroughs.

1. A software company headed up by Thomas Dolby which specializes in audio applications for the web. Formerly known as HeadSpace.
2. The audio player created by the company. The player is a plug-in application for browsers which allows more seamless integration of audio into web pages - i.e. you can have background noise without spawning an external process, and you can associate sounds with UI elements. The player is able to achieve considerable compression because it is assumed that most or all of the sounds it needs are already present on the machine; thus, it can simply ship MIDI data or the equivalent. Unfortunatlely, if this assumption fails, you either have to bundle your sounds in a proprietary format and send them across the wire before using them, or be satisified with piss-poor compression.