Month: July 2003

what the RIAA doesn’t want you to know

Sound And Vision Magazine

He makes two key assertions: 1) that the labels raised CD prices during a down economy, and 2) that they slashed the number of new releases by almost 25% during the past three years. He says that these factors, and not downloading, are responsible for sluggish CD sales.

OK, class, let’s review.

  • We raise the price of an increasingly less-expensive commodity — the CD media itself — no matter what the economy’s doing
  • we give the consumer fewer opportunities to buy what we actually produce — music recordings — even as the times and places they listen to music expand: portable players now make it possible to listen to recorded music every waking minute of the day
  • the kinds of music available and the tastes of our audience both explode in a variety of directions but we pay no attention to that. radio ownership is so concentrated, we can’t sell that stuff to advertisers, so let’s pretend it isn’t there

Great article: it fights FUD with facts, some of which the RIAA has been trying to hide (why else would they stop releasing information about how many new titles they release in 2001, just as the allegations about piracy became widely discussed?).

Not that I’ve bought any lately, but I may just cancel any planned CD purchases until they wake up.

Word -> XML, made easy

Word Html 2 Formatting Objects

WH2FO is a Java application that processes an HTML output, created with Word 2000, and transforms it into an XML content file and an XSL stylesheet file. From these files, a standard XSLT processor may be used to obtain a file containing only XSL-FO markup. You can also apply a stylesheet that converts the XML back into HTML discarding all the extra markup added by Word. Using an XSL-FO renderer, such as FOP, you can also render your document into PDF.

I was looking for a way to convert heavily-formatted Word docs to html, and was starting to gibber in fear of having to write a parser of my own. But someone has (perhaps) already made that unnecessary. In my dreams, I was hoping to generate real XML, but this tool claims to do just that.

constraints drive creativity

ongoing · The Web’s the Place

[ . . . . ] Browsers are more usable because they’re less flexible.

I think I’ve told this story before here, but it’s a good one; at a content management conference, a woman from the Tandem-that-was saying “It was so wonderful when the browser interfaces came on; the vendors had to discard all those stupid sliders and cascaded menus and eight-way toggles, and only leave the stuff that mattered.”

This is a well-thought-out view of the software development ecosystem. The stuff I excerpt above resonates with me, because I’ve said much the same thing many times. Tools that do everything can stunt creativity; they remove your incentive to think. You find either too many choices to master or find that the choices have been made by someone else (saved any HTML in Word lately?).

This was the promise of the browser, circa 1995: one application that allowed you to interact with your data, your projects, whatever, with the OS rendered a commodity. And as you can imagine, that threatens companies who are all about controlling access to all that through an OS.

browser war continues

MacMegasite – AOL officially kills Netscape

AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL.

Wired News: Mozilla Wants to Rumble With IE

“AOL doesn’t really seem to have a motive for supporting Mozilla and Netscape anymore,” said Jeff Howden, a Web applications developer and founder of evolt.org, a group of Web developers who have followed the browser wars over the years.

Regardless of how many new features Mozilla offers, most consumers are unlikely to switch from Internet Explorer, noted Howden. “Users will use what is on their computer already,” he said. “If they want pop-up blocking, they’re more likely to download a program for it or a plug-in for IE that does it rather than download an entirely new browser.”

“Mozilla won’t win with the general public by having a superior feature set,” he added. “It won’t win by rendering faster or being more standards-compliant. Heck, IE didn’t do any of those things to get where it is today. It’s on top because it’s on every desktop.”

Despite such skepticism, Baker and the team at the Mozilla Foundation say they are ready for a fight. “We’ve got the better browser,” said Baker. “And that’s what really matters.”

closing the book on Harry Potter threads

I turned off comments on the two Harry Potter-related threads, one, to prevent the misconception that JK Rowling will ever read these; two, to stop kids leaving their email addresses in a public forum; and three, because they always press the Submit button multiple times, leaving a mess for me to clean up.

Enough.

interview vs reality

We had a new employee start in a group near me this week, highly touted, “we’re lucky to get them” and all that. It’s a clerical position like mine, so my expectations are set accordingly.

I wasn’t quite prepared for her to ask for the manuals for Microsoft Excel (the onlike/Windows help files are pretty comprehensive), nor could I imagine what — on one’s second day — would require RTFM. We have a site license so manuals are not available, anyway. Between the online help and Google, what else do you need?

An hour or so later, she asked someone else “why anyone would use Excel, instead of Word? What’s the difference?” I was glad my back was turned. To me, they’re like a fork and a spoon: they have their uses, and a complete place setting has both. Eating soup with a fork can be tedious.

It will interesting to see how financial reports get done in an Excel-less world.

The position description required a solid understanding of mainstream office software, so I’m not sure how this one was finessed in the interview process. I know I didn’t apply for a lot of jobs because I didn’t want to make claims I couldn’t back up. Not everyone adheres to that, evidently.

irony

CNN.com – Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web – Jul. 15, 2003

Professional news sites aren’t the only ones converting to RSS feeds. Hobbies and fan sites, blogs, and other special interest and community sites are going to feeds, as well.

Of course, not all news sites — like CNN.com itself — are publishing RSS feeds, either (why the writer thinks there’s a conversion process eludes me, but the whole article is just a tad breathless).