Month: May 2005

if you haven’t played this yet, go check it out

20Q.net:

The game you are about to play is a test of the next generation of Twenty Questions.

Pretty amazing stuff. I was a reporter covering neural networks right about the time this was coded up: needless to say, they weren’t this evolved.

<update> I bought one. I played with it online a few times and I think it will be an interesting thing to have around.

acceptance

Commonplace Book, page 29 of 29:

My old cat is dead
Who would butt me with
his head.
He had the sleekest fur,
He had the blackest purr,
Always gentle with us
Was this black puss,
But when I found him today
Stiff and cold where he lay,
His look was a lion’s,
Full of rage, defiance:
O! he would not pretend
That what came
was a friend
But met it in pure hate.
Well died, my old cat.
Hal Summers
“My Old Cat”

We don’t know what happened to the old guy, but I suppose we have to accept the inevitable. I hope it was quick for him, even as my real hope is that he staggers up to the door with his arthritic back legs taking their own path.

your failed business model . . . .

The Real Threat To Yahoo Music Store (Hint: Not iTunes)

Broadband Reports refers to file sharing as the pink elephant in the room, wisely noting that Yahoo’s entry will make little difference in file sharing habits. More to the point, the Yahoo service doesn’t address the main problem with online music ventures: it’s a flawed and failing business model. It doesn’t give people what they really want, i.e., flexible access to lots and lots of music. People will always find a way to do that, as they have for many years, typically through some sort of sharing. As Mike Langberg points out, the online stores are losing out to P2P sharing because, despite offering over a million songs, the stores offer only a small fraction of all the music they could sell — nearly all of which is available on file sharing systems. The converse of this thought is that the labels can reduce file sharing by making many more songs available online than there are today.

Yup, we knew that.

this is crazy enough to be true, maybe

PBS | I, Cringely . May 12, 2005 – Inflection Point:

So Apple takes over video and movies while Yahoo threatens
with a low-priced music subscription service and Google
threatens to take control of, well, everything.

And Microsoft? Microsoft kicks the dog.

Sometimes I wonder if Cringely knows what he’s talking about. Surely he knows that the power of a modern PC doesn’t really have any effect on fetching web pages: the rendering engines and ever-complicated styles are a big part of what the PC does. What a reverse cache does is minimize latency, as he points out: if the entire web is no further away than my local drive, of course, it will seem pretty snappy. But I doubt you could tell the difference between a 1GHz CPU and a 3GHz CPU, given the effects of the cache.

But that aside, it will be interesting to see if any of what he projects comes to pass. This new world when the costs of delivering information — from movies to music to phone conversations — approach zero bears watching.

Now playing: Sugar Mountain by Neil Young from the album “Decade (Disc 1)” | Get it

Tiger early impressions

after some fits and starts, I am now enjoying Tiger. I like what I see so far. I concur on what others have said about some interface inconsistencies, but by and large, it’s a noticeable upgrade: seamless but obvious, if that makes sense. It extends what was there without seeming too different.

It does seem faster (and on an 800 MHz iBook, that’s a real benefit). I think Spotlight is amazing: I have had occasion to use it a couple of times and it’s everything I heard it would be. I can only imagine it on a G5.

The “pre-order” discount is on til the end of May, I think, so it you haven’t taken the plunge, why wait?

And an added bonus, new versions of NetNewsWire, ecto, and the 1.0 release of DarwinPorts all came out this week.

more feline problems

My eldest cat disappeared this afternoon. 18 years old, deaf, arthritic, and devoid of any street smarts. The prognosis is not good. He’s an indoor cat — always has been — and it’s plenty cold tonight for a guy in his state of decrepitude.

I have a flyer ready to distribute to the neighbors tomorrow, assuming he doesn’t stroll up before then.

nuke and pave

Well, the iBook/Tiger grudge match continues. I am backing up the whole disk and preparing to erase the disk and start afresh.

hdiutil create -srcfolder /Volumes/white /volumes/backup/white.dmg

Adding in the destructive upgrade to my drupal site, we’ve had a lovely day of technical difficulties.

<update> well, my planned use of hdiutil didn’t work out. Let’s see if rsync can manage it.