Category: obscure pursuits

Educated Guesswork: December 2003 Archives

Eric reveals why it took Apple to create a reasonable (for now) solution to the music industry’s (and our) problem.

We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net’s gonna fail, Press Play’s gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45’s; then they bought LP’s; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD’s. They’re going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don’t want to rent your music — and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.

And, you know, at 10 bucks a month, that’s $120 a year. That’s $1,200 a decade. That’s a lot of money for me to listen to the songs I love. It’s cheaper to buy, and that’s what they’re gonna want to do.

They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing out AOL as the great model for this and saying: No, we want that — we want a subscription business. We said: It ain’t gonna work.

You remember the monkey with his hand in the coconut? He had a fistful of nuts but the hole was onloy big enough to get his hand in, not his fist out. So he had to let go of the nuts — not all, just some — to be free. Greedy or stupid, it all amounts to the same thing in the end.

Six Log: Software Development and Usability

[ . . . . ] I’m still waiting for the article that goes beyond “they’re so cute” or “Ben created Movable Type”, and tries to get at something core to software development: what factors contribute to creating a great product?

To be honest, in my interactions with MovableType, I find myself thinking more of Mena’s contributions than Ben’s, but perhaps that shows my own bias if I attribute the perl code to him and the CSS and UI stuff to her . . . . .

What would the holiday be without the soundtrack to a Charlie Brown Christmas?

From search request to freshly burned CD in about 10 minutes . . . .

If adserving companies didn’t run such slow webserving plants that they didn’t block pages from loading, I wouldn’t mind so much. But I do, and I can make this problem go away.

nidump hosts / > hosts
vi hosts
edit the file to have adservers synonymous with the loopback interface:
127.0.0.1 localhost ad.doubleclick.net ar.atwola.com
niload -m -v hosts / < hosts

Lawrence Lessig

Law students begin life as idealists, and there’s an obvious and powerful idealism in the Winer’s arguments. I’ll point to my favorite parts when the talk is posted. Meanwhile, I was happy to tell him that the Center will be copying his experiment at Harvard next fall, and offering a blog for every entering student in the law school. Turow’s One L, or even Alex Wellen’s Barman will be nothing in comparison.

I wonder if this will serve as a clue-by-four at my former workplace . . . .

I made reference to this in a report to the Executive Council I was asked to write, mentioning self-publishing as a way of documenting the oral tradition and skeletal institutional memory there. One of the recipients forwarded on to a member of the Board of Regents, since he is an alumnus. But as fate would have it, he’ll be leaving that post to run Delta Air Lines.

Yahoo! News – Mac vs. PC: The Truth About TCO

“Clearly, the price tags for PCs are lower — at least at the low end,” says Macworld (news – web sites) editor-in-chief Jason Snell.

“However, we recently tested the speed of high-end Macs and PCs, and they’re comparable — for comparable prices — in many areas. So, it’s probably most realistic to say that while the cheapest PCs cost less than the cheapest Macs, the cheapest Macs are probably comparable with PCs that cost a similar amount,” he told NewsFactor.

“In other words, as usual, you get what you pay for.”

[ . . . . ]

The question about Mac vs. PC TCO may be answerable, said Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg. “But the question is, is it relevant?”

Differences in cost of ownership are justified — or not — by how suitable a given platform is to a task, Gartenberg maintains. “Based on suitability for task, the numbers for both platforms are going to be roughly the same over a five-year period,” he told NewsFactor.

So if it doesn’t make a difference to the bottomline and the two platforms are functionally equivalent, where’s the argument *against* a heterogenous environment? I’ve always been told competition is good for business . . . . do the business who say “you can use any OS you like, as long as its Windows” not get that?

AARP Magazine : A Few Good Grumps

Curmudgeons aren’t just funny or just mean. Part of what makes a curmudgeon is an almost allergic reaction to injustice. When confronted with it, he responds with two powerful weapons: disgust and sarcasm.

At the dentist yesterday, I found myself reading the AARP magazine (hey, I had exhausted Nick Jr and I wasn’t going near Seventeen) and found this great article on identifying and understanding the domesticated curmudgeon.

In years gone by, fans would be more likely to paint their faces with the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack: this England fan exemplifies the newfound popularity of the Cross of St George, all the way to her fingernail painting and her clothes, it appears.

Keyboard/Mouse Preference screenshot

Well, for a moment there, I thought I had worked out what was making the cursor go all wiggly: it seemed to be related to the “ignore accidental trackpad input” switch being toggled on. Toggling it off seemed to work, but in the process of making the screen grab for this entry, it’s back again.

<grumble>

An error occurred:
Can't locate object method "p" via package "Apache::Request" (perhaps you forgot to load "Apache::Request"?) at /usr/www/mt/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 827.

<grumble> Not having a lot of success installing MT-blacklist . . . . . . this means some work with the ports collection. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but the system that hosts all that stuff is having issues with it’s CPU fan: I get a persistent alarm when the fan stops running, though the temperature seems OK (it fluctuates between 87 and 93 degrees).