Category: two wheels good

TeledyN: Where have all the Listeners Gone:

“Right on, people: Make music, not war; keep on rockin’ in the freeworld!”

I haven’t read the piece he links to (go there for the link: I’m not stealing all his thunder), but the bottomline is that musical instruments sales are up in the midst of the RIAA’s sales slump.

Could it be that people are so fed up that they’d rather make their own music?

This has been one of my hopes with the emergence of broadband, increasing powerful home computers, and now sophisticated software that we would see a resurgence of creativity. There are a lot of work processing programs to crank out the Great American Novel/Play/Screenplay, weblog publishing tools and services, art and design tools, photoediting software, etc. Perhaps we’re getting to a point where we can all share our creative ideas around a softly flickering electronic campfire . . . .

[Posted with ecto]

Professor Ed Felten suggests you take a look and see if other software besides PhotoShop has built-in safeguards against currency duplication.

So you can look for currency-detecting software on your own computer. Just search the contents of your computer for the character string “http://www.rulesforuse.org”, and see if you find that string in any software such as an application or a printer driver.

I didn’t find anywhere on my system: update this page’s comments if you find anything.

[Posted with ecto]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – U.S. software maker Microsoft said on Tuesday it would continue to offer support to customers who still own versions of its Windows 98 operating system, in a move aimed to soothe developing countries.

Extended Support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE had been scheduled to come to an end on Friday, January 16, while Windows Me support had been scheduled to end December 31, 2004.

[ . . . ]

Microsoft has come under pressure in recent years, particularly by authorities in developing countries, for its attempts to push customers into buying or subscribing to newer, expensive Windows and Office software versions.

Many countries have started to buy computers that run on the freely available Linux system, while others hang onto older Windows versions that have been paid for and still do the job.

Microsoft has responded in a variety of ways, such as cutting prices for groups of big customers and opening up some of the source code to address security concerns.

Hmm, uptake of 2000, ME, XP, et al not as robust as hoped?

Newsday.com – Adobe Helped Gov’t Fight Counterfeiting

WASHINGTON — Adobe Systems Inc. acknowledged Friday it quietly added technology to the world’s best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world’s major currencies.

The unusual concession has angered scores of customers.

Adobe, the world’s leading vendor for graphics software, said the secretive technology “would have minimal impact on honest customers.” It generates a warning message when someone tries to make digital copies of some currencies.

The Gimp may skip this feature; it doesn’t seem very popular.

About that [mini] iPod

I really don’t use much more than a quarter of the 10Gb that I have available to me. I’ve gone into my listening habits in more detail in the past, but essentially, I carry around one 1Gb playlist, and occasionally toss one or two other specialized playlists on when I’m in a mood to, and that’s it. Right now, I’m currently using a whopping 2.12Gb of my 10Gb iPod for music, leaving around 7Gb free.

I have been thinking that I may never fill mine up . . . . I think 4-5 Gb is plenty, but that doesn’t mean I think it should sell for $50 less that the one I have.

The New York Times: Movies

I just joined the Modern Age the other week when I bought a DVD player (that isn’t in a computer: I have two of those). I have to say, I’m sold. I may never go to a theater again, though since I have only been once since 1997, that’s not saying a lot.

I like everything about the experience: the quality of the picture and sound, the control of the presentation (no more tedious trailers and promos for coming attractions), and of course, the extras/easter eggs.

I signed up for NetFlix as well, so it may be time to catch up on all the stuff I missed or never saw.

And this review of the state of the art in the Times looks worth a read. Imagine my surprise to that adult entertainment is working on interactive features, once again pushing the envelope (how else did streaming video get so good, so fast?).

Brave New World‘s feelies can’t be too far behind . . . .

“We already shoot our girls against a black background for our interactive DVD’s,” Joone said. “That way, when we perfect hologram technology, we can cancel out the black background and bring the subject into three-dimensional space. Men will love it. They’ll sit in front of their giant-screen TV, turn off the lights and the only thing lit will be the girl.”

Google Search: 11 * 35

So “I’m feeling lucky” doesn’t apply here (I tried that on math tests and it never worked). It’s more than just the basic four functions: exponents and parentheses all work.

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: A sorry excuse to see if the object tag will work

The revolution may not be televised, but for the first time in human history, we could if we wanted to. All by ourselves.

Choice and master spirit of the age Ben Hammersley riffs on the idea of cultural change and co-option, with the observation that the culture that participates in the internet is beholden to no one for its direction or development. Where the previous cultural “revolutions” — rock and roll, punk, hip-hop — were immediately taken up by marketeers and purveyors of lifestyle products, weblogging and its related phenomena are owned by their participants.
Continue reading “historical revisionism or perspective?”

Anti-Mac

The basic principles of the Anti-Mac interface are:

• The central role of language
• A richer internal representation of objects
• A more expressive interface
• Expert users
• Shared control

This was written in 1996 but it sounds like a rough approximation of today’s OS X.

Users have a choice of gestural or verbal commands, as appropriate. Moving one file is trivial, but moving all files in several folders that are more than 30 days old or that contain .html in their title is a little more complex.

Visual display technology has improved to allow more useful representations of onscreen objects: I see this more in applications like PhotoShop than in the OS.

One of the big knocks on the Mac was that the learning curve was gradual and short: expertise was gained in days, not years. The flipside of this was the Mac users generally knew more applications since the basic commands were consistent with the OS they already knew. But now, we have the prospect of a consistent easy-to-use interface with the power of a command line and helpful items like cron and various command shells. As noted in the article, the downside of direct control is that you have to directly control everything: there is no delegation or automation. Undergirding the Mac’s UI with UNIX changes all that.

I think it’s interesting that this predates the release of OS X by two years but foreshadows it pretty well.

Specifications for ST-380021

I installed one of these monstrous drives in one of my machines tonight. I don’t know what to make of an 80 Gbyte disk drive costing about $1.00 a Gigabyte when I can recall paying $20.00 a Megabyte once upon a time. What’s the price/performance rule on storage? Is it like Moore’s Law, where a given amount of storage will both half in price and improve in speed every 18 months?

The hardware fairy returns later this week with 2 64 Mb DIMMs for this resource-challenged webserver . . .