A bunch of us caught Michael Franti and Spearhead on Friday night. The band’s multicultural deep grooves, heavily partaking of hiphop and reggae, while also making frequent references to the bedrock roots of blues and jazz, combined with Franti’s activist politics (not to mention several Bass Ales) for a perfect breather from election anxiety. Though I could’ve done with a shorter acoustic solo segment…
Archive for October, 2004
Following up on my own bad experiences with Apple’s copy protection schemes (I’m no longer going to call these technologies Digital Rights Management, the current IT industry euphemism that can only have been thought up by the same people who brought you Military Intelligence), comes a great rant in the Inquirer by Charlie Demerjian. He hits the nail squarely on the head:
The fundamental question is simply this. Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions? I have asked this question to junior members of the companies to the very top CxOs, and from people on the street to fellow journalists. No-one can give me an answer.
The only answer is greed. They don’t give a rat’s ass about you, what you think, care or do, as long as they get your money. If you don’t want to give them your money, they will take it, and make resistance a crime.
Venture capitalist Tim Oren has a more reasoned, but no less conclusive, take on it:
Following up on my own bad experiences with Apple’s copy protection schemes (I’m no longer going to call these technologies Digital Rights Management, the current IT industry euphemism that can only have been thought up by the same people who brought you Military Intelligence), comes a great rant in the Inquirer by Charlie Demerjian. He hits the nail squarely on the head:
The fundamental question is simply this. Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions? I have asked this question to junior members of the companies to the very top CxOs, and from people on the street to fellow journalists. No-one can give me an answer.
The only answer is greed. They don’t give a rat’s ass about you, what you think, care or do, as long as they get your money. If you don’t want to give them your money, they will take it, and make resistance a crime.
Venture capitalist Tim Oren has a more reasoned, but no less conclusive, take on it:
This week, as promised, OSAF released Chandler 0.4, the first experimentally usable version of the open source, cross platform PIM client.
While this is still a very early pre-release primarily of interest to software developers and other brave souls who don’t mind living out on the edge, it’s good to see a real desktop program that can send and receive email and synch calendars via WebDAV.
As the documentation says, I wouldn’t trust it with my real data, but I got it working fine on a test account here, using the UW imap and smtp servers, and a webdav server I have an account on at UC Santa Cruz.
This is real progress!
Congratulations to Mitch, Chao, Lisa, Pieter, Katie, Heikki, Andi, Ted, Brian, and all the rest of the OSAF gang!
The other day Xeni Jardin mentioned my band’s release of sheet music (along with audio files) using a Creative Commons license in the extremely popular Boing Boing weblog (I believe this to be the first use of CC licenses for the sheet music for original compositions).
The band’s web site had been bubbling along at about 200 page requests a day. On Monday, the day we got mentioned in Boing Boing, we received 2,456 page requests! Aha! Finally, our hour of fame!
But by Tuesday we were back down to 648 requests. I guess we’ve had our fifteen minutes for now.
The Boing Boing post is here.
I’ve been thinking about buying an iPod for a long time…still haven’t convinced myself to part with that much money.
Now Apple’s got some new ones out – you can pay $100 extra to get a color screen on your 40 GB version, so you can display photos (doesn’t seem that interesting to me, but I’m sure they’ll sell a ton of ‘em). Or you can spend $600 (!!!) for a 60 GB iPod with the color screen.
Or you can get the 20 GB iPod in a special U2 version.
I don’t like U2. I’ve never liked U2. I don’t hear anything compelling at all in their music, and I find their attitude insufferable. Sorry, all you millions of U2 fans out there – nothing personal – I just don’t get it.
But I do like the black and red color combo on the U2 iPod – hey, Apple, can I get that version without the autographs on the back?
Alan from Command Post on how blogs and the Internet are changing the news business
Published October 27, 2004 Uncategorized ClosedAlan from the Command Post gave a terrific talk to the AP Managing Editors about how blogs and the Internet are changing the business of gathering and disseminating news. Thanks to Tim Oren for pointing this out!
Your ability to choose when and how something is reported, and the timeline over which you can hold information as you make that choice, are more compressed every day. Anyone can spill the beans, and with the web and email, everyone has access to the beans.
Worth a read!
The other day I bought the Neville Brothers fine funky new album Walkin’ in the Shadow of Life from the iTunes Music Store, putting it on my iMac at work to listen to while I worked.
That evening while at home, I wanted to finish listening to the album. So I mounted my work computer’s disk onto my iMac at home and dragged and dropped the song files over into iTunes and happily listened away.
Yesterday morning I decided I’d burn the album onto a CD to listen to in the car on the way to work. Uh-oh. No dice.
iTunes reports “None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disc.”
What’s up with that?
The tunes burn fine from my work iMac – but not from home, on a machine that’s authorized to play the tunes.
This, IMHO, sucks. No wonder people keep using the mp3 p2p file sharing services, as reported here in Wired, talking about a new study of p2p traffic done by folks at UC Riverside and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.
>”In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished,” says the study, which will be presented at IEEE Globecom 2004 next month. “On the contrary, P2P traffic represents a significant amount of internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding.”
Get with the program, Apple. Sheesh.
Is anybody besides me old enough to remember the old Warner Brothers Records Columbia Records ad campaign from the early ’70s 1969 that had the tag line “The man can’t bust our music”? That was the good old days.
Last week for my presentation on Chandler and the CSG at Educause 2004 I used Eric Meyer’s S5 package instead of Powerpoint for the first time.
It worked like a charm!
In case you’re wondering, S5 stands for the “simple standards-based slide show system”, which simply explains what it is.
I love the fact that it’s entirely web standards compliant, requiring nothing more than a browser to view the slides. And, even better, the same content can be viewed with multiple formatting applied – for instance, here are the slides, and here is the content in an outline view.
Eric’s now released version 1.0 of S5, along with a primer on how to use it.
I recommend it highly – a big thanks to Eric for making this simple and elegant tool available.
Now I just have to figure out how to convert our organizational Powerpoint template into an S5 template.
There has been a bunch of talk on the calendaring standards lists about how to handle time zones, and sure enough, last week I ran into a real-world example that pointed out the issues (but not the answers) in maddening fashion.
The Educause 2004 conference web site has an Itinerary Builder where you can select which conference events to attend and build an personal itinerary. I did that, then exported the itinerary to an ical file, which I then imported into iCal on my PowerBook. So far it worked great all the events showed up at the right times.
I then synched the Powerbook with my Nokia cell phone, figuring I could then just keep track of where I needed to be next by checking my calendar on the cell phone as I wandered the conference.
But lo and behold, all the conference events showed up on the cell phone eight hours earlier than their scheduled times!
When I looked at the data that the Educause ical export put out, I noticed that it came through with no time zone information. iCal on the Mac didn’t pay any attention to that and put it on my calendar as if it were local time. But the Nokia apparently decided that any event without a time zone must be taking place at that time in Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) and shifted the event times accordingly.
Aargh!
