August 2005 Archives
It's bad...consider donating to the Red Cross.
The first week of school is behind us, thankfully. The portal, my baby, held up to the crush of new students quite well. We saw 8 straight hours of 1,000+ concurrent users the first day and 9 hours the next two days. It's calmed down a bit...but only a bit. We still see at least 200 users by 8am. But that wont last long. The excitement of the new semester will fade quite quickly and sleeping in will become more the norm.
And the world could die in pain
And I wouldn't feel no shame
And there's nothing holding me to blame
Makes you want to feel
Makes you want to try
Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky
I'm taking myself to the dirty part of town
Where all my troubles can't be found
Head On
The Jesus & Mary Chain
Dusty lens...but still a fun shot.
It's amazing that an industry this large and this profitable can be this dumb. But then I think back to the Napster days and realize that not only should I not be amazed, I should have expected them to try and screw up the huge success of iTunes.
Now, I'm not a big fan of the "industry" in general, but I tend to be even less of a fan of the "analysts" around the computer and music industry. Which does leave me truly shocked to see an analyst utter something so plain and simple.
Some analysts suggest that the willingness of the music companies to gamble on a new pricing structure reflects a short memory.
"As I recall, three years ago these guys were wandering around with their hands out looking for someone to save them," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2. "It'd be rather silly to try to destabilize [Jobs] because iTunes is one of the few bright spots in the industry right now. He's got something that's working."
Ya think? These clowns get the tiniest whiff of potentially larger short-term profits and they are already scheming how to destroy long term plans for another shiny penny today. Can some group of people who depend on these executives to protect the value of their investment in these companies please fire them?
Although, to be fair, it isn't all of them marching off the shiny penny cliff.
"I don't think it's time yet," said Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Records, Universal's biggest division. "We need to convert a lot more people to the habit of buying music online. I don't think a way to convert more people is to raise the price. (emphasis mine)
Keep prices low to get more buyers? Brilliant!
Oh...but it gets better.
A sore point for some music executives is the fact that Apple generates much more money selling iPod players than it does as a digital music retailer, leading to complaints that Mr. Jobs is profiting more from tracks downloaded to fill the 21 million iPods sold so far than are the labels that produced the recordings.
Wow. What utter stupidity is this? That was Apple's plan from the beginning.
Apple Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson said in July (2003) that the music store could be a "trojan horse" for getting more people to buy iPods.
I can't find the exact numbers, as I don't think they are actually published, but quite a large percentage of each $0.99 goes to the label. Apple is keeping pennies and paying for the infrastructure with iPod sales basically. Apple creates the store, makes it easy, and sells the most popular music player on the planet. What more do they want? Ah yes, more shiny pennies. They don't think they are getting what they should be.
I just wonder how many feet they have left.
Yes, Movable Type 3.2
is finally here. It's worth the upgrade, which is free (money-wise) and rather painless (time-wise).
The whole package has a professional polish that has seen many refinements since the 2.x days and it definitely go better in this release. The list of new features is too long to detail here, but I will talk about one area: rebuilding. It's fast. I don't know what was slowing me down before, but it made me avoid rebuilding individual archives completely. I don't have any real numbers but it seems to be an order of magnitude faster on rebuilds.
I will be enabling comments and trackbacks again to see how the new system keeps up. Luckily there is a quick, global "Off" switch if the spammers figure it out...and they probably will.
So give 3.2 a shot. You'll probably like it.
The camera is here. It's awesome. I give you this lame shot as proof.
The British have learned from the Bush administration -- never admit mistakes and never let them change what you are doing.
London's police force has reviewed its controversial "shoot-to-kill" policy and left it largely unchanged despite the killing of a Brazilian mistaken for a would-be suicide bomber, Scotland Yard said on Saturday.
Although, they clearly have not perfected the strategy yet.
"We have reviewed it and we have made one or two small changes, but the operation remains essentially the same," a Metropolitan police spokeswoman told Reuters.
Small changes like not shooting random people seven times in the melon? Sounds like a good, small change to me. Or as atrios says, "I do wish someone would give me the list of approved behaviors so I too can avoid summary execution."
Jeebus...
Vice President Dick Cheney gave his "CLAP LOUDER" speech to a combat veterans group and the usual terms were bandied about. But this bit at the end of the article caught my eye.
The vice president cited the darkest days of the American Revolution, when the war was going badly and ragtag rebels were ready to go home until George Washington rallied them. "They stayed in the fight, and America won the war," he said. "From that day to this, our country has always counted on the bravest among us to answer the call of duty."
It would be an apt comparison if we had a leader with the skills of George Washington. Nobody in the current administration has what he had. Nobody will have faith in Bush like they did in Washington. That isn't to say that people will not blindly follow Bush -- they will, just not into war. Operation Yellow Elephant exposes that quite well.
It's official. I have a new hobby. I laid down the cash for a Canon 350D.
I needed to get something that wasn't computer related, or at least mostly computer related. I'll still have to use the mini to process the photos, but I will have to get out of the house to actually take the pictures. That or I'll have a really big collection of abstract inside-the-house shots.
Against advice from pros I know and DPreview, I did get the kit lens. I'm not really at a point where I could make an informed decision on what kind of lens I would get instead, so I'll stick with the kit until I do.
It was a tough decision between the Nikon D50 and the 350D. Both come highly recommended from DPreview. They aren't that far away in price, at least at B & H. I knew that no matter which camera I picked it would be a really good camera that would serve me well for a long time. So, why the Canon?
I had been leaning towards the D50 from the day it came out. But in the end something as silly as brand loyalty got me. I've used two point-and-shoot Canons, the S110 and the A85, and I've loved both of them. I'm somewhat familiar with Canon software, even though the 350D will be a lot different I'm sure -- there is sure to be some similarities.
There are also technical details which swayed me at the end, such as the CMOS sensors and DIGIC image processing in the Canon line. All indications are that Nikon is still catching up -- even though they are ahead in other areas, like buffer storage. The pros say that Canon has better "glass". Which reminds me that I'll have to get up to speed on all the 1337 ph0t0graphy lingo.
Ahhhh, hobbies...
Over iChat Greg asked me to explain podcasting to him. So here is a snippet of the chat so you can all understand.
Playing around with old photos and sepia filters...
I have some friends who think that Iraq was the right thing to do. A war of necessity, not of choice. A war of principle, not of politics. Along the long and winding road they have cited all the same reasons that Bush cited: WMD, terror links, and of course, freedom -- even holding out on the first two when they became inoperative. Every once in a while I would find an article that I think may break the cognitive dissonance and I crank out an e-mail. It has never worked. It always devolves into Clinton-bashing. In my mind this says that Iraq couldn't have been all that if the best you have is, "oh yeah, Clinton was worse." But such is the hatred for the Big Dog. Now I'm no fan of President Bush and I can barely think of one policy that he has put forth that I agree with, but I'll be damned if I make excuses for the next Democratic president based on my dislike of Bush.
But last night I thought I'd found an article in WaPo that would finally break through. I was just about to fire off the e-mail when I realized that it wouldn't break through and before the end of the day it would be back to Clinton-bashing.
So I passed. I've given up on breaking their cognitive dissonance. Only they will be able to break through, on their own time and with their own ideas. Of course it's entirely possible that they will forever be convinced that Bush is the greatest man that has ever lived, greater than a thousand Trumans and Eisenhowers all wrapped into one. But even Bush knows that history will be the judge of his work in office and I can't imagine it will be kind to him if events play out like they seem to be.
So here is to 2006 and a change of tactics.
I hereby coin the term 'Uzblogistan.' It refers to a repressive blog regime that tortures people with bad writing. Who will be the first blog to claim citizenship in Uzblogistan?
Get Fuzzy had a great punch-line today.
Surreal? Surreal is how even the vomit buckets on Fear Factor have the show's logo on them.
Bucky Cat
I've been checking out the latest beta of Movable Type and it's got some serious polish on it. The interface is much nicer. They have made tons of tiny improvements. Things so small you don't think about them unless they are done wrong. Anyway, I can't wait for the final version.
Don't forget about last time.
ID is not a scientific theory.
That is all.
Juan Cole catches a great breakdown on the whole good news/bad news thing about Iraq from the Reuters Baghdad bureau chief.
"I regard the charge that journalists in Iraq are skewing their reporting and focusing 'too much on bad news' as ill-informed, and a great insult to the Iraqi people. Many of those who criticize Iraq coverage seem to be suggesting that the media should somehow play down or ignore the fact that so many Iraqi civilians are being killed. It's an attitude that implies that Iraqis are not entitled to the level of safety and security enjoyed by people elsewhere in the world. Of course, some progress is being made in Iraq. Many people in Iraq, including U.S. soldiers, are doing their best to rebuild the country and improve security. But taken in isolation, the renovation of a power plant or the opening of a new school are not a story unless placed in the wider context, and the wider context is that reconstruction is proceeding much more slowly than had been expected."
