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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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| Wednesday, July 21, 2004 | |
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P2P net iMesh falls in line with RIAA | The Register: iMesh will now seek to create a P2P environment in which users can share songs legally - and that means paying for them. 'It allows us the opportunity to migrate to a business model that will continue to provide users with the P2P experience that they have come to expect from iMesh,' company COO Ofer Shabtai said in a statement. Hardly a new approach - UK digital music provider Wippit has been doing this for ages, using song identification technology to ensure that the songs its subscribers are sharing are ones it is licensed to allow them to share. Now that's a slant I hadn't heard. Use p2p to sell songs -- decentralize what the iTunes Music Store does, in effect. Interesting idea. I do wonder when the net's going to be a lot of peers running around in a wildly distributed computing environment as we peel away from a server/client set up for the net. posted by ruffin at 7/21/2004 08:53:00 PM |
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This should be where we're headed with DRM: The SunnComm technology used by BMG is anything but bulletproof--simply holding down the computer's Shift key can disarm the protection on PCs--but BMG executives have said the protection is enough to dissuade many casual copiers. Lately there have been a few CD copy protection schemes that have Windows-specific software that'll autoplay when the CD is inserted into a box running Windows. That's a good start. They're, as the quote shows, awfully easy to get around, but why press harder? As I tried to say in this post in comp.software.shareware.authors, there are only three types of people: It seems to me, as I get ready to release my first trialware app, that there are three kinds of potential users out there for trailware. 1.) People that are honest (or at least not up on crack site URLs) that will pay to use your app if they like it. 2.) People that aren't going to pay for your app no matter what happens, but might use it if they can get hold of a license code or cracked version. 3.) People that would pay to use your application if they can't find a cracked version or license number generator, but would use the cracked version if they find it. ... Naturally I'd rather everyone using the app pays -- and the people that use cracked versions should feel HORRIBLY GUILTY (c) 2003 -- but if they were never a source a revenue, it really doesn't matter from a business (if not a moral) standpoint if they used the cracked version or not. What this trivial protection does is make the number in 3.) much smaller through a minimum of effort. Going much further than slapping something easy on top of your content to keep out essentially "lazy/uninformed pirates" is a waste of everyone's time. I think this'll get pretty complicated in the near future as well. iTunes, eg, might start "cracking" the easy to read but slightly protected CDs and, say, rip them only at a very low bit rate -- heck maybe mono-only, etc -- for the lazy. These seemingly ineffective countermeasures are going to be practically very useful. The bottom line is that companies shouldn't discount measures that fall short of 100% protected content. If you keep out 40% of group 3, well, you're doing awfully danged good. If you need all 100% to be profitable, well, you might just need to revisit your business model! posted by ruffin at 7/21/2004 06:02:00 PM |
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| Saturday, July 17, 2004 | |
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I've never been a Solaris junkie, but this quote sums up my limited experience with Sun as well: For years corporate buyers bought from Sun in part because it seemed to know where tech was heading. Now, many believe Sun spent several crucial years with its head in the sand. 'They've always had lots of great things on paper. But when it comes to execution, they're lacking,' says Gary Feierstein, vice-president for information technology at Premier Inc., a San Diego company that manages 1,500 hospitals. posted by ruffin at 7/17/2004 03:38:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, July 14, 2004 | |
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Um, no. 'Used books are to consumer books as Napster was to the music industry,' [Lorraine Shanley, a principal at Market Partners International, a publishing consultant] said. 'The question becomes, 'How does the book industry address its used-book problem?' There aren't any easy answers, especially as no one is breaking any laws here.' And, um, there's the difference. The implication here isn't that Amazon is like Napster as much as book companies would like to create laws that would make Amazon's selling used books as illegal as the original Napster. The parallel is useful still -- if book companies want to compete with online sellers they'll need to change their model, much as the now-legal Napster does. And let's face it, if the publishers didn't score so many big bucks with so many printings in their first edition runs they wouldn't have so much competition from themselves later. It's in the nature of a book to have licenses like we do now. Posession is 9/10ths of ownership here. If we did change laws and licenses, where would it end? You can't sell your car without permission from Ford or Honda or Saab? That's called a lease, and I really don't think you'll be successful with that plan with books. Start charging more for libraries buying books to match some sort of lending license (similar to Blockbuster and videos/DVDs, I believe)? This is ludicrous. What really bothers me here is that people are straining to increase revenue from information by restricting the ability for the information to hit citizen's hands. We are quickly legislating ourselves into a world where you have to pay to learn anything released after about 1930 -- and who knows, perhaps that'll get some new license as well. It drives me mad. If there's one good thing in the world it's inexpensive access to books. This out of control capitalism that stresses cash before people and society is getting out of hand. The beauty of a book today is the ability to get a ton of specialized information into anyone's hand quickly. Want to make millions? Go sell software. Stay away from my books. posted by ruffin at 7/14/2004 08:49:00 AM |
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| Tuesday, July 13, 2004 | |
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Here's a pretty good answer the problem, "Cannot print Visio files to any type of HP printer: Method 2: Embed Visio drawing into other Office 2003 programs like Word, PowerPoint, excel and take a print. I'd been using Word to get around the fact that our HP 2230 hated Visio for some reason, but Excel was much nicer. There, it's quite straightforward to say how many sheets (width & height) to scale to during printing. posted by ruffin at 7/13/2004 04:31:00 PM |
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Not an all time great kludge, but an interesting one... here's how Thunderbird apparently tells the difference between a line that's been quoted in an email and a line that starts with a greater-than (>), at least in plain text: "Truly" quoted lines: >> 67%, I didn't want to mess up any calculations. I'm also ignoring 0% >> totals right now.) Lines with "artificially added greater-thans": >> ... >> Real quickly -- also had a few street type entries I wanted to check up That's right -- a line beginning with a ">" that was typed, not added through pasting a quote, has an extra space at the front when saved in Thunderbird. Hrm. Now that's a kludge -- you have to know to remove it when you send the email out, right? But afaict, Thunderbird doesn't. Lines where you add a ">" by typing it at the start of the line get that extra space on your recipient's side as well. So not a good kludge. ;^) This is actually one of the issues I've been thinking about a fair amount lately -- eventually with any app you have to drop idealogical perfection, right? Is it realistically possible to create "perfect" code in the real-world? Is this, in part, why Comp Sci majors do so little that resembles real-world code in their undergraduate studies? I always want to do things right, with well factored code, interfaces, and generic implementations, but eventually the right solution for some problems has seemed to me to be a documented, well-thought-out kludge. Thunderbird apparently thought kludges are okay -- so much so that their app even seems to mangle some plain text emails to preserve a concept. I don't agree with that, but would like to see an app past undergrad CompSci (and even then I bet in places it's tough to find) that is kludgeless. posted by ruffin at 7/13/2004 09:13:00 AM |
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| Monday, July 12, 2004 | |
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Bullcrap:: 'That fact is, at the time, we had to do what we did,' Kan wrote in an e-mail. 'CDDB was generating so much commercial interest, the original principals were ill-prepared to handle it. Were it not for what we did, CDDB would probably stagnate and die.' posted by ruffin at 7/12/2004 04:41:00 PM |
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Pretty neat extension to Firefox & Moz (I haven't tried 'em yet): Of all the extensions -- little programs that you can add to Mozilla or Firefox to customize or add features to the browsers -- that we didn't mention in the original story, the No. 1 'must have,' according to Wired News readers, is AdBlock, which allows users to filter out unwanted content from websites. posted by ruffin at 7/12/2004 10:03:00 AM |
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| Sunday, July 11, 2004 | |
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Turning on brushed metal look for AWT in Apple Java from the command line -- add this to your java call: -Dapple.awt.brushMetalLook=true Voila. posted by ruffin at 7/11/2004 05:03:00 PM |
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| Thursday, July 08, 2004 | |
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Finding constraints by name in Oracle: SELECT * FROM all_cons_columns WHERE 1=1 and constraint_name = 'SYS_C003548' ORDER BY position; posted by ruffin at 7/08/2004 09:47:00 AM |
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Why doesn't Apple have the iTunes Music Store offer you a link to used/new CDs from Amazon, etc, if they don't have what you're searching for in their library? Seems like there's some quick dough to be made there... posted by ruffin at 7/08/2004 09:22:00 AM |
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| Wednesday, July 07, 2004 | |
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From a poll on java.net: Earliest J2SE version that your next app must still support: 1.02 1.5% (13 Votes) 1.1 3.7% (32 Votes) 1.2 5.7% (49 Votes) 1.3 19.5% (166 Votes) 1.4 55.2% (470 Votes) 1.5 14.2% (121 Votes) Why is that interesting? I come from a bit of a strange perspective, I suppose, as I still like to consider targetting Mac OS 9- (which only gets to 1.1.x) -- heck, I'm working on a 1.1.x app for fun now, doing all the coding in OS 9.2.2. This perspective constantly reminds me how little one can do in 1.2+ that you can't, with a little work, get going in 1.1 pretty danged easily. That nearly 70% of Java coders are shooting for 1.4+ (so that eliminates nearly every Joe User Mac < 10.3) show me two things. Most obvious is that most Java apps are written for boxes where the coders can easily control what jre is there, ie, most apps are likely being deployed on servers. Second is that there's essentially no bump whatsoever (out of nearly 1000 schmoes) for Mac Classic/Microsoft's JVM, which also plays into Java being almost exclusively server-side, in-house/custom hands-on install, jive. A third lesson is probably the most damming about Java coders... I'm not sure this latest and greatest obsession (14+% shooting for 1.5 already, for heaven's sake! 1.5 is in beta!) says much for their coding abilities. To use and depend on the objects Sun is providing with the jdk/j2se/jvm/jre/whatever shows coders don't quite understand the power of object oriented programming. They aren't creating well-engineered core widgets; they're extending the default. This is part of the reason people don't use Swing -- the ability to use a custom layoutmanager means you can do any sort of GUI you'd like quickly and easily. But coders don't see that. Instead they see what layoutmanagers they get out of the box and stop right there. Oh well, no wonder VB does so well (and I admittedly enjoy my VB.NET!). posted by ruffin at 7/07/2004 01:33:00 PM |
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The cartoon's cute and all, but what the heck is Sun doing using Flash to pass out a web-based application? posted by ruffin at 7/07/2004 09:14:00 AM |
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| Tuesday, July 06, 2004 | |
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Oracle/PLSQL: Primary Keys ALTER TABLE table_name add CONSTRAINT constraint_name PRIMARY KEY (column1, column2, ... column_n); posted by ruffin at 7/06/2004 12:42:00 PM |
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Oracle/PLSQL: Primary Keys ALTER TABLE table_name add CONSTRAINT constraint_name PRIMARY KEY (column1, column2, ... column_n); posted by ruffin at 7/06/2004 12:40:00 PM |
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| Friday, July 02, 2004 | |
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This article at The Register was apparently what it took for me to understand why Sun's been talking about open sourcing Java so much recently. [Competition in the cell phone OS market] has left Microsoft exposed on one flank to Java and to carrier dominated technologies such as SavaJe, and on the other to Linux. The situation becomes even graver as Sun shows increasingly strong signs that it will open source Java too, leaving Microsoft - and Symbian too - under growing pressure to adapt their models or be left behind. The clearest indication yet that the Windows giant is feeling the pressure is this week's announcement that it will introduce a measure of open source to the CE variant of its OS, which is targeted at handheld devices and the embedded market and is the basis of Windows Mobile. Now just yesterday I found (and blogged) a good article explaining why I wouldn't open source java. But why it's even being mentioned makes a lot more sense to me after hearing it argued so succinctly. posted by ruffin at 7/02/2004 09:55:00 AM |
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| Thursday, July 01, 2004 | |
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Have you ever written a Console application in VB.NET and wished you could send all those Console.WriteLine's to, say, a file instead? Boy, I sure have. And here's how... it's horribly easy. Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, _ ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click Dim sw As New System.IO.StreamWriter("C:\convertOut.txt") Dim oldOut As System.IO.TextWriter oldOut = Console.Out Console.WriteLine("test1") Console.SetOut(sw) Console.WriteLine("test2") sw.Flush() sw.Close() Console.SetOut(oldOut) Console.WriteLine("test3") End Sub posted by ruffin at 7/01/2004 05:10:00 PM |
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On Sun, Java and Open Source | The Register: "Wall Street really doesn't want Sun around at all in its present shape: it would much rather see a standalone Java company. It's funny that you don't hear them call for Redmond to split Microsoft into a Visual Studio company, and an Office company, especially after Apple has proved that it can do what Microsoft claims will be cost as much as the Apollo space program with only a fraction of the resources." posted by ruffin at 7/01/2004 04:14:00 PM |
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Heard on the radio today that one reason the recent suit claiming the Microsoft antitrust settlement was too lenient didn't "win" was b/c of the recent success of iTunes. My first reaction was that it was obviously ironic (and somewhat disappointing, if accidental) that Apple would have done something that helped Microsoft get out of a tougher penalty. Quickly thereafter, though, I got hit by the reason we [programmers] like programming so much. We really can create something out of nothing. There's very nearly nothing about Windows that stops us from releasing whatever kind of software we want to release, given enough time and ability. Is IE in a relatively unfair place in the system given Windows' desktop OS dominance? Sure. Anything stopping you from writing a better browser anyhow? Absolutely not -- just see the Firefox project at Mozilla.org. And is there any reason you can't write a better, well, app nobody's written yet (like iTunes, essentially, bringing a real music store to your home)? Aboslutely not. MS can't place an idea on the desktop that nobody's even thought of yet. And with these suits, it'll be tough for them to mop up after the fact any more if you hit big enough. If you write something good enough, the people will come. The net and, more importantly, the way people interface with it are changing (see the OS X Tiger previews with the new "Widget" concept -- which are just web pages, it turns out!). As long as Linux and Macintosh keep the price for Windows reasonable, things aren't quite as bad as they might seem. (Not that I think MS isn't in a horribly sweet spot on the desktop and that they shouldn't get pounded where appropriate, but it's no reason not to keep coding.) posted by ruffin at 7/01/2004 09:52:00 AM |
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