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
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Did you know that if you've purchased one or more songs from an eligible album, you may now be able to buy the rest of the album at a reduced price? You have up to six months after first downloading a song from an eligible album to purchase the remainder of the album.
I'd heard that they were considering something like this, and may have even blogged about how I tended to buy a track or two to try out and then buy CDs I wanted used off of Amazon, and how giving me those tracks back as a $1-2 "discount" off of the album might make me a bigger iTMS customer. I didn't see it happening, though, because overall, they stood to make more money, perhaps, through these dual sales and (most importantly) people buying the whole albums up front to "save dough," than outta schmoes like me.
Well, duh, that's where the six months bit comes in (not to mention the "eligible albums" selective restriction). One key foundation of any good sales technique is something to entice the buyer to act NOW. Poof. Now those $1-2 are a short-term investment in the album, one which I lose if I don't buy later. That's a good reframe.
So for 95% of anybody reading this, duh. For me, pretty bright, though I do wonder about the six-month limitation. Why not more? Less? What's the best time to maximize the cut of the market?
posted by ruffin
at 3/29/2007 04:56:00 PM
Netbeans recently released a vi module for their IDE. Naturally I'll be checking it out to see if I can't slap it into some of my apps. More interesting for most, though, is how Netbeans pitches the benefits of vi...
Combine your vi skills with an IDE like NetBeans and you get a true killer app. Yes, the learning curve for vi is steep. But we are not suggesting you should start learning vi. We are suggesting that developers who already know vi should be enabled to continue using it. Just like developers who are used to Emacs or Eclipse have the option of leveraging their existing knowledge of those keybindings.
Emph mine, of course.
Why not recommend vi? I held out for about a decade, but have a hard time imagining editing html (esp. with embedded php or ASP) without it. Perhaps Emacs rox0rz more, and Netbeans has apparently had those key bindings in there a while, but vi does right well.
Also interesting on that page are the authors' favorite vi commands. Good stuff.
posted by ruffin
at 3/25/2007 11:31:00 AM
To automatically download templates, you need to upgrade your operating system:
Run Microsoft Windows๏ฟฝ 2000 (Service Pack 3) or any later version of Microsoft Windows. Please note that Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME do not meet the requirements for downloading Office Online templates.
posted by ruffin
at 3/21/2007 12:39:00 PM
Mailinator(tm) Blog: The Architecture of Mailinator is a particularly fun read. Looks like the fellow wrote a service that closely mirrors the design approach of most Visual Basic developers I know, but in this case (giving away a free service to anonymous schmoes), he's actually got a reason to take the "Whatever suits me best *is* best," approach.
I particularly like the way that he's got the whole system, email storage and all, sitting in RAM. I am, admittedly, a little surprised it's written in Java, and when he said he'd written his own system, I thought perhaps he'd written his own OS. No such luck, and it apparently remains in Java mostly because that's what Mr. Tyma is most familiar using. (See, we're back to the VB programmer mentality!)
(Btw, apparently by "system" he meant email software, as he rewrote the SMTP software, etc. I'm not real sure why there was ever a POP3 or IMAP side of his house, though, as it's all about web interfaces at mailinator. Seems you simply roll your own to read the files you pull out of the Messages SMTP delivers. I've been wondering how difficult it'd be to write a real OS without stealing any existing code, GNU or no, if you standardized on a mobo, NIC, hard drive, etc. At least for small devices (sans HD, etc), it wouldn't seem all that difficult.)
Anyhow, it's a neat problem to conceive of and an very elegant, in a "clever use of wire and duct tape" sense, solution.
I should admit, I'm partial to elegant wire and duct tape in my hacks myself. Lest that make me sound like a horrible programmer, believe me, I'm awfully strict about the way the code looks, etc, but let's say I've greatly favor using a customized, in-house solution based on pipes, files, or http I/O for inter-app communication than CORBA. You get the idea. Perhaps.
posted by ruffin
at 3/20/2007 01:38:00 PM
You can sync contacts from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and calendars from Outlook, to your iPod (Note: Outlook 2003 or later is required to sync contacts and calendars from Outlook). If you're experiencing difficulty, here are some things to note:
* Outlook 2000 is not supported.
Argh!!!
Can't believe Apple's pushing me to update Office.
posted by ruffin
at 3/14/2007 07:28:00 PM
I think I've talked about this before, but I continue to be surprised by digital EULAs that don't check to ensure you've at least scrolled to the bottom before clicking "Accept." I can't imagine there's any way those should hold up in court. If you're not even doing the equivalent of ensuring there's your reader's initials are on each page, you're not doing your job.
And EULA-offering companies' audit of your reading shouldn't stop there. These are computer programs. They can judge how long you've spent reading each section and have some idea if you've scrolled to the bottom of ten pages of text in less than a second. They could even test you on the contents with randomly selected questions from a test bank and ensure that you've got a good handle on a EULA's content.
Is a post-EULA test over the top? Perhaps. If I'm worried about ensuring people have read my EULA, should I at least have textboxes for initials and a new screen for each page/screen of my license? You'd better believe it.
Courts, please, catch up. You don't even let someone sign a contract without some proof they've been offered the chance to read every page. Don't let software companies erase the page breaks and make you act the fool.
posted by ruffin
at 3/13/2007 12:03:00 PM
I've always wanted to be able to call up my computer through some supra-secret, telephonic back door. Now at least I have a possible blueprint for setting that up.
In other news, the iBook 300 has 288 megs of RAM after swapping chips with my keyboardless iBook 500, which is now back down to 192. With only 3.02 gigs in the hard drive total [sic], the 300 puppy ain't yet ready for X, but at least now I can have Mozilla, OE, Adobe, AIM, Graphic Converter, and another app of my choosing all open at the same time. I'm really moving into the early 2000s now, man.
posted by ruffin
at 3/12/2007 09:37:00 AM
I'm not sure who is going to "win" the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD war to be the next standard for watching shows on everyone's new, high def televisions, but I wonder if, with either this round or one soon after, if it won't be a "both." We've already got serious competition from digital set boxes. I wonder if we'd even have a new disc player war if we hadn't had discs and VHSes before them. If not, I'm suspicious that set tops boxes would be the only choice; there'd just be a good number of them from which to choose.
Still, wouldn't Sony rather sell you two disc players than one? Or wouldn't Sony and Microsoft (one of HD DVD's fans) both like to sell you one? I'm pretty confident game console makers (Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox) are counting on many, many consumers owning more than one. With Nintendo's new Wii, selling someone their second console is all but their main strategy, it'd seem.
If we're not encouraged to buy Blu-ray and HD DVD players this generation, whatever comes next might very well be a both/and rather than either/or proposition.
posted by ruffin
at 3/07/2007 10:02:00 AM
From our good friend, Dvorak via Slashdot (btw, anyone notice /. labelled this "dubiousfacts"? Nice drive-by editorializing, there):
It's no coincidence that these commercials for EV-DO and others for plug-in cell phone network cards cropped up just at the same time the market got hit with a slew of Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi/cell combo phones. Wi-Fi needs to die! These phone companies are going to do everything they can to trash 802.11, especially 802.11n, which may eventually be as fast as 600 megabits per second.
Here's the value proposition. Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky. ...
For these speeds... you pay $50, $60, maybe $70 a month. And for that money, you get to send files from a park bench a couple of times a week or maybe once a month from the airport. Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?
Here's the deal: Roads cost a lot of cash. Somehow, we'll still let the government build them with our tax dollars. They are commercially, militarily, and recreationally useful. So is WiFi. If people are serious about eDemocracy, WiFi (or some sort of unlicensed, unregulated wireless networking standard like 802.11[x] connecting to the Internet) will be made available to as many as is humanly possible.
posted by ruffin
at 3/05/2007 01:00:00 PM
Levy's interview with Gates was only published online, not in Newsweek's print edition. Update: The interview did appear in at least some print editions of Newsweek in Europe, however.๏ฟฝ
Wanted to hang onto the quote, as this is an interesting extreme case of versioned text. I wonder what got dropped from those editions and why?
posted by ruffin
at 3/03/2007 08:07:00 PM
Get mail from other accounts Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other [POP3] email accounts and have them all in Gmail....
This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We're working on making it more available soon. Look for it in the 'Accounts' tab in Settings.
Please, allow us to perform non-specific data mining on your lives, reaping every last penny from those personal emails you labor over every day. Now, you don't even need to leave your last mail provider! Give us more information about you, so that we can make more money off of our ads. That's right, for the low, low price of handing over your individualized information, we'll give you an awesome online email handler!!1!.
The problem is that the online email handler really is nice. *sigh*
posted by ruffin
at 3/03/2007 06:16:00 PM
The postings on this site are [usually] my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any employer, past or present, or other entity. About Our Author
