Nicest of the Damned

Why Apple isn't shaking over the Wal-Mart MP3 announcement

www.fool.com | Before You Bite Into That Apple ...

Over at The Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz notes that Wal-Mart is looking to bolster its online music offerings by offering DRM-free MP3s, and for $.94, where Apple's higher-quality MP3 files are $1.29. Munarriz thinks this may finally be the chink in Apple's iPod/iTunes armor that pundits have predicted pretty much since the iPod arrived in 2001.

Unfortunately, according to Kirk Biglione over at MediaLoper.com, the Wal-Mart Music Store is an even more bewildering mess of dark alleys than their brick-and-mortar locations. He spent two hours trying to download a single Elvis Costello MP3, having to upgrade his Windows Media DRM and the Wal-Mart software itself in the process, and being rejected when he tried to connect via a Macintosh or even through Firefox for Windows. Using IE under Windows, he eventually was able to buy a song file.

So, the Wal-Mart store isn't much for now, but Munarriz is absolutely right about one thing -- the days of a monolithic iTunes Music Store are probably coming to a close. The future of music retail looks a lot like its past: There will be dozens of different outlets for music. Where once you could buy 45-rpm singles at the drugstore (for 99¢!), department stores, and music retailers, in the future, you'll be able to buy singles through online retailers, the artist's home page, and through listening stations in brick-and-mortar retailers.

Where Munarriz misses the boat is in suggesting a diversification in music retail is a major hit for Apple:

iPod users have gone through 3 billion downloads on iTunes because iTunes is pretty much the only show in town for iPod-ready downloads. Most of the other digital-music merchants sell tunes in the WMA format, which works on more conventional MP3 players but cannot penetrate the protected iPod fortress.

An MP3 file is universal. It will work on any and all players, the same way a ripped physical CD would. And if a record label makes its tunes available as standalone MP3 files -- the way EMI has for Wal-Mart, Apple, and eventually Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) -- it doesn't matter where you get the track. As more studios begin to back the unshackled MP3 format and more Web retailers begin to sell them, the line will also blur as to who makes your digital-music player, if audio is your bag.

I see estimates of Apple's take per song sold as low as 10¢ and as high as 35¢ (that one ignores distribution costs). If you take the highest possible estimate, the one that ignores Apple's server, bandwidth, and marketing costs, the iTunes store has made Apple a little over $1 billion since it opened in April 2003, or around $250 million/year.

iPod hardware sales continue to grow at more than 20% year over year. Apple sold more than 9.8 million iPods last quarter (more than 10 million if you include iPhones), for sales revenue of $1.57 billion (excluding the iPhone). Last quarter alone. Meanwhile, woot.com is trying to unload overstocked Zunes for $149.99 while the positively archaic 5.5-generation iPod just keeps selling, with, I'll wager, major new iPods arriving before Christmas.

So who's going to be selling the hardware that plays all those unlocked MP3s? For the forseeable future, it's still going to be Apple. The only possible market or technological derail I could see for Apple would be if a transition to video players happens quickly and Apple blows it -- even the people I know with the video iPods don't think of them as great video players. Even so, I don't know anybody who has given up their less-than-ideal iPod in favor of a more capable video player.

Motley Fool-style disclaimer: My wife and I both own Apple stock.

Finally, a candidate we all can get behind

Tired of all the political ads this season? Here's one candidate who tells it like it is:

Josh Jennings for Congress

Flickr zeitgeist

Tip of the cap to Janet at tech ronin, who was the first blogger I saw with the Flickr zeitgeist web app on her front page.

Here, it's set to only my photos, which I hope will encourage me to keep posting new photos. There have been a couple of times it appeared to slow down page loading, so let me know if you see loading problems.

I've added it to TdFBlog, as well.

Panning the flash (iPod)

I'm a big fan of John Gruber's Daring Fireball. He's a knowledgeable Mac user, a terrific writer, and really gets what makes the Mac insanely great. I proudly wear my Daring Fireball t-shirt.

John was also among the first pundits to appreciate the attraction of the iPod mini, which has, of course, been a huge success.

Last week, John ran a post debunking rumors of a flash-based iPod, whose intended appeal he says he just can't understand.

Gruber complains that people advocating a flash iPod are proceeding from the mistaken impression that there are two kinds of music players, flash and hard-drive. Both, he argues, are “implementation details,” unimportant next to essentials like the user interface.

That much I agree with, but Gruber's argument against two kinds of music players essentially boils down to an argument for only one kind of music player: He argues that only the hard drive player has what it takes. There I disagree: different component choices lead to a range of different products, just as my 12-inch PowerBook and G5 are both Macs, but radically different.

Part of the brilliance of the iPod is the way it overcomes compromises that crippled previous hard drive players. The scrollwheel/clickwheel took what had been 5 or 6 different controls and combined them into one intuitive package. Another innovation: the iPod doesn't actually play your music off the hard drive; it would exhaust your battery in no time and skip like crazy, so Apple periodically spins up the drive, grabs a bunch of music, and loads it onto ... some flash memory, from which your music is played.

John looks at three different angles he think Apple could take with a flash iPod: “iPod cheapy,” “iPod tiny,” and “iPod sport.” None of them warrant a second look, he says.

Cheapy: John says Apple can work their way down in price point by dropping prices on the mini and offering larger capacity drives at the current price point. But Apple's in an enviable position with both lines of iPod, selling all they can make. There's really no reason to lower prices on either line until demand at the current prices abates, so Apple has maintained (even raised) their price points over three years and kept the value up by raising capacity on iPod drives. Why sell a $199 iPod mini with a 2-gig drive when there's someone in line waiting for a 4-gig mini at $249?

On the other hand, Apple has to know there are millions of sales out there for the right player at the right capacity at a lower price. And most people would pay more for an iPod-brand player than your generic Coby. The Mac Observer posted some music player market share data last month showing that sales of hard drive and flash-based players are both growing, but that flash players are growing faster, with no single manufacturer taking more than 20 percent of that market. Smells like an opportunity. By introducing a flash player as a third product line, Apple can hold the line on pricing and margins on the existing models while opening up a new market, and introduce Apple products to a wider variety of people than ever before.

Also note that retail prices for flash (so presumably wholesale prices) appear to be dropping faster than prices for small hard drives, probably because there are many other consumer uses for flash memory (cameras, phones, PDAs) and very few for tiny hard drives.

Tiny: John says there's no utility to a player smaller than an iPod mini: the screen wouldn't show enough text, and the clickwheel is the perfect control mechanism. The rumored flash iPod over at MacMind takes an interesting approach here: no display at all and a minimal clickwheel.

I can actually remember the bad old days of a 64-meg Rio 500 (second from left, above), and what I remember most is how often I had the damn thing hooked up to my computer, since I had to swap music onto it pretty frequently, and it was USB 1.1, so it took a long time to load (small AND slow -- such a deal!). This design makes that an advantage: FireWire takes care of the download speeds, and iTunes can dynamically handle the rest, with smart playlists. Why not manage your music on your computer's big screen, and only use the player to listen? Bang -- there's the cost of a display saved, and the price point lowered.

Another advantage is that you don't have to power the screen, so you can have a smaller, lighter battery or longer battery life, and a smaller package. Add in the power and form-factor savings of ditching the hard drive, and you can build a seriously tiny package. Sony used to sell an MP3 player in a pen.

And perhaps there's an optional display, letting Apple tout the low entry price, but selling most of them with the optional display at a higher price.

But nobody has built an MP3 player without a screen, I've seen people argue. That's sort of true, but Apple partner Audible.com worked with IDEO to build an award-winning audiobook player, based on flash memory, that worked great without a screen (at right and above, far left), and had an FM transmitter (a la iTrip) on board, to boot. The Audible MobilePlayer used audio cues for user feedback, and held hours of spoken-word content in its 4 megabytes (!) of storage, circa 1998. Flash memory was pretty expensive then.

Sport: I honestly don't get John's argument here:

One other difference between flash-memory and hard-drive based players is that because it’s a solid state technology (i.e. no moving parts), flash-memory players are skip resistant and less prone to break if dropped. Thus, a flash-memory iPod might conceivably be targeted as a workout companion. Lower weight would also be a plus in this market. But if this is the case, I see even less reason to expect that such models would cost less than existing models.

He seems to admit the flash player has advantages here, but can't see a reason to charge less for it just because you can manufacture it for less, since this isn't the “iPod cheapy.”

The shortsighted thing about Gruber's post is that he's thinking one-dimensionally times three: either cheaper, or smaller, or more rugged. Any flash iPod will improve in all three dimensions: it will be the “iPod cheapy tiny sport,” not just one of the above.

A flash iPod that was $99, smaller, and tougher than the existing models would be a great gift for 'tweens and teens, a great workout companion (where the iPod classic is a little bulky), and priced for impulse buyers.

Every time Apple has launched a new model of iPod, they've been able to hit a price point at or below retail for the storage itself. The 5-gig drive in the original iPod was about $400 when the iPod was introduced at $400; the Microdrive in the iPod mini was $300 and up when the mini was introduced at $249. Volume wholesale prices mean Apple can build in a profit margin and the other components for less than the difference between wholesale and retail.

On a less expensive player, there's less money in the markup on the storage, so an iPod flash might have more invested in other components than in the memory, but I doubt it. Flash cards at 1 gigabyte are around $90, with 256 meg cards in the $30 range -- at retail. If the MacMind rumor plays out, and Apple sells a 256-meg player at $99, they should be able to maintain very healthy profit margins on the new players.

Will they cannibalize sales of other iPods? Maybe a little, but that's all the more reason for Apple to reinforce how useful the current iPods are for a million things other than playing music, like photos. It might also explain why the flash iPods haven't been released, despite earlier rumors that they would be available for Christmas: Apple may have a specific level of demand for current models, or a specific wholesale price for “iPod classic” components, that would trigger the flash player's introduction.

I thought Republicans were for small government?

cloudy, chance of sun breaks... | Redefining Marriage

Paul is on about the rabid defenders of marriage, and their sudden discovery that marriage is only intended for procreation. Paul suggests the only logical conclusion is the establishment of a learner’s permit for those desiring the marriage penalty, until they prove they can have kids.

The whole question seems so incredibly simple to me: Get government out of the marriage business altogether. The Republicans should be pleased with that; they want government out of emissions controls, the Internet, meat inspections, and business regulation, so why should marriage be any different? Only churches should be able to perform a marriage ceremony. The legal benefits of that ceremony? They should be utterly and completely zero (of course, your friends and family can still give you gifts).

If you want the legal benefits of spousehood, we’ve got a legally binding contract for a civil union or commitment ceremony, fully endorsed and recognized by the federal and state governments. It’s open to two adults of any combination, and really smart chimpanzees (if they have a voting record).

The right-wingers suggest that homosexuals are trying to get special treatment, but that’s 100 percent backwards. The special treatment has been the entwining of government and religious marriage for hundreds of years. With my small modifications, churches can marry or not marry anyone they please. Perhaps it would become a status symbol to have a “private wedding,” as it is to send kids to private school, or maybe the wealthy would have “private weddings” to avoid expensive divorces.

No reason my tax dollars should go to support a religious institution, particularly one that’s apparently so hidebound and exclusive. I mistakenly thought the government’s role in marriage was all about promoting lifelong commitment, building stable families, and encouraging tax revenues (spouses being better able to afford a mortgage).

And yes, Christy and I were married by a magistrate, so my money is where my mouth is on this one.

Inside the iPod mini

iPoding.com | iPod mini Dissection

iPoding.com offers a look at the new iPod mini in pieces, including the tiny, tiny 4-gig MicroDrive from Hitachi (formerly IBM).

One of the developers here bought one Friday night, and is pleased so far. It’s certainly a nice little package, and has the same sort of heft as the original iPod, suggesting that This is a Quality Product.

The buttons aren’t backlit (the display still is). One factor I haven’t seen anyone talk about is the display size: It forces the text to be pretty small, which might be a factor for some buyers.

An insider's view of Bush National Guard controversy

It’s no secret that I would vote for Reagan, Alzheimer's and all, before I would vote for a second term under G.W. Bush. (Historical note: 12-year-old Frank thought G.H.W. Bush was the best candidate in the 1980 race. I was disgusted when Bush refused to run as his own candidate in '88, instead running as Reagan II).

I'm torn as to whether the controversy over G.W. Bush's military service is a legitimate story or just a sideshow, but I'm following the story with some interest. CalPundit, in particular, is covering the story from almost every angle, and Joshua Micah Marshall is keeping up, as well.

But in reading CalPundit, there were a few comments from someone who spent time in the service as a personnel officer for the Air Force Reserve. Jerry at Milblog has posted why he doesn't believe Bush was AWOL and his analysis of Bush's service points for his May '72-May '73 service year.

I think Jerry is going a little easy on Bush, but his perspective based on his background is valuable. If you're following the story, you'll understand it better after you've read his take.

Schoolies go to School of Rock

Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Under eights v middle eights

A writer from the Guardian played a number of classic rock songs (not necessarily Classic Rock songs) for a group of north London six- and seven-year-olds. Among the songs: The Who's Substitute (“He's getting things stuck in his mouth and he can't chew.”), Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the U.K. (“Who's Annie Key?”), Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (“This would definitely win Pop Idol.”), and Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song (“This sounds like Busted.”) .

All of them must eventually be compared to Busted, who are apparently the hot British boy band at the moment.

Greatest crime of our generation?

How I PC'd an Apple G5

My vote goes to the guy who built this web page. Reminiscent of monkey excrement art, this guy ripped the beating heart out of a G5 (a dually, to boot), and popped in a generic Athlon.

That's the moral equivalent of getting a new Porsche, and swapping out the motor for one from an AMC Pacer.

Check out the after photo, to see why we should leave computer design to the professionals.

This is a crime of Bush v. Gore proportions. Update 1/31: The original perpetrator now claims that he did it as a joke on a Mac-using friend, when he acquired a bare G5 case. He received 1300 e-mails within a day or so of the article appearing.

Now I'm a homosexual activist?

Wired News: Gay Marriage Poll Gets Annulled

The American Family Association launched an internet poll to find out Americans' views on gay marriage. Many, many Americans voted, almost 1 million in all. Sixty percent, or around 508,000 said they favor legalizing homosexual marriage, and almost 67,000 favored a " 'civil union' with the full benefits of marriage except for the name.' Taken together, two-thirds of respondents opposed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, which wasn't what the group was looking for.

How to explain the results?

"It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll -- it was forwarded to them -- and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that." — Buddy Smith of the AFA

I voted in the poll, and I did it because I believe the AFA's insular membership doesn't represent the world at large very well. You could, of course, argue that the internet itself doesn't, but I think it's more representative than the AFA. I'm neither homosexual, nor particularly activist, though I am an American with a Family, just no Association.

I'm pretty sure I read about the poll at Boing Boing or at cloudy, chance of sun breaks, neither of which strike me as bastions of the Gay Mafia.

Judging by the number of right-wing weblogs, you would assume that if people online were that worked up over gay marriage, they would have taken the time to vote in the poll.

Townshend on Operation Landslide

The Observer | Won't get fooled again...

Pete Townshend is finally talking about his questioning and police caution for viewing child pornography and providing a credit card to a child-porn site.

Pete seems to not even know exactly what he was accused of, or the legal status of child porn in the UK:

He even says at one point: 'I feel that what I did was for the best of intentions, and I know I broke the law legally, but the law was broken when it was retrospectively changed. I wonder whether Blunkett changed the law to gather up the names that had been found by the FBI on the Landslide list. It's quite possible he did.'

This, in the words of John Carr, internet adviser to the children's charity NCH [National Children's Home], is 'the realm of total fantasy'. (Carr is actually a life-long fan of the Who, who tells me he has just bought the band's retrospective box set for his son for Christmas.) Carr points out that the current legal framework governing the viewing of child pornography was established in 1988.

If you have any interest in Townshend and The Who (and I think he's absolutely brilliant), this is a very interesting look into his personality, not just because of the accusations, but because of how he reacts to them.

There's a pretty good biography of Townshend available.

10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more...

kuro5hin.org || Who Killed The Red Baron?

Here's a good example of great web writing. Posted to Kuro5hin, it's a fairly even-handed look at the controversy surrounding the downing of Manfred von Richthofen, World War I's "Red Baron". It's footnoted, carefully reasoned, and supported by the evidence.

It also makes one of my favorite points about history: The only good history is revisionist history. When I was a kid, the official line in books about World War I was that Capt. Roy Brown had shot him down in a dogfight.

Goodbye, Kung-Log; hello, ecto

They called it "ecto" I've occasionally messed around with Adriaan Tijsseling's Kung-Log, but never registered. I started messing around with it again when posting today, and when I went to the Kung-Log home page, I discovered Adriaan is converting the donation-ware Kung-Log into either a shareware or commercial (can't really tell yet) program called "ecto". ecto is apparently in beta for all registered users of Kung-Log.

December 27, 2003 in Apple - Software, Seen browsing, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 02, 2003

BlogShares a victim of the BlogSEC?

BlogShares - Closed Down

I noticed that the Blogshares icon, usually served from their site hasn't been displaying, and quickly discovered:

Dear BlogShares players,

I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be reopening after the current technical difficulties are resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and looks to be for the next few days.

The latest system crash has highlighted to me that deliverying a fun, useful service for the BlogShares community requires an active operator and developer. As most of you are no doubt aware I've been neither for the past couple of months. That has led to a decline of quality service, new features and ultimately income for the site and it looked likely that there wouldn't be enough to pay for next month's hosting.

Update: The Blogshares powers-that-be now say the site is in the process of coming back.

December 2, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Huh huh -- he said 'micturating'

clevescene.com | Feature :Missing!,Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. Last seen in northeast Ohio. Do not approach, By James Renner

James Renner goes in search of reclusive former cartoonist Bill Watterson, hiding out in the Cleveland suburbs, living on royalties. With the return of Opus and the "18-pound hernia giver" collection The Complete Far Side, could Calvin's eight years of going exploring be over?

December 2, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 05, 2003

Embarrassingly high on the 'Wham' lyrics....

November 5, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 14, 2003

New Mac weblog/wiki

There's a terrific new tech weblog/wiki over at Tao of Mac (not to be confused with the breakout 1994 hit book The Tao of Applescript).

It's hosted out of Portugal, and includes commentary on phone tech, using the Mac with Pocket PCs, and other geekery. The site is part weblog and part wiki.

October 14, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 04, 2003

Know your enemy: The neocons

US News / Special: Empire Builders | Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor has what will likely be the definitive web feature on the neoconservative movement. The only thing missing is the trading cards.

Seen at TomPaine.com.

September 4, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 03, 2003

Two slaps and a circle

NWYH Presents: Operation Slaps

Excellent graphics, entertaining game play. Combines the bravado of Rainbow Six or Halo with a silly playground game.

Check it out!

Update: I played Sophie head-to-head, but now I'm terrrified she's going to get in trouble for playing it for real at school.

Seen at Metafilter.

September 3, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2003

Occasionally, Slashdot's still got it....

Slashdot | The Trilogy as One

Apparently, a number of theaters will be showing all three parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in sequence, on my birthday this year.

Leading to the following Slashdot comment:

Re:Dec. 16th Marathons (Score:5, Funny) by Brad Cossette (319687) on Friday August 22, @03:22PM (#6767735)

Can you image the effects of having an entire nerd populace sitting on its backside for 9 straight hours of LOTR?

- Viruses go rampant as sysadmins fail to respond to urgent system messages
� - Patches, code deadlines missed
� - Executives everywhere are paralyzed as their IT depts leave for a whole day and they can't figure out what to do when that Blue Screen with the white letters appears (in case you're reading this: reboot)
� - More importantly, the obesity % of the American populace has a massive spike

-- "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" [Oscar Wilde]

August 22, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2003

Uncut author interviews by Don Swaim

Interesting collection of RealAudio interviews in preparation for Swaim’s CBS Radio column, “Book Beat”.

These are interesting partly because the authors aren’t “on” : Rather than the interview being aired, Swaim would pull quotes here and there, and assemble them with a radio story on the author or book being discussed. As a result, these interviews typically have a chatty and informal feel.

Among the authors:

Douglas Adams

Anthony Burgess

Pat Conroy

Joan Didion

John Irving

Anne Rice

Art Spiegelman

Kurt Vonnegut

June 28, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 06, 2003

Another step toward the iServe

Nvidia Takes Aim At The "Digital Hub". Nvidia will likely begin optimizing its chipsets for managing multiple audio and video streams throughout the home, based upon comments made Tuesday by the company's chief executive officer. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

This is key. By combining hardware hi-res video compositing and special effects, with a multi-stream router-server - Home LANs can move REAL video - and provide MPEG-2 quality video - everywhere. No more shitty quality, "streaming" video! [Marc's Voice]

May 6, 2003 in iServe and home servers, Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2003

Marathon dilemma: how much water is too much?

Interesting story on hyponatremia, a condition where blood sodium drops to a dangerous level, generally because the sufferer has been drinking too much water.

Last year, a 28-year-old died of it during the Boston Marathon, so this year the Red Cross stations will have scales available so runners can monitor their weight throughout the event. Runners going into hyponatremia retain more water than normal, so you'll be able to see a weight gain.

May be a justification for the various sports drinks, which typically have some sodium content. As does a banana.

From [Reuters Health eLine].

April 21, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 18, 2003

Least popular movie of the last 15 years?

The least popular movies of the last fifteen years (thing)@Everything2.com

Number one? Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which made more than half its revenue in its opening weekend.

The article claims that It's Pat brought in $60,812.
Worldwide.

Christy and I were two of the poor suckers who saw Random Hearts on its opening weekend, which accounted for 48% of its total revenue.

Seen at Lockergnome's Bits & Bytes.

April 18, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2003

Buchanan, Dowd, John Paul II, Natalie Maines....

Whose War?/ Print

Back Off, Syria and Iran!

I give the Bush administration credit for their spinning skills. The tone of the coverage has suggested American support for the Iraq invasion, but Pat Buchanan and Maureen Dowd are both against it (and, thank you Michael Moore, the Pope and the Dixie Chicks, as well). I think there's a tendency to conjoin support for the troops with support for the administration, which is just silly.

I have tremendous faith in the military's capabilities to achieve a clearly stated administration objective. I have zero faith in the current administration's ability to choose between peaceful and military alternatives and clearly state an objective.

If it turns out that the military was overruled on the necessary forces to get the administration's job done, we need regime change at home. Nineteen months and counting....

Also:

15 Stories They've Already Bungled

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher (one of the leading magazines for journalists) critiques the fog of war passing for reporting, and notes that 14 times out of 15 so far, the stories have been reported in a way that favors the US/UK/Aussie invasion.

March 31, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 29, 2003

For days you're too lazy to blog...

The Brunching Shuttlecocks | The Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator

I got:

Not that it matters

My mind is like a fog. Basically nothing noteworthy happening today. I've just been sitting around waiting for something to happen. Not much on my mind to speak of. I can't be bothered with anything these days, but shrug.

Current Mood: stagnant

Seen at MetaFilter.

March 29, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 27, 2003

Project Fu

Reforming Project Management

I used to totally disrespect project management as a discipline. I saw it as needless bureaucracy, as paper pushing control freakery. The hard stuff of software is the technology, right?

As I've gotten older, and earned a collection of development bruises, I've changed my tune. In technology, the soft skills are the hardest thing. Getting multiple hotshot programmers to agree to a single standard, creating a timeline that's anything more than a pure guess, and creating a project structure that minimizes the chance of a political logjam are really difficult.

Hal Macomber offers up a project management weblog, that looks at new developments in project management theory. If you're not married to a PM methodology, you'll find plenty of ideas from which you can pick and choose.

March 27, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 17, 2003

Maybe even more dangerous than Richard Perle

CDC | Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)

There's a new illness spreading in East Asia. It's being reported as 'atypical pneumonia', but is officially called severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS.

A number of early cases have led to dozens of hospital workers also developing the syndrome, and doctors have yet to find a successful treatment. The syndrome is probably airborne, so CDC is recommending hospitals take both airborne and contact precautions.

March 17, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 06, 2003

I've never been so proud to be from Ohio

DDN | 14th Amendment possibly snagged in Ohio House

The Ohio state senate finally got around to ratifying the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of race. They did so unanimously, with every senator as a co-sponsor.

Unfortunately, the Ohio state House of Representatives isn't quite ready to leap into the late 19th Century just yet.

State Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, is proposing to instead proclaim: "Resolved that the General Assembly rejects those judicial interpretations of the 14th Amendment that unreasonably restrict state governments from promoting the free exercise of religion, defending the sanctity of unborn life and ensuring the equitable distribution of education dollars to aid students enrolled in schools sponsored by religious institutions."

Seen at How Appealing.

March 6, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2003

Fast, reliable, supportable: Choose three

Shipping the prototype

An article from InfoWorld by Jon Udell advancing the idea that "scripting languages" are so much more than that.

I've long been of the opinion that there's a general rule at work here: You should always develop a new tool in the highest-level environment you can. Sometimes you'll wind up with a prototype, but sometimes you'll surprise yourself, and suddenly, you've got a system.

The other advantage of starting with higher-level tools is that they tend to map more directly to the problem you're trying to solve. Your Python class proxies your product or data. A Filemaker record represents an invoice. If you're doing the project in C, you're spending much of your time building lower-level structures that don't directly represent anything your customers would recognize.

If you hit a bottleneck, you have a few choices: move to faster hardware, implement the bottleneck in a lower-level language, or migrate the whole shebang to a lower-level language. Even if the worst happens and you have to migrate, you understand your problem a lot better because of the earlier coding in the higher-level environment.

February 16, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 29, 2003

Takes a lot of properties to lose $99 billion

MediaChannel.org -- Media Ownership 2001

A good chart I saw linked from BoingBoing.

January 29, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 26, 2003

Rolling Stone's 'Bug Chasers' Story

RollingStone.com - Bug Chasers : The men who long to be HIV+

Replies: Andrew Sullivan - Sex- and death-crazed gays play viral Russian Roulette!
Newsweek: Is Rolling Stone's HIV Story Wildly Exaggerated?

Full disclosure: I noticed this story because I wondered if the author, Gregory A. Freeman, who I saw mentioned on Romanesko's MediaNews, was the Greg Freeman I worked with on my college newspaper. It is.

Two of Freeman's sources say they were misquoted, as detailed in the Newsweek story above.

Sullivan rightly takes Freeman to task for the thinness of his sources (he talks to 2 purported bug chasers, and no "gift-givers") and the lack of studies backing up this potentially disturbing phenomenon. It's absolutely true that Freeman is guilty of major innumeracy when he applies a fuzzy number to a wrong statistic to suggest that 10,000 people a year are infecting themselves.

But I thought it was interesting that neither the Newsweek nor the Andrew Sullivan story addresses this paragraph:

One standout in public-health circles is the Miami-Dade County Health Department in Florida, which is taking steps specifically to address bug chasing. Evelyn Ullah, director of its office of HIV/AIDS, readily admits that bug chasing is "a definite problem" in the Miami area, having become more common and more visible in the past few years. Miami health officials regularly monitor Internet sites for bug chasing in their community, and they keep track of "conversion parties," in which the goal is to have positive men infect negative men. The health department also is launching new outreach efforts that include going online to chat with bug chasers and others pursuing risky sex.

January 26, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (4)

January 13, 2003

How much of a tax cut are you getting?

Spinsanity - Taxing the public's trust: The Bush administration is stretching the truth again to sell its latest tax cut

January 13, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What is a novelty record?

Hit Novelty Records

Part of our trivia team went to Tune Trivia last week, and were in the running until the final question: "A Sesame Street character had a top 20 hit back in the '70s. Who was the character and what was the song?"

I feel qualified as a Sesame Street expert, having owned many Sesame Streeet LPs (back then, we didn't have VCRs, kids) and learned to read one sponsor at a time. Still, I missed the trivia question, whose answer is on the page linked above....

I was a little surprised by how liberal the linked author was in his definition of "novelty," including the McCartneys' "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" alongside the Chipmunks, Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," and others. So what, exactly, makes a song a novelty? Why aren' they around anymore?

January 13, 2003 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 18, 2002

Santa roasting in a fiery sleigh

Plastic: Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus, But He's Dead

"...what amuses me more is that here you have a guy who is a prominent member of a religion based on such un-scientific stories as virgin births, walking on water and coming back from the dead lecturing children on the myth of Father Christmas."

Seems an Anglican reverend used physics to debunk Santa to a group of children as young as 5.

Sophie still believes (at 7), but we hear some of her classmates don't.

December 18, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2002

Wired for Dummies to debut

Boston Globe Online / Business / Magazine aims to be everyday guide to high-tech life

''Wired's become ultra-boring,'' said Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist with New Enterprise Associates who sits on DigiT's advisory board. ''Everyone else is going out of business or playing it safe, so there's probably room in the tech publishing industry.''

Davis says he wants to use celebrity features to help DigiT do what Maxim did for the then-sedate men's magazine niche. Though it features an interview with the pianist Herbie Hancock about his use of technology, the first issue is heavy on product reviews and techno-speak, but Davis says the magazine has stories in the works on ways such stars as Sarah Jessica Parker use high-tech devices.

This strikes me as exactly what Wired has become -- they did a story on smart homes that was just glowing about the star of TV's "JAG".

The story suggests that "DigiT" will eschew the digerati for the hoi polloi, which leaves the question, "Where is the tech magazine for the digerati?"

With the death of Byte and the rise of dozens of specialist magazines on specific languages and products, the MIT Technology Review is about it...

December 16, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Record industry financials

MacWizards Music -- Special Features

Interesting post at MacWizards Music on the record labels' continuing claim that their slight decrease in sales is the result of piracy. The author carefully considers the public data available, and demonstrates that label revenue per release is actually up, and that the decrease in volume can be explained by fewer new releases and the death (thankfully) of the CD single.

The author goes on to suggest a new model for independent labels, one he thinks is economically feasible and friendly to bands.

Of course, he overlooks one small expense: promotion. The inbred promotional cesspool of radio stations and labels is all about one hand washing the other. Without millions of dollars in promotions, bands don't get radio airplay, and people don't buy records.

December 16, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 09, 2002

Depressing Monday morning read

White-Collar Layoffs, Downsized Dreams

December 9, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 08, 2002

Right-wing media

The Rightward Press (washingtonpost.com)

Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne advances a theory I've believed for a long time: rather than the liberal bias cited by dittoheads and the NRA, the press has actually become fairly conservative.

I remember a study in the Columbia Journalism Review from the late '80s which actually reviewed the tilt of papers' institutional editorials (the unsigned opinions that represent the opinion of the paper, more specifically the editorial board).

The study found that on local issues, papers were all over the map, but leaning liberal. On presidential endorsements and other national issues, they tended to lean right, as the corporate parents (families that owned the paper, ownership syndicates, whatever) nudged the opinions in their preferred direction.

December 8, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2002

Friday uncommentary: Links without logorrhea

TheStar.com - Bush anything but moronic, according to author

Shellshocking | Things you can only say at Thanksgiving

November 29, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 26, 2002

Not that there's anything wrong with that

WSJ.com - If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight

What if you fit in a demographic segment to which you don't really belong? If you're a TiVo user, you may wind up with every program with gay themes. If you're an Amazon customer, you may (like me) get books for preadolescent girls based on your gift-buying habits. Amazon got around this by letting you uncheck a "Use this item for recommendations" box.

Seen at What Do I Know?.

November 26, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Tuesday uncommentary: Links without logorrhea

Cantenna; What is a Cantenna?

Sophisticated Windows app helps Bush run country
Both seen at BoingBoing.

nytimes.com | 1970's Computing Pioneer Alan Kay Joins Hewlett-Packard

MSNBC |AOL may get content from Time Inc.: Some sites could be transferred to AOL's proprietary service

PCWorld.com | Comdex-Goers Size Up Budget PDAs

November 26, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 22, 2002

Ah, Andy Capp, that lovable wife-beating drunk

Comictastic

Comictastic is a new application that downloads up to 154 different comic strips from the web and newspaper syndicates. You can limit the downloading by subscribing to particular strips, but there doesn't appear to be a way to tell which strips you've already read for the day.

Still, a great (OS X only) diversion for a lazy Friday afternoon.

Seen at Forwarding Address: OS X.

November 22, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 20, 2002

Whatever became of the world's greatest chessplayer?

The Atlantic | December 2002 | Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame | Chun

The Atlantic with a long article on whatever happened to Bobby Fischer. It's not a pretty story.

Seen at Plastic.

November 20, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Music labels growing a clue?

All the Music, All the Time

Universal Music has announced its intent to sell music over the internet at 99�/song or $9.99/album. Customers can (says Universal) burn the tracks to CD or transfer them to "compatible players".

My first reaction is that this is the right price point. My second reaction is to wait and see what sort of DRM comes with that; Universal says their downloads will be compatible with Windows Media Player and LiquidAudio, which both have DRM baked in.

November 20, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2002

Match the keyword, win a job

Which technical skills are in demand?

Keith Barrett did some interesting data mining on several job search boards, and found that SQL is the single most common hit among tech jobs. I guess that makes sense, because it's a) a very widespread standard, and b) used in a lot of product names -- SQL Server, PostGreSQL, MySQL, etc. On the other hand, Oracle comes in close behind on either service. I found the relative strength of Unix a little strange, because there seem to be more Microsoft-centric jobs listed (at least here in Atlanta) than Unix/Linux. Maybe they just bother me more, so I notice them more.

November 19, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

There's that intellectual commons again

International Children's Digital Library

Officially kicking off tomorrow, the International Children's Digital Library features a library of children's literature, presented through a Java-based e-book reader. The result is very true to the book from which they're drawing, and all the books are in the public domain.

Seen at Wired News.

November 19, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Cringely on Everquest cheat

I, Cringely: The Pulpit | Get a Life (Which One?)

Interesting Cringely column on the ant at the gigantic picnic that is Sony's Everquest, a massively multiplayer (60-80,000 concurrent players) game that generates $100 million of annual revenue.

Some developers who play Everquest got together and developed a passive cheat program called ShowEQ. ShowEQ runs on a second machine (Linux only even though EQ itself is a Windows game) on your LAN, and never interacts directly with your game. Instead, it sniffs the network packets coming from Sony's servers, and watches them for game data that the engine needs but doesn't show to the player.

By doing so, ShowEQ can warn the player of impending danger, generate a large-scale map of the game world, and help keep a player alive. It also violates Sony's end-user license agreement (EULA), and has therefore kicked off a bit of an arms race between Sony and ShowEQ's developers.

November 19, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 18, 2002

Segway now at Amazon

Amazon.com: Electronics: Segway Human Transporter

Amazon will take your $495 deposit on a Segway starting this week. Delivery will follow between March 1 and July 31 of next year. If you were thinking of buying me one, I would rather have one of these, and you may feel free to spend the extra $1500 on a nice vacation.

If you're seriously thinking about buying a Segway, please post, explaining why. Also, please buy yours through the link above, so Amazon can share the love.

November 18, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 13, 2002

L33t G00g13 1i|\|K

PR3F3R3N(3Z

A link in the tradition of RedHat's internationalized installer, which originally installed in "redneck".

November 13, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Big win for Zope

Austrian Government Deploys Zope, CMF in Portal to Public Services

The Austrian government has introduced a new portal site (for some reason, it's in German) that uses Zope's Content Management Framework to manage submissions and updates by governmental agencies and institutions. The site was developed by a Viennese company in 3 months.

November 13, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mad parodies 'The Onion'

Untitled Document

Certainly The Onion is ripe for parody.

Seen (and discussed here) at Metafilter.

November 13, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 08, 2002

Wired's ad slump ending

NY Daily News - Business - Paul Colford's Hot Copy | Wired for the Future

Says here that Wired's December issue is 224 pages, the largest since April 2001. Guaranteed circulation is also up, to 500,000 copies.

"We've picked up a lot of electronics advertising -- TVs and DVDs -- so that our consumer lifestyle ads have grown to about 65% of what we carry," publisher Drew Schutte said.

This confirms my suspicion, that Wired is slowly becoming a consumer lifestyle magazine. So far, they seem to have one or two thoughtful pieces an issue that keep me a subscriber, but the trend appears to be toward the mass market and away from what the quoted article calls the "digiterati" (more commonly the "digerati").

Seen at Romanesko's MediaNews.

November 8, 2002 in Seen browsing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 07, 2002

Donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk

The Cowbell Project

A site dedicated to that underappreciated rock standby, the cowbell.

Includes a searchable database of tunes that feature th