It occurs to me I should post something here. Mollie and I were both on campus at Virginia Tech yesterday during the shootings. We didn't know the extent of things until well after everything was over and we had been sent home. We're all fine, a little shell-shocked, but okay. This is a horrible event. I don't really know what else to say.
Rafe has recently started using the NoScript plugin for Firefox and he points out how different it makes the browsing experience to have Javascript be a per-site optional thing. I've had the same experience. Surfing ad-support sites without NoScript installed can be a miserable experience. With NoScript the web is (mostly) fast, clean, and usable again. I don't really have anything to add to what Rafe already put well, but I just wanted to note how much I agree with his assessment.
The wisdom of Matthew Yglesias: "We must do what it takes to succeed whatever the cost. Always suppressed is the proviso -- whatever the cost to other people."
Nick Carr makes a much-linked-to and persuasive argument that the practical reality of DRM is more about controlling the means of distribution of digital music than it is about preventing copying. The fact is, illegally shared MP3s are available and will continue to be available no matter what the industry does about DRM. That being the case, there are only two realistic ways to sell music online, either some PlaysForSure scheme from Yahoo or Napster or Real, or via the iTunes Music store (okay, Zune is a third option).
But under any of these regimes, the music industry has very little control. But they don't have much of a choice either, since users aren't going to sign up for five or six different services to get the music they want. Since the iPod has more than 70% of the market share, there's almost no way around going that route.
Unless the labels start selling MP3s. Every digital music player will play MP3s. Once you go this route, you can sell the music yourself, and your customers don't have to worry about whether your service is compatible with their players. Buying direct from the label would ensure correct metadata, consistent quality, and universal availability that the pirate networks can't match.
Piracy is going to happen no matter what. That's a matter of enforcement; there's no way to DRM your way out of that. Simultaneously, I think YouTube has shown more clearly than ever that putting up with some level of "infringement" can actually be very very good for your product. In the end, DRM-less media can open up a whole new world of freedom for artists, labels, and consumers alike. Instead of wasting our time and energy on valueless roadblocks, we should be opening the doors to see what the future can do for us.
The wisdom of Jim Henley: "Cripes, it’s worse than even I thought: our government is like the callers to a sports talk radio station."
The wisdom of Kevin Drum: "It's hard to imagine a more disastrous end to a disastrous war. For that reason, I suspect this proposal will be adopted."
The Onion has your definitive guide to this season's newest game consoles. What's the key difference? The Wii senses motion; the PS3 senses fear.
Even if I wasn't excited by the thought of personally playing the games, moments like this, watching my daughter really get into Wii Boxing, are worth the price of the console and then some:
A leaked memo from National Security Council chief Stephen Hadley:
The information he receives is undoubtedly skewed by his small circle of [...] advisers, coloring his actions and interpretation of reality. His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, [...] But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests [he] is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.Turns out, he isn't talking about Bush.
Jim Henley is taking the week off of work to ... blog a whole lot apparently. Anyway, as one of the smartest political bloggers out there, heavy blogging from Mr Henley means tons of good thoughtful reading material for the world.
Jim tackles one of my personal long-time favorite hobbyhorses today in discussing the problem of bringing good, low cost grocery shopping to poor urban neighborhoods. Turns out that both government and major grocery chains are too inflexible and bureaucratic to deal effectively with the complexities of integrating into older, denser neighborhoods. Too often in situations like these, the government's power of eminent domain is abused to force landowners to sell against their will to a developer too lazy to do the hard work of assembling a large plot of land or creatively designing developments around problem properties. The existing smaller stores can't compete on price with the big chain so why would anyone argue that the neighborhood is better off without the use of the government's power to force the turnover of land at favorable prices to the chain? Well, as Jim points out better than I could, if you're going to subsidize someone, why not the people who are already serving the neighborhood?
The wisdom of Mark Lilberman: "when talking to the press, never mention Eskimos and their words for snow."
So I'm playing Twilight Princess and I realize that it's been a really long time since I've beaten a console Zelda game. I played and beat the original Zelda, Zelda II, and A Link to the Past on SNES, but Ocarina of Time came along and I never made it through. I didn't even play Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker's sailing bored me early on; plus focusing on Zelda with a toddler in the house is a lot harder, as it turns out.
I wondered how much story I had missed (not that continuity between games is important in any way), so I checked out the Wikipedia entries for Ocarina and Wind Waker and well, wow. It turns out I never really made it past the introductory quest-for-these-three Xs that you have to pass before the game sets you off on the real find-these-seven other-Xs. In other words, I doubt I played more than 15% of either game.
Thinking back, I never played much more of Metroid Prime 2 or Super Mario Sunshine, and I got further but never finished the original Metroid Prime. Is the last big Nintendo game I completed really Super Mario 64?
Anyway, I don't know if I expect to play through this latest Zelda or not, but score one for games that don't require such time commitment. The Wii's surfeit of minigame-loaded titles is looking awfully nice these days.
The wisdom of Matt Haughey: "So I guess the moral of the story is you should really use those little leash things and I’m a bigger spazz than I thought."
The Wisdom of Jim Henley: "It can be very hard for Hulk to know just whom to smash sometimes."
Rafe pointed out this slick community review site (built with Rails!). What's cool about it is that you can point it to your blog feed and it will import appropriately tagged posts as new reviews, so you don't have to remember one more place to post stuff. I can see that idea catching on fast, even if the site itself doesn't.
Their choice of implementation is interesting though. Just add an empty span tag with a particular class (indicating a postive or negative review) to your post content. Isn't this what RDF is for?
It figures that like the day after I praise Microsoft for Office 2007 being on time, they announce a delay. Oh well. If they keep going down this path, they are going to get torn to shreds in five or ten years when OSX and Ubuntu, with their much more rapid development cycles, hit their tipping points.
If I were still a Windows sysadmin, I'd be all over the newly-re-renamed Windows PowerShell. Basically, it's an attempt to go back to the drawing boards and make administering their server apps from the command line totally, finally realistic. WMI and Automation, which are merely post-GUI tack-ons, can take a back seat. The new GUIs (for example, Exchange 2007's) are merely overlays onto PowerShell scripts. You can even export scripts for the changes you make in the GUI so you can easily automate them next time around. If MS follows through on this one, they're finally going to have an sysadmin interface worth drooling over. But I expect this will be another half-hearted attempt by well-meaning folks that doesn't really take off in such a way as to make it really useful. Oh, and too bad about the syntax.
Microsoft is stumbling all over itself in the desktop OS arena. Not that overpromising and underdelivering on OS technologies is a new phenomenon for MS (Cairo, anyone?), but with Vista, they've reached a new level of self-parody. The core of the problem comes from wanting to share their great plans for the future with the world as soon as they think of them. So barely a year after XP is out, Microsoft is already talking up the great new features of "Longhorn" that are going to revolutionize desktop computing.
Well, whatever good ideas Microsoft had for Vista which remain in the product (basically fast search and 3D accelerated GUI) have already been implemented by Apple, Google, and the Linux community on all three major desktop platforms. The really big ideas for Vista have long since been spun off into other products that run on XP as well (WinFS and WinFX). When Vista finally makes it to production (early 2007 at the soonest), it's going to seem like a lame ape of OS X, and even its vaunted graphics engine will pale in comparison to Novell's free XGL.
Now comes the news that MS is dropping WinFS altogether. Something tells me the reality of an RDBMS filesystem didn't mesh with what executives were looking for, nor did it fit in with Windows' tight coupling to NTFS. Meanwhile the major supposed benefit, speed of searching, turns out to be doable on a plain old filesystem after all, if you aren't relying on the decade-old MS Index Server to do the cataloging, that is.
So what's the lesson? I'm not even sure. Microsoft has shown that with Office 2007, they are able to deliver a major, even revolutionary, upgrade to an existing large product on time and within expectations. Windows is on another scale entirely, though. Maybe it's time to focus more on incremental improvements. If, after five years of development, all Windows users are going to get is a prettier UI and some friendlier control panels, well it's time to take a new approach.
New Google Search Results Format?
This looks like a potentially great improvement to the standard Google search results pages, integrating drop-down expansion of site information as well as search-further-within-this-site functionality. One more way to keep you on Google's site a few seconds longer. Bravo.
Paul Thurrott gives Microsoft what for
MS lover Paul Thurrott rips into Microsoft over the huge disappointment that Vista is turning out to be. Most of the great new features MS was bragging about three years ago have been dropped, and what features are new are either blatant copies of OS X or poorly implemented attempts at improving security. If Vista comes out looking anything like the CTP previews, it's going to be a huge black eye for Microsoft. Don't expect it till mid 2007 at the earliest either, despite what they say.
Windows on your Mac
Apple has announced it will support dual-boot installation of Windows XP on Macs with a new boot manager called Boot Camp. The other day Microsoft announced it would support Linux in Virtual Server. What's the world coming to??
I tend to get ahead of myself. I'll start focusing on some future aspect of a project that seems interesting to me, and I'll obsess over the idea of it, even if it's not something I can tackle at the moment. Meanwhile, the steps I need to be taking next aren't getting done. It happens at work; it happens for home improvement projects; it happens on this site. About a week ago I decided to write an entry about Rails migrations and schemas, and how I hoped to start working them into my projects. But planning the post out in my head, I wasn't satisfied with just a quick glossover. I wanted appropriate links and some thoughtful commentary--why else would I spend the time to post? Of course, gathering those links, organizing the thoughtfulness, and getting it all down promised to require a bit more focus than I could provide among all our moving preparations.
The obvious thing to do would be to drop the idea and write about something else. But every time I thought of posting something I felt this obligation to write the post I had already thought of. And so nothing's been posted for a week. And it's clear to me now why I so often stop writing here. I get wrapped up in a particular idea that will require more work than I'm willing to put in, but I can't get past it. So to loosen the blogblock a bit I've decided to write a big long apologetic metapost pointing out what a flawed individual I am. Maybe that will get me going...