04.30.03
Posted in Apple at 7:21 pm by Craig
Revolutionary. Short Tower, go long on Apple and Amazon (who surely will implement this soon themselves). I installed iTunes 4, stuck in my .mac username (and after figuring out that I had to use username@mac.com instead of just username), and presto. $0.99 per track if you don’t want the whole album, or $10 for a whole album which is $15-20 at Tower or Amazon to get the physical media. I bought and downloaded The Eminem Show for $10 in less time than it took to subsequently burn it onto a CD-R to listen to in my car on the way home.
Songs are shipped as DRM-controlled AAC, but the DRM is quite lax enough for it all to make sense. I can do everything I reasonably might want to with the media once I’ve downloaded it, and it just sits alongside the rest of my digital music in iTunes. There are one or two restrictions that the AAC files have (can only install on 3 machines at a time, you have to alter a playlist if you want to burn it to CD more than 10 times) but really those are not situations you’ll often encounter, and you can always work around them if you’re really determined (you can burn a CD, then rip it back to MP3 for example). All in all, this is exactly what one needs from electronic music delivery. Not per-month fees, no ridiculous catalog limitations (200,000 track available from all the major labels — and I’m guessing anyone who might want to sign up would be able to). The record labels must be happy too — even at 1/2 the price they charge for an album on physical media, they likely get higher margins with this delivery mechanism, because their distribution costs are close to nil (apart from the presumable cut Apple is taking).
As Jeremy points out in his blog, there’s a bunch of stuff which could be done to extend this with Amazon-like recommendations (and I’m Amazon will be all over that when they roll out their version of this). But the big leap has been lept — convincing the record companies that electronic distribution of their products can and will work, and that it can be done in a way which is beneficial to both consumers and the labels/artists.
Permalink
04.16.03
Posted in General at 1:37 am by Craig
An interesting question raised in
this article, makes me wonder how the concept of becoming jaded might fit into Orwell’s perpetual war concept in 1984. Eventually, even war becomes so over-done that it’s hard to sustain the population’s interest. Is a certain level of attention and interest required in order for the element of control in perpetual war to succeed? Or is that in fact the whole point, to get people to become so jaded an used to war that they ignore anything outrageous you might do?
Permalink
04.15.03
Posted in General at 6:07 pm by Craig
Something about writing checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars this morning has made me wonder about the revolutionary colonies — I can greatly sympathize with a hatred of taxes which finance wars and colonizations of countries where those making the decisions about military expenditures were not elected by those paying the taxes. I feel like I should go dump some tea in a harbor or something; but the FBI would probably arrest me and put me in front of a military tribunal as an illegal tea combatant or something.
I should send a
box of chocolates to my accountant too — I think that’s the least she deserves any time I’m dropping stuff off at her office on April 15th.
Permalink
04.13.03
Posted in Apple at 5:15 pm by Craig
So I’ve been tinkering with Docbook recently. On my mandrake-like linux box, everything works great — I can write to the docbook XML DTD and make output of any kind I want. On OSX though, usink Fink to install all the packages, I could not generate PS or PDF output, though HTML and RTF output worked fine. Problem was a missing tool called
jadetex. So after much searching and digging for instructions, which I wasn’t able to find in much of any kind of complete form, I downloaded the jadetex tarball from SourceForge, untarred, became root, and did a make install. Found somewhere that I needed to create symlinks to tex and pdftex called jadetex and pdfjadetex (ie ln -s /sw/bin/tex /sw/bin/jadetex;ln -s /sw/bin/pdftex /sw/bin/pdfjadetex), then tried running docbook2pdf again — still failed. Error message said it couldn’t find the pdfjadetex.fmt file — even though the output from the make install clearly showed that file being installed somewhere TeX ought to be able to see it. So a lot more digging. Eventually I found the magic nugget: After make install, you have to run “mktexlsr” so that TeX will pick up the newly installed files.
Anyone know why the makefile doesn’t call this automatically? Or why TeX isn’t smart enough to notice that its caches (or whatever that command refreshes) are out of date?
In any case, problem solved! I can now generate PS and PDF from Docbook XML on OSX!
Permalink
