Dear CVS,
Why can’t you let me move files without manually editing your repository? This is very upsetting.
Dear Corey,
Why in the hell do you still use CVS? Seriously. It’s the 90’s now. You can move on to something better.
xoxo,
cp
This one’s for all my peoples out at the Los Angeles Startup Weekend:
Thanks to CMM for pointing this one out! It, truly, is amazing.
From The Future of Reading:
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
– Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
VectorMagic is perhaps the coolest web tool I’ve seen in quite some time. It takes raster (bitmap) images and converts them to vector images. (Allowing you to save as either SGV, EPS or PNG.) There are several command line and desktop tools you can use to do this. Illustrator, for example, does a tremendous job of this, but then you have to pay for Illustrator. If all you want is to vectorize one image, VectorMagic is amazing.
Here’s an example:
Original:
Vectorized: (and then re-rasterized, but you get the point.)
The vector version certainly loses detail, but it scales infinitely, whereas you start to see pixels pretty quickly when you make the raster version bigger. Also, I just sort of think that vector images like this look neat.
This fun little tidbit over on Daring Fireball absolutely floored me.
What’s interesting about this is that the single-computer license isn’t enforced in code by the operating system. (Or at least that’s been the case with Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.4.) And, I suspect, most DF readers are aware of this. Which means many readers are doing the right thing simply because they’re honest. I have no idea if this breakdown is representative of the Mac user base as a whole, but if it’s even close, these family packs are a huge success for Apple.
This simply isn’t how things work with for-pay software. Let’s take, for example, my recent experience with Windows. I run XP in a virtual machine for work. I reinstall the VM fairly regularly. If I try to install with a license that I’ve used before, the install gets all fussy and tells me that the license is already running on another computer and I’ll have to call India to get it up and running. (Amusingly, re-activating my XP license is the only time I’ve ever actually been connected to an off-shored call center, or at least the only time I’ve been aware of it.) It’s an amazing pain in the ass, and the only thing that’s saved me is the big stack of XP licenses I traded beer for a few years ago. (Thanks, Pat!) I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do once they run out. (Probably beg IT to install a VPN that works with OS X.)
We have three computers at home, so I had planned on buying a family pack, anyway. (Can you even get multiple retail copies of Windows for less than the same multiple of the single license price?) Knowing that I don’t have to makes me feel a lot better about doing that.
(For all you Canadians out there: Yes, I’m aware that Linux is still free. Thanks.)
So, Amazon has its very own MP3 store now. I’m generally happy with iTunes, but Amazon claims to be cheaper and free of DRM, so I gave it a go.
Finding albums/tracks to buy works pretty well the same way that finding CD’s works on Amazon. If you’re familiar with that, it’s a no brainer.
A considerable bummer is that Amazon doesn’t currently link the reviews of CD’s to their MP3 counterparts. There’s the “Also available in CD Format” link that will give you as much, but that’s a whole lot of clicking to do. Amazon really should make this happen on their own. (They already do for books between hardback/paperback/audio book.)
One thing that did catch my eye was price. Isn’t Amazon claiming to be cheaper than iTMS? Almost $2/track doesn’t exactly strike me as cheaper. A quick trip over to iTunes cleared things up for me.
So, track for track:
Full album: $8.99 on Amazon, $9.99 on iTunes
As iTunes selection is said to be three (or is it six?) times larger than Amazon’s, I’m sure there are examples to be found of things working out the other way around, but this at least explains the rather high price tag on some of the files.
There are handy links to download individual tracks and entire albums. If you’re going to download an entire album, you have to use their downloader application.
The installation is painless enough. You download a disk image file, open it up, double click on the installer and you’re done.
Why it has an installer application as opposed to just dragging the app bundle to the Applications folder is beyond me. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists out there will chalk it up to spyware or similar, but Gruber didn’t find anything immediately amiss after the install, so I’m comfortable enough with it.
When you buy an album, Amazon gives you a “.amz” file that you feed to their downloader. The browser should open it automagically for you in the downloader application. I saved it to the desktop such that I could take this lovely screen shot for you:
One odd thing I noticed is that as soon as you fire up the downloader application, it erases or at least moves the .amz file. Here’s to hoping that it deals with failures or being shut down gracefully. I’d hate to think that you have to finish your download before you stop the app.
The downloader itself is a pretty pedestrian little application. This is probably for the best, though. If all you’re doing is downloading some files, flashy is a bad thing.
A nice touch at the end of the process is that the downloader automatically imports your album in to iTunes. (I’m not sure how this would work for individual tracks. Presumably you’d have to do it yourself.)
So far the process has been pretty simple. Let’s assume away installing the downloader, because you only have to do that once. To download an album on Amazon, you have to do the following:
There are various “are you sure you want to buy this?” steps thrown in, but they can be skipped on subsequent purchases if you want to.
To accomplish the same thing with iTunes, you have to:
And you’re done.
Clearly iTunes is easier, but Amazon is close enough (especially considering that steps 3 and 4 could be condensed in to one step) that the better price and lack of DRM sells me on the service. (I don’t say this lightly, as I spend a lot of time every week making computers behave correctly and would rather not have to put any effort in to doing the same for software that I’m not paid to write.) I think that from now on if I’m going to buy an album online I’ll definitely check to see if Amazon has it before I buy on iTunes.
Oh, one last thing: Somethin’ Else is a great album. The five star rating that it has on both iTunes and Amazon (on the page for the CD) is well deserved.
The most recent Joel on Software is yet another of his oft-linked to industry history/vision of the future bits that again fails to mention the coming Singularity. In it he likens current AJAX applications (using Google’s Gmail as a specific example) to Lotus 1..2..3.. and other DOS standouts doomed by the great leap forward that was Microsoft Windows.
Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.
But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.
[…]
And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.
So what I wonder is this: isn’t this exactly what the GWT is? A relatively feature-rich programming toolkit that compiles down to JavaScript (and eventually pre-compiled JavaScript or whatever, one would imagine), generates code for specific browsers, allows for all the whiz-bang features one could imagine, etc etc.? Is Joel’s only beef that it’s written in that king of the third rate languages Java? If the same thing happened in JavaScript (which is much nicer) would that be OK?
Personally I think Google and the rest of the current purveyors of AJAX are counting on Yegge’s NBL to power the Singularity. But that’s just me.
This is, without question, the best/worst article on copylefted software that I’ve ever read.
“The expectation of most people running a hedge fund is that their programmers are writing 100% original code, and in most cases that’s probably true,” attorney Bert Wells of the law firm Covington & Burling told Lipper HedgeWorld, but adding that under pressure to develop a program and within a given timeframe, they may “borrow portions of freely available software” – without anyone at the firm, including the tech types, aware that open-source played a part. Such disclosure of enhancements could be disastrous to a hedge fund. Attorney David Lerner of the law firm Morrison Cohen said, in a Lipper HedgeWorld interview, that the “saving grace” of the policy is that according to General Public License, the developer “isn’t required…to disclose the source code, it’s permitted to,” so if the customer doesn’t want it shared, it may be able to keep its secret in-house, but it could never be sure that the developer won’t share the enhancements anyway.
Hear that, developers? If you use any open source software, you can go ahead and give your employer’s code away without fear of repercussion. It’s true! There’s nothing they can do about it! (Except fire you and probably press charges.)
I’m sure that when you all got your latest issue of Optics Express you were as taken aback by An Optical Solution For The Traveling Salesman Problem as I was.
We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP–complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non–polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal–to–noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.
So is the “Gedankenexperiment” (”thought experiment”) whether or not it can be done or whether or not people buy in to the premise of the paper? Anybody want to give a go at reading this, not glazing over, and giving an informed $0.02?
Here’s the lead from today’s “Dime daily blog” on Fox Sports:
Last night the Dime crew was up at Rucker Park for something unprecedented and pretty cool: 2K Sports’ motion capture session for NBA 2K8 on the world famous playground court with Andre Iguodala, Gerald Wallace, Rudy BLEEP and 2K8 cover guy Chris Paul. Chris Bosh was also in the house, but he was just there to kick it …
And here’s the same thing once you use the site’s “censor settings” to allow naughty words.
Last night the Dime crew was up at Rucker Park for something unprecedented and pretty cool: 2K Sports’ motion capture session for NBA 2K8 on the world famous playground court with Andre Iguodala, Gerald Wallace, Rudy Gay and 2K8 cover guy Chris Paul. Chris Bosh was also in the house, but he was just there to kick it …
Rudy Gay was one of the best rookies last year. Too bad his name is apparently inappropriate. I wonder if he can get the name on his jersey changed to BLEEP.
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