Category: Computers/Internet

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You know, when Napster announced its subscription music plan, I never gave it a second look. Not because I assumed it wouldn’t work with my Linux box or Katie’s Mac, but for one simple reason:

No matter how many songs you “buy” on the plan, once your subscription lapses, they’re all gone.

Want to stop paying $15/mo? Say goodbye to your music.

Napster goes out of business? Say goodbye to your music.

On the other hand, suppose I’ve bought a bunch of songs from iTunes at 99¢ each, and I decide I don’t want to buy any more from them? No problem. If the marketplace changes two years from now and Apple decides to abandon the iTunes music store, I can still listen to songs I bought from them.

Amazingly, some people still need this explained to them. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes, “I thought this was obvious, but, judging by my email, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion…” Forget the math, do the logic first!

There is one flaw in Gruber’s logic regarding CDs vs. subscription music: while I expect CDs will be playable over the next decade or two, eventually they will go the way of vinyl records. However, if I were to bet, I’d expect my CD collection will be playable long after Napster To Go has, shall we say, gone.

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Since joining BlogExplosion, I’ve noticed something interesting about surfing it. First, I tend to see many of the same blogs over and over. Second, when I’m actually reading these blogs, by the time I log out all my new credits have been used up by people looking at mine. This leads me to this conclusion:

The only people who see this site through BlogExplosion are the people who are logged in at the same time I am.

If you have a routine where you spend a half hour on BE every evening, or 1 hour every Tuesday, or whatever, chances are the same people are seeing your blog over and over again.

Just to experiment, a few days ago I took 10 minutes late in the day and logged in from work. I don’t think I saw a single familiar blog.

So what’s the answer? Vary your BE routine as much as possible. Don’t assign your spare points when you surf, pick a random time, log in for 1 minute and just assign them. Make a banner and assign points to it the same way. Talk someone into signing up with you as a referrer, and get a share of their points.

Otherwise, you’ll get the same audience every time… and chances are they’re either regular readers by now or they’re tired of seeing you.

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There’s a new anti-IE site on the web: Digital Proof [archive.org]. Rather than tell you why you should switch to browser X, or why you should pick one of browsers XYZ, it just collects links to other people’s articles about why you should switch.

The advantage I can see for this campaign is it can collect a wide variety of perspectives. After all, everyone who chooses to install something other than IE has their own reasons. Some want the security, some want the more modern capabilities for design, some want the better usability, some want to promote marketshare diversity, and so on. No one argument is going to work on everyone.

On the other hand, I suspect the target audience is unlikely to wade through all the articles available, even with a top-5-rated list on the home page.

(via Mezzoblue Dailies)

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Holy crap, ThinkSecret was right about pretty much everything. Apple has just announced a $499 miniature Macintosh. Daring Fireball had suggested the price might be unrealistic, given what happened with the iPod Mini announcement last year (ThinkSecret predicted $100, it turned out to be $250, and the audience was underwhelmed because their expectations were set too high… or low, depending on your point of view.)

The Mac MiniCheck out the photos. I’ve been looking from time to time at what’s available in the small form factor market, but for the most part PCs are still clunkers compared to the G4 Cube (remember that?), and the Mini makes the Cube look gigantic. The specs for the Mac Mini look virtually identical to this generation’s PowerBooks.

I keep having to remind myself I’m specifically looking for a new PC—we’ve got a PowerBook and a G4 tower, and the machine that needs to be replaced is a (non-upgradable) Celeron that dual-boots Fedora Core and Windows Me. Otherwise I’d be seriously tempted.

The iPod Shuffle, on the other hand, is just silly. I think its main effect will be to remind people why they went with the regular iPods in the first place.

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I saw this CNET headline — Microsoft battles piracy with free software — and my first thought was that they were using some GPL’ed/BSD’ed/etc. tool for tracking or some such. No, they’re just giving away free software to people who will let them remotely verify that their OS installation is legit. Which makes perfect sense once you get out of the open-source/Free software (with a capital F) mindset.

In other news, I feel like I’ve spent the entire month of October rebuilding, recovering, restoring, repairing, reinstalling and retrofitting computers.

Strike that. I have spent the entire month doing that. *Sigh*

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I took an odd tech support call at work the other day. Someone called in asking about how quickly she could get a new IP address, because she didn’t want anyone to know where she lived. I tried to explain it was all about the network connection, not the physical location, and no, it wasn’t associated with her email address either, and how are you connected?

It transpired that she wasn’t even one of our customers, and that she wanted us to “block” her IP by putting X’s through everything “like you have on your website.”

Huh?

Well, Continue reading →

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Microsoft responds to Apple’s contention that portable video isn’t a big market:

“Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, ‘Hey, would you like to have your videos there?’ My kids would,” Gates said. “I guess Steve’s kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch ‘Finding Nemo.’ I don’t know who made that, but it’s really a neat movie.”

Yeah, who was that?

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