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About me

My posting summary

1 to 10 of 62

My comments

• Personally, I think the entire music licensing system needs to be completely overhauled. It simply isn't relevant today. I actually tried to investigate licensing a track that I used on a video project and found out that there are a dozen different licenses handled by a dozen different organizations, and no real guidance available to indicate who should be paid what license for what use.
  
  The thing is, such an overhaul is never going to happen because there are a dozen different licensing agencies whose whole business model is geared towards collecting a particular license fee, taking a cut, and distributing it to whichever entity it purports to represent. It's a model that makes the US health insurance system appear to be both simple and inexpensive by comparison. In reply to: "Music publishers: iTunes not paying fair share"

  September 19, 2009

  1 reply

• Interesting. I have a Dell Mini 9, which I bought specifically because I could run Leopard on it, even though its keyboard leaves a lot to be desired...
  
  What surprises me is that I found it easier to type on my Psion Series 3a and Series 3mx than it is to type on the Mini 9. The Psion was a pocket-sized machine with a keyboard about the size of a large pocket calculator. The key is that while the keys on the Psion were *tiny* compared to the Mini 9, they are spaced in such a way that I could actually type on it, while the larger keys on the Mini 9 are flat and not spaced, so I keep hitting two at a time. In reply to: "Uncanny valley of keyboards: Do small keys bother you?"

  July 24, 2009

  1 reply

• I bought a netbook and turned it into a Hackentosh (since Apple doesn't sell a 9" laptop...).
  
  I find that the second button on the trackpad is a royal pain in the you-know-what as I keep hitting the wrong button or hitting both buttons by mistake. I thought Apple's continued reliance on the single button mouse kind of silly until I realized how much better it works on a trackpad. In reply to: "Is Apple behind the laptop curve?"

  May 19, 2009

  0 replies

• The question: "What other sustainable business offers unlimited consumption for a fixed price? You pay according to your use of electricity, phone, water, gas, food..."
  
  The answer: I presently enjoy fixed price/unlimited use subscription periods for my local telephone landline, my DSL internet service, my cellular long distance service, my cable TV service, garbage collection, and my admission to twelve (soon to be 26) different amusement parks. If my lifestyle were different you could probably add in gymnasium or health club, local swimming pool, zoo, museum, symphony orchestra, or any number of other services. It is a common business model whenever the incremental cost of increasing access to any particular customer is relatively low. In reply to: "Time Warner halts metered billing tests"

  April 16, 2009

  0 replies

• (actually replying to jbcahill...)
  So why is it that the CATV providers are the ones who are wanting to cap service? Most of them give their best rates if you bundle the broadband with the CATV service. Why would they necessarily care which of their services you're streaming through their pipe?
  
  Perhaps the bigger issue is that they are running into capacity problems because they want to carry more and more of their VOD CATV service in the same pipe that their customers want to use for everybody else's VOD Internet service? In reply to: "Time Warner faces backlash on broadband caps"

  April 13, 2009

  0 replies

• About the whole "longer lasting" thing...
  
  It isn't about the actual service life of the hardware. If that were the case, then no machine, Mac or Windows, could come close to my trusty Apple IIgs, which ran completely trouble free for 20 years, then I simply had to get it off my desk. It's more about the *useful* life of the machine, and that can be a very subjective touchy-feely kind of thing. I bought my desktop Mac (1 GHz dual G4) and then bought my laptop Mac (1.33 GHz G4 12" PowerBook) a year later. Five years down the line, my laptop is feeling distinctly sluggish and "long in the tooth" and is begging for a replacement (Apple: Where's the firewire port on the MacBook?) while the older, slower desktop machine seems to be just fine. And while both machines are four CPU generations behind Apple's current hardware, both can run Apple's latest OS and most of their software in relative comfort. In fact, running Leopard on a 5-year-old Mac isn't a problem at all, while running Vista on a Windows box that was moderately high-end five years ago can be an exercise in frustration. To me, it's that issue of day-to-day usefulness that is a better gauge of longevity than mechanical durability. In reply to: "Time for an audit of Microsoft's 'Apple Tax'"

  April 9, 2009

  0 replies

• As of QT 7.4, full screen playback is part of the free package. Why it took so long for them to do that I don't know, but at this point you can retire the argument. In reply to: "Is an Apple more form than function?"

  April 5, 2009

  0 replies

• Comparing the two machines, what is the resolution of the screen, of the camera? The Apple has a glass overlay for the screen; does the Dell? What does the Dell feel like when you type on it? What is the battery life? How stiff is the case for the Dell? How hot does it get?
  
  I have an ancient aluminum 12" PowerBook and it has taken quite a beating...and there is no going back to plastic cases! I also have a Dell Mini-9 running Leopard, and while it does run OS X about as well as my laptop, it does have some issues, beginning with its power consumption during sleep. It seems that it lacks Apple's system management hardware, which means it doesn't shut off the CPU during sleep; a day in the briefcase will kill the battery.
  
  I've found that if you do a fair comparison of like hardware, Apple turns out to be price competitive when new. Apple's general failure to update lines with the same frequency as other manufacturers, or to update pricing as the lines age, tends to bring about the largely mythical "Apple tax". In reply to: "Is an Apple more form than function?"

  April 5, 2009

  0 replies

• DRM is ultimately doomed to technical failure. Why? Because the legitimate consumer, by definition, has to have the keys to decrypt the content. That means the decryption means has to be readily available, and that means the odds of the decryption means falling into the hands of someone ready, willing, and able to figure out how to make unintended use of it are approximately 1. In reply to: "SpiralFrog DRM music to play 60 days, then vanish"

  March 20, 2009

  0 replies

• I still can't understand why the content providers are so @%$! protective of content they are giving away for free. Why do they care what computer, OS, software, or monitor I use to watch? And given that there is a piece of wet spaghetti somewhere between their server and my ISP, why won't they let me download the show to watch it, or at least buffer enough of it that I don't have to watch it stutter? In reply to: "Chess match: Hulu blocks Boxee once again"

  March 7, 2009

  0 replies