Stuff you can’t live without
I have a 2006 iMac 20″ Core Duo with the ATI Radeon X1600 GPU. Like so many others, my GPU has started crashing when it gets warm and the problem is becoming progressively worse. The machine is now basically unusable which is a real shame because other than the display freezing, it’s still a perfectly good iMac.
SHALL WILL SHOULD MUST MAY
You see these terms in software requirements documents all the time. There is even an RFC that defines them. Unfortunately, RFC 9119 is poor practical advice.
First, an example, what do these things have in common?
Answer: all of them offer a MP3 audio encoder.
Likewise…
All of them offer an MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) video encoder. The Xvid Solutions encoder is the same as the XviD open-source encoder and often appears in free software. The DivX encoder is proprietary and only appears in DivX Certified software such as the free DivX Converter.
The RIAA won a $222,000 lawsuit against an individual woman in Minnesota who was using a peer-to-peer network. As absurd as that sounds, it didn’t alarm me much until I read more of the details. Apparently, the woman wasn’t found guilty of downloading copyright music. She was guilt of making copyright music available for download.
If you were excited by the iPhone announcement, you may have missed photos of the LG wide-screen smartphone,LG KE850
The Sony w880 also looks promising.
The OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 Smartphone was announced several months ago and will be available in February, 2007.
As I’ve pointed out in previous postings, I’m not a big fan of all-in-one devices. Yes, the iPhone includes a camera, a music player, and PDA functionality. However, the 2 Megapixel camera isn’t likely to replace my 10 Megapixel Pentax, the 8 Gig music player won’t replace my 30 Gig iPod, and iPhone lacks the applications available on the iPaq. I expect my PDA to include Word, Excel, handwriting recognition, DivX Mobile Player, removable memory cards, IRDA, and maybe most importantly, the ability to install 3rd party applications.
Here’s an interesting post from a Microsoft employee called “Zune Sharing explained” http://www.zunester.com/2006/09/zune-sharing-explained.html
I still have a few questions.
This started as a simple task. I wanted to convert some cassette tapes into MP3 files. I have a shiny new iMac that I thought would be perfect for the task. Then I ran into lots of problems.
I used GarageBand to record the audio. I thought I could simply save it as an MP3 file but that would be too simple, wouldn’t it? GarageBand only creates AAC encoded audio in M4A files. Unbelievable! Eventually I got a solution.
binocular222 at experts-exchange.com asked
How do I know the rank of my site? It seems that there’re some tips to make one webpage get high rank in google search where can I have reference?
I use the Google toolbar to find the PageRank of my site. When installed, the toolbar indicates the PageRank of each URL you visit. BTW, “PageRank” is not the same as your search result number. Let’s look at an example… Read the rest of this entry »
Tools, Tools (Ad Nausium) [sic.]
“There are problems with the many-tools-hacked-together approach that adds an odd balance to it.”
Bruce Alderson and I have a common vision. I wish that there was a stable platform for PHP applications that provided all the common stuff like database abstraction, user login and account management. I just want to seamlessly combine the best of MediaWiki, WordPress, Gallery and PHPbb. I don’t want to have 4 different logins and spend weeks trying to make templates for each so that they all look alike. Somehow these Open Source packages need to cleanly separate the functional engine from the application presentation layer. Then I could mix and match them.
Ashlee Vance wrote an anti-subscription rant for The Register
Customers do not, as Napster suggests, pay $10,000 to fill their iPods with 10,000 songs just because the capacity is there. They take their existing music, CDs and MP3s, and put that onto the device first, then later add iTunes songs as they go along.
This is a narrow point of view. OK, Ashlee might have a pile of CDs and the patience to collect over years, but my 14 year old little brother has about a dozen CD’s and the attention span of Rain Man. Now, he could go buy another disk for $14, or he could buy 2 months of Yahoo Music for the same price. What is the better value for his dollar? 10 songs or 1 million songs?
If you ask me, a $60 subscription to Yahoo Music is a much better graduation gift than 4 new CDs. Here little brother, for $240 I will buy you an entire high-school lifetime of music. You can worry about starting a CD collection after you graduate.
Why does everyone think that consumers care about the long-term value of their purchasing dollar? Has anyone seen the national credit card debt statistics? People buy on impulse and worry about the consequences later.
As I said before, looking at my collection of about 300 disks, I could have bought 60 years of Yahoo Music for less! Am I still listening to Cindy Lauper when I’m 75? What was the point of owning all this plastic?
What’s the advantage in paying for all of the tethered music on the planet? That’s pointless gluttony and nothing more.
Well, it’s cheaper than buying 300 disks I like.