12 Nov 2006
From Apple’s Quicktime Pro webpage:
Professional studios around the world spend millions of dollars and man-hours producing commercial entertainment. Please don’t steal their work or in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater [sic]. But, you can find lots of material on the Web that’s legal to cut, copy and remix. Look for the Creative Commons license and add to the world’s culture.
(2) Exaggerated estimate.
What. The.
It’s hard to tell whether they’re mocking the MPAA’s of the world or being serious. In which case, it’s great to see they’re being honest, but, again… what the?
Oh, and I still haven’t bought Quicktime Pro. I went there via their trailers site and saw this line in the footer: “Broken Movie icons? QuickTime 7 is now required to view Trailers- and it’s free.”
Clearly, Quicktime 7 isn’t free if you paid for 6. And, so far as I know, there’s no way to run multiple versions of Quicktime in tandem. So if you want to be able to view new generation content being created, you’re basically locked into a continual upgrade cycle. Which is a load of crap.
Also a load of crap is their Australian pricing for Quicktime Pro, which is $AU44 versus $US29 (about $AU38 at time of writing). The bits are identical. Don’t charge me more. I have foreign exchange transaction fees added to my card if I purchase something in a different currency, but it’s not anything near six dollars (try twenty cents or something ridiculously small). And it doesn’t cost you six dollars more to send an email to Australia instead of to your US customers.
I’m in this bizarre pseudo-closed-source land at the minute and I’m really fearful for the longevity of content sitting where I am now. In terms of relative openness, Apple aren’t looking too crash hot right at the minute…
11 Nov 2006
If everyone were to stop hiring or outsourcing to people that did rubbish work for six months, that should be sufficient for them to either starve, find non-IT-related employment (or at least IT-related employment far enough away that they wouldn’t piss off the rest of us), or become at least slightly proficient.
Assuming that the average IQ of developers is not so dim that, if the Matrix were real, a room full of us would struggle to light an LED, this might even go some way to resolving the gargantuan labour shortages with which the industry is presently faced. Latest is that even Bangladore (or whatever non-Westernised name they are wanting to be known by now, I can’t remember it) are anticipating having only one-third of required workers based on current growth rates within the next year or two.
Incidentally, if anyone knows a decent developer (preferably with a Python background, but that’s not essential…) who would be keen on working for a Christian organisation full time for about three months, pass on their details. I’m not fussed about working from home or not, but ideally they would be based in Sydney and able to come into the CBD once a week or as required. Remuneration commensurate to experience and all the rest of that. Nothing’s finalised yet, but this would be for a start in early January. After the three month period there would be occasional contracted/casual maintenance.
Just putting this out there in case anyone’s looking for work or has heard of someone with the right skills that is. My strong preference is for someone who is aligned with the goals of the project to come on board (it’s a website for enabling Christian youth ministries to use the Internet more effectively… so, Christian applicants who are motivated in the same ways by the same thing)… but if things don’t work out then obviously first preference is someone I know/is recommended over having to do the whole CV-trawling, cold-interviewing trip.
Will post more once I get around to making some decisions (sometime after exams, which finish next Friday, allowing me to catch up on about a month of untouched work!)
09 Nov 2006
Appears to work by dragging down everything a great deal. I presume this is to prevent anything clipping (down is better than up, use system wave and master faders to make it loud again if you must) but don’t really understand how it gauged the best performance point: it levelled volume way too quickly to have indexed levels in the entire library. Maybe it’s a progressive thing, or maybe the data was kept even before the feature was enabled (if, in fact, that is the way this is being performed).
I would be interested to know, because regardless as to how it works exactly, their levelling kind of sucks. I’ll admit I haven’t used a library programme to manage my music for a while, but seem to recall things on Linux being that much more consistent. That was before I tottered off to CD land several months back (long story, involving a missing road case and a messy office… things still aren’t quite back to normal, that’s one of my summer projects), where you’re expected to flip the volume control backwards and forwards with alarming regularity. I don’t know if this problem would be any less prevalent if I didn’t have such a smattered collection of tracks from different genres… one would think that, in the same way all pop is mixed to sound identical, surely it would be mastered in a similarly stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps not.
09 Nov 2006
It has this way of forgetting stupid mistakes that indexed, online things cannot. Or, can, but do not. Or something. You can’t convincingly scrunch up and get rid of a file, but things that make you cringe on a piece of dead tree are far more readily disposed of. Electronically, there’s always this sense of “what if getting rid of this breaks something else that refers to it?” — paper has no concrete chronology, which is wonderful. I never understood people dating their letters, unless they fully anticipate getting the letters of [name] published and/or are trying to pretend that something only arrived late because of the postal service. We place far too much emphasis on intervals at times.
07 Nov 2006
I was on a blog I (used to) run that uses WordPress 2.x today, and noticed the 2.0.5 release announcement.
Opening copy runs like this:
It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.
I skim read it, as I tend to skim-read things on the Internet or when sitting reading with someone (do you do that? reading as a competitive sport? When I’m in those scenarios I read things by making multiple passes over the content and developing what I actually comprehend each time, just so I’ve read it all if they have… stupid, yeah), and on second pass saw “vulnerable” in the first line.
It might have been the “upgrade or get haxx0red” warning at the end of the second sentence (which, incidentally, has an absurd number of clauses in it for product release text) that made my glance at the word “venerable” distort somewhat, or maybe not. Maybe some signs are just a little to close to other signs to be safely used as signifiers in certain contexts. This, I would suggest, is one such context.
(There we go, a little bit of Saussure to brighten up your evenings, if not my day. Death to functional grammar and pseudo-linguistics courses engaged in guerrilla warfare within English departments. We need a Third Force.)