Mike Cohen

Maybe they ARE serious

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Sony will be selling DRM-free tracks through Amazon. Hopefully this means they’ll drop that stupid trading card scheme.

Now that Amazon will sell DRM-free tracks from all major labels, that leaves iTunes as the only significant store still selling DRM-crippled music. I’ve bought a lot less music in iTunes over the last year for that reason. When I want to buy an album, I always check eMusic first, and if it isn’t available I’ll then try Amazon. I’d only buy it in iTunes as a last resort, if I can’t find it elsewhere.

How NOT to sell DRM-free music

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Sony BMG can’t possibly be serious about wanting to sell DRM-free albums. The only explanation for their hare-brained scheme is that they want to be able to say that they’re dropping DRM without actually doing it.

To download one of their DRM-free albums (no individual tracks are avaialble), you need to go to a store, buy a card for a specific album, and then go home and enter the PIN from that card to actually download the album. Not all of their music will be available that way, only a select group of 37 albums.

Of course you could just buy a CD as long as you’re going to the store and rip it when you get home, although the RIAA considers that illegal.

Sharing between NetNewsWire and Google Reader

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I’ve used NetNewsWire for a long time, but I recently started using Google Reader instead for the sharing & suggestion features. Unfortunately the two don’t sync, so switching between them is a bother.

In light of today’s announcement, and because I always found NetNewsWire faster & more convenient than reading news online, I switched back to NNW. I did one last read in Google Reader, and then marked everything read in NNW.

I still want to be able to share items in Google Reader, though, so I came up with a partial work-around.

When I add an item to my clippings in NetNewsWire, it’s shared publicly at NewsGator Online and made avaialble as an RSS feed. I subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and put it in its own folder which I made public. The results can be seen here.

Although Google Reader doesn’t provide a combined feed for all of my friend’s feeds, I can still subscribe to them individually.

Bad news from New Hampshire

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Hillary Clinton is projected to win the New Hampshire primary, although the race is still very close.

I oppose her very strongly, not only because of all the baggage she brings, but for her anti-progressive record.

To really move on, we need to elect someone NOT named Bush or Clinton. Since 1981 there has been someone in the White House, either as President or Vice President named Bush or Clinton. It’s time to throw out the past and look to the future. There’s too much baggage associated with her, and I’m sure the Republicans would just love to have Bill in the white house again.

Aside from that, there’s nothing progressive about her policies. She always goes along with the Republicans on most things. She voted for the war, and she voted for the Patriot Act twice. My biggest objection to Hillary is for her support of Jack Thompson‘s video game censorship campaign.

Pre-Expo Madness

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Macworld Expo starts one week from today, so the anticipation & rumors have reached a fever pitch. Apple’s announcement of new Mac Pro & Xserve models today certainly means they have something much bigger to announce in the keynote.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple will introduce a subnotebook, possibly with a touchscreen.

I’m also pretty sure Apple will officially kill the hard drive based iPod. Flash memory is now available in 64G and larger sizes, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see an iPhone or iPod Touch with 32G or 64G of flash storage.

Other likely announcements: Blu-Ray drives in laptops, iMacs, and Mac Pros; a new much more capable Apple-TV, possibly with Blu-Ray, a web browser, and DVR capability; new displays with built-in iSight; and of course movie rentals in iTunes.

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Yet another reason Canada doesn't suck

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Cringely points out one more thing Canada does right that we got wrong:

My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right.

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as “scrutineers,” are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an “X” with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate’s name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don’t, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?

The 2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada is just over $57 million U.S. dollars, or $1.81 per Canadian citizen. It is extremely hard to get an equivalent per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me, it is a LOT higher. This week, San Francisco held a runoff mayoral election that cost $2.5 million, or $3.27 per citizen of the city. And this was for just one election, not a whole year of them.

We are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for new voting machines. Canada just prints ballots.

(via Daring Fireball)

Trouble with case-sensitive file system

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One of our customers was having a strange installation problem after upgrading their Mac from 10.4 to 10.5. It turns out they reformatted the drive as a case-sensitive file system. During the installation, a utility gets downloaded from the server. The installation process specifies a pathname to execute that utility, which doesn’t match the case of the actual filename.

We’re in good company, though. A lot of applications including Photoshop CS3 won’t install on a case sensitive volume.