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Technology

New printer

On the advice of two cow-orkers, who coincidentally had the same printer, I purchased a Canon PIXMA iP6000D today. (Canon has a crappy website, btw).

I, however, forgot to see if it has Linux drivers available. (It doesn’t).

It’s for the wife more than me, as she needed a color printer, and the sample 4×6 photo I saw at the office was good. I’ve printed out 8-10 4×6 photo’s after hooking it up, and it’s phenomenal. It’s amazing how far the technology has come. I printed off a bunch to hang in my cube at work. I’m quite interested in seeing how an 8×10 looks.

I’ve hooked it up to Kelly’s computer, and shared it over the network so I could print from my MCPC. I have a wireless Netgear print server around here somewhere, I’ll have to give that a go.

I’m annoyed about the Linux thing though. Now I have to transfer my pictures from my main box to my MCPC to print. But the printer does have a 7-in-1 card reader, so I can always just stick the memory card in if I want, though it looks like I’d have to press a bunch of buttons on the printer which doesn’t look the most user friendly way to do it. Ah well.

EFF Blog-a-thon

The EFF, in celebration of their 15th anniversary, is sponsoring a Blog-a-thon.

I can’t say it any better than they did:

We want to hear about your “click moment” — the very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights — whether it was blogging about an issue you care about, participating in a demonstration, writing your representatives, or getting involved with EFF. As a thank you, we’ve enlisted an independent panel of judges to choose from among your posts for “Most Inspirational,” “Most Humorous,” and “Best Overall.” At the end of the Blog-a-thon, we’ll announce the names of the three bloggers with the best posts on our website and in our weekly newsletter, EFFector. We’ll also publish the three best posts on our site and send the authors a blogging “kit” as an extra thank you: an EFF bloggers’ rights T-shirt, special EFF-branded blogger pajama pants, a pound of coffee, and a pair of fuzzy slippers.

I’ve been thinking about my story for the last few days since I first came across this. It will definitely be up by Aug. 2nd.

Everybody Loves Ludwig

Via Slashdot, comes a story at the Guardian that the BBC’s free downloads of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s symphonies have become the most popular songs ever legally downloaded.

Amazing:

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

What does this teach? Free music works. And Classical has proved it – the music industry is amazed by it. And scared:

Not everyone was so positive. Some from the recording industry expressed concerns that the BBC was setting itself up as unfair competition in the recording market.

Mr Cosgrove said: “I would be worried if the BBC repeated the experiment. We would take an extremely dim view if it happened repeatedly.” But, he added: “It’s caused quite a bit of controversy – but it has also provided us with an amazing piece of free market research. I don’t think anyone had any idea in their wildest dreams that there would be this level of response. Yes, the downloads were free – but if charged at a commercial rate that would have been a huge amount of revenue.”

You know what music industry? Screw you. This music is in the public domain, and you haven’t served your market for offering classical music downloads as the article says. Once again, your arrogance has failed you.

Kudo’s to the BBC – They put on the concert, broadcast, and distributed it. And consumers listened and downloaded and the BBC gained customers.

And I was one of them, I downlaoded it.

Nice Touch

I installed a Netgear XE102 powerline to wireless adapter this morning to see if I could get my X-Box a better wireless signal.

Installation was a snap – I’m very imperssed how far powerline has come. Plug the powerline adapter into the wall, plug an ethernet cable into the same adapter in my den and into a switch. In my living room, I then plug in another adapter, and voila, instant wireless range extender. No setup, just works. And my X-Box went from poor to good signal quality (I’ll talk about my X-Box Media Center Extender experience in another post later).

Tied for the best experience with the installation, was the bright yellow business card I found in the Netgear box. With a big Netgear logo at the top, there is a paragraph of information underneath it that informs you that software used in building the product uses the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License. It also gives you a link to download the sourcecode on Netgear.com. (Ironic that a source code link directs you to an ASP page).

Bravo Netgear! Bravo for calling out that you use open source in a document external to the manual or just in a website like some of your competitors.

EFF Suprise

I was surprised in the mail about a week and a half ago, when out of the blue I received:

eff-sticker

I had re-upped my membership with the EFF in May, like I have for the last few years, and I was delighted to receive the bumper sticker, especially as I wasn’t expecting it. It was a nice touch, as was the accompanying letter.

Once I get this basement finished (someday), I’m going to have Kelly build me a shadow box to put that in, along with the silver membership sticker and letter I received when I first joined. It’s probably best to frame it, as I’m looking to sell my car in the next year or so.

Misc. Stuff

I’m back from California, and getting caught up on misc. stuff.

I’ve updated the theme to K2 Alpha 3, added a new Flickr badge, and still don’t care that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Go get Firefox already.

I mentioned the Burn It Club a while back. The summer Burn It session is now on if any of my three readers want to do it with me. I have to say I’m struggling with the theme, but I really want to participate.

I have a ton of stuff do this weekend, more as my muse wills later.

The Truth Behind Apple's Switch

Ars Technica does a deep dive into the real truth behind Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel.

Focusing on how Apple has shot itself in the foot in regards to it’s relationship with IBM, and what Intel stands to gain in the iPod arena, it covers some things I hadn’t thought of until now.

One of the major factors in the switch was something that’s often been discussed here at Ars and elsewhere: Apple’s mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers.

And the iPod:

For the real reason behind the switch, you have to look to the fact that it’s the iPod and iTMS—not the Mac—that are now driving Apple’s revenues and stock price. As I stated in my previous article on the switch, Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel’s famous volume discounts on the Pentium (with its attendant feature-rich chipsets) and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per Watt, of the Mac.

It’s critical to understanding the switch that you not underestimate the importance of Intel’s XScale to Apple’s decision to leave IBM. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. So because Apple is going to become an all-Intel shop like Dell, with Intel providing the processors that power both the Mac and the iPod, Apple will get the same kinds of steep volume discounts across its entire product line that keep Dell from even glancing AMD’s way.

Silwenae.com

Yes, I know silwenae.com is down.

I received an email from my hosting company that silwenae.com executed a denial of service attack approaching 100 Mb/s this morning resulting in the hosting company shutting my site down.

This is the second time my site has been exploited in the last 60 days. I’m starting to lose my patience.

I’m waiting for the hosting company to respond, and hopefuly re-activate my site.

More blog programming

I’m playing with the newest release of the Kubrick theme, K2, which is in an early alpha.

It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer correctly on Windows XP (the right hand sidebar is off significantly), but I really don’t care anymore. I’m sick of tinkering with themes because IE doesn’t render CSS properly.

If you are still using IE (and why are you?) please switch to Mozilla’s Firefox.

I’m going to leave the default colors up for now, maybe tinker with the sidebar, and when it’s final, I’ll apply a black style / CSS (maybe from the old theme by neuro).

Behind the scenes of a MMO

Via Slashdot:

Plaguelands has a summary up of the recent MMO roundtable hosted by IBM. Game Developers participating included Geoff Heath, CEO, NCsoft Europe & Steven Reid, NCsoft Europe; Raph Koster, Sony; and Patty Fry, Global Executive, Online Games & DCC.

We’ll ignore the others and focus on some very, very interesting things Mr. Koster mentioned, I highly recommend you jump the link and just read his section.

A bit on pathfinding:

On the tech aspect, something I didn’t know Koster mentions is that 40% of the cpu processing is utilized on pathfinding. Yes, fuckin’ pathfinding. A fuckin’ decade, and almost half of the potential processing powers developers are allocated is used to fuckin’ pathfinding. And you know what? Pathfinding is a joke, it could use a lot of work.

And databases:

Koster also delves into some details about mmos and their databases. The runtime database and the static game database and explaining their differences and how and what needs to be done so developers will have the hardware that allows for more dynamisms, more impact, making that world a virtual living breathing world in itself that players can impact and not just some static sandbox. It’s funny when Raph talks about players having an impact on the world and how we are seeing somewhat of a reversal instead of progressing. Notice how games like WoW do not allow players to drop items on the ground? While this may save a lot of CS headaches, this is the type of simple impact on the persistent world.

Who thinks about these things? Everyone wants to be a developer or a producer, and never thinks about what the programmers have to go through. Fascinating.