Scripting News

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:31:25 GMT

Interesting essay by Steve Jobs on DRM. "If the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?"

Brother printer with HTTP server

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:05:44 GMT

Based on a recommendation from Julian Milenbach, I bought a Brother HL-5250DN printer, and so far I'm quite happy with it. You can set it up to connect via USB 2.0, which I tried for a few days with good results, but it can also connect via Ethernet, which I'm using now, and that's much more interesting. The cool thing which is becoming almost routine, is that it has a built-in HTTP server -- and it works quite well. Weird thing, the printer has an email address. Not sure what this means. Can you mail jobs to it? Oy!

Mike Arrington was over to watch the SuperBowl on Sunday, and I demo'd my Denon receiver with its built-in HTTP server. Following up by email he encouraged me to write it up. It's hard for me to write a feature story like the ones Mike does on TechCrunch, I prefer to write things as they occur to me, and so the story is here, but it's in chunks spread out over days.

It's hard to explain why it's so exciting to be able to control a consumer device like a stereo through a web browser. I have written up bits and pieces of it, and explained it verbally, often to very technical people, but the only thing that makes the point is a demo. The idea of an HTTP server in a stereo sounds like a gimick, people say they get it but you can tell they don't because they can't put it all together to see that you could use a laptop (or a cell phone for that matter) to control the stereo. I think you have to live this stuff for years to see how exciting it is. But the really coooool thing is that there's someone at DENON who sees it too, someone with the resources to get it into the product.

Every picture tells a story

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:10:35 GMT

Yesterday, I showed some graphs produced by Google Analytics that tell a story about the readers of Scripting News. Perhaps I didn't provide enough detail to support one conclusion I drew: We don't get a lot of new readers here.

I know that for a couple of reasons, and it's supported by Ian, who works at Coremetrics, a company that is in the business of analyzing web traffic.

1. Even though it shows that 46 percent of the traffic are first timers, that's based on a four day sample, of which two days were weekend days. Traffic patterns change on the weekend, esp for a business oriented site like Scripting News.

2. I could compare it to the graphs for the XML-RPC site, which I also host, a relatively high flow site. Its traffic is almost entirely new people. It's not a blog, it's a reference site, with several popular specs that are widely pointed to.

Over time the graph for Scripting News will likely skew even more toward repeat business.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, I'm just sharing something I've learned. I've deleted some personal comments about this, which are completely ridiculous. These no doubt are the people who edit my Wikipedia bio. ";->"

Why I have a bio here

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:23:11 GMT

One reason is to counteract the mischief of the idiots who keep defacing my bio on Wikipedia. ";->"

Taking care of business

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:05:39 GMT

Apple is a big successful company with lots of customers and lots of employees. Microsoft is also a big successful company with lots of employees.

The iPod is a publicly released product. Vista was in public beta for many months.

Yet, Apple is warning iPod users to not install Vista, which shipped last week, until they get a chance to adapt their software so that it doesn't destroy the user's music and podcasts.

From outward appearances it seems someone isn't taking care of business, and it seems that's Apple, since you didn't need a special agreement with Microsoft to test software with Vista. Apple can hardly plead poverty, they make enormous amounts of profit from Windows iPod users. Further, it's so typical of Apple to ding users of Windows, to use them as pawns in their psychic battle with Microsoft, which serves no one, except perhaps them. Putting the users in the middle is bad business.

Now, it could be that a bug surfaced in the final shipping version of Vista, one that wasn't in earlier test versions, in which case it's just a bug, and no one is to blame. If not, it seems someone screwed up. Lots of people, actualy.