Author: Tim Jarrett

Disney bashes Apple; Intel to its defense???

Disney is acting hostile to consumers on behalf of the motion picture industry, and apparently made some snarky remarks about “rip, mix, burn.” Then Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive VP, Intel, steps up to the defense:

Another major point of misunderstanding is our differing perspectives on the role of the PC in the hands of the consumer. Mr. Eisner’s characterization of the phrase “rip, mix, burn” as emblematic of our industry’s perspective on piracy is utterly false. What the content community fails to recognize is that these utilities – the ability to copy content, remix and manage it and port it to other storage media for personal use in a protected fashion – are features that consumers have come to expect. The ability to rip, mix and burn in a protected manner is not piracy, it is simply fair use of content as permitted by law.

The music (and movie) industries need to hear this. If you’re at war with your customers, at war with their rights under the law, then of course CD sales will fall. If you persist in implementing ham handed and insulting copyright protection on your media that render it unplayable and remove features that consumers like, you’ll render yourselves irrelevant and illiquid in less time than it takes you to cut loose quality acts like Wilco, Tori Amos, or Cowboy Junkies–or for one of your innumerable teen pop bands to peak, fade, or be forgotten.
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Male grief? Male feelings

Dave has kindly reminded me that grief is part of a bigger issue, male feelings in general. His Davenet on the subject from 1998 suggests that manhood = controlling emotions in our culture. He suggests that if the culture were more open to receiving male expressions of emotion, that men would be better at expressing their feelings.

I don’t know that I necessarily agree with the first point (though I’m not sure how I would define manhood otherwise), but I definitely believe the second. It’s a reinforcing loop. As men stay silent, the culture becomes accustomed to men not expressing their feelings. Eventually, expressing feelings becomes an exception, exceptions aren’t tolerated, and the cost of not expressing feelings becomes over time too high to bear.

How do we break the loop? Men have to stop being afraid of the cost. Everyone needs to stop treating expressions of male emotion like they’re antisocial behavior.
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Why can’t men grieve?

This link will probably break, but if it does it’s worth going to inkiboo.com and finding the post yourself. There are so few male role models to show us how to deal with grief. This blog entry, about the death of the author’s mother, is one.

I wish I had seen this a long time ago. I don’t think I could have managed to be nearly as adult or effective as the writer. But I might have had an easier time dealing with the death of my grandmother last year. I was totally unprepared and I didn’t allow myself to grieve. Because I never acknowledged how I felt, I just felt bad all the time. I ended up putting myself into a deep depression that it took me months to come out of–I’m still not sure I’m out of it. Why can’t men grieve? Or maybe just why couldn’t I?
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I prefer my Mac clothed, thank you

More proof that we Mac users are a weird bunch: Undress your Mac for thrills. I’ve never taken pictures, but I confess that when I got my PowerBook G3 a year and a half ago I set up a big work area, reverently unpacked each of the pieces, and, salivating, turned on the machine to hear the chime. I’ve never ever said anything like this, however: “I’m pretty sure it’s as close to sex as you can get with a machine. I mean, look at this photo.”
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Not MySQL, says Boston judge

I’m delighted to see that Judge Patti B. Saris in my home town of Boston, a town not normally renowned for avoiding confrontation, is ducking the question of whether the GPL can be enforced. She does appear to be practicing good jujitsu on the negotiators, though, by turning around the injunction issue:

Before pushing the parties toward a settlement, the judge previewed a likely outcome of the preliminary injunction if a settlement is not reached. For a preliminary injunction to be granted, she said, the plaintiff must show that it is being done irreparable harm.

On the GPL issue, Saris told MySQL that “I haven’t seen the irreparable harm to you and I have seen it to Progress,” if its business were shut down.

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More Manila stuff: sitePref.set funkiness

So I’m having problems setting site prefs from my application. I was going to add a quick feature to allow managing editors to change the tagline of their site from within Manila Envelope, but I can’t get sitePref.set to work–it either complains about something not being a valid address or responds “true” without doing anything. I’ve put a detailed description on the XMLRPC discussion site.

An explanation for the diagram

I fell down when I posted this diagram. I should really have written a brief explanation. I’ll restrict myself to describing the main loops. Of course you can substitute whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing instead of blogging for “schoolwork effort” in the diagram:

  • B1: “Oh crap” As schoolwork effort decreases, guilt increases, leading eventually to more schoolwork effort.
  • B2: “Burnout” As schoolwork effort increases, boredom increases, which decreases schoolwork effort.
  • B3: “Waste time” As boredom increases, web surfing increases, which leads to an increase in blogging effort, decreasing schoolwork effort.
  • R1: “Show off” As schoolwork effort increases, intellectual curiosity increases, spawning original ideas and increasing blogging effort… this gets eyeballs and leads to more blogging. (This may be either a balancing or reinforcing loop, I’m not sure.)
  • R2: “Addiction” This is the simplest closed loop. As you put more effort into your blog, you eventually get eyeballs. This feels like a reward and encourages you to put in more effort.

The last loop is the most vicious. It’s why I had to stop looking at my referer logs; I wasn’t doing much schoolwork any more, I was blogging so much.

Written on the wall

Saw this on a wall outside the Big Dig this morning: “Torquemen: Fortitude, Guts, Persistence.” I don’t know what the hell it means, but “Fortitude, Guts, Persistence” just became my tagline.