Tuesday, April 29, 2003
- Robb Beal:
- “Apple users? Huh? You mean Mac users.” Bingo.
- “A revolutionary system would be decentralized (i.e., Web-like) and artist-centered (i.e., artists would have ultimate control). Apple’s system is neither.” But didn’t Apple have to work with the big companies because they own the rights?
- “What an embarrassment…that we continue to see stories written that idolize a single person rather than…the diversity of contributions being made. Does anyone find the idol stories interesting, or believable?” I agree with the first part, and perhaps the stories are exaggerated, but could Gil Amelio have pulled this off?
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Bill Bumgarner: “In other words, as my purchased music library grows, backing it up becomes quite the serious inconvenience.” And, apparently, iTunes’s backup feature doesn’t help you segment the library.
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Steven Frank: “The major negative is of course the Digital Rights Management.”
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Nat Irons: “I distinctly remember what happened to my music purchasing patterns the year I was using Napster most heavily. I’d buy ten albums a month without even thinking about it.”
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Chuq Von Rospach: “A lot of the anti-piracy seems to me like the attempt to move speed limits to 55: too many Americans simply didn’t agree and didn't buy into it. so you can either try to put a policeman on every highway, or you can raise the speed limit.”
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Dan Wood: “If Apple wanted to do something and revolutionary, they could have done something much more extraordinary that would have not only included the big names, but also allowed the ‘little guys’ to make their music available over iTunes.” I think getting the big players on board is a necessary first step to getting the concept accepted. It reminds me of Don Norman’s story about how Edison’s phonograph lost. And Rhapsody. The current system is a big enough step forward for 1.0.
This Web page lets you compile Java code when you don’t have the JDK installed (via Lambda).
Ken Arnold:
If we accept that programmers are humans, one primary and interesting consequence is that human factors issues can be properly applied towards the tools they use.…I am speaking about the more basic tools programmers use every minute they do their work: programming languages and APIs.
Consider garbage collection. One can argue up and down about the overhead, etc., but consider this: Two of the best selling C++ books are Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ and More Effective C++. The single largest category of the 85 tips—about one quarter of them—is dealing with potential memory leaks.…This is fundamentally a human factors problem: You can tell people how to avoid the whirling knives of the abattoir, or you can close the abattoir door.
(via Ned Batchelder)
Tony Arnold has updated iTableView.
Dennis G. Jerz:
On the web, a blurb is a line or short paragraph (20–50 words) that evaluates (or at least summarizes) what the reader will find at the other end of a link. A good blurb should inform, not tease. Usability testing will help you determine the best way to lay out your blurbs, but this document will help you write the content.
Dan Frakes has written an article that every Mac developer should read. My favorite piece of advice: put the full name of the product and the version number in the name of the disk image.
Classes are what make objects possible, and without objects, object-oriented programming would not make sense.
—Special Edition Using Java, quoted by Douglas Dunn on the now-defunct javarules.com
