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Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Why I hate Real, cont'd 
| | RealPlayer fails. Faithfully. Repeatedly. Unfailingly. Reliably. |
| | It just failed again, predictably, in the middle of KCRW's broadcast of the show on which Paul was a guest. I had it running on a machine that was being used for nothing else at the time. I even checked to make sure no other processes risked interfering with it. But it failed anyway, just like it always does, right before Paul came on. I killed it and got to hear Paul's last word. Nothing between. |
| | Meanwhile, I'm sure I could record the next 10 hours of KPIG or any other station that streams MP3s, without fail, off iTunes or MacCast or SoundJam or WinAmp or any of the Linux clients, as long as the line stayed open and the stream stayed up. |
| | Yet for some reason broadcasters, including public ones that should know better, continue to radiate in Real, leveraging the ambitions of a company that has proven, repeatedly, that its last priority is the convenience of the listener. |
Death at the end of the distro chain
| | Like Glenn, I visited the Sony showroom at the Metreon during Macworld. But unlike Glenn, I hadn't noticed how lousy it had become. I just took it for granted. I think I sold a couple PC-110 video cameras while I was there. I didn't see a salesperson, so I just kinda filled in. |
| | Anyway, there's a piece in this morning's WallStreet Journal that blames the departure of K-Mart's President, Mark S. Schwartz, on, of all things, promotional advertising. Seems more than 10% of K-Mart's operating expenses are devoted to junk mail and junk newspaper filler. Charles C. Conway, K-Mart's CEO, calls the circulars a "heroin needle" and "the apex of what's wrong with K-Mart," because it isolates the company's market to the kind of customers who use coupons as currency. By contrast, Target's junk promo number is 2.2% and Wal-Mart's is just 0.4%. |
| | What does Wal-Mart do instead of junk circulars? It simply boasts about low prices. |
| | But here's a deal: you can pick up K-Mart stock on sale for under $1.64 a share. Wal-Mart's is $56.47. |
Ragerolling
Operating under the illusion of value
| | Most TV is free, or close enough. More significantly, it has relatively little negotiable value as "content" for sale. Once shown, it's compost. Even fresh, it is little more valuable than what Fred Allen called it 50 years ago, when the medium was still new: "chewing gum for the eyes." Yet, ars technica reports, the broadcast industry's insistence on protecting its gum from passing from mouth to mouth is largely based on paranoia that a market of some kind might develop for used television shows once the industry goes all-digital. |
| | I know watching the broadcast industry melt like an iceberg isn't box office for everybody, but I like to savor those moments when it turns toward the Sun, hoping to pick up a tan. |
Who knows?
| | Maybe somebody can figure out why my old (June 2001) TiBook wakes up instantly and Dori Smith's identically-equipped 3-week old unit doesn't. |
| | In the 60 hours and 18 minutes that OS X 10.1.2 has been running on this TiBook, every problem that showed up on screen was isolated and corrected either in Process Viewer or in a more detailed command line view of the same thing, using the command top -u. Usually the culprit is TruBluEnv, though sometimes it's something else. Doesn't matter. Every process has an ID number, or a PID. TruBlueEnv is 1622 (this time). If I run the command kill 1622, the process dies, the screen backgrounds go away for a moment, and then the user interface puts itself together again. Everything is fine. |
| | What's cool about the terminal mode is that we finally have a popular desktop computer that lets you get under the hood and fix stuff or get somebody else to help. |
Pointers
Enough science of suckage. Now we have suckage of science.
| | Here. With a tip of the hairpiece to RageBoy for the linq. |
Blug
There are responses to this message:Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Dave Ely, 1/18/02; 8:33:03 PM Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Dori Smith, 1/18/02; 3:59:15 PM Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, David Brown, 1/18/02; 12:11:42 PM
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