Que es?
The Weblog of Brett Singer. Bringing the world what it needs most - a blog.
Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as
CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will
soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
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Sat, 22 Jan 2005
The Popular Comics Store on eBay looks dangerous in a spending-too-much-money kind of way.
Free Marvel Dotcomics
Lots of free funnybook reading here, including the first appearance of Spider-Man. Considering it goes for over two thousand dollars on eBay, reading it online via Flash is a better deal. Oh, if only I still had my old comics...
Slim Devices, makers of the Squeezebox held a plugins contest for developers. They release their software open source, which means anyone can use it, even without the device I think. Plus, they actually gave good prizes to the people who won the contest, and even to the runner's up. So why is this good? Think about it. They get good people, smart people, and don't have to pay them a salary or benefits. At the same time, they don't take advantage of them. The prizes are actually good prizes with decent dollar values. Which makes the developers happy. The developers write code that the company gives to everyone, which makes the users happy. The users buy the products from a company they feel good about, which makes the company happy. The common thread here is HAPPINESS.
Music Creation As Marketing Tool
Jack Daniels is getting on the make-yer-own-music tip. This is getting sort of interesting. Obviously, music has been used to sell crap for years. Now, thanks to mashups, remixes and the like, everyone wants to be a DJ and large corporations are happy to help you out. What I find funny about this is the fact at some point a subsidiary of Sony, or some other huge corporation that makes everything from batteries to beat-matching software, is going to sponsor a contest or do something marketing-department generated that will butt heads with the buttheads who are suing teenagers for playing with unauthorized music samples (Grey Album, etc). Hopefully that's clear. What I mean is that you can't have it both ways. You can't use something cool (remixing) to sell me something (liquor), and then turn around and sue my ass (RIAA, MPAA) when I don't use your DRM'd Flash-based widget to mix some of your content. Doesn't work. It'll bite you in the ass. At least, I hope so.
Malcolm Gladwell Hates Steroids
Malcolm Gladwell promoting his latest book on ESPN. Somewhat surprising, but frankly, all media is intersecting in surprising ways these days. I suppose the world has worse problems. His newest book is BLINK, the one he got wicked famous for is THE TIPPING POINT, the one with a title that never caught on (at least not that I know of) is UNLEASHING THE IDEAVIRUS. "The future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other," he writes. "Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk." Ewwwww.
This is a great blog post for several reasons. (First read this on Lucas' blog.
Many of my readers don't know that in a previous life I worked on Internet Explorer 3.0 (or Internet Exploder as we called) ten years ago at Microsoft. I was part of the effort that stupidly, blindly and ignorantly insisted on making IE 'developer friendly.' In the process we made it the best friend a slimy ad-ware hacker never even dare dream of. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm so fucking sorry. Really.
Wow. The personal touch. And an admission of guilt. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are the bane of my existence in terms of helping other people fix their computers (which I have to do far too often because of spyware and virus infections).
Now there's a scare that adware has penetrated the music file format and unfortunately, it's more than a scare, I know of a few cases where this has struck.
Now, he means WMA, not MP3 or another format. This is yet another reason to avoid Microsoft's codecs. The idea that an audio file could contain adware/spyware (or, as Lucas has called it, tickware, is just astounding. I'm not a programmer, but why make anything that has so many potential problems? Okay, so SMTP has problems (spamming is easier) but that's not a commercial product created by a giant corporation that makes billions of dollars in profits. Plus, fixing SMTP (again: not a programmer, so this could be way wrong) would involve changes to the infrastructure of the 'Net, whereas re-coding Internet Explorer, while probably not exactly fun, is hardly a project of similar magnitude. Anyway, IE sucks, but Victor's blog is cool.
jrock playlist
This playlist I must listen to later. The playlister's avatar is one of the best I've ever seen.
SRX-Another new acronym
Speed and Range eXpansion. Oooookay. $179.99 seems like a lot of money for this device, but a lot of people seem to be buying it, based on the Buy.com sales ranking. The Wireless-G Broadband Router with SRX is really three devices in one box. First, there's the Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect Wireless-G, Wireless-B, and other performance-enhanced SRX devices to the network. There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together. Finally, the Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection. See, that doesn't sound all that different from my el cheapo $20 wireless router. But wait! There's more! The Wireless-G Broadband Router with SRX combines smart antenna technology with standards-based Wireless-G (802.11g) networking. By overlaying the signals of two Wireless-G compatible radios, the "Multiple In, Multiple Out" (MIMO) technology effectively doubles the data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce "dead spots" in the wireless coverage area. The robust signal travels farther, maintaining wireless connections up to 3 times farther than standard Wireless-G. And the farther away you are, the more advantage you get -- the higher data rate and reflection-friendly technology can yield up to 8 times more throughput than Wireless-G in some situations. The router avoids interference by dynamically switching to the clearest channel available. Even your standard Wireless-G and -B equipment will work better when communicating with SRX-enabled devices. Ah. So it blasts the signal further. That's a good thing I suppose, but frankly I don't think it's worth spending that much money. Get a high-gain antenna, or even a bridge device that will fill in any dead spots. Me, I'm fine with 802.11b until I decide to try and stream video or something.