Day: December 22, 2011

TM2 – Back from the smoke break (a note on consumerism)

Back from the smoke break:

If you are one of the many who kept using TextMate over the past few dim and hazy years, even if you don’t find the alpha usable yet its mere existence is fantastic news. It’s a pretty good sign that—despite all the cynicism from jerks like me—the thing’s actually going to be released. It’s missing features and has some performance issues, but hey, it’s an alpha.

[It’s been interesting, no doubt. But even as I was tweaking Mark Hurst about his “works just fine” monitor, I admit that for the most part the original TextMate was working just fine for most things. BBEdit gets used for certain situations still, and in some ways always feels like home. Either way, the “it’s not new” syndrome is a problem from my perspective because I feel like that model is broken. I’m not alone, Patagonia (the clothing company) is getting a lot of press about their recent ad telling you to “not buy this jacket” and explaining why. So while it was fun to poke at Mark about his monitor, as he said, it’s working for him just fine. And while a new monitor might use less energy (as I teased), and Mark will no doubt give away the old one working or not, I can’t make the case that more energy overall would not be used in the creation of the new monitor. He’s doing the right thing. When it comes to software the model has shifted. Adding features used to be considered a good thing. Now it’s not that simple (no pun intended). And sometimes the best “new” feature is the one that causes the rethinking of all the old features. But that’s a topic for a different day.]
Source: Coyote Tracks

Steve Jobs and Rudy Van Gelder as Trustees Award honorees

Lifetime Achievement Award | Grammy.org:

“This year’s honorees offer a variety of brilliance, contributions and lasting impressions on our culture,” said President/CEO of The Recording Academy Neil Portnow. “It is an honor to recognize such a diverse group of individuals whose talents and achievements have had an indelible impact on our industry.”
 
The Lifetime Achievement Award honors performers who have made contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording while the Trustees Award recognizes such contributions in areas other than performance. Both awards are determined by vote of The Recording Academy’s National Board of Trustees. Technical GRAMMY Award recipients are determined by vote of The Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing Advisory Council and Chapter Committees as well as The Academy’s Trustees. The award is presented to individuals and companies who have made contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field.

[Are the Grammys jumping on the bandwagon or is this well deserved?]

How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet

How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet » blog.easydns.org – Happenings and observations:

If this becomes law, it’s a short stretch from SOPA to NODA (No Online Dissent Anywhere) and if you think I’m a nutcase for saying so, I’d like to remind everybody what happened just over a year ago, when US politicians were tripping over themselves to shut down wikileaks (a royal fiasco in which this company was embroiled) and to this day, they have not been charged with a crime anywhere.

Many of the “dirty tricks” employed against Wikileaks would be enshrined on law under SOPA (and someday, NODA):

A requirement that service providers block access to offending domains, including that they stop resolving their DNS
Search engines to purge search results for offending domains
Payment processors to sever ties to offending domains
And they added an extra provision that it will be an offense to knowingly create a service or system to provide a workaround to a banned domain or host. So for example, they would no longer have to hassle Mozilla to remove that firefox plugin that let’s you reach ICE blocked websites, it would be illegal to make it or distribute it.

[snip… emphasis below is mine -Ed.]

Already we get business from companies whose stated corporate IT policy is to not use US based servers to hold email or route web traffic. I’m not talking about torrent hosts, whistleblowers and fake Rolex vendors. We’re talking large enterprise entities whose legal departments find even the theoretical legal ability for Homeland Security to monitor their corporate communications simply intolerable.

[Land of the free eh? Don’t stand on the sidelines for this one. Disclosure: I use easydns to host domains.]