The Apple customer from the Heise report linked here, who had problems after moving, has since been contacted by Apple and is now allowed to play his songs in Canada after all (and also access his account, but can't make any new purchases).
His conclusion is similar to what I wrote in the comments to my post: DRM creates a very poor position for the customer. He therefore no longer wants to buy DRM-protected media.
The question is how much longer DRM-free alternatives will continue to exist...
At algorhythm there's the original article.
Oh yes, the wonderfully absurd arguments from the marketing folks. Nobody pays the total sum (assuming it's even actually that high - the assumptions of these pseudo-experts are completely arbitrary), since it's distributed across all companies. If you break it down to the individual employee, you save a few euros per year. The 6 minutes per day certainly doesn't justify the immense investments a company would have to make in an archive system. You need other motivations for that, not just a bit of email searching. But that's much more effective for advertising ...
At heise online news there's the original article.
... in this weather. As Jan Ullrich had to find out - a crash, and the stage win (he probably couldn't have taken the tour win today anyway) was gone. But that's cycling for you: it's not just speed that matters, but also skill. And unfortunately Jan Ullrich didn't look as good as Lance Armstrong there, and that cost him seconds. But still, he put in a super time - because despite the crash, Lance Armstrong only managed to gain just 11 seconds, and that's saying something. This year Armstrong really wasn't given anything for free, not even the final time trial.
Of course it's a shame anyway, but I think Jan Ullrich can be more than satisfied with his performance. We haven't seen him perform this well in a long time. And in next year's Tour he might finally break Armstrong's winning streak.
Oh, and of course an incredible performance by David Millar, he really deserved that stage win, because Lance Armstrong couldn't catch him either!
And then there was Tyler Freaking Hamilton, who just managed to take second place in this stage and thereby lap the two Euskatel riders in the overall standings. Incredible performance!
So, after Schockwellenreiter wrote about it, now the overview page is here too. And wonder of wonders, it's the same one as for the ping. So much functionality, and everything with just one address!
And his suspicion that Python is involved is correct too. The XML-RPC server is written in PHP (almost the original one from Reinvented Technologies, just ported to PostgreSQL), but the cronjob (the part that runs every 5 minutes) is written in Python.
The overview page is especially helpful when first trying it out - you can see when the ping goes through and whether it goes through. Oh yes, you should only ping either weblogs.com or simon, otherwise you get strange error messages back from weblogs.com.
Of course everything is still beta at the moment, so if you try it and find problems, please send me a message and I'll take a look at it.
Here's the original article.
A couple of ribs broken and one seems to have pierced into a lung. Let's hope the doctors can get it under control, because the loss or severe impairment of a lung would end his athletic career. :-(
The weather today combined with the track is really very dangerous. Let's hope no more serious crashes happen.
The designer of the ingenious Minox 8x11mm cameras passed away on July 17, 2003, at the age of 97.
In his honor, load a film into your Minoxes again and take a few pictures.
For everyone whose software doesn't support multithreading, a Ping-Cacher in PHP is linked. It probably still needs a MySQL database and presumably the ability to set up PHP cron jobs. Pings then don't go to weblogs.com, but to the Ping-Cacher. And it forwards them.
Hmm. You could actually run that centrally in one place, then others could use it too. Not everyone needs to operate something like that. Ok, I've put something together, it's running on my server. If you want to ping weblogs.com but don't feel like waiting for weblogs.com, you can instead simply send a weblogUpdates.ping call (same format) to http://simon.bofh.ms/ping/. That gets stored in a database (PostgreSQL, not MySQL, but basically the same script as in the link). Behind it runs a cron job that starts every 5 minutes and sends pending pings. I'll probably also build an overview page that's similar to the one on weblogs.com, so you can see the pings with me right away and also get their status displayed.
Here's the original article.
