Pixel Pushing Monkey

When EMI announced that they were going to be offering DRM-free tracks on iTMS in May, I was pretty psyched to see that a major label has finally stepped forward and admitted that DRM doesn't work. However, the month of May passed slowly, and I was somewhat paranoid that EMI would back out on the deal.

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of "iTunes Plus". DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I've always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD's that I don't really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3's.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment I can relegate to my schedule per day, and most of those times are split in between games, TV, and other activities outside of the house. My interaction with music now are limited to my commute and a few minutes at work when I don't have to worry about the next meeting. I am now content with 256kbps

Everything seems to be up and running as usual. I was pleasantly suprised to see that my themes & plugins are all fully functional. The only difference seems to be the inclusion of widget functionality in WP 2.2, which makes the previous "widget-enabling" addon obsolete.

This past week, Microsoft's Mac development team announced that a real document converter, that will allow old versions of Office users to convert to new versions of Office 2007 format, will not be released until after Mac Office 2008 is complete. It was a choice of using existing resources to focus on releasing Office 2008 for Mac on schedule, rather than delaying it to get the converter out.

A few weeks prior, Apple made a similar announcement in regards to OS X. In order to get iPhone delivered and out on the market on time, they had to shift resouces from the OS X team to work on the iPhone. Therefore, they had to delay the release of OS X until after iPhone.

The general reaction to both of these events are about the same, although Apple's announcement created a much more visible ripple through news coverage (and understandably so). Most people would think, a company with the size, resource as Microsoft and Apple, shouldn't have any issues simply pulling in new resources and get the software released on time. Having gone through the responsibilities of finding new hire and contractors myself, I can sympathize with the difficulty of simply bringing in new resources. It's never as easy as finding qualified people and bringing them in.

Besides the process of finding and filtering through the number of talents out there available, you have to find the one that culturally fits into the company's general atmosphere. That process in itself can take more than a few weeks. Multiple interviews are scheduled with each interviewee, each person in the process will take up at least half of a work day. If you were lucky enough to find someone who is equally qualified in both skill set and personality (usually you end up with more of one, or not enough of the other), it will take anywhere between a week to a month to integrate the new hire into the processes of your workflow.

All in all, for just one new hire into an established team, you're looking at a hiring and development cycle that ranges anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 months. Not to mention that getting the new hire attuned, probably takes attention and time away from the rest of your team. By the time that new hire is an active, autonomously contributing member of your team, you're looking at 2 months down the road.

This situation is even worse when you're dealing with short-term hires to finish specific projects. You need to ramp them up to speed to finish the project on time, then after the project is done, you have to figure out if the long term plan of your company justifies keeping that person on tab. The obvious solution is to not make any permanent hires, and simply contract out the work. However, the process of finding a contractor, and maintaining the relationship with the contractor isn't any easier than finding a permanent hire.

It's easy to criticize these companies for not expanding resources to get their products out on time. The question is, would you rather put up with shoddy quality on the final product because of improper resource expansion? Under the same situation, I would always choose to maintain the quality of the product, rather than the schedule of the product.

It's rare that Microsoft comes up with something truly funny, but this parody is really, actually, LOL-kinda good. Which makes you wonder, if they had this much time to make this parody... where is the ZunePhone?!

Another miscellaneous test for a WordPress plugin, with a cute picture!

Ran across an interesting little tidbit in my random browsing of the intrawebtube:

Last season for Battlestar Galatica

All I gotta say is, ABOUT TIME!

This past season of BSG was complete, utter crap except for the last episode, which just gave you barely enough to want to see how it ends. The progression of plot in BSG is completely reminiscent of X-Files. One episode in the beginning of the season to continue the cliffhanger from season past, and one/or one two-part episode with a cliffhanger to keep you coming back the next season. Fill in everything in between with utter, useless crap that explores mini-plots that no one cares about.

Since the second season of BSG, I've felt that the show was written for maybe one mini-series, or maybe two seasons; then stretched out into many, many more seasons because the TV executives realized they have a franchise on their hand, and they can make a *LOT* of money from it. So let's stretch out that story arc, fill in as much crap as possible, and figure out how to make money from it for another extra few years.

It's sad when a series that started off with so much promise, left me in the end saying, "Good riddance." Although, I'll still Tivo the last season just to see where it goes, and probably watch the movies and whatever other property they'll come up with after that as well. After all, I stuck it out for every single season of X-Files, even after Mulder was nothing but a guest appearance for three or four episodes a season.

Another unlikely teenage/college shooting happened today, apparently the argument was over a stolen Playstation. Jonquel Brooks, a 19-year-old freshman at Fresno State was accused of stealing a Playstation by three other guys; when he was confronted by the three man, he choose to shoot them instead of... well, there are a variety of other options, none of which was taken.

What I find really disturbing, especially so soon after the Virginia Tech incident, is that at some point the media will focus their attention at the video game console that is in the center of this event. Just as some people tried to link the VT incident with video games as well, although later proven to be completely irrational. There will always be a part of media, and people, that like to sensationalize violence and associate it with new trends in society that they can't fully accept. For the last generation, movies, music, television were their scape goats. For our generation, it's video games.

Why do I find that disturbing? It's not because I had a particular affinity towards protecting criticisms towards video games. I'm for the most part, completely indifferent about how other people feel about my video game hobby. This incident is disturbing to me, because despite repetitious display of outrageous public, violent act performed by troubled teens, the "tool" at which they use to their means continues to be ignored as one of the factor & culprit of these incidents. We focus on "what went wrong with this kid" and "who do we blame for what happened here", rather than pointing our fingers towards a much more direct question, "Why does a teenager have a gun?"

United States, by my recollection, is the only so-called civilized country that allows its citizen to acquire firearms with ease. Private ownership of lethal firearms is outlawed in almost all other first-world country. Americans as a whole continues to ignore the role that firearm plays into these violent crimes.

I have handled shotguns, went to shooting club with my uncle, took target practice in the past. What surprises me is how easy it was to disassociate a extremely lethal weapon to the potential harm it could do if not used properly. Yes, stabbing a person with a knife is a violent, and potentially lethal act; but there is something strange about using a gun that disassociate at least part of the visceral impact, and the moral ramifications of what you're about to do, to actually doing it. I think of it like fighter jet pilots in a war, where they bomb targets by following instrumentations. It's like playing, *gasp*, a video game, where the act of what they do and the ramifications of what they've done is almost completely disassociated with the actions they are taking.

I just think, that there's a very huge difference between being able to shoot, versus trying to kill another human being without the help and the instantaneousness of a firearm. If we didn't have firearms commonly distributed to private citizens here in United States, a lot of these violent crimes would've happened on a much smaller scale, perhaps not even occured at all. Columbine does *not* happen if those kids only had knifes and bats. Sure, some kids might be hurt or killed, but it would not be as massively terrifying as it was. Virigina Tech does *NOT* happen without a gun.

So why are the media so obsessed with scapegoating video games, movies, television?

A very interesting thing happened at Digg yesterday. There was public posting of a HD-DVD decryption key, which was very promptly deleted by Digg's admin. It created a public outrage of Digg users feel like they are being censored, and prompted a reaction that resulted in even more posting of the decryption key, and more posting about the deletion and the censorship that Digg was exercising.

The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It's a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to "know somebody that knew somebody" and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what's a software maker's right to protect say... their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft's right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?