Linked List: April 22, 2008

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Rivet Review 

Jared Kuolt’s glowing review of Rivet, Cynical Peak’s new $19 app that allows you to stream photos, music, and video from your Mac to your Xbox 360.

Sony to Buy Gracenote for $260 Million 

Gracenote owns the CDDB database iTunes uses to supply song and album names for CDs you rip. $260 million sounds like a lot to me, but at least now Sony can claim to have something to do, however tangential, with a popular portable digital music player.

Microsoft to Pull Plug on MSN Music DRM License Servers 

Existing DRM keys should continue to function, but you won’t be able to authorize new computers after August 31. Get a new PC after that, and it won’t be able to play your MSN Music. This is bad news for all seven of the people who bought songs from MSN Music.

Wired on The Big Word Project 

Wired does a short profile of Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, the grad-student duo behind The Big Word Project.

Mac Clone Lust 

The Macalope, regarding ZDNet’s Jason Perlow’s statement that “it made absolutely no sense that Apple backed off from the prospect of cloned systems”:

And the Macalope has always said that the water fountains at ZDNet must be served with lead pipes.

Today 1.0 

New $15 utility by Justin Williams — it provides a nice little “here’s what’s going on today” view with your events and tasks from iCal.

Perhaps It Comes With a Free Kick in the Pants 

Here’s a PR from Ascender, announcing that they’re now selling Microsoft’s Vista ClearType fonts:

Ascender Corporation, a leading provider of advanced font products, today announced a compatibility solution for Mac OS X users looking for the Microsoft ClearType fonts that are included with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac software products. Office 2008 for Mac includes 24 fonts that were first introduced in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

Ascender’s font bundle costs $299, but the home edition of Office for Mac 2008 — which Ascender itself points out comes with these same fonts — costs just $130. Am I missing something, or is this just nutty?

Update: So the font bundle from Ascender is licensed for up to five users, whereas a single Home and Student license for Office is intended for one user. So I guess it’s not that nutty. Update 2: Several readers note that the Home and Student license for Office is for up to three computers. So it is nutty.

(Thanks to Joe Clark.)

Asus Eee 900 Battery Shenanigans 

Mark Wilson reports at Gizmodo that review units of the Eee 900 had higher-capacity batteries than the ones actually being shipped to customers. Bizarre.

David Weiss: ‘Metacognitive Miscalibration’ 

Thoughtful essay by David Weiss on, among other things, the desire to learn:

Another reason why some can feel “informed” when in fact they are not is that they have lost the hunger to learn. They’ve lost the desire to learn and grow. René Descartes said it this way: “Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.”

Philip Greenspun on the Problems With Tying Executive Compensation to Bogus Metrics 

Philip Greenspun:

Oftentimes the debacle on Wall Street is painted as too complex even for the executives involved to understand.  Merrill’s near collapse was easy to understand, though.  They bought mortgages that nobody else wanted and repackaged them into securities that they couldn’t sell.  They had a couple of huge warning flags.  AIG stopped insuring these securities against default in 2005; when one of the world’s largest insurance companies says that these things are too risky for it to insure at any price, you’d think that anyone holding $32 billion of such items would take notice. 

Half-Off Sale on Take Control E-Books 

Adam and Tonya Engst:

To celebrate our 18th consecutive year of award-winning Apple and Macintosh coverage in TidBITS, we’re offering all our ebooks at 50% off through April 29th.

The offer includes books from Macworld, too, including the new Mac OS X Hints Superguide, which is chock full of hints and details on Leopard.

Asus Eee PC 900 Battery Life 

It’s a bit more expensive than its bestselling predecessor, but the screen is bigger and they’ve made improvements to the trackpad and other hardware. But battery life seems horrid:

In our own DivX movie playback test, it ran for 1 hour 29 minutes, which was just about long enough for us to enjoy a feature-length movie or a couple episodes of our favourite TV show.

89 minutes doesn’t cover many of the feature films I see.

McCain’s Optimum Look 

The New York Times’s Steven Heller talks to graphic designers and critics about John McCain’s use of Optima for his campaign’s identity. (I see he didn’t talk to Jonathan Hoefler.)