Microsoft has come up with a fantastic new concept: a place where you can
legally download music, for only 99 cents per song! If only
someone else had thought of it
earlier, and beaten them to the punch.
Seriously though... I know Apple didn't come up with the idea but it's
pretty hard to pretend that they didn't make it very successful very quickly,
and even harder to pretend you're launching a competitor, but have never heard
of the iTunes music store. But apparently not impossible:
Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for MSN said, “Our goal
with the MSN Music service is to finally bring digital music to the masses by
offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal
music on the Internet, available on the broadest selection of portable
devices.”
First off: which masses are they “bringing it to”? The millions
of people in the world who are both
trendy enough to want digital music, and yet who have been living under a
rock and haven't heard of iTunes and/or the iPod? Do this guy really think there
are people sitting on their couches watching iPod commercials and thinking,
“I'd love to have digital music, if only I could find somewhere that
sells it”?
Second: does he think that because Microsoft's PR group has been living
under a rock? If they believe that the library of 500,000 songs mentioned in
the article is the largest catalog of legal music online, they might want to,
you know, check some recent numbers from their only serious competitor.
It's nice that they want to compete and all, but perhaps they should focus
a little more on not sounding like they are either criminally ignorant or
lying while they do it.
Category: Geek
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I've been using fink's GIMP 2.0 installation for
a while, but my old drag-and-drop script was still set up for 1.2.
I could have just fixed it by changing the symlinks that point GIMP
commands to a specific version so that they refer to 2.0 instead of 1.2 (which
I ultimately also did), but I've been bugged for a while by the old script's requirement of
launching GIMP in advance, and having to fix another part of the process
finally motivated me to do something about it. Poking around a little I found
this
hint, which improves on the script I'd been using (the one mention at the
beginning of the new hint).
The new script has some issues, mentioned in the comments, but unfortunately
the fixed version that is alluded to is MIA. The bright side it that it gave
me an excuse to play with AppleScript a bit, and now I have a script that uses
X11 and handles multiple files correctly in almost all cases. I still need to
fix it so it doesn't launch multiple instances of the GIMP if it tries to open
several files and finds that the GIMP isn't already running, but that should be
easy enough to fix. And if not, it's still worlds better than the old script.
Here's to progress! AppleScript is very cool, but I never quite get around to
learning more than a tiny bit of it... but I guess that's what
Automator is
all about: automation without learning/remembering AppleScript.
If any of the other 20 people running GIMP on OS X using fink instead of
Gimp.app need good
drag-and-drop support, drop me a line :)
[Update: It now handles all drag-and-drop cases correctly, and also launches
the GIMP if you run it without dropping a file, so it's now an app for all
purposes that matter to me!]
Category: Geek
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