Well, I made it through my nine hour trip to San Francisco (that sucked), and am now sitting in the WWDC Cocoa pre-conf sesson. Getting to Moscone West from the hotel was a trip in itself. Today was the SF "Pride" parade, and Market street was blocked. And, since I don't know my way around SF, I walked back and forth between two blocks trying to find a way across to get down to Mission. Lucklily, I found the SF shopping square, and was able to cross underneath the street.
Anyway, tomorrow is going to be when the real madness starts.
Well, with a little shell scripting, I was able to get a Gmail invite from Gmail Machine. After 11 1/2 hours (during the DoS of course!) and 133,384 requests my script obtained the magic number. How anyone does this manually is beyond me.
And before anyone asks, no I will not share the script. All I used was wget and grep; any self respecting UNIX nerd should be able to duplicate this script in about five minutes.
Thanks to everyone who dontated the accounts, and thanks to GMail Machine admins for their work.
I was out and about today, and saw the new Velvet Revolver CD "Contraband" (you'll notice the irony of this title if you keep reading) for $10. I was about to plunk down my money for it, and then noticed a shiny sticker on the front with the band's logo. Upon reading the fine print under the logo, I find out the CD is copy protected (the first I've seen for Rock music). The fine print says the CD is copy protected to "prevent unauthorized duplication".
I didn't work.
Instead I walked out of the store sans CD. Back home, within a minute of getting on the computer, I had several links to every single track on the album using one of the many P2P networks. I didn't download the songs, but this just proves that copy protection does not work in its intended role. Instead, it unfairly limits the paying customer from listening to the music in the multiple ways possible today. For instance, I rip songs from the CD's I do buy to listen to on my computer (without needing the CD) and to listen to on my iPod. Since I can't do that with the new Velvet Revolver CD, the band and the music label just lost some money.
Hopefully, if enough people opt out of this "customer" protection with their wallets, the music labels will get the idea and think of other ways to get people to buy the CD's (like including a DVD with band video, or some exclusive internet tie in).
Well, Apple announced the new G5's today. I've been waiting for the 2nd gen G5's to get one (my QS G4 will be three in August). Everything looks pretty good, but I was hoping the CPU speeds would be a little higher (2.6, 2.4 and 2.0) and that there would be a Dual-Layer Superdrive (with +R support).
So, should I drop the cash now or wait until October/November in the hopes of the Dual-Layer burner (CPU bumps are a given)? My sister is getting my current QS so of course she wants me to get a G5 today. :)