Crippled

It has come to my attention that Microsoft requires that netbooks have no more than 1GB of RAM in order to qualify to run starter/netbook editions of Windows XP and Win7.

Some hardware manufacturers have always intentionally crippled low-end hardware models, and some software manufacturers have always intentionally crippled low-end versions of software.  But only Microsoft would require manufacturers to intentionally cripple their hardware in order to qualify to run a particular low-end version of software on it.

PerlJammer!

As recently mentioned, I've been working on my own music player as a feature replacement for Mike Oliphant's DigitalDJ, since DigitalDJ is abandoned, unmaintained, and de facto dead.  My new player is now officially named PerlJammer (thanks to perspicuity for the excellent name suggestion), and it's complete except for some of the supporting tools to allow it to be used by people without an existing DDJ-compatible SQL music database.  As an amusing side note, some of the extra features I've added into PerlJammer to replace things I'd had to implement via complex hacks around DDJ have meant that I've been able to massively simplify a variety of my own tools.  About fifteen minutes ago, I realized that I could eliminate my LogJam music-detection helper altogether; all the work the LogJam helper used to do is now done by a single invocation of pjam-remote babylon5 status.

I started my playlist on babylon5 this morning by sending a remote command from whitestar ... just because I could.  MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sniffing the breeze

Just sniffing the breeze ... I've been getting one holy hell of a lot of special offer promotions from Barnes & Noble lately.  The latest one, in today's mail, is 50% off all after-holiday merchandise (understandable) and all DVDs and Blu-Ray discs 3-for-2.  It makes me wonder:  Is B&N in trouble that they're not talking about publicly, and trying to whip up revenue any way they can?  Did their Christmas season sales fall far short of expectations because hardly anybody has spending money to spare?

We have $125 in B&N gift cards sitting here.  If B&N might be on shaky ground, I'm wondering whether we should use them now while we know we still can.  Has anyone heard anything...?

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