Sarah Slean has a way with words

Sarah Slean takes a break from poetry to share some tales from the road. Her words recall Finding Forrester:

After the requisite used bookstore visit, we return to the room to find a tray full of goodies from our fairy godmother Natasha. Champagne, roses, chocolates, and fruits…heavens! I enjoy a brief moment of pretending I’m Maria Callas in Milan. The wind howls outside and I remember my toque-wearing self. My guests are impressed. The grapes are delicious. Cool, perfectly taut globes that burst sweetness at first bite. My mind drifts into thoughts of nature’s dazzling perfection.

OK Go says “OK stop DRM”

Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM:

From the blog:

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was “protected” by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.
…
s I understand it, EMI decreed that all of its labels (including our label Capitol) would be required to copy protect all of their releases starting on the day of our album’s release. When I heard this, I fucking lost it. Not only did our label want to make a gigantic business mistake across the board, but we, apparently arbitrarily, were chosen to be at the prow of the crashing ship. Guinea pigs, as it were.

And the more tempered Times piece:

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that’s at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

a woz interview

The Cardinal Inquirer interviewed Steve Wozniak:

Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they’re doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don’t know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don’t work. The most things that are left out because they aren’t finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

textbook pricing scams

Freakonomics readers get a lesson in price discrimination (or bad customer service):

Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discrimination”, using an example of the demand for textbooks (relatively inelastic) vs. novels (relatively elastic), the students pointed out that in our campus textbook store, “Freakonomics” is on sale at the regular price in the textbook section (1st floor) and at a 30% discount in the General Reading Section (2nd floor). Same college. Same store. Same hardback.