Thursday, May 18, 2006

Grand Unified Web Tools

Tools, Tools (Ad Nausium) [sic.]

"There are problems with the many-tools-hacked-together approach that adds an odd balance to it."

[Bruce Alderson][1] and I have a common vision. I wish that there was a stable platform for PHP applications that provided all the common stuff like database abstraction, user login and account management. I just want to seamlessly combine the best of [MediaWiki][mw], [WordPress][wp], [Gallery][g] and [PHPbb][bb]. I don't want to have 4 different logins and spend weeks trying to make templates for each so that they all look alike. Somehow these Open Source packages need to cleanly separate the functional engine from the application presentation layer. Then I could mix and match them.

[1]: http://www.technorati.com/profile/madmaxx
[mw]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
[wp]:http://wordpress.org/
[g]:http://gallery.menalto.com/
[bb]:http://www.phpbb.com/

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

More on Music Rentals

Ashlee Vance wrote an anti-subscription rant for [The Register](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/napster_go_away/)

Customers do not, as Napster suggests, pay $10,000 to fill their iPods with 10,000 songs just because the capacity is there. They take their existing music, CDs and MP3s, and put that onto the device first, then later add iTunes songs as they go along.


This is a narrow point of view. OK, Ashlee might have a pile of CDs and the patience to collect over years, but my 14 year old little brother has about a dozen CD's and the attention span of Rain Man. Now, he could go buy another disk for $14, or he could buy 2 months of Yahoo Music for the same price. What is the better value for his dollar? 10 songs or 1 million songs?

If you ask me, a $60 subscription to Yahoo Music is a much better graduation gift than 4 new CDs. Here little brother, for $240 I will buy you an entire high-school lifetime of music. You can worry about starting a CD collection after you graduate.

Why does everyone think that consumers care about the long-term value of their purchasing dollar? Has anyone seen the national credit card debt statistics? People buy on impulse and worry about the consequences later.

As I said before, looking at my collection of about 300 disks, I could have bought 60 years of Yahoo Music for less! Am I still listening to Cindy Lauper when I'm 75? What was the point of owning all this plastic?

What's the advantage in paying for all of the tethered music on the planet? That's pointless gluttony and nothing more.


Well, it's cheaper than buying 300 disks I like.