Thursday, December 05, 2002

Too bad AOL didn't do something bold yesterday. Here's an example. Pretend Steve Case said this. "Hi my name is Steve Case. Remember me? I work for AOL-Time-Warner. We own a lot of record companies. I was talking with my friend and colleague Ted Turner, while we were trying to figure out what to do with our online system, and he told me the story of how he bought MGM to establish Turner Classic Movies, and what a hit that channel is with cable subscribers. I asked Ted if we couldn't do the same thing for music with AOL. After all the people really seemed to like Napster. Why not give them what they want? So today we're opening up the vaults of Time-Warner music, all kinds of great acts, for only $19.95 per month, for AOL subscribers only. A new version of the client software, version 8.1 will be available shortly with the new Music Manager app built-in, based on work done by the WinAmp folks. Guess what, it plays MP3s. We've done really clean scans of all the classics from Billy Joel to Boy George. Welcome back to innovation and staying in tune with customers at AOL. And welcome to the world of convergence, where synergy is more than just lip movement, where we put weight behind the big ideas of our time." I suppose that was too much to hope for, eh? [Scripting News] Yes, too bad.  That would have been truely innovative, and very sweet.  Assuming I would be able to play the MP3's in anyplayer, and not have them locked away inside the AOL client somehow, I would have signed up for AOL for this alone.  I guess Steve doesn't have Ted's brains. 11:22:08 AM

I'm on a mission to optimize my Lifebook's performance, somewhat. Given that the transmeta chip runs reeeeeeally slow in power save mode (the upside of this is that I can work off the battery for over five hours, even using wi-fi), the more cruft I can get out of my configuration, the better. Monday night's episode of The Screen Savers had some nice tips on this subject.  Their segment was targeted at XP, but most of the same stuff works well for Win2k as well.  They recommended Black Viper's web site for information regarding services that run on your system.  I found this to be a useful resource, but unfortunately limited to the standard Microsoft services. This morning I Googled a different site, Answers That Work, that has information that extends to things other software vendors install as well.  So far, every service and application I've looked for has been there, and has included a detailed description of what it does, whether or not it's truely needed, and in what situations one might consider disabling it. Another tool I found, via the TSS web page, is Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel.  It adds a new applet to the control panel where you can manage all of the methods that applications can insert themselves in to your startup process, including the Run and Run Once keys in the registry.  Very nice. Update I found something that wasn't in the Answers That Work site: LTSMMSG.exe.  According to AZpcHELP.com (Google ROCKS!), it is the driver for the Lucent software modem.  Additionally, their advice on this one is to "Buy a new modem, these are bad news".  Too bad they couldn't provide a more detailed explanation than that. On that note: I rarely use my modems anymore.  I've either got wired Ethernet or wi-fi at work and home.  I'm not complaining.  I think this is a nice improvement over Internet access ten years ago. 10:00:46 AM