That won't work for the board

Why not?

Well, I don't want to do a file date/time read every time a page loads. Overhead.

So, I overstated. Can work. Don't think it's our best solution.

I'm pissed that what should work, the http headers, does not.

Right now I think asking the user to refresh one page is clunky but overall better.

Overhead

Ahh, makes sense.

Sudo Make Me a Sandwich: the robot edition

Inspired by one of the funniest goddamned XKCD strips of all time, Bre Pettis and Adam Cecchetti have built a "Sudo make me a sandwich robot" that makes a sandwich when you tell it to.

I like what happens when they don't include the "sudo".

Interesting article about netbooks - I didn't know they are far more popular outside of the US....

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent.

"We started inventing technology for the bottom of the pyramid," Jepsen says, "but the top of the pyramid wants it too." This bit of trickle-up innovation, this netbook, might well reshape the computer industry—if it doesn't kill it first.

...

Nearly every company in the PC industry has had its game plan uprooted by netbooks. Microsoft had intended to stop selling Windows XP this summer, driving customers to its more lucrative Vista operating system. But when Linux roared out of the gate on netbooks, Microsoft quickly backpedaled, extending XP for another two years—specifically for netbooks. Most experts guess that Redmond can charge barely $15 for XP on a netbook, less than a quarter of what it previously sold for. (Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks assures me the company is earning "good money" on the devices and plans to make sure its next OS, Windows 7, can run on netbooks—Vista performs poorly on them.) For its part, Intel is selling millions of its low-power Atom chips to netbook manufacturers. "We see this as our next billion-dollar market," says Anil Nanduri, Intel's technical marketing manager—except that the company makes only a fraction of the money on an Atom chip as on a more powerful Celeron or Pentium in a full-size laptop.

...

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US—where netbooks are only just taking off—it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they're already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, "I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, 'This is where my next billion customers comes from.' And he was not referring to the US." He meant the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make—Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps?—will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.

I have a question for you guys. If I upload epub books to the net, people can download them directly to their iphone or ipod touch if I make the link stanza: (or something like that. Will have to check exactly proper) instead of http:.

Any ideas how I would do that?

Also, they suggest making the link expire after a certain time so the downloader can't give it to all their friends, and then obfuscating the expiration time/date. Any ideas how I'd do that?

(This is what comes of learning by reading things piecemeal. I know lots of stuff but it doesn't always connect properly.)

Deena, part 1 is easy: just stick the ebooks in some location on your site, and instead of making your links look like <a href="http:// blah-di-blah">, you'd set your links to <a href="epub:// blah-di-blah">.

The obfuscation part is a little harder, as there are a number of ways to do it. It looks like most sites do it with javascript and/or php -- are you comfortable at all with that?

A wee bit comfortable with both, enough to find it now that you've given me an idea where to look/what to look for.

Thanks so much Amych. You rock!

iTunes help needed.

I had my work (and only) macbook pro laptop stolen out of my house last month (fun! not). I now have a shiny new unibody macbook pro, and am slowly rebuilding my archives from scattered backups here and there, but of course didn't back anything up since early November.

I've got a 8gb Nano that has music, video, and photos that I would like to salvage, but I can't for the freakin' life of me figure out how to copy content FROM the ipod onto the new computer.

I have successfully transferred purchased content, but that's the only thing that Apple makes simple.

Any hints?