I thought Yahoo! Music Unlimited was going to be the next great thing – until I started using the service. Buggy software and brick wall support lines soon showed me that sometimes a bargain is not all it is cracked up to be. Fortunately, a white knight rode up to the rescue: Visa’s disputed charge system.

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It looks like Forgent’s long run of JPEG lawsuit revenue has now officially dried up. The Austin American Statesman has an article (registration required) that says the remaining JPEG lawsuits have all been settled, with a grand total of less than $8 million from somewhere fewer than 20 defendents. Apparently, the whole JPEG lawsuit run [...]

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The eminently quotable Samuel Johnson had a very pragmatic view about writing, and was quoted by Boswell as having said: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. Personally, I think Johnson is pretty close to the mark on this one, but I will add one caveat. Ask any writer about their first [...]

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I enjoyed getting an additional 1.57% discount on my amazon.com purchases for the small work of using A9.com once or twice a day. No need to use the toolbar or anything like that, just use A9.com from your Amazon.com account while logged in. Well, it seems that paying people to use your search engine doesn’t [...]

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Ownership of the Zip file format has always been a tenuous thing. Back in the day, PKWare’s founder Phil Katz (shown) didn’t publish an official document or specfication, but hobbyists such as those with the Info-ZIP project did eventually have the Appnote.txt file that shipped with PKZip to provide a pretty good road map to [...]

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I’m ordering some cat food, which for some reason is always out of stock in the local store. By using Amazon, I’m going to pay shipping, but I get a break on the tax, and I get my A9 discount, plus I get 3% bonus points on my Amazon Visa, and so it all works [...]

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Nothing to see here

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Data compression is of course more than just a hobby of mine, it’s a way of life. And now I have an inspirational poster that I can frame for cubicle wall or use as wallpaper while I engage in my passion. Thanks to the photoshop pranksters at b3ta.com for helping!           [...]

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A recurring question that I see in my inbox, or in a comp.compression post is: “Can’t I write a program that figures out in advance what the best compressor will be for a given file?” Of course, what the question implies is that there ought to be a good way to do this without actually [...]

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I worked for Don Killen at Greenleaf Software for quite a few years in the late 80s and 90s. Don was a pioneer in the world of commercial C and C++ libraries, and I received the sad news that he passed away this week.

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