More progress on the Thinkpad T60 and Gentoo

Well, so far so good. I've enabled the CPU's auto-frequency governor, which reduces power usage quite a bit, as well as TICKLESS (turns off the kernel's internal heartbeat) and USB suspend (turns off USB connectors when not in use), and so far it still suspsends to RAM nicely. According to Intel's powertop program, I'm saving over a Watt of power, which will increase my battery life some 8% or so. Not too shabby.

I've chosen the name Chi. It's short and easy to type, and just because I wanted to. Kurumi was my second choice.

This morning, I accidentally issued the wrong command to the laptop: instead of suspend, I sent it hibernate, which does not just suspend all operations yet keeps the system "live" in memory, but actually writes out that live image to disk and shuts everything down completely and powers off. To my pleasure, the system came back to life without a hitch when I got into work: the OS booted, saw that there was a pending image, and loaded it. It worked great.

And according to Intel's powertop program, I have about 4.5 hours of battery life if all I'm doing is word processing. Now that's good news. I can take it to the cafe' with me without having to lug the cord.

More on Doug Morris

Like a lot of people, I've ragged on CEO Doug Morris at Universal Music Group for his disastrous interview with Wired Magazine in which he angrily whined about how the industry had changed so much that he didn't know what to do. The most common observation has been that he was a once-brilliant music industry insider blindsided by a new distribution channel, namely the Internet, requiring a completely different pricing mechanism and business model.

What's most telling to me in the interview, now that it's fully on-line, is this quote right here:

This business had been the same for 25 years. The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy -- to make a product that anybody liked.

This quote tells me two things about Morris. The first is that he's upset because from when he entered the industry in the early 1960s through to the mid 1990's, a period of thirty years through which he matured as a musician and as an industry executive, the pricing and distribution model changed not at all. Morris inherited that model. Someone else had done all the heavy lifting of creating it out of whatever had come before (sheet music, public performance, and so on), and when faced with the responsibility of having to do something new, Morris was simultaneously unwilling to stand up to that responsibility, and unwilling to stand down from his command chair. He should have had the courage to tell the UMG board, "I can't do it. Find someone who can." (See Morris's comment about having to operate on one's own dog, and the interviewer's snarky retort.)

The other thing is that Morris is blind to the new reality of technology. Not the Internet specifically, but technology in general. It has put the production of music into the hands of millions of people who once couldn't afford it. The idea that "it's hard to get something that somebody wanted to buy" is simply wrong; Morris's anger stems from being in a world where he's lost control of the channel where we were all required to wait until he found something that most people wanted to buy. Now, peer-to-peer allows small bands to develop loyal followings without waiting for the Morrises of the world to greenlight them. For Morris, this is a tragedy, but the for rest of us, it's a miracle: we can find music we like without having to kowtow to the RIAA.

It's a bit of a shame; Morris actually seems like he was once a decent fellow, and I'd be more sympathetic if he hadn't stepped on his own dick, over and over, for an entire decade, destroyed his own business with his incompetence, created enormous ill-will among consumers, and inspired draconian legislation that continues to create needless suffering and hardship and stifles creative expression.

For Amythis

For the lovely Amythis: Fan Fiction Considered as a Sexual Act