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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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| Wednesday, February 21, 2007 | |
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Wired News: The top five schools [that received the most copyright complaints [from the RIAA]] are Ohio, Purdue, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. WE'RE NUMBER 5!!! posted by ruffin at 2/21/2007 12:39:00 PM |
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| Monday, February 19, 2007 | |
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Thanks, Bobby['s replacement]. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2007 03:43:00 PM |
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I thought this portion of the PayPal user agreement was particularly interesting. I'm not sure if meeting these criteria garner you an additional badge/icon on your sales (like the "PowerSeller" star), but even if so it's an interesting distinction to bury in your agreement. Essentially, if you've got a high enough score, your customers gain much more protection for their purchases... an order of magnitude more. 13.9 eBay Items Eligible for PayPal Buyer Protection. Every item on eBay (except Live Auctions and vehicles) that meets the above requirements is eligible for PayPal Buyer Protection up to $200.00 USD, but items are only eligible for PayPal Buyer Protection up to $2,000.00 USD (and should be identified as eligible items in the eBay listing) if: a. The seller's eBay feedback rating is at least 50; at least 98% of the seller's eBay feedback is positive, the seller is a PayPal User from an eligible country, the seller has a Verified Premier or Verified Business Account in good standing; and b. The listing was on an eligible eBay site (eBay.com and certain other eBay sites self identified as such) and PayPal is listed as an acceptable payment method. (emphasis mine) I was eyeing a Nintento DS on a site with 97.5% positive. The thing is pretty cheap anyhow, and won't get near the $200 limit, but there were regular enough negatives on this seller to at least see what PayPal and eBay were pushing for protection. And I'm 13 positives away from getting my customers the $2000 protection. *sigh* Sorry folk. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2007 10:57:00 AM |
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| Friday, February 16, 2007 | |
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Daring Fireball strikes again: [quoting Paul Thurrott, fwtw] If that's really true, I'll just reiterate a request I've been making [back to Gruber] Remember the RIAA's response to Jobs's essay, where they misread Jobs's clear statement that Apple has rejected the idea of licensing FairPlay as an offer to license FairPlay? Thurrott takes it even further, suggesting not only that Apple license FairPlay to other companies, but that Apple "seek" (read: "pay for") a license to Microsoft's Windows Media DRM. This is, yes, a remarkably laughable suggestion. But it raises a genuinely intriguing question: How could Thurrott be so wrong? Another interesting read. I'll withhold the answer since I'm not commenting on it, but worth reading. DRM squabbles really are the most interesting [popularly influential] things going on in comp sci/info tech/digital media right now. posted by ruffin at 2/16/2007 04:53:00 PM |
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From Macworld: News: Microsoft's YouTube rival arrives in public beta: Microsoft has unveiled a public beta of its MSN Soapbox video-upload service, its competitor to Google's popular YouTube service. There's a huge disconnect here, and I'm going to imagine that it's not on Microsoft's, as they have enough intelligent people employed at Redmond not to make such a large slip-in planning strategies. In the next four years... YouTube will not be unseated by MSN Tube. The iPod will not be unseated by Zune. MSN will never overtake AOL, at least not while dialup is still arguably relevant (I believe that's almost history rather than a prediction already). I'd have to guess Microsoft knows they're smart enough to create a knock-off of these technical innovations that they can make far more money off of 5-25% of a market than it'll cost to write and maintain. They've got the talent, why not make something just as good, technically speaking? Innovation? Zilch. Minority stake in the market? Guaranteed. So what's out of kilter is that MS automatically gets their new item slated as a possible market dominator when something like an iPhone equivalent gets press like this from SciFi.com. SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM: Well, this [digital device], known as the Meizu M8 PMP, comes to us from China, land of the knockoffs. The Kia Amanti looks like Jag (the first version even more so), and can leverage that "homage" to grab a slice of the car market. This is happening in each of these cases. posted by ruffin at 2/16/2007 01:44:00 PM |
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| Sunday, February 11, 2007 | |
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I'm a big fan of text email, both for consistancy of presentation on your reader's platform and to cut down on unneeded bandwidth. I don't care if it takes two and a quarter seconds to load your email, that's too long. If I need to view pictures, include them as attachments. This trick from the O'Reilly Network seems awfully useful, and I'll be trying it out soon. What it does is makes emails that come in multipart format display as plain text, as long as one of the parts is a plain text format version of the message. It turns out, though, that you can force nearly all of your inbound messages into plain text mode. Make sure Mail isn't running, then launch the Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities) and type this (hit Return at the end): defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool true Now that's useful, imo. Note this isn't about *composition* in plain text, but reading emails in plain text as long as it's possible. Neat-o. posted by ruffin at 2/11/2007 04:00:00 PM |
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| Friday, February 09, 2007 | |
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How long before we have Google Adwords-like advertisements in the next Crichton novel? Try, "It's already happened". I never knew how important in-content, relatively subdued advertising would become when I watched the World Cup back in '92 or so. Remember that? When Coke (or whoever) would have a constant image at the bottom of the telecast while the game was played? Certainly product placement has grown a bit, which Disney has masterfully taken to such heights that, for Disney, the product is the headliner of the show (Wiggles, Doodlebops, though they too learned from the capitalist's petri dish which is educational TV -- Sesame Street, Barney, etc). Still, these "unobstrusive" ads, unobtrusive only due to the over-conditioning society has received from TV (minus World Cup) and radio, are growing pretty quickly. As an aside, I've got the first volume of the Seasame Street "nostalgia" release on DVD, which includes the very first episode of the show to air. I was struck both by the new intro, where a cartoon character warns me that the show might not be applicable to the needs of today's pre-schooler (they've got to have a reason to make more, right?) and with the speed with which industry inserted a commercial into children's TV via the government, in this case, government grants for the show. In the episode, there's a five minute or so commercial for drinking milk that boggles my mind. I'll likely comment more later, but there's your typical 1960s film strip, deep, masculine voice explaining why milk is good for everyone involved laid over a soundtrack of a 1960s style folk singer quietly extolling the benefits of milking to the happy cows, eating under shade trees, making the milk. This is something that deserves transcription, certainly. To end the aside, The Electric Company's early episodes rock. I could only wish for a show this educational to be released now. Between the Lions doesn't come close to the unabashed, direct, almost unconscious approach to learning to read The Electric Company provides. That, or, more likely, it did one heck of a job enculturating me. In either event, thanks, Cos, for taking on the job of being the godfather of a generation. I fear the demise of the printed book, though I'm intrigued by the possibility of ads to possibly provide books for free. I'm not sure you can ever kill the medium of the codex. It's simply too cheap to produce, too easy to transport, and inexpensive enough to replace that it can go anywhere with anyone. It is an extremely low-cost alternative to the Game Boy and Blackberry, and will on this point alone continue to exist for quite some time. But how will it become remediated by digital media, and for what effect? There, I'm extremely curious and suspicious. Labels: ads, copyright, Google, government, Sesame Street posted by ruffin at 2/09/2007 03:09:00 PM |
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| Thursday, February 08, 2007 | |
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Just to show I don't quite equate Jobs with Moses (see recent post)... From Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Music": It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music. Please. My mother thought, once leaving AOL and getting DSL, that her new provider was Google (that was her default home page, somehow), and that she had to go to the Google front page and type in her URL to surf anywhere. Why? Because Google's search page, used this way, looked and acted a lot like AOL's interface to the net. To many people, I'll even say for most of its users, iTunes *is* the only way they know how to get to their mp3 collection. There's a reason iTunes copies imported mp3s (and not just those that it's ripping from CD, but those from any source) to a folder -- so that once the original mp3s disappear and the user no longer knows where they are, iTunes still has a backup. Of course, for iTunes, the backup is important enough that, for iTunes's purposes, it's the original. I'm sure Media Player 10 finds mp3 files anywhere on someone's box by default, and that's a big help if you want to move, but let's face it, buy-in is buy-in. iTunes has enough momentum that for many, 100% of their music is, in praxis, closed by iTunes the application, ultimately a much more effective gateway than FairPlay the DRM. FairPlay just leverages replacing those extra 3% of songs into another barrier for leaving iTunes and iPod for someone else. I'd tell Jobs to spin it straight, but, as we all know, he is (and he and Gates and Sony and friends are) just trying to make a buck, bless his (their) heart(s). posted by ruffin at 2/08/2007 03:46:00 PM |
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I can't begin to capture all that's recently occurred in the ongoing struggle for platform supremacy, but let's begin. Steve Jobs has written that digital music should be DRM free. I've yet to read it, and will do so immediately after posting this. Not surprisingly, Daring Fireball has one of the best takes on post. Best point taken from his summary and commentary: Music companies already are releasing DRM-free digital music, and it's higher quality than you can get from the iTunes Music Store. They're called CDs.[1] Also of interest from Daring Fireball's commentary: DVDs have not, for the most part, ever been released on a large commercial scale without DRM, contra CDs. Thus Jobs on DRM is titled "Thoughts on Music." The leverage isn't there for unDRMing video, neither in industry (movie companies don't want it and Apple hasn't the power to negotiate it) nor historically, in the format of the medium. (I'd say this makes the CD something like the early days of open source, but un-copylefted, software. The protection was anonymity, something many bloggers don't quite understand any better than the record companies did. I daresay many original open sourcers are a little less hip on MIT/BSD style licenses today than they were when the hacker community was still a true, knowable community. See disgruntled FreeBSDers when Apple didn't give much back initially after building OS X atop their work.) In the Daring Fireball post, we get this choice quote (though the source isn't clearly cited): Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, said Mr. Jobs's call for unrestricted music sales was "irresponsible, or at the very least naive," adding, "It's like [Jobs is] on top of the mountain making pronouncements, while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen." (bold mine) The image of Jobs on the mountain reminded me of this recent, somewhat bizarre, interview with Bill Gates over at Newsweek's/MSNBC's website. [Interviewer's question:] In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system. [Gates' response:] You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, 'Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,' that's fine." (bold again mine) Where to begin? I'll start by pointing out that Microsoft's higher ups seem to share some common imagery -- that Jobs believes he's Moses, and that somehow being Moses is A Bad Thing. This seems both sour grapes over iPod and FairPlay and, well, demonic by self-identification, right? Look, I don't think Jobs is Moses either, but this is the worst smear campaign I believe I can recall in a while. What's bad about having open content? I'm also impressed with how well companies pretend piracy continues to "work," even with those same music companies increasingly using lawsuits against p2p traders, to me seeming to be as much to grow another source of revenue as anything else. Are people still finding their music so easily post-Napster that DRM doesn't factor in, or is it that music player manufactures simply want a larger piece of the pie? Interoperability is more about profit than piracy. Oh well, there are the links I'd like to remember and some of my typical dime store commentary. [1] Well, at least the non van Zandt ones. posted by ruffin at 2/08/2007 03:30:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, February 06, 2007 | |
 I've blamed Google for not allowing users access to more than one edition of some books online, effectively erasing access to those old versions in a 1984 style that would make Orwell proud. Well, now Softonic, apparently one of Europe's analogs for download.com or versiontracker.com, has pulled a fast one in the opposite direction. Softonic places themselves between users' access to the files they'd like to donate, and end users to download. It's skillfully arranged. Let's say I release version 1.0 of my software for free, and choose to make it available on Softonic. Now let's say that I release version 2.0 and want to charge, I don't know, $4.99. I pull down all my copies of 1.0 and update my listings online. Versiontracker.com, as an example, links directly to your site. They serve as a clearinghouse of links. Users search, hopefully (if you're versiontracker) click a few ads, and download directly from the site without ever going there. This seems like a pleasant enough tradeoff. Versiontracker allows you to find my software, and for that they get first crack at showing ads. I can easily halt access to the file since Versiontracker is not mirroring it; it's only on my server. Softonic never takes down version 1.0. The links to your "mirrors" of the software are gone, but they still have an accessible copy. If 1.0 does a decent job, will people shell out $5 to get the update from you, or will they download from Softonic? Now, a la used books, you're competing in large part with yourself. Bad? Not necessarily, but it is a pretty clear paradigmatic disconnect. I've often wondered about the potential harm of releasing a to-be-shareware app as a free demo first. You'd likely pick up a few users, and certainly later versions would be sharper, less buggy, and contain more features, but you'd always have to worry about competing with your historical selves. With a digital release, you've essentially created the possibility of there being limitless, all but free, copies of your "old edition." Taking down your copies solved the Versiontracker issue. But there will always be a few people hosting your file on some wacky ftp site, somewhere. You can't eliminate the production of the old edition; you can only seek to make it more difficult to find -- and therefore, a la the iTunes Music Store where it's often worth $0.99 a track not to have search for a song or worry about viruses, scarity means you'll have more people willing to pay. Okay, so here's the deal with Softonic. Softonic continues to mirror your file even after you've taken it down. Great. They charge a dollar for a user to download from their mirror. Less great. If you've taken down your old file from your site and done a good job getting it removed from other hosts, you're now in competition directly with Softonic-as-host. They are selling your software for a dollar when you're charging five. Is your upgrade worth the extra dough? If not, and especially in a case like this where the application doesn't offer a demo, Softonic's easily found mirror is awfully tempting. I'm not sure how I ultimately feel about hosting what were released as freely distributable files. Perhaps in this case it's the PodTube designer's fault for letting out a free 1.0. Though I can't say s/he should've known better, s/he could've, and that's the way the system runs, better or worse. I know I have zero sympathy for those who try to limit the sale of used books, and am against Google's remediation of books into a closely monitored, digital rare book room style end run around copyright. Softonic is doing precisely what I hope Google doesn't, but fear they will. Softonic is able to [and Google is increasingly putting itself in a position where it could]... 1.) limit access to files in ways we can assume the original author did not intend. 2.) directly profit from this ability to control access 3.) leverage its position from [ad supported] information clearinghouse to information broker. Perhaps this simply means I'm not for having a new medium influence the distribution of a legacy medium when such a change would benefit predominantly the proverbial fat cats. Regardless, it's an important distunction to make. posted by ruffin at 2/06/2007 02:35:00 PM |
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| Sunday, February 04, 2007 | |
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And if you believed in your code enough to want to go through that for one project - in groups that create lots of little scripts and pieces of software that could be considered individual projects, it would take up a fair amount of time writing up the paperwork and justifications. Enough that you'd likely soon be doing more paperwork than code, which kind of defeats the whole purpose in the first place. Got the above quote forwarded to me, the source apparently an academic listserv where the possibility of open-sourcing faculty code was raised. Look, let's cut to the chase. The LGPL is a perfect license for all academic work, and I can't think of any good reason to use one that's any less open. MIT, Berkeley, etc. all seem like good substitutes. (GPL is not a good fit, I don't believe, if only for the sorts of negative connotations the project members could develop for open source once they figured out what GPL really means. If the university and its partner(s) were fully aware of what GPL means going in, or the university instated a generic GPL exemption for faculty as an alternative to automatic university copyright, however, I'd be all for it.) Any sort of closed partnership between a publicly funded institution and a corporate interest is inappropriate, and this is luckily still largely the conventional wisdom in the subset of publicly funded institutions which includes universities. The LGPL allows a corporation to freely continue work enabled by their partnered research without being forced to hand over one iota of their later, independent work -- work they later, independently complete from the end of the project until the end of time. Flip side, the LGPL ensures that everyone has equal and open access to the fruits of each partnership's labours, at least from the project's code's point of view (social connections are a little more difficult to manage). Ensuring code-specific fruits are accessible to all is a good place to start. But what if we're talking issues of national security, like nuclear testing? Makes me being to wonder if public universities should be contributing directly to those issues, honestly. Look, if universities are going force their faculty to enter into contracts stating that research for their personal, monetary gain is against the spirit or mission of that institution, the university better dammed well follow suit. Otherwise, the university (and other incorporated entities) are becoming the backbone of a [not so] new [but growing], increasingly sinister sort of bourgeoise. posted by ruffin at 2/04/2007 03:03:00 PM |
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| Saturday, February 03, 2007 | |
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I've been arguing that Google is increasingly evil here for a while, and I've stumbled over another example that scares me a bit. Take this search at books.google.com. This book, Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, recently released a new version. I ordered an older version to read and mark up. Note that the older version isn't on Google. Google's Books interface, if my guess is correct, is, at least for academic books, looking to become not just a searchable database, but a publisher. Pulling up well short of this -- I hope, but don't hold my breath, that Google will soon put the older version online as well. I want to see what's changed, and right now that's occasionally impossible. Google's "latest version is greatest" approach, for which I have only this slimmest of anecdotal evidence for now, essentially erases the potential of searching old versions. No, that's completely wrong. It only removes the barriers from doing highly productive searches on the latest version of the book. This means that, for all practical purposes, as books.google catches on in academia, the older versions will no longer exist, 1984 style. Castells' relatively unquestioned progressivism in his approach to labor and social improvement, along with his grossly inappropriate misuse of ecological metahpors for the purposes of unfairly and underhandedly misleading his audience, could be quickly swept away, or at least more cleverly hidden from each new edition's batch of readers. Luckily here the new edition seems, in many areas, to be little more than a dusting off and renumbering of the old text as it is reprinted for a new generation of would-be academics. And I know this precisely thanks to Google's presentation of the new version coupled with Abebooks.com's ability to get me a used original for under $16 shipped. The power of exclusion still boggles my mind, as does Googles' process' provision for shipping us what used to be books like so much more licensed software. Ah, which reminds me, I did mean to include an interesting snippet from the copyright text on the inner cover of the book. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Can't tell if that means it's better to be in the US or not... posted by ruffin at 2/03/2007 09:56:00 PM |
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