Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

I caught this from a link on the Bad Vista! site, after my bimonthly stumbling around the gnu.org site for fun.

Groklaw - Burning Issues With Vista, by Richard Rasker - Updated:

The options are clear: the Mastered format is readable on any computer, the Live File System format only on Windows computers -- and even then, it depends on the chosen version (via "“Versie wijzigen”) of Live File System, as the following screen shots show:

Surely this can't be true, that by default all Vista machines will be burning CDs that can only be read by Windows machines, can it? Could Win2k read this Live File System?

In the past, like with the Sony rootkit on some CDs, people were content to institute file protections on Windows only, and have other OSes continue to rip away. I wonder if that wouldn't be the case here.

Here's a bit from the fellow's sum:

I tried reading LFS format media on my Linux systems but failed, even though I installed udftools. Yes, K3b (a great Linux burning tool) could tell me that there was data on the disks, but it was unable to show the actual data itself. All other tools failed with the error message that the disk couldn't be mounted.

Let me make clear this guy is a Linux zealot. Throughout the groklaw post, he's wasting our time slamming the "Start" button in Windows, etc. He's burning [well, trying to burn] a file about Linux with Vista whose icon has Tux on it. This isn't exactly an unbiased report. When at the conclusion of the first day he's determined Vista can't burn anything, the machine's owner is able to, the next day, burn the files without a problem. Sketchy.

Still, the postscript possibly has more useful information.

Postscript: After reading some feedback to the article, I fired up the Vista box once more, testing some things posted. What I find is that the two oldest UDF versions (1.50 and 2.00) indeed can be read by Linux -- but only if udftools are installed on the Linux system, which isn't the case by default. This option also suffers from a similar problem as the Mastered format, i.e., it can't be set as the default choice and must thus be selected consciously every single time.

Rather quickly, evidence mounted that Live File System isn't (as I thought) just based on a ISO standard called Universal Disk Format, (UDF), but that LFS is UDF. So how did I get the idea that LFS was a new, incompatible Microsoft format?

Let's assume, then, that some day in the near future we'll probably be able to read these disks in Linux with an updated version of udftools. Let's say that day is now. Later in the update...

But if LFS is in fact UDF, why couldn't my Linux boxes read the disks? Well, this was due to sloppiness on my part, a lack of proper UDF support in Linux, and my hardware setup.
...
One of Groklaw's readers pointed me to a Linux kernel patch for improved UDF support, and also provided the following general information on UDF support in Linux:

[Linux can read 'em all with an update]

Still, this doesn't explain why I had trouble reading UDF disks formatted with the older (older than 2.50) versions, but that turned out to be a hardware issue. My (older) CD-ROM players seemed to be incompatible with UDF, most probably because they didn't support the 2048 bytes per sector UDF uses. When I put the UDF formatted CD-RW's in my DVD burner, they could be read properly (with the exception of version 2.50).

...

I found this lagging UDF support in Linux a bit surprising, especially as it seems that UDF 2.50 has been around for four years. Apparently, there wasn't any reason to support it because it was very rarely used. But with the arrival of Vista, and also new DVD formats, this will no doubt change.

Does any of this excuse Microsoft? Absolutely not. The post is an interesting read for understanding how choices in an OS can put up barriers to entry for other players, like software and hardware vendors. It's just that, as written, the guy is doing exactly the power play he's accusing MS of performing! Read the first quote I've put into this post, that remains in his post, unedited or qualified. The compare with what we find in the last paragraph of this huge post...

So in this case, it's actually Linux that's lagging in development; Microsoft isn't really to blame, at least as far as lock-in is concerned – although more accurate information on the nature of “Live File System” could have prevented quite a bit of trouble and confusion. Also, it depends on the CD or DVD device whether a UDF formatted disk can be used or not. Especially older CD-ROM players may not be UDF-compatible. (emph mine)

In some ways, that's too large a backtrack. Linux isn't "lagging" so much as Microsoft is forcing one to upgrade, which is going to leave a nontrivial number of Granny Smiths with boxes that won't read the discs. I'm assuming UDF has no ISO 9660 (iirc) backwards compatibility. Microsoft is to blame, not for lock-in, but for forced upgrades, which is, in a sense, the same thing. (This is not unlike yesterday's rant on the proposed end of Firefox support for OS X 10.3.)

Let's face it -- MS is going to install updates to Vista, usually automatically, that'll keep their UDF burning functions ahead of the versions installed on Linux and likely OS X by default. Replacing a relatively universal standard with one of [I assume] likely your own making isn't progress. I'm betting UDF/LFS discs never work on my Mac running OS 9. That's a power play. I just get tired of the Linux hyperbole.

The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right.

A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange.

That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

(Matt)

Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment.

The Rare Book Room

What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain.

How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you.

More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel.

How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.)

Rare Books and Software

So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.)

Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means.

Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not.

This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms.

Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out.

The Obsolescence of Copyright

I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books.

(Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.)

The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates.

Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens.

Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0

Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it.

So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way.

As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers.

Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console

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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Friday, May 25, 2007
ssh -L 590X:localhost:590Y name@serverbox.com ssh -L 590X:localhost:590Y name@serverbox.com Labels: noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 5/25/2007 09:25:00 AM

Passwords and Stock VNC on Mac OS X Server VNC fun on Mac OS X Server. Info from Apple. Enable VNC access (on test machine) Go to your admin computer, or a client computer, that either has VNC access enabled or it can be enabled. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences. Click Sharing. Select the Apple Remote Desktop service (by clicking its name, not necessarily its checkbox). Click Access Privileges. In the resulting dialog, select the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" checkbox. Enter a VNC password in the field to the right. The password you enter will be the password you assign to other clients later. Click OK. posted by ruffin at 5/25/2007 08:40:00 AM

Thursday, May 24, 2007
The Checkbox Battle So I'm trying to view Revolution OS on Google Video and have to download the Google Video Player. When it's done installing, I see the following. What the heck does using Google as a default search engine in IE (heck, I'm using Firefox anyway... they should know that from my request) have to do with playing Revolution OS? Ah, the battle of the checkboxes. As we learned earlier today from Mr. Rasker, it's not a Trojan because they "asked". I'll try to stop blogging so danged much now. posted by ruffin at 5/24/2007 10:38:00 AM

Simmering Issues With Burning Issues With Vista I caught this from a link on the Bad Vista! site, after my bimonthly stumbling around the gnu.org site for fun. Groklaw - Burning Issues With Vista, by Richard Rasker - Updated: The options are clear: the Mastered format is readable on any computer, the Live File System format only on Windows computers -- and even then, it depends on the chosen version (via "“Versie wijzigen”) of Live File System, as the following screen shots show: Surely this can't be true, that by default all Vista machines will be burning CDs that can only be read by Windows machines, can it? Could Win2k read this Live File System? In the past, like with the Sony rootkit on some CDs, people were content to institute file protections on Windows only, and have other OSes continue to rip away. I wonder if that wouldn't be the case here. Here's a bit from the fellow's sum: I tried reading LFS format media on my Linux systems but failed, even though I installed udftools. Yes, K3b (a great Linux burning tool) could tell me that there was data on the disks, but it was unable to show the actual data itself. All other tools failed with the error message that the disk couldn't be mounted. Let me make clear this guy is a Linux zealot. Throughout the groklaw post, he's wasting our time slamming the "Start" button in Windows, etc. He's burning [well, trying to burn] a file about Linux with Vista whose icon has Tux on it. This isn't exactly an unbiased report. When at the conclusion of the first day he's determined Vista can't burn anything, the machine's owner is able to, the next day, burn the files without a problem. Sketchy. Still, the postscript possibly has more useful information. Postscript: After reading some feedback to the article, I fired up the Vista box once more, testing some things posted. What I find is that the two oldest UDF versions (1.50 and 2.00) indeed can be read by Linux -- but only if udftools are installed on the Linux system, which isn't the case by default. This option also suffers from a similar problem as the Mastered format, i.e., it can't be set as the default choice and must thus be selected consciously every single time. Rather quickly, evidence mounted that Live File System isn't (as I thought) just based on a ISO standard called Universal Disk Format, (UDF), but that LFS is UDF. So how did I get the idea that LFS was a new, incompatible Microsoft format? Let's assume, then, that some day in the near future we'll probably be able to read these disks in Linux with an updated version of udftools. Let's say that day is now. Later in the update... But if LFS is in fact UDF, why couldn't my Linux boxes read the disks? Well, this was due to sloppiness on my part, a lack of proper UDF support in Linux, and my hardware setup. ... One of Groklaw's readers pointed me to a Linux kernel patch for improved UDF support, and also provided the following general information on UDF support in Linux: [Linux can read 'em all with an update] Still, this doesn't explain why I had trouble reading UDF disks formatted with the older (older than 2.50) versions, but that turned out to be a hardware issue. My (older) CD-ROM players seemed to be incompatible with UDF, most probably because they didn't support the 2048 bytes per sector UDF uses. When I put the UDF formatted CD-RW's in my DVD burner, they could be read properly (with the exception of version 2.50). ... I found this lagging UDF support in Linux a bit surprising, especially as it seems that UDF 2.50 has been around for four years. Apparently, there wasn't any reason to support it because it was very rarely used. But with the arrival of Vista, and also new DVD formats, this will no doubt change. Does any of this excuse Microsoft? Absolutely not. The post is an interesting read for understanding how choices in an OS can put up barriers to entry for other players, like software and hardware vendors. It's just that, as written, the guy is doing exactly the power play he's accusing MS of performing! Read the first quote I've put into this post, that remains in his post, unedited or qualified. The compare with what we find in the last paragraph of this huge post... So in this case, it's actually Linux that's lagging in development; Microsoft isn't really to blame, at least as far as lock-in is concerned – although more accurate information on the nature of “Live File System” could have prevented quite a bit of trouble and confusion. Also, it depends on the CD or DVD device whether a UDF formatted disk can be used or not. Especially older CD-ROM players may not be UDF-compatible. (emph mine) In some ways, that's too large a backtrack. Linux isn't "lagging" so much as Microsoft is forcing one to upgrade, which is going to leave a nontrivial number of Granny Smiths with boxes that won't read the discs. I'm assuming UDF has no ISO 9660 (iirc) backwards compatibility. Microsoft is to blame, not for lock-in, but for forced upgrades, which is, in a sense, the same thing. (This is not unlike yesterday's rant on the proposed end of Firefox support for OS X 10.3.) Let's face it -- MS is going to install updates to Vista, usually automatically, that'll keep their UDF burning functions ahead of the versions installed on Linux and likely OS X by default. Replacing a relatively universal standard with one of [I assume] likely your own making isn't progress. I'm betting UDF/LFS discs never work on my Mac running OS 9. That's a power play. I just get tired of the Linux hyperbole. posted by ruffin at 5/24/2007 09:59:00 AM

Wednesday, May 23, 2007
If code doesn't rust, platforms apparently do. From Proposal to Drop Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) Support For Gecko 1.9 (thanks, MacSlash): Dropping support for Panther would also free up engineering resources and allow us to take advantage of APIs that only became available on Tiger. We have made a huge number of great changes to our Mac OS X code for Gecko 1.9, but we still have a lot of work to do and we are already running short on time to deliver a product that works well on Tiger and Leopard. We will deliver a great product, our best yet - but every day counts from here on out. There is already a backlog of tricky Panther-only regressions, bugs, and performance issues[...] that I suspect will consume at least a few weeks of development time. Over the next 6 months, especially as QA ramps up for release, the number of serious Panther bugs will go up and thus require even more time. As for taking advantage of APIs that only became available on Tiger, I mean a couple of things. First of all there are some things Tiger can do that Panther can't. Thankfully that is a somewhat short list, but it is not insignificant. I'd like to quote less, but would like everyone to read more. This is exactly the strange sort of conversation that drives me crazy, both when programming and as a user. Can it really be that 10.3 doesn't allow Firefox to work correctly? That OS X has bugs that simply have no workaround? 10.4 turns everything to gold, I suppose. Has Apple killed support for 10.3? 10.2? I was wondering recently, spurred by a recent round of reader mail on lowendmac.com about G3 support in 10.5 and my own continued daily use of OS 9 [sic], how long the Mac community tended to support an older OS. I figured it was one major release back. Still, today I run across Coda, which turns out to be 10.4+ only, and now hear this about Firefox. Firefox as is will continue to be a good browser for a long time to come. Even Mozilla from 2002, iirc, remains a decent app for browsing in OS 9. Yet the fact that so much time can be saved by dropping support for 10.3 makes me wonder... well, it makes me wonder. Here's a reply to the above doc from someone apparently working with Adium: The point is that it's fairly old hardware, and those users are probably not the types to try an alternative browser -- they'll probably just stick with Safari. To succeed on the Mac you need to be nimble and fashionable. Josh's work with native form controls and all the Cocoa port work in general has gone a long way, and I think with a nice theme and a few "hip" touches, we can make a big splash with Firefox 3. Dropping 10.3 will help us be more nimble. "Nimble and fashionable"? I guess. Proof that if code doesn't rust, platforms apparently do. In brief, for me, if you're dropping support for an older OS version, you're helping push people to upgrade. That means you've become a salesman for, in this case, Apple, on some level. Make darned sure you think long and hard before you cut out users, regardless of their percentage of your perceived whole. Perhaps it's unavoidable. Perhaps Firefox has moved beyond rendering web pages well with a minimal wrapper. Perhaps Firefox is too bloated to implement well xplat. Perhaps it is absolutely essential that it's able to "prevent a menu bar menu from opening when a user clicks on it with a context menu open already". Maybe that's mission critical for Firefox. I don't know. I don't know anymore. (apologies again to Mr. Mamet) posted by ruffin at 5/23/2007 10:52:00 PM

Fireball on Coda Just wasted too much time reading Daring Fireball on Coda: The danger creating an ambitious IDE like this is kitchen-sink-itis. One problem with application bloat is that it has a gravity-like pull. Once you start edging closer to bloat, the pull gets stronger. Like an undertow, it’s easy to think you’re playing it safe – Us? Bloatware? Never! – when in fact you’re already being pulled out to sea. If nothing else, Panic has clearly succeeded with Coda in two ways: (a) the app looks marvelous; and (b) it does many things but is almost devoid of bloat. (a) is the one most people will rave about, but (b) was the more difficult accomplishment. A good point in theory. Nobody uses Seamonkey. Everyone uses Firefox and NVu. No serious web developer used Visual InterDev. They used, well, Ultra-Edit and mapped drives. The real measuring stick here is, of course, does the app save you time without sacrificing quality? If you will use it every freakin' day for three years, a steep learning curve is acceptable. Exhibit A: Several years back, I finally stopped using pico, BBEdit Lite, and Ultra-Edit and now use VIm on every computer I own. I still feel like a VIm n00b (I only started using "b" regularly a few weeks ago, years in), but I've saved craploads of time. It's that good at text editing. Nobody will ever beat it, only match it generally in a different way, you freakin' emacs fanatics. If I had craploads of monitor real estate, would it be nice to ensure that none of my windows overlapped when I was editing html, a la Ratpoison? You'd better believe it. I'm good, no, I'm ninja-freakin' AWESOME at the alt-tab, but I'd rather have five text files open in VIm plus SQuirreL-SQL, Safari, Firefox, FileZilla/Transmit, and, heck, long as we're dreaming, IE on Win2k on the screen at the same time without losing sight of any of those windows. So how could Coda help? Well, if it'll provide me with a web-editing-specific ratpoison like interface stitching together the apps of my choice (of which Transmit is one), I'm game. That would save time. But before I could save all that time, I'd need another $1800 first. posted by ruffin at 5/23/2007 02:51:00 PM

Coda -- with SubEtha! Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X: Collaboration. Using the innovative Subetha Engine, edit code simultaneously with a co-worker in the next cube — or across the globe. Share documents via Bonjour, track changes, or just sneak in dumb jokes. Yeah, but does it have VIm mode? (Well, sorta, yes.) The big deal here is that Panic's made something that's browser, editor, and ftp app in one, and now allows you to do it all from a single window. Great. If you have a giant monitor. And don't mind only checking in Safari (Firefox for xplat, anyone?). And don't have anything server side (php, asp, jsp, lmnop). I really like Transmit, Panic's ftp client. It's one of the few shareware apps I've paid for, and, much to my chagrin as I've ranted here before, paid for twice. Perhaps this would be useful, but I'm not sold, yet. posted by ruffin at 5/23/2007 02:27:00 PM

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Nobody rolls their own anymore, but they should From Daring Fireball: Long ago, Apple did. Apple wrote the entirety of the classic Mac OS. They had their own compiler, their own networking protocols, built computers using Apple’s own proprietary peripheral ports. Originally, they had to, because the ’80s were a proprietary era. But by the ’90s, that “let’s do everything ourselves” mindset nearly killed the company. The biggest difference between the old Apple regime and the new post-NeXT-merger Steve Jobs regime is that Apple now focuses on just a few things. Wherever possible, Apple now builds on open source. BSD and GNU userland tools in OS X. GCC compiler, Apache web server, open source scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. It's another interesting read. The upshot is that Microsoft spent years rewriting Hotmail to move it from BSD to Win2k. Could they do the same to Yahoo if they buy 'em? Who writes an OS on their own anymore? Now I could bring up that even Internet Explorer isn't MS's own code, so they certainly understand "borrowing" as much as Apple does. In fact, Windows could be considered, at least until this latest version (which I'll admit I don't know as much about) something similar -- remember when XP borrowed heavily from NT instead of 98 et al? The idea was that there were a number of codebases, and MS picked the one that made the most sense given their current developers and in-house familiarity. And man, the "classic" Macintosh OS? What a hack. The static memory addresses get me. I still use OS 9 daily, mostly for what I assume is an extremely secure OS for coffeehouse browsing and emailing (not the email itself, but from an attack point of view), but having to remember what you opened first and how to close it back down drives me crazy. And if one app fails, well, PA-BLAM!!! You're hard-resetting. Yet when businesses borrow for their applications, they often find themselves in trouble. I recently worked with a site that used CakePHP for no really good reason other than developer familiarity, and even then I believe the developer was using the project as an opportunity to get familiar with the tech. Why not roll your own php site? Why not have your own code? Reminds me of all the .NET DataGrid posts I wrote for this site back in the day. The first 50% is 300% easier. The last 50% is 3000% tougher. I'd rather know what's in there, myself. It's just that OSes, I wager, are getting complicated enough that there's really no good reason to rewrite kernals. That's exactly -- and all -- Apple stole, give or take. Aqua, etc, all in-house. It's just that, unlike MS, Apple's in-house legacy code stunk. [insert smilie; I use it, dang it, daily. Beat that.] posted by ruffin at 5/22/2007 01:20:00 PM

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Enough 950, Apple As many on the MacRumors forums have already pointed out, the new MacBook updates are especially underwhelming when it comes to the video card. When Dell offers laptops with better graphics for half the price, well, at this stage in my game, I can't bring myself to blow the dough on the Apple. Heck, for the price of the MacBook, I can get a Dell laptop and a new Mac Mini once OS X 10.5 is out. (The "950" of the title is, of course, the Intel GMA 950 graphics processor. Nice stuff.) posted by ruffin at 5/16/2007 07:51:00 PM

Monday, May 14, 2007
The Obsolescence of Copyright: Virtual Rare Book Rooms The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right. A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange. That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings). (Matt) Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment. The Rare Book Room What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain. How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you. More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel. How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.) Rare Books and Software So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.) Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means. Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not. This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms. Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out. The Obsolescence of Copyright I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books. (Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.) The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates. Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens. Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0 Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it. So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way. As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers. Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console posted by ruffin at 5/14/2007 11:18:00 PM

Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Geico Programming at Apple One thing I noticed when running my shareware development experiment was the lure of removing thorny issues by quickly hacking the UI in some ugly way. That is, if I was having a hard time getting some Look &Feel (in Java) to work correctly on Mac OS X, I just greyed out or removed the radio buttons for selecting a Look & Feel on the UI. The UI elements were still there, just unselectable, annoying users. Still, the sheer joy of being able to say, "Problem solved," is seduction enough that I went ahead and went the hack route. Not such a big deal in the short-run for headless issues in your back-end code (though even there you don't want to create a maintenance nightmare), and in the back-end your customer's not going to notice, but it's a real flaw to do so in your UI. This is the worst of minimum-coverage revisions/bug-"fixes". Well, turns out I at least have company (which I might have referred to before, but didn't include pictures from our friends at Apple). The one for AppleTV is particularly bad. I understand that Win2k isn't the primary deployment platform for Apple, but phew, that's slack for the company that prides itself on simple, minimal, intuitive interfaces. posted by ruffin at 5/08/2007 04:45:00 PM

Friday, May 04, 2007
X11 vs. native OpenOffices From a MacWorld.com article on "Mac native OpenOffice gets shot in the arm from Sun": "Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port," wrote Lohmann. Man, tell me about it. I recently went to a convention on using digital media in education, and was surprised to see so many in the audience sporting not only MacBooks, but MacBooks for which they'd paid the "Apple black tax" or MacBook Pros. They've been steadily gaining, and now seem to have hit the proverbial tipping point. What were the audience members using the beasts for? Browsing the free wireless while the speakers spoke, of course. (Admittedly, many were looking at the conference's web page, and I think I caught one guy using Emacs on a MacBook running Windows; go figure.) The only exception I saw/recall that wasn't related to the A/V system being used to record the event? Somebody at the back had a Dell XPS laptop glowing, which was right tacky. I never realized those letters not only looked like they were glowing in the ads, but that they actually do light up. I realize they're "for gaming," but come on... One might determine from that comment that I'm a laptop fashionista myself. It's true. I brought my Clamshell iBook 300 in with me. If everyone in the room had shelled out for a clamshell and donated the balance to education, would there have even been a conference? (Well, of course, but at least one more scholar would have had pretty decent funding for next year. And it would have been more difficult to use iChat A/V while browsing.) In any event, I do wonder about Sun pumping dough into OpenOffice for OS X rather than into X11/OS X integration from which even more would benefit. I wonder how difficult it'd be to tease X11 apps to look more Mac-like, so there isn't as obvious a reason for a traditional Mac user to feel disoriented when they call them up. When I used The Gimp on OS X, the grey background and three-button mouse assumptions were pretty off-putting. Still, if X11 remains useful in current *NIX development (and I've admittedly not kept up), why not simply make your X11 version of OpenOffice work that much better xplatform? I guess these are the words of a Java-phile who hasn't figured out that Java on the desktop hasn't and won't work (beyond perhaps Limewire), as my confidence in X11 being The Right Way to port applications crossplatform smacks of using Java and Swing (Java's GUI widget toolset). It's a shame Sun killed Watson; they had something going there. Just another case of the ivory tower mentality conflicting with typical, nonprofessional PC end-users. Seriously, Sun should fund an Xbox equivalent so that they could build an out-of-house, but Java-dependent, repoire [sp] with consumers. posted by ruffin at 5/04/2007 11:37:00 AM

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