Archive for the 'Interesting' Category

Why DRM is good for you, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Microsoft

Published
by
Sal
on August 10, 2005
in Computing, Interesting and media
. 0 Comments

Actually you must have me confused with Christopher Baus. I think DRM is the most boneheaded and harmful idea to have come to the whacky world of online-media (and this is the industry that gave us Boo.com and the dot-com bubble). DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management”, a collection of computing technologies that restrict what you can do with digital content.

For example, a DRM scheme might allow a song to be only played three times. An attempt to play the song a fourth time will fail because the DRM scheme will not permit you to do so. Another kind of DRM might limit a downloaded song to be played on a single machine only. If you copy the files onto a CD and give them to a friend they will not play.

DRM does not manage your rights, it restricts them. I’m not going to justify my feelings with meaningless phrases like “Information wants to be free… man”. I do not need to tell you about erosion of Fair-Use, because no such concept exists in British Law. There are many other compelling reasons why DRM is an awful thing.

As a Linux user most of these DRM schemes are irrelevant to me. The DRM encumbered files are unplayable unless I spend time cracking the content. This is a nuicance, Fortunately I do not need to be a hacker to play downloaded content.

You can take advantage of the network to buy content from countries with more consumer friendly copyright laws. The notorious AllOfMp3.com Russian music store has an enormous range of premium content, all sold without DRM and at a fraction of the price of the western stores. DRM is like locking and double-bolting all of your upstairs windows, but forgetting that the front-door is not only wide-open but illuminated by a giant flashing neon sign. Would you wait until somebody lets you into the thief-proof window or just legitimately walk through the front door?

DRM policies are just as much about locking content buyers into specific hardware and software platforms as they are about reducing piracy of that content. Microsoft want to keep you using Windows. And if you switch from Windows to a rival product, you will forfeit your DRM encumbered music collection. Apple, Napster and the other media companies are no better.

If you switch from Apple iTunes to Napster, will you still be able to play DRM encumbered tunes with the other company’s tools? If you emigrate from Europe to America will your iTunes content licenses remain valid, or will your content suddenly become unplayable? Who knows – to some extent the most off-putting thing about DRM is not ever knowing what you cannot do.

In summary, DRM is a self-defeating short term strategy: DRM punishes the honest music-fan and will not deter even a moderately determined pirate. Eventually Microsoft and all will realise that customers do not want DRM but it will take them a long and painful years for them to come to this realisation. In the meantime AllOfMp3.com will have become very wealthy.

Inappropriate use of MS Comic Sans

Published
by
Dan
on July 23, 2005
in General, Interesting, Photos and Words & Pictures
. 0 Comments

Inappropriate use of MS Comic Sans

While spending a week’s holiday in Gran Canaria, (it was a last-minute deal, we booked it the day before) my girlfriend and I noticed the preponderance of Comic Sans, a horrible font.

As we noticed more and more instances of this pernicious weed (menus, shop fronts, signs, notices, posters, fliers, etc) we developed a kind of shorthand “look, Comic Sans” gesture. The satisfaction - similar to that felt in the mid-nineties upon sighting of a prime mullet, before the term had seeped into the public consciousness - was short-lived. It became less funny and our tastes became more discerning.

Now only the crassest use of the font will hold our interest. We haven’t seen any funeral homes using Comic Sans yet, but pictured above is a handout from a course my girlfriend attended. It quotes (probably erroneously as it turns out - see Wikipedia article) Petronius Arbiter, a noted satirist and courtier in Nero’s Rome, who committed suicide in AD 66.

Call a spade a spade

Published
by
admin
on July 14, 2005
in Experiment, General, Links and Words & Pictures
. 0 Comments

Typical of the internet, and particularly Google Images. I’m trying to research images for a cartoon I’m directing. I have a mob of villagers with torches and farm implements, so I search for spade, and get only one image in twenty that’s any use!

Waiting for Bulldog

Published
by
admin
on June 27, 2005
in Bulldog Broadband, Computing, Interesting and Reviews
. 0 Comments

“Thank you for calling Bulldog Broadband. Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered as soon as one of our representatives is available. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, your call will be answered shortly. Once again, sorry about the delay.”

My internet connection has been non-functional since Thursday night; It just packed in around 8 p.m. and has not worked since. I would love to report the problem to Bulldog (my internet service provider) but I have no means of contacting them other than an email address which they never respond to or a phone line which they rarely answer.

Whenever I try to ring their technical support line, the calming voice of Bulldog apologies and then tells me that they are too busy to answer any technical support requests right now; They suggest that I try their web-site or call back later.

If this were some kind of performance art installation, or perhaps a figment from a Kafkaesque nightmare I could see the irony, however I am trying get my connection fixed a quarter of an hour before they close for the weekend. What hope do I have?

Actually, I lied about the email address; They do answer it sometimes - first you get a well worded (but automatic) response informing you that your query will be dealt with efficiently and with the greatest possible haste. This is another lie. My technical support query will be answered by a dribbling imbecile.

He or she will be barely literate, possessing neither the ability to comprehend nor to write simple English expressions. Only an insane optimist would expect the slightest technical acumen from the person who tries to answer my mail.
This illiterate will randomly push buttons on the computer they barely know how to operate, and if I am lucky, I will receive a barely coherent response to somebody else’s question in less than a decade. Having failed to make any sense from email support, my next attempt was to try the phone line…

Continue reading ‘Waiting for Bulldog’

An oddity in Highgate Woods

Published
by
admin
on May 20, 2005
in Interesting and Photos
. 7 Comments

As I walked home through Highgate Woods today I noticed an tiny green caterpillar dangling from a long ‘thread’. It’s tiny green body was suspended at approximately head hight. It seems so odd that a bright green creature might have evolved a behavior that causes it to suspend itself so visibly in mid air.

I tried to take a photo of it, however it was swaying too briskly, even in the calm of the woods. In the end, the best I could do was a slightly blurred shot which I achieved by steading the thread with my finger.

Oddity
This cluster of debris hangs a few metres below the canopy of the woods.

Later as I continued on my way I noticed another collection of hanging oddities; random looking collections of some kind of plant life. Had a similar caterpillar created this as a lodge in which to pupate? If indeed another creature of the same species did this, how did such a small creature manage to suspend such a large quantity of bracken?

In the high resolution version of this photo it is just about possible to see that the parts of this structure are bound together with shorter lengths of thread.

Oddity
A tiny grub hanging from a single silken thread. Could this be the culprit?

The great “PJ” diversion

Published
by
Sal
on May 15, 2005
in Computing and Interesting
. 0 Comments

Most IT “news” is not really news at all; When trade journalists are not cut’n'pasting press-releases they are writing ‘exclusives’ about products that will never exist, or will be rubbish despite the hype; At best they engage in groundless and ill-informed speculation. The IT news is filled with uncritical enthusiasm for whizzy useless products; non-stop advertorial from cover to cover.

The tech press occasionally descends into a grubby soap-opera where debate no longer focuses on the technical or business issues, but on the personalities who report on them, an opportunity that the companies on the loosing side of the SCO vs IBM debate have taken great advantage. This has been SCO Group’s luckiest break since their train-wreck of a lawsuit began.

I don’t mean to tar an entire profession with the same over-broad, sloppy and over-saturated brush; I know there are diligent journalists out there; because a few of them felt compelled to resign when Sys-Con’s Fuat Kircaali offered a very explicit defense of his publishing Maureen O’Gara’s stalking story.

Picture yourself at the helm of fading company; deeply mired in series of court-cases, each doomed to fail spectacularly. Your mission is to draw out the legal proceedings for long enough for your investors to flee the sinking-ship, and prevent yourself from getting dragged into court as the whole thing collapses. You’ve got a perfect plan, apart from one thing – an annoying blogger picking apart every little detail of your scheme

The last thing you want is a rabble of zealots, acquiring detailed knowledge of your business plans, studying your finances and cros-referencing every one of your public statements: You need to silence your opponent by whatever means. If you cannot destroy her arguments you can try intimidation. If she refuses to be intimidated your only (legal) choice is to try to destroy her reputation. Fortunately, this is something that the IT press are eager to help with.

Oddly enough, the interests of SCO group are mirrored by those of the professional tech journalist; These people have as much reason as corrupt businessmen to fear the rise of the “celebrity blogger”. If the public start turning to informed campaigning activists for their news, who will be left to read the 2nd hand punditry? Who will click on their flash animated advertisers? Who will be left to believe their bogus reports that prove beyond all doubt that Linux is more expensive than Windows?

The sad thing is, that this little distraction has worked; The whole world of IT punditry has become focused on a side show: an insignificant clash of personalities; Meanwhile on the main-stage the SCO vs IBM tragedy continues to unfold with less of the withering attention that so irks the SCO Group.

Of Zealots and Mercenaries

Published
by
Sal
on May 10, 2005
in Free Software, Interesting and voffle
. 0 Comments

It came as no surprise that Sys-Con Media, the publishers of the dimly Linux-related scandal rag have decided to let their technology industry stalker Maureen O’Gara go; at least that is what they are saying publicly.

The evidence fails to support this statement. Those of us who have the patience to wait for a response from Sys-Con’s spavined web-servers show a site that remains full of the toxic belchings of “MoG”. In any case, the unexpected anti-popularity Maureen’s “Linux Business News” website is far more effective than any DDoS attack conceived by even the most sadistic hacker.

For all her outspoken bravado, the surge of visitors from Slashdot and Groklaw has all but wiped out Sys-Con’s ability to serve pages. This implies that even the small proportion of the Slashdot and Groklaw audience that cares about this issue is many times greater than the entire expected audience for the whole of Sys-Con.

This is hardly surprising, as Sys-Con are a third division publisher, with a reputation for journalistic integrity somewhat below that of “DC Thompson” (the Penny-pinching publisher of the Beano). A browse of Sys-Con’s wonky archives is about as stimulating as being clubbed repeatedly in the testicles whilst being made to stare at flashing Microsoft adverts.

Maureen is not the first baddie in the SCO vs IBM dispute to be brought low by an overwhelming public response; I note with some satisfaction that Rob Enderle has not been typing out anti-Linux tracts on his Ferrari Laptop. Rob has somewhat backed-off his bullish predictions of SCO winning billions at IBM’s expense. Perhaps he has better things to do since most of his readers now realize him to be a dull ranting troll who is still bitter about getting sacked by IBM.

The grandly-named “Alexis de Toqueville Institution”, have also decided to butt-out of this argument. AdTI’s director Kenneth Brown’s rose to fame by publishing an paper which claimed to prove that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of Minix.

The most remarkable thing about this paper was that it was debunked by it’s primary source before it was even published. Since then, the extent of AdTI’s contribution to this debate has been a half-arsed list of apparent contradictions and sarcastic remarks on their scraggy, sorry excuse for a web-site.

The difference between O’Gara and Enderle / Brown is that the latter two knew when to walk away. Maureen is made of braver stuff, and she has plummeted further and with less grace; Merely deleting her words from the LBN website by no means constitutes an apology. She has irked the Linux zealots who will be after her, for as long as she provides interesting sport.

But I don’t think Maureen will be one to give up so soon; I expect that like any good villain she will return. I look forwards to her next outlandish and sinister plot. Will she resort to murder or kidnap to up the stakes in this most personal conflict? Nah, she needs to make a bigger statement:

What would be the journalistic equivalent of launching a giant space-laser? Perhaps starting to write for “Pro-Sco”: Sco’s ill-concieved attempt to counter Groklaw. I hear that it is in desperate need of some editorial input right now and I know an editor who needs a new job.

Spiral Water Turbine, Greenway near Three Mills, East London

Published
by
Sal
on May 8, 2005
in Interesting and Photos
. 3 Comments

The east-end of London is full of relics of a golden era of engineering, before those Health and Safety at Work spoil-sports decided that human life was more important than astounding feats of ironmongery. Now days, engineering is done in computer labs, far from the blazing heat of the forge or the foaming water that once drove the dark satanic mills. It seems somewhat fititng that this industrial fossil resembles the equally extinct amonite.

Spiral Water Turbine
A spiral water-turbine, found on a path leading from the Greenway to Three Mills Film Studios, East London.

I photographed this unusual object on a cycle ride back from the Alps (The Becton Alps), and figured it would look very nice on the front of our blog.

UPDATE: Dan requested a photo of the rear of this machine, and I am only happy to oblige, view the rest of the article if you wish to see my 2nd photo.

Continue reading ‘Spiral Water Turbine, Greenway near Three Mills, East London’

Voting in the 2005 British General Election

Published
by
Sal
on May 5, 2005
in Cycling, Interesting and Photos
. 2 Comments

Surprisingly for 8:10am, the polling station was doing a brisk business. I asked the official in charge if I could take a photo of his team, but he said no. I asked if I could take a picture of a ballot-box because I might find a use for it one day. I told him that I write a blog, and it would be somewhat entertaining to display and make sarcastic comments about the vessel that contains the dreams and wishes of our fair constituency.

This second request was also denied without stating a reason, possibly on the grounds that if Osama Bin-Laden were to know the exact dimensions of this recepticle of democracy, he would be saved one more task of espionage. I expect the election officials work on the principle that all actions not explictly allowed are implicitly prohibited; which is actually the same rule that most computer programs organise their security.

So anyway, here is my third-the-worst proof that I at least made it to the polling station. The smartly dressed man outside was collecting numbers for the Labour Party. I gave him my number in return for looking after my bike. Of course, thats not my bike in the picture. My bike is much prettier than that.

A Polling Station

Zero Comments

Published
by
Sal
on May 5, 2005
in Experiment and voffle
. 1 Comment

Blogging is fundamentally a form of vanity publishing: You can dress it up in fancy terms, for example call it “pardigm shifting” or a “disruptive techology”, however the truth is that blogs consist of sensless teenage waffle. Adopting the blogger lifestyle is the literary equivalent of attaching tinsely-sprinkles to the handlebars of your bicycle.

In spite of the rubbishness of blogs, just about every “Internet Company” company these days sees bloggers as the next cash-cow; A cash-cow from which I personally hope to milk golden-moolah. I’ve just invented a way that is guaranteed to make some serious wonga out of this whole blogging thing - what bloggers want more than Google-style technological wizardry, is readers, and I shall be the one who provides them.

Compared to other forms of vanity publishing, blogging has a more tangible and immediate reward and at a lower risk. You get to see your article on the screen just as soon as you click the publish button; However with printed publication you could thrust books into people’s hands and at least delude yourself into thinking that somebody might be reading your novel. In the world of blogging “0 Comments” is an unambiguous statistic that means absolutely nobody cares. The awful truth about blogging is that there are far more people who write blogs than actually read blogs.

But my company can fix this, for a nominal fee: My employees will post an agreed quantity of comments and trackbacks onto your pathetic blog. You (no matter how dull and undeserving), will be the centre of a lively discussion. Your days of comment-free blogging will be long gone as your new virtual friends will hang upon (and most importantly reply) to your every word.

I’m convinced it can be done - the whole thing can be automated. Customers submit their RSS feed when they susbscribe (you can pay by MasterCard or PayPal). The system will randomly distribute articles that require comments to a panel of specially selected commentators who will spend their entire day reading and responding earnestly to their clients blog articles. They get paid according to the number of comments that are published on Customer Blogs. Of course, this opportuniy will be open to citizens of all countries - the only qualifications are internet access, basic grammar and a modicum of wit.