Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures, is a bit unhappy because apparently the Internet has destroyed entertainment. I’m surprised. I thought we were having record-breaking box office nearly every month and that there were new movies being made, and hundreds of channels of cable, and whole new worlds of user content in the way of podcasts and the like. And that CEO of Sony Pix was making bank. But no, the internet is killing off all entertainment.

First, he decried the impact of the Internet on the movie business: “I am a guy who hasn’t seen any good come out of the Internet,” Lynton, a former CEO of AOL Europe and president of AOL International, said. “It seems to have done damage to every (part) of the entertainment business.”

Put down the YouTube. Internet content (not for-pay from Sony) is dangerous and wrong, and nothing good can come of it. Can’t we just turn it off and go back to paying for each viewing at a theater like in the good old days? Now that we have internet, I guess nobody can find any way to entertain themselves. Or maybe nobody puts down their wifi-powered entertainment device long enough to go out and consume traditional media. I guess that’s the problem.

Of course, nobody is making any money off the internet. I guess nobody is buying off of web-based catalogs, or ordering movies or music, or electronic trinkets. It’s not like you can buy your clothing and food and everything from the internet. Or learn a skill, or take classes, or find support for your particular health crises or political issues. Or google for help with homework and real work. Or download manuals for the sony devices you’ve purchased from Amazon. Let alone making friends or falling in love. Not one good thing has come from the internet. It’s all bad. Period.

The answer? The Movie Industry needs special legal protection(ism) to survive (without changing).

He also called on Washington to increase protections for copyrighted material, saying “somebody has got to realize that we need some rules.”

In his defense, instead of consuming a nice Sony movie with a box of extra-transfat popcorn, you’ re reading this blog. Hardly compares entertainment-wise.

And he’s partly right about losses due to illegal copying. I’m sure there are plenty of people who won’t buy a movie ticket for some movie they don’t like after sampling it for free on the internet. I would have purchased several more movies if I didn’t watch them cheap via On-Demand and realize I didn’t like them. The ones I like, I eventually buy on DVD. It’s nice to own something that’s good. Movie channels let me pay less for things I don’t really want. I suppose there are people who don’t bother to buy the movies they like. I just don’t know who they are.

Of course, I’m pretty happy to buy a sub-$10.00 DVD copy of a good movie I’ve previewed. I’m much less happy to spend $40.00 plus food costs for the four people in my family to see a single movie we might not even like. I really don’t think that industry can survive on their current trendline of increasing costs passed to consumers, with or without Internet. Not with the current economy and the means for people to bypass obstructions. Protectionism won’t change that.

But the problem isn’t that copyright laws are weak. Copyright is extremely well protected legally. Consider that circumventing copy-protection is not a civil issue but a criminal charge. If backing up a movie I bought with my own money from a legitimate commercial dealer can land me in jail on criminal charges, I am betting the problem isn’t that the law is too *weak* on protecting movies. I might think the opposite. Adding to the laws won’t help. There are strong laws against many behaviors, and they don’t cease.

Most importantly, I don’t think anyone can make money by going against the Internet.

So I’m browsing and I get a popup that says a trojan was detected, then my browser went full-screen and the attached image appeared.I would have been afraid, except there were two mistakes.

The first mistake is that firefox doesn’t allow you to eliminate the borders of a window (at least the way I have it configured) so I could see it was in a browser and not my desktop. If I were an IE user, it might have convinced me it was my desktop. With FireFox, I wasn’t impressed. I could tell. Lesson #1: use open source, or at least use browsers that allow you to configure your javascript more intelligently.

The second mistake is that my desktop couldn’t possibly look like that. I don’t have a C: drive. Or a D: drive. Or a “Shared Documents” folder. Or “My Documents” folder. Nor the blue ’system tasks” bit. My computer runs Linux, and so all my hard drives look like a single big file system rooted at “/” instead of “C:”. Also, although the various Unixes have allowed spaces in filenames for decades, Unix users don’t use spaces in filenames. It’s considered uncouth to make people wrap quotation marks around file and folder names. We can, we just don’t. Lesson #2, use open source, or at least Linux.

Maybe some day a jerky attacker like this may put up an attack versus linux machines, but we all have custom desktops, themes, backgrounds, window control themes, and the like. Would the jerk write it against Gnome? KDE? OpenBox/FluxBox? XFCE? What? Another advantage to having more choices is that it’s harder for bad guys to predict.

Nice try, no buy, goodbye bad guy.

B&N has a new mp3 e-book store. Good for them. Books on CD or Tape or MP3 are a nice way to catch up on some stories while resting your eyes. MP3 is the “standard” format for all audio these days though it is kind of a lowest common denominator. Everyone has some kind of mp3 player(s), some built into cars, some portable, and every computer loaded to the hilt with them. A lot of devices that can play mp3 files can also browse the net. This is true for mobile phones, netbooks, and you-name it.

I see this, and go off a bit (emphasis mine):

After you complete your B&N.com purchase, we’ll send you two emails, usually within 5 minutes or less of placing your order. The second email will have a link to download your Audiobook MP3. In order to play the MP3, you’ll also need to download the Media Console. This free program allows you to download Audiobook MP3s, listen to them, and transfer them to other devices, including burning to a CD if you wish. The console also serves as your audiobook library

Why would B&N require a special downloader for their store? This kills me. There are web technologies a-plenty out there. You can do http and ftp and whatever you like for actual transfer (and theirs surely does). You can secure URLs using standard web tech. Why in the world would I want a custom barnes-and-noble file downloader that only works for their sites? Does that sound assinine? Redundant? Limited? Stupid?

If that whole game were server-side, and the prices prove to be good, then I could be happy about this service. But I’m not.

I’m not a Windows or Mac user. I choose not to be, and I expect that to have certain repercussions. But I’m not going to be alone here. Every device that isn’t a windows PC or a Mac is shut out of the store. Why would B&N not be going after books-on-phones like it was free money? This seems short sighted. Standard web tech would allow them to reach everyone. Their downloader means only Macs and PCs, and only those whose owners want to bother with downloading yet another limited, pointless application.

If I had something like the kindle or sony reader that had http, ample storage, and wifi, I could see mixing ebooks and mp3 books on the device. That would be a all-in-one edutainment center to reckon with. But it wouldn’t work at Barnes & Noble.

As is, I’m better off with RSS feeds to radio programs I care about. Sorry B&N, though I still love you and retain my membership, but this strikes me as bone-headed.

Get your guide (from Consumerist) to spotting ATM card skimmers. They’re not dead common, but they’re less uncommon than we might hope. Don’t let anyone get access to your bill-paying accounts!

Ten Things Credit Card Issues Don’t Say might make you grumpy, but it’s good to know where you stand. Forewarned is forearmed.

One more of the What You Ought To Know, just because.

I think it’s brilliant how they used a brilliant white background so that most web pages can embed them so cleanly. Look how nicely the video matches the decor here. And they’re funny. And can be pretty informative.

I like the opening joke about bailing out v pulling out. What’s funny is that the words can mean something opposite too. Pulling out can be abandoning a position, and bailing out can be the way you try to save a boat. But that doesn’t matter. It’s fun.

And it’s likely to get somone’s panties in a knot, which is a bonus.

Windows lacks a package manager. If you want to work in windows, you have to find and install all your software yourself. Each program has a different installer, and there is no batch mode. Search, find, download, double-click, run, click boxes, click-click-click, accept licenses, click, and finally you have the first program of 18 you actually need. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Sometime tomorrow you’ll be doing some actual work if you still have the energy for it.

Holy cow, this sucks.

Debian/Ubuntu Linux have a really good package manager. For just about any software, you ask for the program you want and it pulls down the most recent versions it knows about and installs all the bits your software depends upon. You can install with any number of gui or command-line clients. It’s really trivial by comparison. And quick. Did I mention that it’s very fast? With the command line, I can write a script or a line of text and you have software ready to go.

And in Debian/Ubuntu, the software all is updated through the same mechanism. Not through one mechanism per source. It is so effortless for the user/consumer.

I don’t know how people think that windows is easy and linux is hard. I think the opposite.

I use Miro. I like Miro. It has great channels, has reasonable control over how many you pull down, how often, how long you retain them, etc. There is much to recommend it. I subscribe to probably more video feeds that I ought to, including web search “channels” to pull down vintage aircraft videos and guitar lessons. I pull down more old crummy movies than I watch. I should get more software videos, less old movies. There are great software videos. Duh.

Anyway, there is supposed to be a feature to click on a feed and drag it to a channel folder. That doesn’t work. Not even a little. Well, at least not on Linux if it works anywhere else. I don’t know what’s wrong and haven’t pulled down the code (but I don’t know how to code drag-n-drop anyway… it would be fun to learn). It works miserably poorly. If you click the folder, the big window that opens up says you can drag things to it, but you cannot. It is just busted.

Alternatively, you’re supposed to be able to select with ctrl-click and then right-click to move movies to a folder. If I right click, I’m given the option to move them to a new folder (which it will create for me) but not to move them to an existing folder. That’s a pain.

And when you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t get an option to create it in a folder. There is no right-click meno on the folder that will allow you to create the feed there, either. It’s kind of a pain.

If you have a folder, you cannot change the folder’s contents. The best you can do is select all the contents of the folder and the new feeds you would like in the folder, move them to a new folder (which you would name similarly), and then go delete the old folder. That’s not very intuitive.

Everything else Miro does, I love. I am saddened that this part doesn’t look better. Maybe I should pull down the source code and see if I can fix it. It seems like it ought to be pretty simple in concept. I know there are bsddb data files behind it all, which are not hard to work with. I wonder what makes drag-n-drop work so poorly here, and why we don’t get to create the new feeds in existing folders. If I learn anything more I’ll post it as a followup.

In the meantime, Miro is worth your time.

How bad is it? This is how we stack up against a few other recessions:

And here’s a broader historical context: