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.

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.

The best verdict money can buy? You be the judge.

According to Steve Holden’s blog, Monty Python decided to give away their complete works on the internet.

Their sales would plummet, you say? Think again.

They must have had miniscule sales to begin with? Think again.

So how do you explain having a 200% increase in sales when people can have your content for free?

XKCD becomes embittered over the loss of his collection of files. Being greatly upset, he recommends avoiding all DRM-ed content, and draws a comic that suggest that you are better off to just steal to begin with than to have DRM recalled and break the law later trying to recover a collection you’ve already paid for.

If you buy DRMed stuff, it can be taken from you at any time. If you’re okay with that, then by all means go ahead and enjoy the material. Only accept DRM for something you are going to discard after a month or two anyway. You can save yourself a lot of disappointment and embitterment and stay on the right side of the law this way.

If you expect to keep the content you buy, then you must avoid DRM entirely. Use DRM-free content only if you expect to hold onto it and use it freely (time-shifting, format-shifting, device-shifting, etc). I use services like EMusic to get drm-free music. I don’t get the top-ten from the radio, but I keep finding new music to listen to.

There is more out there than ITunes and Audible and big-label stuff. Open your head, pour in something new.

Yeah the SCO thing has still been going on all this time. This is one of those “forever trails” like the M$ antitrust (are you even aware that Microsoft didn’t win that one?). But maybe we’re finally at the end of the SCO nonsense. Looks like SCO is losing outright (Microsoft was pushed into a settlement). Serves them right. It looks for all the world like someone was funding them to create some kind of FUD in the Linux community, and it didn’t really work all that well. Some commercial interests were concerned, but for the most part the world just kept turning.

Now, maybe finally, we’re done with that.

I got the computer that will be my wife’s laptop in a rush because I need VisualStudio.NET for a class next week. Sadly, I find that VisualStudio 2005 and its installer have incompatibility problems with Vista. Great. My whole reason for spending money from savings now instead of after four or five more months of saving up, and it’s going to be a time-consuming ordeal.

The first VS.NET installer work-around is in progress now, where I have to copy the installer disks to my local drive (2nd disk first) and run it from there. In vista, the installer won’t run from the CD drive.

The first major annoyance with windows Vista is that everything confronts you with an EULA acceptance screen, and all the license agreements are monstrous tomes. The idea of all my software uses being hedged in by lawsuits is a little troubling. I’m not sure what I’ve agreed to, and I don’t know how I’ll ensure that all my family uses the software in strict compliance. Does that make your skin crawl?

Second disk copied. Copying the first. I’m grateful for xcopy still being a windows feature. It’s been a long time since I have had to use backslashes for command lines. It works fine, though.

The second annoyance is that the Vista UI is clunky, in that the things you want to do are usually a few cascading menus away. If it weren’t for Win-R/cmd it would have been far worse.

The mouse controls won’t put enough acceleration on my touchpad, so I have to make multiple swipes to get from one corner (say the start button) to the other (say the close X button on a full-screen program). It takes three left-to-right swipes to move a half-screen window from the left side of the screen to the right, regardless of mouse speed. Likewise, it takes two swipes to get from starting a program to the “Cancel or Continue” dialog’s “ok” button. Maybe inconvenience is the new usability. When you have to do a lot of seeking and clicking, this touchpad sensitivity limit is not your best friend. That might be my computer more & driver and not Vista. Is it like that for everyone?

Another windows annoyance is the reboots. Not only do you have to do them often when installing software, but they take forever to complete. I have much faster times from all-the-way off to fully-logged in on my Linux machines including my laptop. I never have to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel. I suspect vista doesn’t really draw a distinction, or perhaps it’s because open files can’t be moved, renamed, or deleted in Vista.

Ah, first disk is copied now. Starting the installer.

People say Vista is pretty, but I can haver nicer compositing and better UI choices and tweaks with Beryl. Or to Mac OS/X. Vista has only one real look-and-feel choice. You can tweak colors and some trivial settings, and that’s about it. I can’t even change the location of window buttons to get the X away from the minimize/maximize buttons. It’s Vista’s computer, I just live here.

The desktop comes pre-cluttered with third party icons. All these trial offer icons need deleted. I also need to get rid of the IE and Outlook buttons. I don’t want to invite all the web’s viruses into my wife’s machines. It’s Firefox and Thunderbird for us.

It troubles me that windows doesn’t respect my browser choice like Linux does. When I set firefox as my default in Ubuntu, everything starts firefox for web browsing. In windows I set firefox as the default, and Microsoft programs still launch the internet exploder. Another reminder that Vista owns this box, not me.

The lack of a package manager is a real problem. Every software title you might want, you must first find online, and then download and run the author’s installer. Chasing down all my software seems a waste of time. Of course, each program you run, including installers, has a permit or deny dialog, and may also have a “Cancel or Continue” dialog later on. I’m going to have to find out when there are updates, and then I’m going to have to repeat this process. Debian APT will fetch upgrades for all your software. It’s a single command, can be done with a GUI, and (in Ubuntu) is done periodically by the “update manager”. Not just your operating system… your compilers and office software and games and database servers… the whole shebang.

Oh, look, only one desktop. How quaint. How do you windows manage with all their running programs cluttered up in one screen? I immediately download VirtuaWin, but I can’t install it because another installer is running. In Debian Linux I can likewise only run one copy of APT at one time, but I don’t notice so much because it can install all my apps at once. Here I can do one at a time, and only one installer at a time. This will take a while.

Everything is downloaded to the desktop by default. I guess that’s almost convenient, but the desktop (as I mentioned) is cluttered to begin with. I’ll have to delete all the installers once I get the software loaded.

The two advantages so far are 1) that we were able to reformat my wifes iPod to use vfat, so we can load songs and podcasts from our Linux machines, and 2) that (after web searches and incompatibility work-arounds) I was able to finally install my copy of Visual Studio 2005.

So far the only thing I like about vista is that I can use programs whose authors decided to support *only* windows. Linux people get used to proprietary developers ignoring them, and tend to work-around problems (or wait for some other open-source group to work around it for them), that’s the only thing I *don’t* like about Linux.

Ah. Now I need to download patches to try to solve the incompatibility problem for VisualStudio.NET 2005. I download the patch for vista first, and it dies saying that the program it’s looking for is not installed. I later download it again and it works (for about 1/2 an hour it keeps working and working… followed by a reboot). Oh, but then it didn’t really work. After the reboot, I’m told to get and run the patch again.

I’ve spent the whole morning trying to install visual studio on vista. I installed Mono and MonoDevelop and some additional tools in Ubuntu Linux, and it maybe took me 4 minutes. And I never had to reboot. Three or four hours with Vista and I’m not even installing Resharper yet. Sigh. I was really hoping to work through some of the examples my colleague will be leading Monday using the Visual Studio environment. I guess I better not plan on sleeping much tonight.

BTW: after I got done giving permissions for it to run, reshaper installed very quickly.

Another service pack. “A program needs your permission to continue.” Sigh. I’m twenty minutes into the service pack and still waiting for it to finish.

Okay, it looks like I can run my applications. It’s now 2:00 in the afternoon, and I started before 9:00. I took a break for a sandwich and 1/2 hour to go get my rental car, but otherwise its been all sitting here on the laptop, swapping disks, searching the web for work-arounds, blogging, and waiting for things to finish.

Enough angst for one day. But basically if you want to know what it’s like for a Linux or Mac guy to run vista, it’s easy: tape two fingers of your left hand together, put a sock over your right, randomly remove or disable 1/2 your programs, ad then try to do some work. It’s a lot like that.

According to an Ars Technica report and a similar report at ZDNetit is now legal under the EULA to run windows in a virtual machine. You can now stop hiding your parallels-equipped MacBookPro and your many VirtualBox Linux machines.

Come into the open and breathe freely again. They’re no longer gunning for you. They’ve decided that they will let you own you machine if you’ll just continue to be a customer.

My friends doing OS work tell me that virtual machines like VirtualBox are the best thing that’s happened to computing in a long time.

Part 2 of the Linux Foundation’s interview with Linus Torvalds has some nice sound bites about patents.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to stop a particularly nasty move in the senate. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 includes among its odious bits some legislation that prevents third parties from examining and busting invalid patents. Like the one on clicking a link, or the one on writing loops in code, or any of the millions that have prior art and are obvious. If mad patents cannot be attacked by third-parties, then we as programmers will become increasingly afraid to code as all obvious mechanisms become covered by patents and we will have to pay for defense from mad lawsuits.

As with all legislation, this act has good parts and bad parts. I’m not totally against all that it does, but the harmful bits are ugly.

We need to get some money into the EFF right now.

We are unapologetically a Linux-only household. That is generally a very good thing. I don’t have a lot of the troubles that Windows households have, and I get a lot of powerful software for no cost whatsoever. I would happily accept a new Mac into the fold, but have intentionally stayed away from Windows for about seven years. My kids have grown up with free software. This only causes problems when people don’t realize that there are non-windows households. Sometimes people expect us to have the latest version of Word and Excel (we never will, we use OpenOffice.org . Someone might try to give us windows software, or winPrinters, or winScanners, or winModems or similar nonsense. We can at least give them away and make other people happy though.

The latest reminder of this difference is that my music-loving son was given an iTunes gift card. It’s pretty thoughtful, because he’s always carrying around his CDs, and an MP3-capable CD player. We typically will rip a CD and burn an MP3-CD with the music so that he doesn’t have to carry around dozens of CDs to have dozens of hours of music. He has an iPod, but likes his CD player better (going against the cultural flow is apparently a family value). He loves a lot of styles of music, and would keep the soundtrack going 24/7 if he could.

However, the card is not useful to us because we don’t have a Mac, nor a Windows PC. We can try to get the windows iTunes working under Wine, but he’s not going to be able to burn the music to a CD in wine or transcode it to mp3 or ogg. Nor will we spend a few hundred dollars to buy Windows so he can use a free gift card . If we installed itunes with wine, the music would have to live on the shared family desktop machine, where it can be played when there’s nothing else going on. It’s not portable, and it’s not convenient.

Also, my son and I both signed a petition saying that we would not intentionally buy DRM “enriched” music. We’ve stayed true to that, so he isn’t interested in breaking his word even with the gift of iTunes music.

My thought is that he should probably thank the giver, then sell the gift card to a buddy and spend the money it brings on whatever he wants. Even if he sells it under face value, it is still a gift and he has money he did not have before. Ah, if only it were eMusic or Magnatune, maybe an online vender like CdConnection or Borders or Amazon, it would be fine. Likewise, it would be fine if it were to a brick-n-mortar store like Target (where we do a lot of business) or Starbucks or a even a more cash-like gift card rom MasterCard, Visa, etc. The problem is that iTunes is iTunes, and you need windows and mac.

It was kind to give a gift of music to a music lover, and a good idea to let the very eclectic gift-receiver make his own choices. The real issue is that the iTunes store is dealing in DRM-polluted music, and only certain platforms and devices can play it. If it were free of DRM (like emusic and magnatune) we would have the freedom to download, play, and even convert audio formats. The gift-giver just didn’t realize that the whole world is not populated by Windows and Mac users. It was simply a matter of not understanding our computing setup, which reflects the philosophy we live in a practical way.

PS: He agreed that the correct thing to do is to sell the card to someone who feels differently about DRM and has Windows or Mac at home.