We Should See Other Blogs

• In exactly one week from today, I will be married. Well, okay, one week and a few hours. WOOHOO!
• I checked the uptime on my Linux file/wiki/backup/RAID/CMS server, and lo and behold, it has been running for 483 days straight. That’s awesome! Our Windows 2000 fileserver has an uptime of… one day.
• I have coffee in front of me, and it’s good coffee.
• Last night I watched the film “Paprika”. A bit of a mind-trip. But also okay. Not great, but okay.
• If you hear these words in the same sentence as the word Microsoft, you may consider yourself given a cue to laugh: Standards, Honesty, Ethics, Style, Taste, or Good ROI.
• Okay, I’m back to work.

The Senate has once again demonstrated that’s it’s hopelessly out of touch with modern technology.

We must protect the children! To do so the government must be given sweeping power to monitor the populace! We won’t use the newfound powers at our fingertips for evil!

Idiots.

Today I watched at the Reality Distortion Field around yet another poor Mac fan was pierced by the evil Kernel Panic.

It was a thing of horrible, dark beauty.

I love watching the patch stream for Ubuntu’s upcoming releases. I mean, I only know what maybe 10% of them actually do, but it’s fun to see. Most of the year, for instance, there’s just the occasional maintenance patch, with maintainers releasing new versions, and of course security patches. Then you get to the Debian Import Freeze where, iirc, there’s a flurry of patches and modifications.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

They really do. Let me ask you a question:

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?

You know what I would find funny?

If all the userland tools and common packages like Samba were forked and maintained as GPLv2. Two developmental branches if you will. And if someone were to keep a repository of these forked projects.

And if that someone were Microsoft.

I just realised that on my home computer–internetless as it is right now, curse Bell–Windows has been relegated to a sort of seldom-used shared library sort of deal. I boot it up in virtualisation every once in a while when I want to compose something in Notion or… I can’t think of anything else right now.

Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype, etc, are all exactly the same in Ubuntu. Compiz beats the pants off any other windowing system, period.

And Windows XP is that appliance I put in a box in a closet and don’t pay much attention to except when I need it, which is rarely.

It’s a beautiful thing really. The simplest of simple technologies gives me back the choice I want. As a fanboy might put it, I no longer bow before the golden calf of Redmond.

In our office, we have two Windows 2000 servers, both of which are working just fine and doing their jobs without undue strain on the hardware. I estimate we could keep both of them going and doing what they’re doing for another three years.

Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. Support has ended or is ending for Windows 2000–their most stable OS to date in my experience–and in order to keep a well-patched web-facing server alive, we have two choices. One, we upgrade to Server 2003, and replace the boxes as well, as they’re pretty old and probably won’t handle 2003. Two, we keep what we’ve got, understanding that if vulnerabilities are found, we’ll be, well, vulnerable. Either we pay out a large ($10,000 or so) sum to upgrade, or we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

We’re a small company with a small technology budget. Guess what we’re going to do? I hate crappy hardware and upgrade cycles; there’s no good reason that a well-made server and operating system shouldn’t run for ten years without breaking down or becoming out of date. And not something you need a forklift to move.

On a related note, what is it with operating systems and applications devouring RAM and disk space? I mean, I understand that computing is more complicated than it once was, but Windows 95–piece of all-dancing crap that it was–took something like 25mb of RAM to run. Something like that. These days, only Mac OSX gets faster with each release, and I’m not sure how they can keep that up. Linux gather more moss with each passing day, and Microsoft Windows is positively ballooning with each new and less-needed version.

I ask myself a simple question: what sort of insane processing power, HD space, and RAM will one need to simply check ones email in 2015?

I was floating around on the intertubes lately, and came across a blog post (so help me, every once in a while I read a blog or two) that claimed iTunes doesn’t suck.

But you know what? That post is wrong. iTunes sucked before, and it sucks now. I have had the unusually annoying experience of trying it out on a computer at work–you know, seconds chances and all that–but came away disappointed again. Let me address a few key points.

iTunes is a system hog.

It just is. Come on people, I know you like it, but let’s not deny the facts that I’m not going to support with numbers. Instead, a worthless anecdote: I initially installed iTunes on a grey box with a fresh vanilla XP install, and it used 46mb of memory fresh out of the box (so to speak). On my sister’s computer, with a large library, playing a good old MP3, it’s using 59mb. That’s far too much memory for something as basic as a music player. WinAmp, even with all the bells and whistles, doesn’t come anywhere close. Without the bells and whistles, it’s at a quarter of the memory used.

iTunes does too much stuff. But not enough stuff.

Really, people. iTunes is wildly functional. Extravagantly functional. It plays video, for crying out loud. It generates a thousand kinds of playlists. It has a built-in music store. &cetera. Except where it needs to be. When I want to write a plugin, how do I do this? How do I play a different codec than the limited pre-chosen selection? How do I easily manage multiple collections? Any player worth its salt–including Windows Media Player, the most worthless hunk of confusing crap ever imagined in the mind of man–can do these things. Why can’t iTunes? Sure, iTunes is pretty easy to use. It’s an MP3 player for crying out loud. But who cares if it does things easily if it doesn’t do what I want it to do at all?

Note to software designers: You will never be as inventive as those who use your software. Design for extensibility. It may be hard, but it will add value you can’t even imagine to your software, and allow those who use it to use it as they see fit.

Wait, I don’t want to use iTMS.

I don’t particularly like the iTunes Music Store. I mean, I know I can get restriction-free music for a buck thirty or so, and their selection is great. So maybe I want to use iTMS and a different music store in conjunction, or maybe not use iTMS at all. How do I do this inside the program?

iTunes is locked into this proprietary iPod -> iTunes -> iTMS channel and won’t let you exit the channel except by going outside the program. Do you see how silly this is? Imagine if you bought your car from Ford, and not only were you only allowed certain Ford-approved fuels, but you had to buy them from Ford-branded petrol stations. Or if you bought a Sony television and it could only be plugged into a Sony brand electrical socket with a patented electrical plug. You wouldn’t stand for that.

Now of course, people are going to say, “Well, iTunes can handle other music store’s MP3s!” Which it does. But that functionality is only a caveat from Apple, understanding that no one in the world would use a player that only played restricted media from iTMS.

So they went another route entirely. iTMS -> iTunes -> iPod is an easy way to buy music. It’s all integrated. You literally just click a couple times, and you’re done.

Boot up Firefox -> Log in to other music store -> Download -> Drag into iTunes -> iPod is decidedly less easy. So of course, only the people know alternatives exist will use said alternatives, and then only sometimes. This is Apple’s right, of course. It’s their software. They can do with it what they like, at least within the bounds of law. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like iTunes, or even use it. I’d much rather nurse an antipathy.

But you don’t have to listen to me. I may think iTunes is annoying and bloated, but you can keep using it. That’s your right. iTunes will fade into history like every other media player has, and eventually neither of will have to worry about it.

From an Ars Technica story, comes these ten inconvenient “truths” per the IFPI.

1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.

Probably. But to clarify, do the profit from it, or do they simple make enough money to cover the server and bandwidth related stuff? That’d be a nice question to answer. In any case, tPB’s rhetoric is its own, and I doubt many people who use it to facilitate their downloading actually care about the rhetoric.

2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.

True. AllofMP3 is pretty much a skank joint, and if you’re buying music from them, you might as well just download it via The Pirate Bay.

3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.

This may be true, though who really knows. In any case, physical piracy is another beast altogether from digital piracy, and I’m not sure why it’s included on the list. You might remember that no one really (with the exception of the Pirate Bay and the people who index trackers) makes any money from digital piracy.

4. Illegal file-sharers don’t care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.

Doubtful, but what’s the point here? That people aren’t all a bunch of RIAA-boycotting freedom fighters? Sure. Free music is free music.

5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on “underground” artists and more inclination to invest in “bankers” like American Idol stars.

Absolute hogwash of the worst kind. Record labels are some of the most conservative companies in the world. They’ve always been reticent to develop new artists vs milking cash cows, from the 1930s to today. If piracy went away this very minute, they’d still be doing it, because they’re entrenched companies and are scared of change.

6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.

Good, shoot the messenger. Is it not true that bandwidth providers also facilitate people downloading from iTunes and its ilk as well? Clearly these monsters must be stopped!

7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth–it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is why so many people hate labels and copyright organisations. Because they don’t like anything that comes between their hand and your pocket. They don’t like piracy because it costs them money. They don’t like the internet because it makes sharing trivial and breaks up the cartel on physical distribution. They don’t like copyleft and Creative Commons because you generally don’t have to pay for these things, and because if there’s an ecosystem of free music out there, that means less revenue for the labels.

8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.

Are you telling me that poor Chinese farmers with a subsistence living aren’t interested in downloading music from the internet? I’m socked. Shocked!

9. Most people know it is wrong to file-share copyright infringing material but won’t stop till the law makes them, according to a recent study by the Australian anti-piracy group MIPI.

This is partly true. The reality is, however, that even laws won’t stop them, because guess what, there are simply too many people for the law to deal with. Even in the US, where the most strict laws ever are in effect and the most piracy happens. Period. PS: A study by a group with a particular bias comes out supporting that particular bias? You. Don’t. Say.

10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.

Which is what the labels fear the most. The most popular music is their cash-cow. Their big revenue stream. They don’t actually care about independent music as you might think from point number 4. What they actually care about is money. Pure, hard cash. And they’ll do anything (from suing their own customers to lobbying and bribing the US congress and by extension the world to making ever so slightly deceitful lists of “truths” to support their viewpoints) to make sure that these cash-cows are protected.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. If you can get away with selling crap to people for $20 a pop, by all means, it’s a free country. But if it stops becoming a free country because you want to protect a revenue stream instead of inventing new revenue streams, then at least let’s stop wrapping the truth up in frilly pink dresses.

I mean, record labels can call pirates leeches who eat from their revenue streams, and the pirates can call labels leeches who bottomfeed off culture itself, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a binary issue where one side is right and the other wrong.

Call a spade a spade: they’re both wrong, they’re both scum, and they both deserve to disappear, both labels and pirates.