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The Museum of Just Not Getting It
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| Moving! |
[Sep. 10th, 2007|07:03 am] |
I have moved this blog to my home page at http://www.webindexing.biz. At the moment there is no provision for comments there, but if you desperately need to comment let me know.
The existing pages will remain here but will not be added to.
Jon. |
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| How to make reading really difficult... |
[May. 24th, 2007|07:50 am] |
 What are the advantages of eBooks? They don't take up space. They don't weigh anything. You can carry lots of them around at once. You can back them up really easily. Take all those away and you have DailyLit, a bizarre advertising-funded website that sends its subscribers public domain e-books in chunks, as email messages or RSS feeds. Those are 2-page chunks, so if you want to read Crime and Punishment, say, it will take you from May 24, 2007 to mid-January 2008. And if you then want to go back and check what happened on page 15 you'll need to dig out your email archives from last year,
DailyLit is free and currently boasts 50,000 subscribers. How many people are still going to be reading in six months' time, I wonder? |
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| How DARE they? |
[May. 15th, 2007|06:44 am] |
I went to bed last Wednesday night leaving my computer on and connected to the Internet. The reason? Every week I record a streaming audio show off Internet Radio. The show is on at 5:30 AM, so rather than getting up for it I leave the PC running with a timed recording program ready to start up and pick up the show when it begins.
But not this time. Because this time Microsoft decided to send me an upgrade to Windows. And having done so, they took it on themselves to reboot my computer! Goodby timed recording program! Goodbye any other programs that I happen to have been running at the time! How dare they?
As it was I lost a radio show. But someone else in the same situation could have lost a mission-critical fax, or an important instant message. They could have been running the last phase of a two-week data analysis for their PhD thesis. Whatever they were doing, it had to be a damn sight more important than Microsoft's daft impulse to get this upgrade out right now.
What can I say about Microsoft's staggering, overwhelming arrogance in assuming that their stupid upgrade is more important than whatever I happen to have running on my PC at the time? Words fail me.
Yes, it's my fault. I should turn off the automatic upgrades -- as should anyone who wants to retain some autonomy. And I have now, too late. But until last Wednesday I wasn't quite cynical enough to realise how low in the Microsoft pecking order the actual user comes.
Well, I already have Linux in mind for the next PC. One day in the not too distant future this will be a Microsoft-free zone. And not a minute too soon.
Jon. |
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| Internet Radio Devices |
[Feb. 26th, 2007|06:40 am] |
 Are these as daft as I think they are? Let me quote from the Dick Smith store advertisement:
Portable Internet Radio
Allows access to Internet radio from anywhere in the world without the need for a computer.
1. Make sure you're in range of a Wi-Fi network or public Hot Spot. (If you're at home you may need a Broadband connection)
2. Turn your radio on and scan for networks by using the select button.
3. Enter your code (if you have a security-enabled network).
4. Choose your station...and away you go
So 'anywhere in the world' means 'anywhere in the world within Wi-fi range of a system that you have access to', and 'without the need for a computer' means 'without the need for a computer within ten metres'. And the price of $AU399 is getting up to the cost of a laptop anyway.
 I enjoy the idea of Internet radio, but any time I'm in Wi-fi range of a computer I'm working at it. And how 'portable' is something that you have to re-tune every ten metres or so? That's going to make for an awfully slow jog.
Maybe when this becomes standard equipment on MP3 players I'll reconsider. In the meantime, what's wrong with plugging a $40 FM transmitter into the speaker jack of your PC and using good old $5 FM receivers?
Roll up and see these latest miracles of science here and here!
Jon. |
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| You May Already Have Won The Most Clueless Spam Prize!!! |
[Feb. 11th, 2007|11:47 am] |
Spammers are smart, sophisticated operators who know every trick in the book, right? Well, not always. Today I received a spam email with the following properties:
From: %FROM_NAME
Subject: %SUBJECT
Message text: %MESSAGE_BODY
Kind of pathetic, isn't it?
And it helps to remind us that most of the spammers are victims too. The real bad guys are the address list vendors - they're the only ones making real money out of this.
Jon. |
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| You've got to turn off to turn on... |
[Jan. 14th, 2007|07:30 am] |
 This is a weird one. We recently bought a new DVD recorder (turned off the region coding straight away, of course). Checked it out and everything worked fine except the timed recording. I set it up to record in a few minutes, sat back and waited, and nothing happened. Wasted an hour fiddling with it. Wrote to the company and received the reply: "Timed recording will only work when the device is switched off".
Am I missing something or is this just bizarre? You can't use the device to do something if it's turned on, only if it's turned off? Who dreamed that one up? I understand that timed recording can't start if the recorder is doing something else, but haven't they ever heard of error messages?
I'd be interested to hear from other DVD recorder owners. Are there newer, smarter models that get around this strange flaw? Or is it an entrenched part of industry thinking?
Jon. |
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| Microsoft Zune |
[Nov. 19th, 2006|05:58 am] |
 The wraps are off the Microsoft Zune and the results are profoundly underwhelming. One one side of the family: Microsoft's naked desparation to get into the portable music market. On the other side: a determination to resist even the appearance of allowing people to enjoy what they didn't pay for. The result: a device that's deliberately been crippled in the only area where it had a remote chance of outshining the iPod - WiFi music transfer.
For the record, the Zune allows users to transfer the files to other Zunes via WiFi. But the transferred files can't be retransferred to someone else,. and they disappear after three days or three playings. Add this to the minor annoyance that the music on the Zune has to be turned off in order to transfer a file, and the ever-present threat of Microsoft imposing new restrictions under the guise of 'firmware upgrades', and you have something which Apple is not going to lose any sleep over. Until the first hacks come out, that is.
Which raises an interesting question: did Microsoft deliberately release a crippled device knowing that it could be easily uncrippled by hackers, thereby allowing them to reap the benefits of the hackers' labour without having to take any responsibility for violating copyright? Naw, a big corporation like Microsoft wouldn't do that.
Would they?
A thorough review by Lars Anderson can be found here.
Jon. |
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| Print-on-demand evangelism |
[Oct. 16th, 2006|08:45 pm] |
 This isn't an example of just not getting it, so much as an example of not quite getting it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to set up another blog just for that, so it goes in here anyway.
Bryan Appleyard, lamenting the decline of book sales and the increasing homogenisation of bookstores, has set out the standard Print-On-Demand predictions in the Times Online:
You will go into Starbucks, slip your credit card into a machine, order a book and grab a latte, which you will finish just as your book completes its printing and binding process.
There are, of course, lots of other people who say similar sorts of things. Most of them have a vested interest in selling paper with stuff on at exorbitant prices.
How are they wrong? Well, a) wild horses would never get me into a Starbucks again and b) why? Once the book is in electronic form, why should I have to go anywhere or get it printed at all? I will sit at home, download it through the Internet and read it on my mobile phone, or my PDA, or my computer, or my media player, or...
In short, everything that makes POD possible also makes it possible to bypass POD altogether. Bookstores have the same future as music CD stores.
That is, none.
Jon. |
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| "FORWARD!" he cried, from the rear, and the front rank died... |
[Oct. 8th, 2006|08:22 pm] |
The subject heading today comes courtesy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
In the International Herald Tribune for October 8, 2006:
As books go online, publishers run for coverBy Carter Dougherty
....."Once we can be assured that there will be security for our authors, then we can move forward," said Arnoud de Kemp, spokesman for the digital publishing working group of the German Association of Publishers and Booksellers.
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De Kemp said that in time, new techniques for restricting access to copyrighted books - like dicing a single work into many PDF files and using digital watermarks - could solve this problem....
Just remind me - which way is forward again...?
But it's nice to see them recycling the old mantra about protecting authors. It's weeks since we've heard that one.
Jon |
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| Microsoft abandons DRM system. For another DRM system |
[Sep. 21st, 2006|12:35 pm] |
 The much-hyped Microsoft Zune media player, due for release in late 2006, doesn't support Microsoft's own PlaysForSure DRM copy-protection system. According to Wikipedia, this means that "music purchased from one of MS's many PlaysForSure partners will not work on the Zune device, nor will Zune-DRMed music work on 3rd party devices using PlaysForSure". That's going to upset an awful lot of Microsoft 'partners'. In fact the more Zunes that Microsoft sells, the more it's going to PO its associates. Good move, Microsoft.
Disposable DRM. Set up a system, use it for a while, then abandon it. Not only can you overcharge for the protected content, you can actually sell it over and over again to the same customers.
In your dreams.
Jon. |
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| DVD Region coding |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|05:03 pm] |
 Successful capitalism relies on symmetrical 'rules' that apply to sellers and buyers. One such pair of rules is that sellers are allowed to charge whatever they like; while buyers are allowed to buy from whoever they want. Over the years media corporations have been particularly good at defending the first rule, while doing their best to infringe the second. One such attempt has been the use of regional coding for DVDs.
DVD regional coding is a response to the global free trade movement, and particularly to increasing pressure from governments and citizens to remove all bans on parallel imports. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, a media company that sold worldwide could legally appoint an 'exclusive agent' for a particular country or region. Anyone wanting to purchase from that company in that region had to go through the exclusive agent, and in fact anyone else selling that company's items could face criminal prosecution.
So reseller X could sell books in India, say, for a dollar each, but if anyone bought up a stack of those books and started selling them in Australia where reseller Y was the exclusive agent, they would be in deep trouble. And this meant that reseller Y could sell the same books for five dollars and make a stack of money without fear of being undercut.
Alas for media companies; those days are over. So manufacturers looking for a way to prevent undercutting have to resort to technological methods. When DVDs of movies and TV shows started appearing for sale some media mogul had a bright idea: encrypt the disks and twist the arms of the DVD player manufacturers so that DVD players sold in a particular region would only play disks encoded for that region.
Unfortunately for them, some governments -- like those in Australia and New Zealand -- have deemed that selling encoded DVDs is just banning parallel imports by another name, and equally illegal. Worse still, DVD player manufacturers who want to sell their players worldwide -- that is, nearly all of them -- usually make it as easy as possible for the devices to be reprogrammed from one region to another, or to turn off region coding altogether. And it doesn't usually take long for 'trade secrets' about how to reprogram a DVD player to escape into the wilds of the Internet.
So we have an enormous waste of time and money, a few alienated customers, and another monopoly-protection system which has quietly collapsed under the weight of people doing what comes naturally. How many more will there have to be before media companies get the point?
Jon. |
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| Print more copies? How dare he?? |
[Aug. 5th, 2006|11:57 am] |
Here's a wonderful example of Just Not Getting It that goes all the way back to the 1500s. It relates to William Tyndale, an English printer who was driven overseas to Germany by heresy charges, but kept on doing his thing. The quote is from Foxe's Book of Martyrs. You can find it in context at The William Tyndale Home Page.
 ...[William Tyndale] was stirred up of God to translate the Scripture into his mother tongue, for the profit of the simple people of his country; first setting in hand with the New Testament, which came forth in print about A.D. 1525. Cuthbert Tonstal, bishop of London, with Sir Thomas More, being sore aggrieved, despised how to destroy that false erroneous translation, as they called it.
It happened that one Augustine Packington, a mercer, was then at Antwerp, where the bishop was. This man favored Tyndale, but showed the contrary unto the bishop. The bishop, being desirous to bring his purpose to pass, communed how that he would gladly buy the New Testaments. Packington hearing him say so, said, "My lord! I can do more in this matter than most merchants that be here, if it be your pleasure; for I know the Dutchmen and strangers that have brought them of Tyndale, and have them here to sell; so that if it be your lordship's pleasure, I must disburse money to pay for them, or else I cannot have them: and so I will assure you to have every book of them that is printed and unsold." The bishop, thinking he had God "by the toe," said, "Do your diligence, gentle Master Packington! get them for me, and I will pay whatsoever they cost; for I intend to burn and destroy them all at Paul's Cross." This Augustine Packington went unto William Tyndale, and declared the whole matter, and so, upon compact made between them, the bishop of London had the books, Packington had the thanks, and Tyndale had the money.
After this, Tyndale corrected the same New Testaments again, and caused them to be newly imprinted, so that they came thick and threefold over into England. When the bishop perceived that, he sent for Packington, and said to him, "How cometh this, that there are so many New Testaments abroad? You promised me that you would buy them all." Then answered Packington, "Surely, I bought all that were to be had, but I perceive they have printed more since. I see it will never be better so long as they have letters and stamps: wherefore you were best to buy the stamps too, and so you shall be sure," at which answer the bishop smiled, and so the matter ended.
The bish seems to have been a quick learner. Unfortunately his contemporaries were not, and in 1536 Tyndale was arrested in Antwerp and strangled before being burnt at the stake. Why? To encourage a climate of fear. Now that sounds more like the media industry that we've come to know and love today.
Jon. |
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| But the Whitlams don't play 'Happy Birthday'! |
[Aug. 3rd, 2006|06:16 am] |
 There are just oh! so many ways a company can shoot itself in the foot. Take for instance the Australian mobile phone company, Three. Apart from its benumbingly stupid name, which almost deserves an entry to itself, Three has been pretty good to its customers, of whom I am one - free upgrade, nice phones, excellent pricing.
Then last week Three turned 3, if you follow me. And they decided to celebrate their birthday, in a corporate kind of way, by giving their customers presents.
Now, when I give a birthday present I rush in to the nearest store at the last minute and pick out something cheap. But that's me. Three is a multi-million dollar company with a marketing division and everything. Surely they could take the time to ensure that the majority of their customers would get a gift they liked.
No, it turns out that Three is just as rotten at gift-giving as you and me and Auntie Jean. Their free downloads consist of:
- A video track from ageing Australian band The Whitlams
- A 'selection' of video sport stories (whose selection? Grandma's?)
- Free daily news videos for a month
- A 'selected' Peter & Jaydee and The Chaser video clip
Now, I don't like sport, I've never heard of Peter & Jaydee, and I get my news off the Web, so none of those three thrilled me. As for The Whitlams, to me they're elevator music - certainly not worth downloading into my precious phone space when I can fill it up for free with my stuff. So the psychological effect of Three's 'presents' on me - and other customers in the same situation - is to leave me thinking 'what skinflints! Other people got presents they wanted and I got left out!' And that shouldn't bother me, but it does. I'm going to be just that bit more cynical about Three and its promotions from now on.
How could Three have got all its customers on side for this promotion, not just the sport-loving Chaser fans who dig The Whitlams? To start with, they could have given a choice. The Whitlams or Bach? Sport or culture? Petey and Jaydee or a $5 discount? You choose, customers, and - what do you know! - we can learn something about you when you do. Second, they could take a realistic view of the value of video clips in today's online world. We're already drowning in free entertainment, guys: give us something we can use.
Jon. |
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| The Doctorow is In |
[Jul. 28th, 2006|08:09 am] |
Cory Doctorow's latest posting in Information Week continues his long-term, reasoned, passionate assault on DRM for copy-protection. This week's target is Apple and iTunes, but in the article Doctorow also makes reference to some other failed DRM attempts, linking back to articles on his Boing Boing blog. I won't steal all his thunder, so I'll mention just one.
 This is the Motorola ROKR phone, which attempted to provide an iPod/mobile phone hybrid, and was killed by Apple's restrictions on the use of 'their' music. Boing Boing's take here: detailed post-mortem in Wired by Frank Rose here.
While we're at it, who decided that mobile phones weren't going to have standard headphone fittings? I appreciate that you also need a microphone connection and an override for music when the phone rings, but why not have a standard headphone jack as well as the high-tech plug-in earbuds? After all, headphones get a lot of use. They break. Surely it's not because that way you could buy new accessories at the local import shop for five bucks instead of going through the phone vendor for double figures?
Jon. |
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| Lest we forget: the Sony rootkit |
[Jul. 22nd, 2006|09:25 am] |
"Watson, my dear fellow," said Holmes to me when it was all over, "If ever I should be tempted to believe that a large media company would behave rationally and with integrity, just whisper in my ear the two words 'Sony rootkit', and I will be forever in your debt."
Technical details of the Sony rootkit can be found on Wikipedia. Essentially it was a copy-protection system bundled with Sony audio CDs. When the user attempted to play the CD on a Windows computer system, they were asked to sign a licence agreement. The CD then installed software on the user's system to prevent the CD being copied, and to prevent other media player programs from accessing the tracks it contained. This 'rootkit' was functionally equivalent to sophisticated spyware: hidden from the user, hooked into important system files and virtually ineradicable by an ordinary user.
Sony began using the system on its CDs in 2005. By August 2005 there were reports of crashing PCs. The possibility of malicious software using the rootkit to subvert the user's PC was quickly raised. An uninstaller was offered on the web by Sony but this too was shown to have security flaws.
The resulting scandal did immeasurable harm to the public's perception of Sony. Production of the CDs stopped in November. Sony were obliged to recall up to 4.7 million CDs and exchange them for unprotected versions. To add insult to injury, it was shown that the rootkit could be circumvented by simply sticking clear tape around the edge of the CD, hiding its multisession nature from the computer.
Now that Sony has had its fingers badly burned, will that stop other media companies from trying to cripple users' equipment?
Is the Pope protestant?
Jon.
Update: 2007-04-24 - They've done it again! My theory now is that Sony has been taken over by a group of pirates who are trying to destroy DRM from the inside. See here for details. |
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| Turnover E-reader |
[Jun. 29th, 2006|07:42 am] |
What's wrong with this picture?
It looks like a book, but there's something missing...what could it be? Oh, yeah, pages!
The E-Reader by Timothy Yeoh illustrates again the remarkable amounts of effort and talent that can be wasted when you don't understand convergence. Here's a device that has all the disadvantages of a book: bulk, fragility, limited access - and none of the advantages; you can't leaf through it, stick in a bookmark, highlight text, give it away... Can you copy and paste? Annotate? The site doesn't mention it.
 Writing on the site about 'humanising' ebooks misses the point: the paper book is an artificial and clumsy device that we have had to get used to in the absence of anything better. It's no more 'human' than an automobile or an aeroplane. (And shouldn't that be 'simulating' in the third line?)
But because it's pretty (and it's white! like an iPod!), I give it a year.
Jon. |
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| Why copy protected PDFs fail |
[Jun. 27th, 2006|05:55 pm] |
 In 2005 I purchased a number of role-playing ebooks from www.DriveThruRPG.com, an ebook provider whose pdfs were encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM). These products worked fine until I wanted to access them on our second computer. Then, I received a message “Your Adobe software could not be activated. Adobe DRM Activation error Server code 27 Fault Location 5. Client User is not an Easy Activation user and cannot be migrated to a full user.”
The idea of DRM is that it is usable by computers that share a Microsoft Passport. Since our computers did not share a Passport, and could not (for various reasons), DriveThruRPG’s customer service allowed me to download my products a second time on the other computer. Of course, this defeated the purpose of protecting them in the first place, since I now knew I could download the ebooks wherever I wanted by emailing customer service.
Over time, DriveThruRPG realized the impracticality of DRM and introduced a watermarking system – this places, at the bottom of every page of every pdf I download, a message with my name and a unique code. If the ebook is illegally distributed, they reason, they can track me down. They also limit the amount of times I can download the product, to four or five times, and only within the next 2 years.
Now, I buy my PDFs for the same price from the ENWorld GameStore. I have unlimited downloads, on any computer, and there is nothing to distinguish my ebook from anyone else’s. DTRPG lost my custom because a competitor came along who wasn’t afraid of piracy. It makes sense – most books will become pirated ebooks quickly after their release, so there’s no point alienating moral readers who are prepared to pay as long as they receive a functioning, friendly product.
Bill Browne |
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| Self-destruct DVDs |
[Jun. 7th, 2006|05:35 am] |
New technology! From the people who brought you the Y2K buq!
 An oldie but a goodie: self-destructing DVDs, which change colour and become unusable 48 hours after being taken out of the packet. Disney was seriously considering using these for distribution in 2003, but by 2004 they had become a gimmick for promotional purposes only.
There are so many things wrong with the idea of self-destructing DVDs that it's hard to know where to start. Resource wastage, for one. Failure to understand that consumers like to keep things. And - unless it takes forty-nine hours to copy the disc - how does it stop piracy?
Now, a DVD that self-destructs immediately as soon as the packet is opened, that would be the ticket! And you just know that some media company executive is dreaming about it right now.
Jon |
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| The Franklin eBookMan |
[Jun. 6th, 2006|10:01 pm] |
 The Franklin eBookMan, first appearing in late 2000, was an early attempt at a proprietary eBook reader. Unfortunately Franklin was so paranoid about copyright violation that every device had to be individually registered by the owner and connected to their PC before they could download the operating system required to get the device up and running. This allowed Franklin and other vendors to uniquely identify each device and 'tag' software, including eBooks, to run on that device and no other.
So anyone who walked into a store and asked for an eBookMan demonstration would get a blank look and a blank screen. Franklin did try and fix this later by putting out a number of 'demonstration' models, carefully neutered so they couldn't - horror! - display unauthorised works, only to cause more confusion and greater customer alienation when these got on to eBay and were sold by unscrupulous or misguided vendors as the real thing.
If and when you finally got it working, the eBookMan was a reasonable attempt to provide for reading on a cheap device with a monochrome screen. Apart from a tendency to crash when the battery was changed - which meant connecting to a PC and reinstalling the OS all over again - it could provide hours of happy reading. And it was quirky enough to have a character all its own.
But the damage was done at the point of sale. After a few years Franklin cut its losses and disowned the little device. Another Pyrrhic victory for DRM.
Amazingly, some eBookMan devices were still on sale in Sydney for close to their full original price ($AU300 and up) in March 2006.
Jon. |
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| Printing upside down? That's GOTTA work! |
[Jun. 6th, 2006|06:59 am] |
From The New York Times
Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. [His novel] "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."
Like being able to turn them upside down?
Jon. |
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