Oh no you don’t
I’ll say it. Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo stinks. I know that Yahoo is a corporation, and that a corporation is ultimately responsible to its shareholders, who probably welcome Microsoft’s $20+ per share markup on their stock. However, I can’t see how this will benefit the online world.
Microsoft is notoriously bad when it comes to the web. When is the the last time you’ve ever heard anyone say, “I don’t know but I bet I can find it on Microsoft Live Search?” Or, “You can see my photos on Windows Live Spaces?” (sorry, Ben). You don’t. While Google was able to build the defining search engine of our time, and while Yahoo is smart enough to buy things and keep them intact, Microsoft has been nothing short of a train wreck when it comes to doing anything interesting on the web.
I admit that besides Yahoo Groups, Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, and the YUI tools, I don’t make much use of Yahoo anymore. Actually that’s quite a few things. So I naturally fear the intrusion of Microsoft and their heavy-handed way of doing things. It’s sad that in their fruitless quest for the top, Microsoft feels that they need to consume one of, if not the, true progenitors of today’s web.
Going Gruber
Á la the man behind Daring Fireball, who has turned the practice of criticism of tech journalism into an art, this Saturday’s TechMan column in the Post-Gazette inspired me to dash off the following letter:
Mr. Kurtz -
This paragraph in your latest column is, if not just plain wrong, then at least a mean-spirited swipe at Apple that misrepresents the facts:
“Amazon’s MP3s can be played on an iPod or any other type of player. Although Steve Jobs says he wants to sell DRM-free music, he apparently doesn’t want to sell music you can play on a player you didn’t buy from Apple.”
I think that iTunes Plus, which was announced with the EMI (not BMI, as you state earlier in the column), is a pretty fair indication that Apple wants to, and is in fact, selling DRM-free music. You say so yourself.
Are you confusing DRM with AAC, the audio format of the songs sold through iTunes? If so, it is most definitely supported on many other devices, as this list indicates.
Of course, for the music from labels other than EMI, the DRM that is present in the AAC files – FairPlay – is indeed a limitation to playing the music on other devices. However, this is a problem that stems from the record companies, not Apple itself.
Apple’s (not Jobs’, as you state) decision to keep FairPlay to themselves stems from the legal rights of the record companies as it was negotiated in their contract. In Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music,” which you reference, he says:
“However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.”
Fixing FairPlay when it is solely under Apple’s control is one thing. Licensing it and fixing any problems that might arise when it is a technology shared by many others is a much harder task. Again, Jobs:
“Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an ‘open’ model of licensing their DRM to others to a 'closed’ model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.”
And as I was re-reading your column, this sentence jumped out as strange to me as well:
“If you downloaded a 'DRM-ed’ song to your computer and wanted to burn it to CD to play in your car, you could not.”
With what music service? Certainly not iTunes, although from the tone of the rest of your column, it seems that is what is implied. I have never had a problem burning a purchased album to a CD. And, as an added bonus, you can even re-rip the songs into MP3 format, if you so wish.
All said, it’s a complex issue, but one that I think is worth additional scrutiny and is deserving of an accurate representation of the facts. I hope you agree.
Thanks for your time,
Jake Krohn
Pittsburgh
1 != 1 (Or, the laws of logic no longer hold true)
Encountered while cleaning old some old files today:
$ ls
millibots
$ rm millibots
rm: millibots: is a directory
$ rmdir millibots/
rmdir: `millibots': Not a directory
I think the end times are near.
Hey, so do some others!
Honorable mentions
Several items, all deserving of more than just a quick link:
Pee-Wee makes a comeback
Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-Wee Herman, was on NPR’s Fresh Air today. The interview coincides with the DVD release of the complete Pee-Wee’s Playhouse collection. At the request of Reubens, the interview stayed far away from the unfortunate movie theater incident in 1991 that put an end to the show as well as his questionable art collection that was seized in 2001 (Reubens explains). What was aired was a fun look into the development of the Pee-Wee Herman character, the show, and a better understanding of Reubens himself.
To say I was (am) a Pee-Wee Herman fan is an understatement. My best friend, Buff, and I religiously watched his show every Saturday morning and went through a period in our childhood where we watched the movie about twice a week. We had all of the best lines memorized, could point out all of the production shortcomings in it, and yet laughed our heads off every time we watched it.
By the time of Reuben’s arrest in 1991, we were starting to outgrow our extreme fascination with Pee-Wee, but it was still a disappointment nonetheless. His TV show was a classic and was cut short of the long life it deserved.
Public Radio on the Web
One of the downfalls of living in Pittsburgh is the lack of an all-news Public Radio station, such as KNOW in Minneapolis. WDUQ does a fine job in the morning and early evenings, but the presence of Jazz the rest of the time has forced me to look elsewhere for informational edification. AM radio here is full of sports talk blowhards and right-wing nuts, both of which I do listen to, occasionally, for laughs.
For the past month, I have been enjoying a public radio station out of Boston, WBUR. I first came across it in the dark days of post-election America when I was looking for coverage of Kerry’s concession speech. It offers free, around-the-clock streaming audio in the three major streaming media formats. The quality of the stream is surprisingly good and the shows it broadcasts are top-notch.
I like the station so much that tonight I set up a $5/month pledge for a year. Even though we’re pretty much dirt-poor right now, this is a worthwhile $60. After all, without it, I would have missed out on hearing Pee-Wee Herman today. And that would have just sucked.
Optical illusion weirdness
This do-it-yourself optical illusion is really amazing. Not believing the video, I downloaded the PDF file and assembled it myself. And, amazingly, it works! The effect of slipping into and out of the illusion is somewhat akin to playing Q*Bert for a long time – at some point, your eyes will cross and everything that was concave is now convex and vice-versa. It’s disorienting but also very cool.
Patterns, patterns, everywhere
Although I haven’t read the book, I am familiar with the ideas of Christopher Alexander, as illustrated in his book A Pattern Language. His ideas inspired Design Patterns in the field of software engineering, and helped other disciplines break down their complex ideas into simpler components.
This website recognizes the networked structure of Alexander’s book and presents it as a series of interconnected pages, allowing one to build up a collection of patterns that can be applied to a specific architectural problem. Although it may be of limited direct applicable use to most, if one is creative with metaphors and abstractions, inspiration may result.
Computer Sweatshops
By the looks of this article, working at Electronic Arts is anything but a good time. 80 hour weeks? Some weeks, I can barely make it through 40.
