Virtual Thought

So I’m talking to a friend of mine about building a NAS and, possibly, a media server. We were commiserating on the state of DRM and how it limits our choices: Since I’m an iTunes user I have to use Apple TV to enjoy my media on my AV system in my living room since no other product can work with Apple DRM… dammit. By the same token, I’m not about to use Vista and its crippling of the end-user experience in the name of protecting content.

He steered me towards an ArsTechnica story about how DRM isn’t about piracy and is, in fact, a way of creating false scarcities in an effort to ensure traditional revenue channels. Of course, the flies in the face of my growing admiration for agalmics in relation to digital media of all types. I mean, c’mon: I can perfectly reproduce any digital thing I want at little or no cost… so why are we applying traditional economic models here?

The two arguments I hear the most go thusly:

1. If you are not paying someone for every digital copy of media you are stealing.
2. The content creators would make no money without a structure for generating revenue.

These are both a bit stinky:

1. Am I stealing when multiple people come over and watch the DVD that I purchased, or listen to the music that I own? What if I lend it to them? What if, heaven forbid, I make a copy for myself because CDs have a tendency to not survive for very long? What if I bought a movie on DVD and want to enjoy it on my iPod, or stream it from my in-house NAS to my TV? None of that is stealing.
2. I differentiate here between content creators and content producers. Content creators are the actual artists who, y’know, write stuff; content producers are the ones who distribute and try to control all that content… in this case the RIAA. Who would we want to protect, the creators or the producers? The creators of course. Who does our current system protect? The producers!

But I digress… I’ve heard people question why Microsoft would bow to the RIAA on this since, really, it’s Microsoft that should be in control of this relationship (since it owns 95% of the machines in the market it can use its position to dictate to everyone else how they’re gonna play in that market). Instead, though, MS says, “Okay, we’ll make everything more fragile and jump through all these hoops and force all the hardware makers to jump through these fragile little hoops as well.” Why is that?

I think it’s the side benefit to MS that makes this interesting: Vista’s content-protection scheme squeezes out the open source hardware support necessary for people to run open-source OSes on their desktops.

Since open source hardware drivers, by definition, can’t keep proprietary content protection schemes a secret, as required by the licenses, and because the licenses themselves cost money… no more hardware support for open source OSes. Microsoft gets a bit of a win on this one.

But where are the consumers in all this? Nowhere.

Engadget’s got good live coverage:

• The iPhone is here…
• ...and so is Apple TV.

I’m still betting the “And one more thing…” is Leopard, thus scooping Vista.

The person of the year, according to Time magazine is you. Aren’t you glad? ( = Time made some weird, arbitrary choices about who they actually wrote about inside the covers, but I heartily agree with their basic statement—user-generated content is huge right now and for the foreseeable future.

Wired has a neat article about crowdsourcing and user-generated content (ugencon?) in Second Life. The success of Second Life is entirely built on what its users can provide… surfing that wave is working really well for them and that makes me glad. One company, Cambrian House is even getting explicit about this idea by directly basing its business model entirely on user-generated content (UGC?) and crowdsourcing. Seems to be a sort of paid open source…

And in other news, humans smell like bacon.

I’m agreeing with Joel again about simplicity.

Less is more. (In fact, sometimes you want only half)

Do you hate preferences? I do. (Yeah, yeah, yeah… I love that book)

Seems there’s a design trend lately towards minimalism, a trend towards items that do one thing and do it well,... and we’re seeing it again, and again, and again.

I want in. ( =

Every once in a while I read a post that perfectly captures how I feel about a certain technology (in this case, SOAP). Painfully funny for the formerly SOAPed up.

Meanwhile, there’s REST and all the dialogues around that. Very interesting guys… just, y’know, look for SOAPs tracks on the path that you’re walking… because there but for the grace of The Bit go you.

I owe someone an apology.

I was chatting with someone (I won’t name names to protect the vaguely innocent) a while back about trends in technology. My friend lamented, “When are scientists going to invent wireless power?”

“Dude,” I said. “I think that’s called lightning.”

Wireless power can also work on resonant electical effects.

Damn. I shoulda saw that one coming.

Update (I’ve always wanted to do that): Count on Ars Technica to have a big ol’ cool write-up about wireless power.

He could have said, “Our competitors are trying to limit the power of the OS,” but, instead, Bill Gates has said that Microsoft’s competitors are trying to castrate Vista.

I find I don’t anthropomorphize the various material objects around me… much less the abstract realm of software… and when I do, I don’t sexualize my software. I’ve never said, “Man, that Microsoft Word has hairy balls,” or, “My RoR project needs a training bra.” I’ve said, “The code is angry!” and, maybe once, “This method’s being bitchy,” but never assigned a gender identity to the software I’ve worked on or with. That’s just weird, man.