Corporate Tyranny Sucks

Now I am really pissed off. I have been trying to be a little more proactive in keeping in touch with my friends, and many of them ask me if I have an IM account. My response usually is "Sure, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and AIM."

Their usual response is "Why are you using those? Everybody is on MSN! Get with the times; nobody's used those IM clients in years!"

Well, I've retorted saying, "Well I don't even use ICQ anymore, and I rarely log into Y! Messenger, and the only reason I have an AIM account is that it is compatible with iChat, which has the best interface I have yet seen. Besides, Apple rocks, and M$ sucks! Not to mention, that Apple has seamless integration between all its software, which carries a lot of pull in my book."

Their response usually is: "Well, if you wanna chat, you're gonna have to get an MSN account."

So I have decided to swallow my pride and sign up for an MSN account so I can talk to a few of my friends who live in galaxies far, far away. So I downloaded an MSN client, and went through the process of setting up an account. I was informed that I would be getting a verification email in my inbox shortly.

Guess what? 90 minutes has passed, and I have yet to receive a confirmatory email from MSN. I have checked my account information, which is intact on the M$ servers, but no confirmatory email. I absolutely hate waiting, especially for automatic confirmatory emails.

What a pile of bull. M$ Sucks.

BTW, the tales of my travels abroad will appear once I am done fuming.

iTMS Doomed? Napster the Next Big Thing (Again)?

A recent statement from Micro$oft, Napster, and Yahoo! claim that Apples' Music Store is doomed, and that subscription-based music services are the future. Representatives of the above companies attacked Apple, stating that charging 99-cents for a song was ridiculous with respect to Apple's newest 40-gigabyte iPod. To paraphrase: "Why would anyone want to spend $10,000 filling their iPod with music?"

Apple rivals claim that they have developed a better solution: Offer subscription services that will allow you access to the entire music database. In addition, Micro$oft has developed a copy-protection format that allows the user to transfer a set number of songs from Napster or Yahoos' database to a portable unit, such as an MP3 audio player, for an additional fee over and on top of the subscription fees. Furthermore, it has been determined that only a handful of portable audio devices are compatible with the Napster subscription service.

In contrast, Napster is claiming that a one-year subscription to their music database would cost $180, and consumers could essentially fill their digital music player with 10,000 songs at a fraction of the price the Apple Music Store is currently offering. There is a hitch though, in order to transfer a song to a portable music, it costs an extra dollar a song. All of a sudden, this doesn't sound like such a good deal after all.

Enter Micro$ofts' new copy-protection software. They are suggesting for $5 per month, that consumers could transfer Napster's entire catalog to their portable music player and listen as often as they like -- as long as they continue to subscribe.

So does this sound like a winning model to knock Apple off the top of the digital music heap? To me, this sounds like a lousy deal for many reasons. There are many facets to this model that don't sit well with me.

1. Nobody in their right mind would spend $10,000 filling their iPod (or other digital music player) with music. Apple's adversaries are using faulty ammunition to attack their rival. They are using the assumption that us consumers are stupid enough to believe the only way we can put music on our iPods is by downloading them from the iTunes Music Store. This is simply not true. People can encode their entire CD collection, or even download files from peer-to-peer networks. Sure, millions of people download from the iTunes Music Store. Millions more resort to less legal methods. Audiophiles like me continue to purchase CD's (pawn shops have great bargains), and listen to music on our iPod that we legitimately own.
   
   
2. The 40-gigabyte iPod is a high-capacity model, which is aimed at a target audience: Audiophiles and computer geeks. Audiophiles often can't stand listening to compressed music, which means that they will be listening to uncompressed audio. A 40-gigabyte iPod will only hold about 1000 songs on uncompressed audio. Can you buy uncompressed audio from the iTunes Music Store, Napster, or MusicMatch (Yahoos' music database)? Not last I checked.
   Furthermore, computer geeks find uses for iPods other than storing their music collections. It makes a great portable hard drive. More often than not, I am reading about computer technicians installing operating systems and other diagnostic tools on their iPods. In essence, they've created portable, bootable hard drives so they can repair downed computers on the fly. Others are using their iPods as backup drives, to store valuable information.
   The smaller 4-gigabyte iPod Minis are the models that are aimed at the consumer market. Most people don't have large music collections, and a model that has a 1000 song capacity is ideal for them. [ed. note: I must apologize for this rant, it obviously has nothing to do with debunking Napsters' allegations.]
   
   
3. I would expect that most people would purchase between a dozen and a hundred songs per year from a music download service. Conversely, I cannot fathom how I could possibly listen to 10,000 songs in a year. That's almost 40,000 minutes of non-stop music. In other words, that's nearly an entire month of music, 24 hours a day, seven days a week! I have a hard enough time managing an iTunes library of 2500 songs.
   
   
4. Most importantly, consumers like to own their music. Napster and MusicMatch are offering subscription services which basically allow the user to license music from their database. I would be weary to say that they even allow you to download the music to your computer. It is likely that the music is just streamed to your computer (I really don't know how they manage this as I never have subscribed). I refuse to pay a fee for any music service that only allows me to listen but not own. Apple offers anyone to preview music on their iTunes Music Store for free. Furthermore, what happens when you do not renew your subscription fee to Napster? Do they send you an email stating "Your subscription has expired. Please delete all songs licensed by us from your hard drive". Not likely. This is further evidence that music from these stores are likely streamed to your computer, which brings me to my next point.
   
   
5. Micro$ofts' new copy-protection music format would have to include some sort of self-destruction device, that the song file would corrupt itself once a consumer's subscription was not renewed. You know as well as I do that hackers are attracted to copy-protected software like vultures are attracted to carrion. Someone will crack the code. Anti-copying codecs aren't much of a deterrent anymore; neither is the threat of legal action. Finally, charging an additional fee for this (over and on top of Napsters' subscription fees) is nothing short of robbery.
   
   
6. Subscription fees of $9.95 per month might seem like a good deal, but how can Napster manage to generate a profit from such low fees? Royalty fees for record companies are astronomical. If you pay for a CD in a music store, the artist you've supported may see one dollar of that $20 you paid. Half of what you paid goes to the store you bought music from, the rest is monopolized by the record company, manufacturing companies, and management firms. You better believe that these same companies are getting a share from every song you download from an on-line retailer like iTunes. The artist you supported is making no more than a few pennies from every downloaded song. Conversely, in order to keep prices competitive, Napster, iTunes and MusicMatch have to cut their overhead. Apple is only making a few pennies for every song downloaded from their store.
   In order for a subscription service like Napster to work, they would have to have tens of millions of subscribers. No record company is going to let digital music sit on a server and wait to be downloaded. Those record executives have been paid already. Unless Napster can entice ten million music enthusiasts to switch, and happily pay their license fees, their music service will tank -- and when it tanks, there will be many unhappy subscribers who have lost access to their favorite tunes.
   

It seems to me that this new marketing scheme reeks of rotten vegetables. I'd have to be a sucker to believe they are offering a better deal then Apple. I fully expect to see the iTunes Music Store alive and well in the next few years.

Browser Wars: Episode III - Revenge of Mozilla

There are countless people who feel that a holy war is being fought right here, on the internet. Their opinions are as varied as they are subjective, and are usually based upon a bias toward a brand. Others feel that they should have a choice as to what software they should be allowed to run on their computer; they feel that their right to choose has been stolen from them. Even others feel that information is something that should belong to everyone, and it should not carry a price. Of these people, their opinions of their adversaries are so fierce and jaded, that they actually consider the competitor (and those who use the offending software) agents of evil. Individuals and marketing schemes continually attempt to convert users of one platform to another, which can only be compared to missionaries infiltrating a primitive culture with the sole intent of converting "ruthless savages into believers of Christ". One leader of a company is perceived Godlike, the other is considered the Devil. But nobody really knows which side is the right one, because in fact, no right side exists. It is a war that has no real purpose, and there is no end in sight.

This is a battle that has been raging since the introduction of the personal computer, or at least, since the internet had been used for recreational purposes. In actuality, software piracy has been a problem since the mass production of computers and software, which arguably began sometime in the late 1970's. Back then, software piracy, the protection of electronic intellectual property (ie. music), and related lawsuits weren't headlining news -- as it is today. Why now, rather than then? My guess is that the computer industry wasn't as profitable as it is today, as well as our reliance on digital technology has increased. Twenty years ago, nobody even considered putting commercial audio or a motion picture on the computer; that's what VCR's and stereo systems were for. A person already had specialized items for these media. It didn't matter anyway as the computers of the past were too archaic, slow, and didn't have the capacity to store large media.

It only took about ten years before computer entertainment and mass media began to converge. Computers were slowly becoming the digital entertainment center of a household. The progress was in fact so slow it was hardly noticed. Computers were being shipped with CD-ROM drives and multimedia speakers years before anyone had any real use for them. It wasn't until the rising popularity of the internet that brought the computer on par with satellite television, digital music and digital video as kingpins of the entertainment industry.

Whose idea was it to bring mass media to the computer? It was likely software companies and computer manufacturers. It was likely a marketing scheme in an effort to sell more computers and increase profits. We, as consumers really have no need for blazing fast computers with broadband connections, complete with hundreds of gigabytes of storage to hold all our digital movies and music. It's a false need. Even computers that are ten years old have the capability of connecting to the internet to share electronic mail or surf the world-wide web. We just want bigger and faster computers because we are spoiled consumers and we must have everything now. We are too impatient to wait 15 minutes for a digital file to download from a dial-up modem. The general populace would rather download a movie or audio from a peer to peer client rather than pay for it. It's not the fact that it's free, nor is it the fact that it is stealing; we can afford to pay for these items. It is just that we, as a population, are greedy and impatient. Why should anyone pay for something if it is readily available for free?

The entertainment industry is of course, enraged. They are claiming that they are losing billions of dollars per year due to internet file-sharing. These accusations are not much more than that -- it is difficult to prove that they are losing profits. Let me explain:

The numbers the entertainment industry have been using to argue that they have been losing profits is the year they made the absolute most: 1999. This, uncoincidentally is the same year the NASDAQ broke 10,000 -- it's highest value ever. The economy was better than it ever had been before. Computers were flying off the shelves and every first-world citizen (who could afford it) jumped on the internet bandwagon. So what happened in 2000? It's called the "tech bubble burst". Recession. Investors lost trillions when their dot-com stocks withered to nothing overnight. Now it seems that the entertainment industry is blaming the file-sharing phenomenon for their lost profits, instead of putting the blame squarely on the poor state of the economy. The arguments are both subjective, and would be difficult to prove the case that it is in fact the poor economy that can be attributed to poor sales in record shops. But just watch: once the economy recovers, music sales will be up again. It would nonetheless help if the recording industry would support acts that are talented and have the ability to write good songs for a change.

I actually did not want to discuss the "David versus Goliath" scenario of the recording industry suing the general public, as it has been discussed to death on every imaginable internet site for the last four years. This will be another jihad of the internet, and will continue for years to come.

File sharing on the internet is a bit like Pandora's Box; once it has opened, you will unable to close it again. Computer programmers are an intelligent and resourceful bunch, and they will always be trying to outsmart, outwit, outfox, and out-hack the competition. The recording industry will try to devise more complicated mousetraps in order to copy-protect their songs (and/or video), and programmers will always find a way to get around the obstacles in their way. The war could go on for years, but I would put my money on the hackers as the ones that will eventually wind up victorious. Hackers have noses like bloodhounds when it comes to obtaining encrypted, confidential, or copyrighted information. They are the ones who believe that information should be free and shared with everyone.

Zeropaid.com is a website dedicated to file sharing on the internet. They feature resources on multitudes of peer-to-peer software for any major computer platform. What intrigues me most about this site is not the software itself, but all the news coverage they feature on the legal battles between the entertainment industry and software development corporations, or teenaged kids who can't afford a lawyer. The spin Zeropaid puts on their news makes if feel like there is a crusade to defeat the Evil Galactic Empire and restore freedom to the galaxy. I find it rather amusing.

There are of course, other things you can do as a computer consumer if you believe that there is some sort of electronic "holy-war" taking place over cable modems across the world. If you wish to participate in the battle against "Big Brother" (whomever he may be), then learn to program. I would suggest learning to program in as many languages as you can, and try your hand at becoming a software developer. Learn what "open-source" means, and use such software whenever possible.

For nearly every major (branded) computer application that you deem invaluable on your computer, there is likely a free, open-source, program the does virtually the same thing, and is being developed by scores of programmers worldwide.

The most indispensable computer program that everybody needs is an operating system. Even that version of Windows that came stock with your PC came with a price. Microsoft and Apple love to make their consumers buy new, upgraded versions of their operating system every few years. The new OS usually has a few new features, but it is rarely worth the price you pay. Unfortunately, the new programs and the new games normally only operate on the most recent versions of the operating system for which it was devised, so often it seems like there is little choice but to keep your operating system current. In actuality, with all the security risks, spyware, and viruses that are spread throughout the internet, it is in a computer operator's best interest to keep all their software current.

If you are tired of security holes in your operating system, and sickened by viruses and worms, if your computer has had it's modem hijacked, then you must understand how frustrating it an be to be a computer user. There are alternatives.

Linux was originally developed by Linus Torvalds as an open-source clone of the UNIX operating system. You must imagine that writing an operating system is not an easy task, thus he had difficulty solving some programming problems. So Torvalds placed what he had managed to program on the internet in an effort to see if others could help him finish writing the operating system. The response was immense. Linux soon became a fully-functioning, stable, freely distributed operating system based on the UNIX kernel.

Red Hat Linux is a popular commercial version of the Linux operating system. There are even versions of Linux that operate on old hardware, breathing new life into seemingly obsolete machines. It may be an alternative choice for those who cannot yet afford a new computer.

Mozilla is an open-source web browser that is every bit as powerful as Microsoft IE. It is absolutely free, and is highly customizable. For instance, you can install skins to alter the appearance of your browser. If you are looking for a highly capable email client, Mozilla has those too. In addition, Mozilla runs on every major computer platform (Windows, Mac and Unix). I found this image on the web, and fell in love with it. I just had to show you.

"That's all fine and dandy, but Microsoft Office is the industry standard for word processing and spreadsheet applications, and I need those for my career," you say. Ask anybody and they will tell you Microsoft Office is an incredibly expensive program, and business owners usually fork out a healthy sum every couple of years in order to keep their programs up to date. Enter OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is a fully functional office suite that does about everything that Microsoft Office does -- absolutely free. And it is being developed for every major computer platform. It is also my understanding that OpenOffice has the ability to read and write Microsoft Office files. What isn't there to love about this program?

Long live open-source software. As long as computing power is in the hands of the programmer and not the corporations, we will always have alternatives than to give our money to Corporate Big Brother.

As I close this lengthy post, I thought I might tell you a little about The Stone SouperComputer. A number of years ago, a friend of mine told me about this article in Scientific American about a couple of professors who needed a supercomputer to do some physical modeling for their research, but it was not in the budget to purchase brand new machines. So these professors built a Beowulf supercomputer using obsolete PC's. It cost them next to nothing to build, as hundreds of old desktop computers were donated to them. I hadn't visited the Soupercomputer homepage in quite some time, upon my last visit it had been brought to my attention that the Soupercomputer went offline just over one year ago. I find these gentleman an inspiration when creative thinking allows a problem to be solved efficiently and at minimal cost. What a great idea for a bunch of silicon that was destined for the landfill.