Technophile Monkey

Here’s a very insightful comment on a recent Slashdot article asking for the best eBook reader:

dpbsmith writes: I’ve been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar’s record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn’t exist, Gemstar customer service doesn’t exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.

Because of another limitation of DRM–I couldn’t share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn’t, she didn’t know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay. Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.

The same is true today with the Kindle. The Kindle only supports a handful of formats, and none of them are open. Perversely, the Sony readers mostly support open formats like ePub today. Sony used to be the king of crippled, proprietary products and formats, but with their eBook readers (Sony PRS-505, etc.) they seem to have opened up. Who knows why, but it’s a good thing to have happened. A good thing for Mr. and Mrs. Customer, at least.

So before you buy a Kindle, ask yourself the question: Do I want my reader to natively support non-DRM-crippled books? Do I want my reader to still be able to display the books I’ve bought five years down the line? Then maybe the Kindle is not the right choice. Right now, there are ways to get the Kindle to do this as well, but Amazon can issue an update at any time that removes your ability to do so. Other manufacturers are instead adding more and more open formats to their readers. You may think the ~ $100-$200 lower price on the Kindle may justify the loss of freedom, but I think you won’t be happy with that decision.

If you want to find out what DRM is all about, check out Defective By Design.

Roman Haefeli and band recorded a short Ubuntu song yesterday.

They lyrics are simple, so sing along: “Ubuntu – no Windows” Well, you gotta get the timing right as well, which might be harder.

Hugo Roy wrote an excellent post over at the FSFE fellowship blogs. While he says that there’s nothing new in what he’s writing, I’ll put another spin on it and say that some things can’t be repeated often enough. Such as software freedom, an issue that most people don’t care about and/or don’t understand yet. But once they run into enough of the problems that non-free software causes, they will care.

Hugo uses a nice comparison to democracy — while not everyone would run for an election, most people would probably still agree that the fact that they could and that democracy exists is a pretty comfortable thing.

Here’s an excerpt:

Anyone can run for an election, but it does not mean that everyone will. Because not everyone has the capacity or the will to become a politician. This being said, would you say that Democracy does not matter because you do not want to be in politics? I guess most people would not say that.

It’s the same thing with Free Software. Anyone can use, share, study and improve the program. But the fact that you will not do that, does not mean that it’s not important to you. It’s important for the whole system. And the more important the system becomes, the more valuable is that freedom.

Read the rest at Hugo’s blog.

Another huge disappointment from the US Patent and Trademark Office: They let Microsoft patent a feature that has been part of UNIX systems since almost 30 years (Original source: Groklaw). sudo allows you to execute a program with the privileges of the superuser (root, admin etc.). Also, remember that su (e.g. via su -c) has this functionality built in as well, just without the beautiful configuration options.

This should once again demonstrate why software patents are a dangerous, stupid thing.

In the very near future, your typical way of consuming entertainment could be so much improved, but only if Big Content stops barking up the wrong tree and works with us instead of against us.

It’s Saturday night and you have a two hour blank spot in your evening schedule. There’s a good film in theaters right now, but you don’t feel like going out and would much rather cuddle on the sofa and watch the same film with your significant other. What do you do today? You grab the thing off RapidShare or some BitTorrent tracker. The quality isn’t all that (it’s a telesync or a cam release, ewww), but you got it nearly for free and you didn’t need to move your butt anywhere.

How could the entertainment industry improve this situation and turn this into cash? By offering the same film to you at home, in Full HD, to be streamed to your TV for 10% more than the movie ticket would cost. Hey, you’d save that much by not having to buy drinks, popcorn and parking. Also, as opposed to the RapidShare solution, you could start watching right away and, let’s be generous and realistic, finish anytime in the following 7 days. Huge profit for the industry, and they can make even more if they use e.g. BitTorrent to spread content distribution onto all connected cable boxes of all subscribers of the service. That way they put some of the cost of scaling onto the customer instead of having to buy their own bandwidth. So their profits improve from two sides: Not having to maintain the cinema distribution chain for that particular view and not having to pay for all their own bandwidth as customers pay a significant amount.

This isn’t bullshit: Look at any decent HD torrent today and you can usually find a solid amount of seeders. My line at home isn’t particularly fat (10 Mbit/s), but BitTorrent can saturate it, and that means I get a good 8 GB HD rip in a bunch of hours.

Back to the future vision. Later on, when the film is out on Blu-Ray, you could buy a downloadable copy for e.g. 30% less than what the BD version costs. There’s no DRM on it, but that’s fine because the industry saves money by having to pump less funds into maintaining the phyiscal disc supply chain. They piss off the channel partners, but hey, life is tough. If you want to hear complaints about changing markets making jobs obsolete, talk to a blacksmith.

The same works for series or games: The earlier you want them, the more you pay. The later you buy, the more restrictions (e.g. DRM) are removed. With games you may even get bonus packages such as downloadable content included free with your purchase if you choose to buy later, e.g. a year after release. And while we’re mentioning DRM, it could of course be removed completely once there is enough bandwidth to stream HD movies or game assets on demand. You’d never even receive a fully copy of the film, just the instant you’re viewing at the time. If there’s no file in the customer’s hands, there’s no pressure to have DRM.

Now you’ll call me naive, you’ll say that the studios will never have enough common sense for such a simplistic solution, and that they don’t have balls big enough to go without DRM or put some part of the distribution system onto customers’ devices. At the moment you’re right. But in 10 years, we’ll be getting our entertainment in a way like I described, and all these problems will have been miraculously solved.

These are ideas that are perfectly possible to implement right now, today. Just like MP3 was the ‘current’ thing, not the future thing, for us techies 10 years ago. This means the entertainment industry will have caught up with our ideas in a decade. The question is whether these ideas, or the big label entertainment industry itself, are still relevant then. It’s for them alone to decide, and they have to decide today.

The physical retail channel for entertainment will go away sometime soon, butts all over the world will be more and more reluctant to move out of their comfortable sofa grooves, so the entertainment industry better wake up to these facts, stop playing the victim and start planning now.

Photo CC-By Randy Son Of Robert

It seems that Microsoft wanted to use some Free Software in their Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which they have now removed from their website to investigate the license violation. Taking FOSS code would be fine, no one would stop Microsoft from doing this if they would abide by the terms of the GNU General Public License under which the original code was published. In fact, I’d welcome it if Microsoft would stop their own silly suite of “open source” software licenses and just develop under the GNU GPL like they do for their Hyper-V drivers, but MS seems to be on some sort of holy war against the GPL.

Anyhow. So Microsoft took GPL code and incorporated it in their own CD downloader/writing utility (what the heck did the tool do in the first place?). This is still fine. But then they refused to give out the source to their modifications and they changed the license to be a more restrictive one. You cannot do that with Free Software under the GPL! You must license the code you took under the same terms as it was licensed to you.

I’m looking forward to see how this will play out. We’d all welcome Microsoft to the Free Software field, but my guess is that they wouldn’t be able to compete anymore if their software were Free Software. Also, they ought to have enough lawyers to understand the GPL, so perhaps the team behind the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool should ask one next time they take some Free Software code.

Update: Microsoft have admitted their mistake and are now providing the source code to the tool, as the license demands. Congratulations for solving this the right way! And enjoy trying out the GPL. Maybe you’d like to shift some more projects to that license?

Matthias Ettrich, the founder of the KDE project was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Federal Cross of Merit) today for founding the project that created the Free Software K desktop environment. Specifically, the award was given “in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good”.

It’s good to see Free Software recognized on a national level — the Bundesverdienstkreuz is the only decoration given by Germany on a national level. KDE is a kickass desktop environment, certainly the most configurable and powerful one on any platform. Now let’s just fix a few more bugs and it’s ready to dominate the world.

Congratulations, Matthias

Vor einiger Zeit habe ich mich über das deutsche Schwein geärgert, das in die Schweiz gekommen ist. Keine Angst, damit ist kein Deutscher gemeint, sondern das deutsche Wort Schweinegrippe, das in meinen Augen falsch verschweizerdeutscht wurde. Damals meinte ich es nicht wirklich ernst, konnte mir nicht vorstellen, dass deshalb auch das “schwii” einmal zum “Schwein” werden würde.

Gestern der Gegenbeweis. In einem Gespräch mit einem richtig schweizerischen Schweizer sagt er doch tatsächlich “und döt häts zwei schwein gha”. Werden wir jetzt Zeugen, wie ein Schweizer Wort ausstirbt? Spannend! Und alles nur wegen H1N1.

Dabei ist die Sache ja doppelt pervers: Der Plural von “schwii” ist “schwii”, in allen mir bekannten Dialekten. Der Plural von “schwein”, so wie das Volk dies jetzt nunmal konjugiert, ist auch “schwein”! Eis schwein, zwei schwein, drei schwein, vier schwein.

Die Deutschen werden irgendwann denken, wir sind total doof.

Some large Swiss publishers in the educational sector got together to put up this website:

http://fair-kopieren.ch/

(http://fair-kopieren.ch/

(http://blog.allmend.ch/2009/11/04/lehrer-muessen-keine-diebe-sein-offene-inhalte-fuer-die-schulen-anstatt-schutz-der-verlage/

(

Over at Boycott Novell we have a few choice quotes by early users of Windows 7, both big and small names. It’s interesting that Harvard sees no rush migrating to Windows 7 and will instead increase their Ubuntu GNU/Linux deployment.

My Windows 7 review was mostly about gaming, and for that I see no real problem with Win 7. Windows is where the gaming market is, at least until PC gaming dies the horrible death that has been predicted for it since 1997. For serious work I’m sure that I get fantastic performance from the FOSS systems, but I’m not sure how Windows would fare because I haven’t risked doing any serious work on it.

Perhaps the seeds of a second review when the first service packs roll in?

In related news, if you haven’t yet, check out the new Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. Update: Reading some of the comments around those articles linked in the Boycott Novel one seems to indicate that 9.10 contains a fair bunch of regressions (problems that had been fixed in previous releases that reappear in the current one). That’s bad! More QA at Ubuntu HQ, please! Go and help Canonical with testing Ubuntu releases, post bugs etc. Also, consider contributing your time to Debian GNU/Linux. They only release once every aeon, but their releases usually have far less regressions, and this helps Canonical who are leeching know-how from Debian.

Regressions don’t have to be, and this throws a bad light on Shuttleworth’s plans of release-every-six-months-or-die. If the consequence is more regressions, either the community at large has to focus on synchronized releases together (which would throw more eyeballs at discovering and fixing regressions) or Canonical has to hire more developers and testers to do this themselves.

Another hint could of course be not to change half the system, eh? Audio subsystem here, system initialization scripts there, yeah, let’s wipe out 80% of the system architecture in six months and see if that improves anything.

Oh my, now this has turned into a rant against regressions. It started so innocently…