Technology: August 2005 Archives

I'm getting ready to spend the weekend in Bellingham at the 25 year reunion (I couldn't possibly be that old, could I?) of the band I played in during the early '80s, Eddie & The Atlantics.

Last night while rummaging through old band stuff I came across the first demo tape we did and the recording of our wild first birthday gig at the Rainbow Tavern (our home in Seattle), and I decided that I'd try to get them on my computer.

I dug up a cord to connect the RCA output jacks on my tape deck to the line-in mini-phone plug on my Mac, downloaded the excellent Audio Hijack application from Rogue Amoeba, used their LineIn app to get the line input into the audio subsystem, and I was off to the races!

I stayed up much too late working my way nostalgically through both tapes, and now have them safely ensconced in iTunes, where I can burn them to CDs for my old bandmates.

That oughta impress them.

Audio Hijack is a great small app and a great value for only $16.

As you may recall from July, Ashlee Vance had some critical commentary about our Dell/Napster deal in the Register.

That prompted a rather lively email exchange between the two of us, that started out sort of flamey on both our parts, but then turned into a substantive discussion of the issues around institutions getting involved in providing music downloading services for students. I'll post some of that discussion soon, but one result was that Ashlee invited me to write an op-ed piece on the topic for the Reg.

That piece has just been published, under the headline How Napster and DRM arrived at University of Washington. They even put in a picture!

All in all, it's been great chatting with Ashlee about the topic, and it's very nice of the Reg to offer the opportunity to get my opinion in.

Google has released it's IM service, dubbed Google Talk. There's a native Windows client that does voice as well as text, and there are instructions for configuring other IM clients for use, including iChat, Gaim, Trillian, and Adium.

I haven't tried it on Windows yet, but it works fine with Adium on OS X.

I'm orensr if you're looking for me - see you online.

Mitch is talking about the future of the Mozilla projects and how they relate to OSAF projects. He likened Mozilla to being similar to Harry Potter - having lived with the repressive aunt and uncle while it was Netscape, and having blossomed into unanticipated success with Firefox.

In this conversation Mitch is very careful to note that his role at Mozilla is as the chair of the board of the Foundation, not as someone in charge of product direction or priorities.

The new Mozilla Corporation is organizing around the product development at Mozilla, working very hard on Firefox 1.5 and looking ahead at 2.0, with a lot of work going on in the graphics rendering engine, etc.

There is a Mozilla project that is working towards making Python a first-class language for Mozilla development. Mitch notes that it's just not realistic to expect devlopers to write Mozilla extensions in Javascript these days. This could make integration between Chandler and Mozilla easier.

There is a Chandler project getting started to look at whether it makes sense to look at moving Chandler's cross-platform GUI development tools from wxWidgets to XUL (the platform used by Mozilla). This would be a large long-term shift which would not take place before Chandler 1.0 is released.

One possible Chandler parcel that could integrate with Firefox - Integrating web-browsing stuff with email, tasks, and calendaring. Effectively types everything you look at in Firefox as Chandler items that can be searched and integrated with other stuff in the Chandler repository, synchronized, and shared.

Mozilla is kind of a platform and kind of not - it's very hard to build applications other than a browser on top of the code base. That is slowly being addressed, but certainly makes it difficult for Thunderbird to progress. There are questions about how good is good enough - what should be the aspirations for Thunderbird?

We're talking this morning about the requirements for calendar access from mobile devices. There are widespread deployments of SyncML in the mobile device space. There also is talk about creating CalDAV clients on mobile devices - there is at least one proof-of-concept implementation on a J2ME platform. OSAF is gathering information about where the CSG schools are with mobile devices.

Jon Udell attended the PKI Summit at Dartmouth College. He writes about that over at InfoWorld, but in his blog he shows that he really gets it when it comes to higher-education IT:

Universities differ from other large enterprises in ways that make them bellwethers for IT's future. The user population is transient, hardware and software monocultures cannot be imposed, and collaboration across institutional borders is mission-critical. These are excellent circumstances in which to evolve methods of identity management that will also meet the requirements of corporations as they increasingly outsource work, connect with customers through the web, and engage with partners in federations of web services.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing points out this insightful post by Carl Longino.

What's funny about all of this is that the DRM doesn't work anyway. The latest Foo Fighters CD features similar copy protection, but that didn't stop it from topping the file-sharing charts. Not only that, you've got bands and labels telling people how to circumvent the DRM -- the Dave Matthews Band tells buyers to rip the CD through Windows Media Player, then burn a copy with it, then rip the copy into iTunes to get the music onto an iPod. Just so we're clear: you've got one of the artists with DRMed CDs telling people how to work around the DRM and make "unprotected" MP3 files of the songs, with one of the labels giving the same advice. Why bother having DRM if you're going to tell people how to get around it? If that's not a tacit admission of its ineffectiveness, I don't know what is.

One of Ted's OSCON posts pointed me to the Creating Passionate Users blog. Some great reading.

An example:

Remember, learning is like a drug to the brain (actually, it is a drug). The best user experiences--combined with a clear path to greater expertise and the promise of more time in flow--are like a healthier, happier form of crack. One of the best examples of this drug-dealer model in software is Apple.

But even if the goal is not to teach or inspire users to appreciate your higher-end products, just having goals to strive for is what matters. Whether the promise is that you can become a first-level moderator, a church usher, one who can use the RAW features of Photoshop, a CSS guru, a Sun Certified Business Component Developer, a double black diamond snowboarder, or a 3-dan go player... never forget that where there is passion, there is always a next level.

A few days ago I noted Cory Doctorow's rant about Apple's rumored use of the Trusted Computing platform, where he paints a picture of Apple trying to lock down content in many nefarious ways. Now John Gruber has what seems to me to be a very sensible take on this:

Certainly such a scenario is a potential use of Trusted Computing DRM mechanisms — and such a scenario would indeed be dreadful — but it’s a far stretch to call it the “point of Trusted Computing”. In the actual case here, Apple’s Developer Transition Kits — which, I’ll remind you, may bear zero resemblance, internally or externally, to the actual Intel-powered computers Apple will eventually ship to real customers — are (reportedly) using TPM for one and only one purpose: to prevent the OS from being run on non-Apple hardware.

This is not about third-party software developers limiting access to your data. This is about Apple limiting access to their operating system.

Sounds like there's no need for alarm. Move along folks, there's nothing to see here.

I've been watching as the telcos use their lobbying muscle to try to get state legislatures to pass measures prohibiting municipalities from building their own wireless infrastructure.

In a NY Times op-ed piece today Tom Friedman is sounding a wakeup call:

Congress is on the case. It dropped everything last week to pass a bill to protect gun makers from shooting victims' lawsuits. The fact that the U.S. has fallen to 16th in the world in broadband connectivity aroused no interest. Look, I don't even like cellphones, but this is not about gadgets. The world is moving to an Internet-based platform for commerce, education, innovation and entertainment. Wealth and productivity will go to those countries or companies that get more of their innovators, educators, students, workers and suppliers connected to this platform via computers, phones and P.D.A.'s.

A new generation of politicians is waking up to this issue. For instance, Andrew Rasiej is running in New York City's Democratic primary for public advocate on a platform calling for wireless (Wi-Fi) and cellphone Internet access from every home, business and school in the city. If, God forbid, a London-like attack happens in a New York subway, don't trying calling 911. Your phone won't work down there. No wireless infrastructure. This ain't Tokyo, pal.

Yahoo has a beta of a new audio file search service. They're indexing songs available from many online music services, including not only iTunes, Napster, etc, but also Audio Lunchbox and other web sites (there's a list of services indexed ).

Using it turns up that Musicmatch has the Jethro Tull album I was looking for the other day.

Searching "Whispering Johnson" does indeed turn up my own band's tunes (though not first on the list).

It seems to me that aggregator services such as these should, in the long run, increase pressure to distribute music in standard formats.

I think I've glimpsed the future, and it's available now at Audio Lunchbox!

Chris Anderson pointed me to Audio Lunchbox in his Long Tail Blog posting on niche aggregators.

AL offers downloadable music for the same 99 cents a song as the other downloading services, but the songs are available in regular mp3 or ogg vorbis formats.

While there isn't the same breadth of major label coverage as at iTunes or Napster, it's not just totally obscure artists either. Names I recognize from an initial perusing range from Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Doc Watson, and Steve Earle to Al Jarreau, Albert Ayler and the Rebirth Brass Band. Not to mention my childhood neighbor Stu Goldberg.

That's right - legal, downloadable music from real record labels in open, non-copy-protected digital formats.

I know that Audio Lunchbox will be the first place I stop when looking for new music online.

I really enjoyed Joel Spolsky's latest essay, Hitting the High Notes, where he talks about how to have a successful software company you really need to hire the best programmers. It's full of good lines, like:

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6.

You really should go read it.

What's wrong with this musical picture?

I gladly admit to being a music junkie - I spent a good part of my younger life playing music for a living, I still play when I can, and I am constantly looking for (and finding) new things to listen to. Sure, I still go back and listen to old favorites, but that has no impact on the drive to discover music yet unheard, artists yet unknown.

I am also pressed for time and have enough income that I am willing to spend some money to acquire music the easy and convenient way.

So the emergence of commercial online music sources should be exactly what I need - lots of information about the artists (usually from the All Music Guide), ways of cross-linking performers and genres, wide (if not comprehensive) selection, and good (if not great) quality sound files.

I've been an avid user of the iTunes Music Store since it first went live, and lately I've enjoyed trying out the Napster To Go subscription service with a Dell DJ portable player.

So what's not to like?

It's the damn copy protection, of course. Let me explain.

I have two computers at work - one Mac and one Windows box. I have a Mac laptop. I have two computers at home, again one Mac and one PC, plus I have a Slim Devices Squeezebox for streaming digital music to my stereo. I have a Rio flash memory mp3 player and would like to buy a hard drive player.

The music purchased from iTunes will play on both Mac and Windows (as long as I use the iTunes application in both places), but not on the Squeezebox or on the Rio or the DJ. The Napster music will work on Windows PCs (as long as I use the Napster application) and on the DJ, but not on the Macs, the Squeezebox, or the Rio.

In addition, there is no way to integrate music from Napster and iTunes together into a single collection, which should be one of the great advantages of managing a music collection on a computer.

All this in the interest of trying to lock up the music so I won't put it up on a peer-to-peer filesharing network - which I wasn't going to do do anyway.

Do I occasionally make copies of songs or even entire albums for my friends? Sure - we've all been doing that since the advent of cassette recorders in the early '70s. I didn't notice that having a negative impact on record sales over the years - did you?

At least with iTunes there are ways of making the files work on other systems. Funny thing - I haven't noticed Apple's sales declining either.

So, as much as I'm enjoying the all-you-can-eat model of the Napster subscription, I'm not going to buy an account. I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to let my choice of computing environments be dictated by what music service will play where.

Astute historians will recall that none of this is new - the music industry has a long history of combatting the rise of new ways of enjoying music:

In 1907 the sheet music industry fought against player-piano rolls:

White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company 209 U.S. 1 (1907) was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers. The ruling was based on a holding that the piano rolls were not copies of the plaintiffs' copyrighted sheet music, but were instead parts of the machine that reproduced the music.

This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act in 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.

You can see Chapter 11 of Donald Clarke's The Rise and Fall of Popular Music for details about the running battles among the record companies and radio stations and publishers during the 1940's that led to ASCAP publishers boycotting radio stations and a musicians strike.

Right up to the late '70s where the industry blamed a sales slump on the advent of home taping on cassette recorders:

...anyone who rewinds to the last major music-biz slump will find some interesting parallels. In 1978, record sales began to fall, and the major labels blamed a larcenous new technology: cassette tapes. The international industry even had an outraged official slogan: "Home taping is killing music." The idea was that music fans—ingrates that they are—would rather pirate songs than pay for them, and that sharing favorite songs was a crime against hard-working musicians (rather than great word-of-mouth advertising). Cassettes were so anathema to the biz that Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren could think of no more provocative way to launch his new band, Bow Wow Wow, than with a ode to home taping, "C30, C60, C90, Go!''

By the time Bow Wow Wow bowed in 1980, however, the crisis was almost over. It turned out that home taping had not killed music. Instead, the central problem was the collapsing popularity of dance-pop—lively, sexy, but personality-free music whose appeal was broad but thin. They called it disco back then, and the name has never recovered from the era's backlash. Although usually termed teen-pop, the music of 'N Sync and Britney Spears is not unlike disco: Both are intellectually underachieving, cookie-cutter styles that have made stars of performers not known primarily for their skills as singers, songwriters, or musicians.

And so it continues to the present day. Mark Cuban hits the nail on the head yesterday with an essay titled "The definition of insanity.. The Music Industry", where he says:

There is an old saying that the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting the outcome to change”

I think of this saying everytime I hear about music industry efforts to impact piracy.

After some great summations of the details he goes on to conclude:

The music industry has a very unique opportunity to really re-establish itself as a growth industry. It’s not like they don’t know all of the above. For whatever reason, they just love to do the same things over and over… Which to me is just insane.

One has to think that sooner or later the folks in the music industry will come to their senses and offer music in open formats at reasonable prices. I'll be waiting with my wallet open when they do.