Real and DMCA?

So this news broke a few days ago, but the interesting thing about ot is that there are no DMCA claims yet. Real has effectively put a bright spotlight on what is wrong with laws like DMCA (for which I will blame Clinton and the republican controlled congress of the day equally). People love to use the "Hood welded shut" analogy when discussing open source, but in this case I think we need a slightly different analogy.

Apple's iPod is like a car with a locked gas cap. The only gas stations with the keys are ownled by Apple and pump a special grade of gasoline. That gas grade doesn't perform any better than Real Gas, but it costs just a little bit more and you get just a little less mileage.

Now Apple is pissed off because they have started distributing keys to Real Gas stations and people with iCars can fill up there.

Wait one smegging minute, I thought that Apple was not making money off the iTMS. One would think that they were making money off the iPod sales themselves. One might by extension also believe that Apple should welcome competition in the music sales space if it would drive iPod sales.

One might also think that Apple is among the top ten companies most adept at shooting themselves in the foot.

Part of the problem...

I just spent some quality time on Scary John Kerry. I got a link from a liberal friend with a conservative brother and wnated to check out the colitical cartoons. Sometimes I look to see what is being said but the other side. Sine I've made some hay about Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore. I had to watch this piece.

I don't even know where to begin. Michael Moore is a comedian. He overstates thing to get a reaction from the audience of the moment.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?

Michael Moore is the enemy of my enemy to be sure. That is probably true of most democrats and liberals. Does every one of them agree with everything he says? Probably not, Moore spoke against Clinton during the war in Yugoslavia. He didn't say "wag the dog" like the republicans did, but they silently agreed with him then.

The enemy of my enemy is my firend... Iran's enemy is Iraq. When we hated Iran, we helped pay the 4th largest army in the world. Then we paid twice as much to dismantle it.

The Mujahideen were the enemies of the old Soviet Union in Afganistan. And we know exactly what happened there...

Russia was an ally anaginst Hitler. Once the common enemy was removed we were no longer friends.

I think this is the case with Michael Moore and the Democrats. As soon as Bush is gone and he goes about his work against John Kerry He will not be nearly as loved.

Laszlo ClockBlox

Laszlo ClockBlox is now locked to the top right corner.

So this clock has a long and storied history. And I play a minor part in it. David Temkin was looking at Konfabulator. He was looking at the language and how it was constructed. I too looked at it and grabbed the source for their nifty clock (visible on the front page).

The language was simmilar enough that the prot was straightforward. The interesting things we learned about LZX and Konfabulator was that we could do the same job with less code and fewer art resources. Oh yeah, and it runs in a web page. So, since I had used some of their art, we couldn't ship that with the product. It was decided that we would have a clock in the product somewhere. It's visible on the demos page on Laszlo's site here as the World clocks.

Bret Simister rewrote the shadow code using a much more complex algorythm than I had initially, but when I looked at it, he was doing the same job. Since this was to be demo/example code for people learning LZX we pulled it back to the simpler method.

But the point is that this is another one of my very minor contributions to the blogosphere. I hope you enjoy it!

[UPDATE] I forgot to mention the influence of Lyndon Wong on the wolrd clocks app. He was the one who approached me about using it there and also involved our designers here at Laszlo.

DrDreff's PVR Project

Announcing DrDreff's PVR Project. A new pet project of mine to documnt the process of building a Linux based PVR. I'll be taking it one step further than most PVR projects by replacing the UI elements with a collection of Laszlo Applications. This has some neat possibilities because not only would the UI have the ease of development and deployment that LZX provides, but I'll probably be able to extend that UI out to the web and allow me to schedule recordings or view audio, video, and pictures from my PVR across the web.

More to come, but it will all be over here. Maybe I sould start a sourceforge project for others to help... hmmm...

Testing Comments

Seems I've been to long without digging around my settings. Comments are now available. Let's see if they work.

Laszlo RSS

Laszlo has just added an RSS Feed to their support structure.

Very cool, now you can agregate the tips of the week. Nice.

I should put up my Laszlo RSS reader one of these days...

The history channel turns my stomach

Although it may be apropos to be playing ads for George Bush on the "history" channel, it's a bit thick. Every hour I'm getting the attack ad.

I've complained and stopped watching. I urge others to do the same.

Tell them here

Kerry has his priorities... and the History Channel has theirs.

Per CPU RIP!

Oh how I have been waiting to see this issue really tackled This article titled: New server chips carry hidden cost points to a wonderful boondoggle in the world of proprietary software. The age old pricing model of charging for the number of CPUs you use a piece of software on will finally come to an end.

So there was a time when the cost of software was actually measured in man-years. I don't know if it was described that way at the time but, your sofware was written (for the most part) by staff programmers. The sale of software changed all that.

So now we need to come up with a new metric... The way I read current EULAs and licences you don't actually own anything when you buy software, so why not just whole hog lease it? I seem to remember that IBM only leased computers and software at one time... Microsoft would love it so of course that won't work.

Per seat / per user could work for some sofware. Per user licenses are common in the desktop and server world (perforce springs right to mind).

Maybe a tie to capacity... Oracle could charge based on the size and performance of the database. With regular audits, MySQL would rule...

OK, what do you get when you buy sofware? Someone to sue? Support? A warm feeling knowing that the BSA won't kill your company? Manuals? The permission to use?

Finally one that is real.

Looks like my above list contains one more... Support. So how about support? What is that worth? If it breaks you have someone to call and they will hopefully be able to fix it. This works in the Open Souce and proprietary worlds since the smelly hobbit at the end of the hall might not know that the problem is in a missing Xlib file called by some obscure AWT function buried in a preproccessor somewhere in your pipeline.

So how does support scale? Following the per user model, you could guess that each user is going to generate 2-3 support calls a year. Say $10 each call and we get a nice number to work with (again Perforce springs to mind).

Now what about server software? I'm still mulling that over, but the only differences between my little database supporting 2 adminstrative users tracking about a thousand people's medical insurance data and Kaiser's simmilar DB are cpacity and complexity. They have many more users though and I don't think they pay per seat for the terminals (though I could be wrong).

More pondering on this in the days to come. I'm fairly certain that perCPU is rightly dying as being irrelevant and unfair. I once blogged on this because of hyperthreading and 64-bit. Multicore makes it that much more apparent.

I leave you with this little one to ponder though: What is the difference between installing software on a 2Ghz uniprocessor computer and a DulaProcessor box clocked at 1Ghz?

Should you really pay twice as much money for the software?

Answers come later...

DOJ and Longhorn....

I would have expected some spin from a story about the DOJ and MS on MSNBC but this is a bit more than I expecded.

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said the company expects Longhorn to be released while the settlement is still in force, and that Microsoft will adhere to the agreement in designing the new system regardless of when it comes out.

"All development is being done with full consideration for our obligations and commitments" under the agreement, she said.

Priceless is on the old XMMS and it couldn't be more apropos. You see, XAML isn't a web browser technology. IE will still be there and be able to be hidden, but anything you wish to do with the "new and approved" internet will be done through Avalon apps talking to friendly .Net servers. SOAP should be expected to be slower on Longhorn, as should XML-RPC.

So thw Web Browser is no longer an issue. Anything can be coded around, even the DOJ.

Although the courts found that commingling of the browser code with the operating system was anti-competitive, the deal with the Justice Department stopped short of forcing the company to decouple the programs.

And now that they are redefining "browser" to be something else all together, the comingling will only get worse. The DOJ should have forced them to remove browser code from the OS. They would be in less shit if they had. But the DOJ decided to give them a pass on actually doing the right thing and allowed the anticompetetive behavior to continue.

Doom 3 Hardware specs...

HoustonChronicle.com - Computing has an article on the specs for Doom 3.

No OS requirements, but it's all about x86 hardware... hmm.

My $700 homebuilt box will work fine it seems. Maybe I could spend $100 or so for a new MB/CPU to go faster but I should be good to go.

That $700 matches the performance of a $2500 G5 by the way and the cost is probably lower today than when I did the measurement.

Phellow PhotoBloxer Phrom the Phar East

Bayski Blog

Nice pictures too.

503 Service Unavailable

Wild... /. slashdotted? 503 Service Unavailable We'll see when it comes back.

[UPDATE] They're back 10:25 PDT

Somebody finally gets it...

Just saw Michael Rogers on KTVU talking about outing anyone or their staff that is gay if they vote for the gay marriage amendment

I think we should have a watchdog group that calls every one of these people to task when they vote or speak one way and live another.

Oh... the best ./ sig of the day:
"There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now."

ABCNEWS has factual issues...

OK, I'm reading this thing:ABCNEWS.com : Bush Ad Assails Kerry for Missed Votes and one quote jumps out at me:

Nicolle Devenish, a Bush campaign spokeswoman, said the Petersons knew their daughter would be referenced in the ad, which Devenish said seeks to "set the record straight."

Who the hell is she talking about? Does she mean the Rocha family?

Bullshit Talks, Bush Walks

See how this adds up?
Ridge Warns of Election Terror Plot
CIA weathers cycle of accusation - fair or not

CIA takes the fall, George smells like a rosebud, and we all get to remain scared of some upcoming terrorist threat that will keep you from voting. Oh, but we're not actually going to raise the threat level. Just tell you to be scared because we said to.

Bush gets dirty early

So I read this new article on Reuters.com on the new Bush attack ad. The slant is so bad...

"Kerry found time to vote against the Laci Peterson law that protects pregnant women from violence."

That law does nothing to protect anyone. The only thing it does is create a new classification of victim called "unborn child".

At least the article has a quote from the Kerry camp: "They've got no record to run on, no positive vision for the future, so they attack."

Fahrenheit 911 & BitTorrent

So on /. the other day was a blurb titled: Moore Approves Fahrenheit 9/11 Downloads. I've already seen the film, but just to see I checked out suprnova to see what the quality of the downloads was like.

I've seen some movies show up and get hundreds of downloads and tens of seeders, but never before have I seen anything like this.

Right now there are 5 copies of Fahrenheit 911 up there. The copy with the least number of seeders is 109. Greatest is 815 seeds. My word, there are over 12,000 downloads going on.

So Let's get Jack Valenti to explain this one... It looks like Fahrenheit 911 is going to be the most pirated movie of all time, and still break all the monetary documentary records.

Maybe Mr Moore isn't just correct about Bush, but also about his business of movies? We shall see.

I can't help myself...

This texan obviously is writing a review after reading someone else's review. Moore should attack Dems too - The Daily Texan - Opinion is a waste of time.

"The movie does prominently feature George W. Bush, whose incompetence, greed and favoritism have careened the nation toward an unjust and unnecessary war. Such a portrait should raise the question of what the "opposition" party was doing during such a debacle, but Moore would not relish giving the only possible answer: It was supporting the war"

Umm... I think he said so, in the movie and by implication. He also showed ust the party of opposition signing the patriot act.

But here's Mike O’Connor's excuse: O'Connor is an American studies graduate student and a member of the Green Party.

I'm a Libretarian, go cry me a river.

Let us not forget who Moore pointed a finger at Bill Clinton (among others) in "Bowling for Columbine", Never mind how vocal he has been AGAINST the "most worthless excuse for a party -- the Democrats", recently.

More worthless trash from texas, please take your village idiot back, he's fucking up our country.

I Guess I only get one day off from being a prick. I just can't help myself.