New iPods
Apple announced an entire new line of iPods at yesterday’s keynote. Asside from redesigning the Shuffle and the Nano, and doubling the capacity of the standard iPod (now called the “iPod Classic”,) the really exciting news was the announcement of the much anticipated iPod Touch, which is effectively an iPhone with more storage and without the, well, phone.
Now I have to say it’s a very sexy device indeed; it’s got a big screen, a new UI and it looks gorgeous, but there’s no way on earth I’d buy one. Why? It’s got a maximum storage of 16GB, that’s why. It’s a move I just can’t understand. Why on Earth, would they give what is clearly their new flagship iPod 10% of the storage of the old-style one? Why would they give a device that is clearly intended for video playback less room than I need to store all my music, never mind something more to put some movies in? It’s a real shame, too. I have no intention of buying an iPhone – not unless it’s a lot cheaper in the UK than the US – and the prospect of an iPod that could play movies well, and be used as a handy wifi web browser is quite appealing, but only if it also meets all my requirements for a music player, and paramount amongst those requirements is that is simply must have enough storage for my music.
At the same time, the iPod classic has just too muchspace. Not that that’s any bad thing, and it’s the iPod I’d be looking at getting if mine were to break, but given that my current model, with 100GB less space, has enough room for my music and then some, there’s just no point upgrading there either.
Still alive
Yes, I’m still alive, and yes I’m still blogging.
It’s been a bit quiet for the past few days because I’ve been sorting out some server issues. Basically, my host ran out of memory on Friday morning, and I’ve been getting it upgraded and trying to sort out some of the memory use and performance issues since then. It’s nothing particularly huge, but it’s taken all of my non-work/non-gaming time. All the software work is now done, but there’s a server migration still to happen, that’ll come up when my hosting company (the excellent RimuHosting can sort out some trouble they’re having with broken Intel BIOSs. But since that’s almost entirely managed by them, it shouldn’t take any more time out of my blogging.
While I was at it, I installed a couple of plugins for Movable Type 4, which should give quite a bit more flexibility in how you sign in while commenting. Not that anyone ever does.
Possbily the best USB hub ever
Microsoft discovers why centralised software validation is a bad idea
When microsoft launched Windows XP, and it required “activation” with a central server before it would work, everyone thought it was a good idea. When they launched “genuine advantage,” which strengthened the protection by requiring more frequent checks against the server (previously it had only checked at install time,) everyone said it was definitely a bad idea; no one liked the idea that Microsoft could, through malice or incompetence, remotely deactivate their copy of Windows. Microsoft said that would never happen.
This weekend it did.
Ars reports that on Friday night the central Windows Genuine Advantage server failed and users started to have their copies of Windows deactivated. The problem is already solved, so kudos to Microsoft for turning it around that quickly (and I bet a lot of people worked a lot of hours to get it going,) but this should never have happened in the first place, and it just demonstrates why requiring any centralised validation step in software is a Bad Idea. In this case it didn’t have a huge impact, but it could have had. What are we – the paying customers – supposed to do if, next time, the outage is a week, while they track the problem? Just not use our computers? What if Microsoft goes out of business? I know it’s unthinkable, but if it were to happen, we’d all be screwed. I just don’t see any good reason we should accept that our operating system should only work for as long as the company we’ve already paid for it is able to keep a server somewhere else in the world working.
It’s worth pointing out that the people who have illegal copies of Windows would have been unaffected by this outage, since they long ago disabled the WGA checks. Not only is Genuine Advantage ineffective as an anti-piracy measure, but like any “copy-protection” scheme, it encourages piracy, by inconveniencing the legal users in ways their less-scrupulous counterparts get to ignore. Brilliant.
Suprnova returns
On the subject (sort-of) of whether the recording industry can continue to gouge people for money, Ars Technica is reporting that, after three years off the net, Suprnova has been relaunched by The PirateBay. Not content with relaunching an iconic torrent tracker, they also released the following statement:
This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.
While I’m glad to see an old favourite return to the web, I’m not sure I really buy into this “pirates vs, content providers” thing. Copyright infringement is a fact of life, and it’s never going to go away, but it’s not some noble life goal, and people should never be proud of “sticking it to the man” by not paying for things they like, unless they really want to see the people who produce those things they like going out of business. It’s a big deal at the moment, because a large part of the media people consume is overpriced, and the monopolies that control the markets are trying hard to hang on to those margins in a world where content reproduction and distribution has suddenly become very much easier. In that sense you could see piracy as a temporary necessary evil until the content producers wake up to the fact that they can’t keep doing business the same way they did before the internet came along, and start pricing things realistically. I guess the above statement could be helpful in hammering that point home to the monopolists, but we should be careful that we don’t start to actually believe that we should never have to pay for access to any content regardless of what the creator thinks, because if we ever actually achieved that, we’d soon find that there wasn’t any more content to get for free.
Deezer: A free online music player
This is a good one; a free, legal, online streaming site that lets you pick the songs you want to listen to.
Back in the mists of time, when I was a teenager in the early-nineties, who’d never so much heard of the internet, I had this idea for the future of music. My idea was that you’d have a mobile player that used a more advanced version of mobile phone technology to stream music from some central server somewhere - possibly with the ability to store some amount of it locally, if you thought you were going out of range of the broadcast. The key thing I envisioned was that you’d pay a reasonable, monthly subscription – say about the cost of a CD or two – for access to the music database. Everyone was a winner; consumers got access to all the music they could want, the electronics producers could sell you ever more advanced players, and the music prodiction companies still got the CD or two a month’s money out of everyone without ever having to manufacture so much as a single physical item.
Of course, looking back now, I was hopelessly off on the way technology would develop; storage technology has far outstripped broadcast, such that it’s more feasible for people to carry all the music they could possibly want to listen to with them than it would be for even a modest number of people to tirelessly stream even low-bit-rate music over the cellular network. But I do still believe that the subscription model for music access is the way to go, for the same reasons I stated above. Of course the music industry doesn’t want to play that game; they want to charge us for every track we want listen to, and if they can get away with it, charge us every time we listen to it as well. There’s a whole discussion about the morality of that and whether it’s practical, but it’s been played out all over the internet countless times, and I don’t want to get into it here. The point is that Deezer seem to be offering that subscription service, and for free as well! I can’t stress enough how cool I think this is.
The site isn’t perfect yet, but it’s good. Their track list is extensive, but there are plenty of tracks I might want to listen to that they don’t have yet, and the streaming quality is good enough for headphones at work, but I wouldn’t pipe it through my hi-fi at home. Other than that it’s pretty much what I’d ask for, the tracks keep playing while you navigate the site, it has workable integrated playlist management and there aren’t huge stuttery “buffering” pauses. It’s a good site that I can see myself using, and I really hope they succeed.
Which is rather the point; I’m just not sure that their business model is going to work - they’re planning to pay for the whole thing with revenue from ads. I guess they’ve run the numbers and think it’s going to fly, but it just seems like the recording industry would demand more money for this sort of thing than ads alone can generate, Maybe I’m wrong, and if they can make it work, then more power to them. Everyone go and check it out. Also, remember, if you give their ads a click they probably make more money than if you just look at them, and that helps them raise the cash to keep the site going.
Local user registration now active
One of the new features in Movable Type 4 is native user registration. What that means to you is that you don’t need to go and sign up for a TypeKey ID to be a registered commenter here any more. Of course, if you do have a TypeKey account, you can still use it (and it might come in handy at other SixApart sites you visit,) but you shouldn’t have to have one.
Obviously, I haven’t tried it out yet, so if it doesn’t work for me, leave a comment (anonymously) on this topic, and I’ll look at why it might be broken.
Movable Type 4.0 upgrade
I’ve just upgraded the site to the new, improved version of Movable Type (the blogging platform I use.) This should make improve the blog in the long run, but in the short term it basically just means that I’m back to using one of the default layouts. This will (maybe) change over time.
The only important thing that’s missing is the links to the feeds from the main page; the two afeeds (Atom and RSS) are both still there and working, but you can’t get to them unless you know they’re there.
3D sound
I always said you don’t need a fancy multi speaker system for good 3D sound; a good pair of headphones should be enough. You have two ears, so two sound-sources should do the trick as long as you’re capable of correctly processing the sound to correctly model the way in which sound-waves reach your ears from any point in space. Now, finally, I have some proof.
Linked from Pharyngula.