the case against .NET

Following the previous post, and in the spirit of full disclosure, a few notes on my own experiences of software activation and DRM.

I’ve never yet had problems with product activation (but I’m grateful to Jeff Duntemann for his advice not to upgrade to the latest Acrobat version - I too remain happy with version 4.0).

I like iTunes, and sometimes buy music there. My next step, though, is always to burn to CD and rip back to a non-DRM format (Ogg Vorbis in my case). My iriver H140 audio player has no DRM support whatsoever, and I see this as a big plus. I want to be sure that I can never be locked out of anything I load onto it.

I buy CDs often. Just once I bought one that was “protected” so I couldn’t play it on the PC, or copy it to my iriver. Of course, I had to find a way around this (and I’ve sworn never to buy a BMG disc again).

Talking of good music, this is what’s currently seeing regular play on the aforementioned iriver:

• The Decemberists, Picaresque
• The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema
• Goldfrapp, Supernature

Jeff Duntemann has a great post on the foolishness of Product Activation.

Activation is to software as DRM is to the music industry. Both serve more to alienate existing customers than to deter pirates. In fact, both can turn today’s loyal customer into tomorrow’s pirate.

Say you buy Acrobat and find it won’t run because you have a RAID array. What do you do? You’ve paid for the software, so you’re entitled to use it. Adobe apparently isn’t going to help you so, arguably, you’re justified in looking for a (cracked) version which will run on your system. Now you know where to find other cracked software, and given that the industry treats you like a criminal, perhaps you might as well act like one…

Similarly, how many people have bought music CDs which won’t play on their computers, and have then turned to peer file sharing systems to find a pirated version which they can actually use. Or people who’ve bought music from DRM services and then struggled to transfer it to a new PC?

This problem is in its infancy, and will get much worse. If the software/music industry regards you with such patent disrespect, there’s going to be little respect flowing the other way. In both cases, the corporations are signing their own death warrants.

Customers will learn to go elsewhere.

Bands and music artists are already realising they don’t need big business to publish their music. They can do it for nothing on the Internet, and retain all the profit. It will only take one really great breakthrough artist to self-publish on the Internet for this trickle to become a flood.

Will the same thing happen in software? Will the best graduate software engineers and computer scientists gravitate to companies which aren’t afraid of the future, who trade solely on the excellence of their products and services? Maybe they’ll even set up their own micro-ISVs. Time will tell.

Much has already been written about the stupidity of DRM. Perhaps the definitive talk was given by Cory Doctorow at Microsoft in June 2004. You’ve probably already seen it - if not, you should take a look.

A number of bloggers have been writing about Pandora. I found it via Scoble, and have been trying it for almost a week.

It works like this: you tell it a band/music artist you like, and it builds a radio station (streamed over your broadband connection) including that artist and others you may like. You can click to indicate you like or dislike a particular song, and can also add other bands to the station.

Pandora is driven, not by matching tastes of multiple users, but by the input of a panel of analysts (music specialists) - see this post on the Pandora blog.

After a short trial period, Pandora is now open to the public. An annual subscription costs $36, but you can try it for 10 hours first.

There are some frustrations, notably the reliance on a web browser (it uses Flash), and the fact that you can’t remove an artist from a radio station (if you changed your mind, say), or even see which artists a station is built from. There have been glitches with certain songs too: I’ve listened to 2 badly mangled Elvis Costello tracks, but have had no trouble with any other artist. It’s also a little US-centric at present, both in the choice of songs, and the fact that it allows you to purchase music from Amazon.com, but not other Amazon stores.

Here’s how I’m currently using Pandora: I created a station around 20 of my favourite bands. Within a few tracks, other favourite artists began appearing, as well as some good stuff I’d never heard before.

Highly recommended - but beware of spending too much money on the new bands you’re sure to find!

Opera is giving away free registration codes as part of it’s “10-year online anniversary party”. Get this while you can - Opera 8 is a very good browser.

However, I hope Opera can find a way to make their browser free on a permanent basis. Developers and influencers will only consider Opera as their primary browser once charges are dropped, as they know no-one else is going to pay for it while other browsers are free.

Update: “Free registration codes are available until midnight CET (GMT +1) on Wednesday 31st of August”.

Been a bit quiet lately, due to a recent vacation. In fact, my previous 3 posts were queued up prior to my departure, as my colleague Adrian correctly deduced.

Anyway, I was chatting with my manager the other day when he made an analogy which was so obvious I was amazed I’d not come across it before. He compared the process of project scheduling with the game of Tetris: the different columns represent resources, and the rows are units of time. Blocks are tasks and the passing of time equates to, well, the passing of time.

The objective is the same in both cases: to optimize resource usage while completing as many tasks as possible. I guess the end of the game occurs when you get fired for failing to complete any tasks…

FWIW, Tetris is one of the few computer games I’ve ever got really hooked on, the others being Lemmings, Doom and Transport Tycoon.

Given the title of this blog, maybe I’ve been a bit quiet on why I’m not totally enamoured with .NET.

To make a case, I’m going to need to refer to some older material, so please forgive me if you’ve seen this before.

Richard Grimes is a well known author and speaker on COM and .NET. However, he caused a stir earlier this year when he stepped down from his Dr. Dobb’s column with something of a tirade against .NET. I can’t help thinking this is a little hypocritical - Richard certainly toed the Microsoft line for long enough. However, I agree with many of his points - e.g. that Microsoft’s attitude to .NET is much like its attitude to VB before it.

For a rebuttal, and subsequent debate, see this article from Dan Fernandez, Visual C# Product Manager at Microsoft.

My home office room is modest in size, and that’s being generous. Yet it contains an amazing 17 devices/appliances currently plugged into mains electrical outlets, and several more which are currently disconnected.

Of these 17, more than half are fed through some kind of external DC adapter, or ‘power brick’. When I travel, several of these travel with me (brick and all) - when I can disentangle them from the rat’s nest on the floor.

Isn’t it time our homes and offices were equipped with mains DC power, as well as AC? Perhaps some sort of 3-pin plug supplying 12V, 5V and ground - that should satisfy most kinds of mobile device. I’m sure this presents technical challenges, but the current situation is just getting silly.

Am I imagining it, or is Microsoft more inclined to speak my language of late?

I’m hearing less about Indigo, Avalon and XAML, and more about REST, Ajax and RSS. And that’s the way it should be - the future lies with cross-platform interoperability, especially with mobile devices such as smartphones, and not with fancy proprietary desktop systems.

However, Microsoft seems to be missing one big piece of this puzzle: SVG. With Opera and Firefox now starting to offer good native SVG support, developers can finally begin to rely on it for cross-platform vector graphics through a browser interface.

Make no mistake, many of the new generation of web applications will need advanced vector graphic displays, and will require that they can co-exist with Ajax techniques in the browser. SVG is the only game in town, and Microsoft is refusing to play ball. I’ve been following the IE7 blog, and have seen little or no mention of SVG - this looks to me like a major tactical blunder on Microsoft’s part.

Time for a change.

This Citroën DS was caught in Steyning High Street on the morning of Sunday June 19th, 2005. The driver told me he owned 11 of these cars.

The DS (in French, this sounds the same as the word for goddess) is 50 years old this year. Special celebrations will take place in Paris on 6-9 October, with more than 1500 cars expected to attend: see www.dsjubile2005.org.

As well as being one of the most technically advanced cars ever produced, I humbly submit that it is easily the most beautiful.

(Photo taken with Casio Exilim EX-Z750, default settings.)

Elliotte Rusty Harold grumbles about RSS aggregators offering a poorer user experience than web pages. I have to agree.

I completely love Bloglines, and spend way more time there than any other site. However, there’s no substitute for actually visiting your favourite feeds’ HTML web pages once in a while. In the same way that a picture is worth a thousand words, the design of the blogger’s site often gives away much more information than the content of his/her writing.

It’s rather like working with someone for several years and then visiting him at home for the first time. His domestic decor can tell you more about him than any number of conversations. That aggregator’s great, but don’t get too cosy: take a walk on the web every once in a while.