‘By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.’

I don’t even understand why this is necessary. Why can’t this just be ‘you give us a license to display your content on the service until you delete it’?

During the first year I had this handheld vac, never once did a full charge of the battery last more than 5 minutes. When it got down to less than 3 minutes, I spoke to your support representatives, who told me that the charger was probably defective, and sent me a new one. That helped for a short period of time, and I lived with it.

However, I’ve reconsidered. I no longer want to own this device. Its complete inadequacy at the task for which it was designed plagues me, and I am sufficiently disgusted with it that I cannot bear to pass it on to someone else. Nor am I willing to just throw it in the garbage – it is not worthy to even contribute to landfill somewhere.

I am therefore left with no choice but to return it to you. Please do as you see fit.”

This seems like a strange effect to me – we’re paying less, we’re technically using less (3 out instead of 6 out), but we’re turning over more, so the net effect is probably that we’re heavier users now than at 6-out. Because the pricing is only on the number out instead of the turnover, we’re unarguably paying less and using more, even though we’re technically on a “lower usage” plan. At this point, even if we wanted to spend the extra money, I have no desire to go back to a 6-out plan, because I like the extra sense of urgency that comes from having the out slots be a scarce resource, and it makes me want to use the service more.

I don’t know if this makes me a better Netflix customer or not, from their perspective. Obviously I’m paying less money to them per month and using more in mailing fees, but I’m also holding onto premium movies for a lot less time than I used to, freeing them up to be sent to other customers.

Anyone notice the same thing?

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/10/consumer-safety-rule.html

I have a few thoughts on this.

This is a pretty common libertarian vs. nanny state disagreement – should consumers be allowed to make their own choices, but I don’t think it’s that simple, for a few reasons. (Before you go on, I think it’s worth reading my previous piece on some failure modes of the market.)

Keeping toxic chemicals out of kids toys can’t really be the responsibility of the parents, because it’s not within their domain of control. You can be a responsible parent, you can only buy toys you “trust” (whatever that means) and your child will still be exposed to toys you didn’t have any say about. It’s unavoidable – other kids have toys, day care centers have toys, kids play with toys in the playground that other kids bring or leave behind. The only way to prevent these toys from coming into contact with kids is to keep them out of the marketplace to begin with. If you like, it’s society’s responsibility to keep poisons out of kids’ toys in general, because the incentives don’t line up for the individual actors.

After-the-fact deterrents are simply not effective. Lawsuits take years to resolve, are overly burdensome, and it may be impossible to even track down the responsible party (I’m told it’s nearly impossible to sue a foreign company). On top of that, even an expensive PR-nightmare lawsuit may not be a sufficient deterrent to a large corporation with a hefty legal budget. A few million dollar settlements can seem very small in the face of a few hundred million in profits per year. Also, it’s worth noting that this is a reactive response which doesn’t actually fix the problem, but tries to throw monetary compensation in an attempt to “make things better”. But that’s basically what we’re being asked to accept here with the free market solution – let us do what we want and if you don’t like it, sue us, because it’s “too expensive” to ensure that we make safe products. We have that prefrontal cortex for a reason – people are uniquely capable of making predictive decisions, and to allow reactive forces to handle problems we can plainly see are coming seems ridicuously primitive to me. One might argue that we don’t have the capacity to predict how our actions might affect these complex systems, but that’s exactly why we need to be able to adapt and tweak them as we go. I haven’t seen any evidence that the market makes better choices in these kinds of situations, and in fact the call for regulation is a response to the failure of market forces – these companies have already shown an inability to keep toxic ingredients out of their products, yet we still continue to have these problems. Public outrage and whatever lawsuits are currently in the pipeline haven’t served as an adequate deterrent. Why’s that? I don’t know.

This is similar to the conundrum faced by small food producers. See Joel Salatin’s Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal for a lot of good examples of this. The main thrust is that the rules that are meant for large corporations where the overhead gets absorbed by the scale are overly burdensome for small producers, who don’t have the resources for dedicated testing facilities but also have less capacity to do harm, both because they have fewer customers but also because some kinds of harm are caused by the steps needed to operate at scale in the first place. I like to buy local food from farmers that I’ve come to know and trust. This can work at a small scale – if I want to see their operation, I can go visit the farm. I have no similar way to verify that with a larger company.

I don’t think that broken regulation is a condemnation of the entire idea of regulation, but I think it’s obvious that the rules need to be different depending on the scale of the domain they apply to. It is not unreasonable for Hasbro and Mattel to have to follow different rules than the guy who’s carving wood figures in his garage and selling them on etsy. Scale matters – more is different, and bigger is different.

There are other articles about how the Google Chrome terms of service give Google an irrevocable license to use any content you submit through “The Services” (a nice catchall term which includes all Google products and services), but the analysis really hasn’t gone far enough – that article glosses over the fact that this applies not only to content you submit, but also content you display. Of course, since this is a WEB BROWSER we’re talking about, that means every page you view with it.

In short, when you view a web page with Chrome, you affirm to Google that you have the right to grant Google an irrevocable license to use it to “display, distribute and promote the Services”, including making such content available to others. If you don’t have that legal authority over every web page you’ve visited, you’ve just fraudulently granted that license to Google and may yourself be liable to the actual copyright owner. (If you do, of course, you’ve just granted them that license for real.) I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that Google has either committed mass inducement to fraud or the entire EULA (which lacks a severability clause) is impossible to obey and therefore void. [Update: there is a severability clause in the general terms, which I missed on the first reading. Does that mean that the entire content provisions would be removed, or just the parts that apply to the license you grant Google over the content you don't have copyright to? I don't know.]

Even more so than usual, these terms are, quite frankly, ridiculous and completely inappropriate for not only a web browser but an open source web browser.

http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html

Nice going guys.

http://gizmodo.com/369235/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-are-no-longer-yours

I think the analysis in that article is flawed. It doesn’t make any sense to be able to resell the reader with the books on it, because the license for the books is assigned to you, not to the reader. For example, if your Kindle breaks, you can move your books to another one. I’ve never heard anything other than the opinion that you can’t resell the digital copy – the assumption has always been that these sorts of transactions break the first sale doctrine. The problem then becomes “what are you buying?”, if there’s nothing you can resell.

The first sale doctrine has to apply to the license, not the bits themselves, because under the scenario in which it applies to the bits, arguably Amazon retains no rights whatsoever. They had no direct hand in arranging the bits of your copy the way they are – they merely sent instructions to your computer about how to arrange them in a certain pattern. The article asserts that you can’t “transfer” the bits, but in the same way, in downloading a copy, Amazon hasn’t actually “transferred” anything to you, either.

There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to sell your Kindle, and the books don’t necessarily go with it, but if you want to sell the books separately, you can do that too. Legally, if you do that, you’d be obligated to destroy all of the copies you’ve made. Amazon’s inability to police that is as relevant as their inability to police the fact that you haven’t made a photocopy of the physical book you sold when you were done with it. There’s no weight to the argument that this will encourage rampant piracy, given that unencrypted cracked copies of all of these things are available to those who want them anyway, and always will be. People comply with reasonable laws willingly because they’re honest, it’s the “right thing to do”, and they feel that the laws are an acceptable tradeoff for living in a civilized society where sometimes you have to make compromises and not just do whatever you want. People do not comply with one-sided laws where they feel like they’re being ripped off for no reason. A law which turns your sale into a non-sellable license is of the latter kind. It turns normal users into petty criminals who don’t care when they break the law, because the law is stupid. Once they’ve ignored some of the terms, it’s a shorter step to ignore others, or ignore similar terms for other products. People like consistency, especially in legal treatments. I would argue that it’s in Amazon’s interest (and the others) to not niggle on this point, because a reasonable license with terms that look like a sale makes for happier customers who aren’t interested in trodding on the license terms, and that’s better for everyone.

(Yes, I’m arguing that restrictive license “sales” are anti-civilization.)

The Kindle ToS not only prohibits selling the Kindle with your books on it, it prohibits anyone else from even looking at it. If someone reads over your shoulder on the train, you’re in violation.

This is, of course, ridiculous.

The right legal response here seems to me to be to not dicker about with splitting hairs about whether you can sell your digital copies if they’re on a physical device and you can’t if they’re not, but to declare that anything sufficiently close to a “right to view, use, and display [...] an unlimited number of times” de facto consitutes a sale, and with it comes certain buyer’s rights regardless of what kinds of outrageous restrictions the licensor tries to bundle in the ToS. The fact that this also seems to be the right business response reinforces my belief that this is the correct path. This kind of a transaction is different from renting, which is by nature a temporary one.

It is the right thing for society to declare that if you’ve bought something that isn’t time or use limited, you’ve therefore also bought the right to resell it, whether it’s a physical object or a license.

Previously:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/04/30/sony-cant-make-up-its-mind-if-music-is-sold-or-licensed/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2004/12/30/cory-rants-on-drm-and-rightly-so/

Tags: sony, amazon, kindle, gizmodo, first sale doctrine, digital work, content, licensing, purchase, sale

As an example, let’s take “100% fruit juice”. I’m pretty sure that at some point, “100% fruit juice” meant that what you got in the bottle was, prior to being put in the bottle, a piece of fruit that was crushed and maybe filtered. I’m 100% sure that that’s what most people still expect when they buy something that’s labeled “100% fruit juice”.

Except that’s not what you get anymore. Now, it’s reconstituted from concentrates, mixed from different kinds of fruit juice concentrates (which may have vastly different nutritional profiles), and blended into whatever they like, but it’s still the healthy choice kids, because it’s 100% fruit juice!

Right off the labels:

—-
Kedem concord grape juice (which, incidentally, is among the sweetest of the grapes):

The label says “100% fruit juice”.

Ingredients: Grape Juice, Potassium Metabisulfite Added To Enhance Freshness.

It has 150 calories per 8oz.

—-
Welch’s grape juice:

The label says “100% grape juice”.

Ingredients: Grape Juice From Concentrate (Water, Grape Juice Concentrate), Grape Juice, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), No Artificial Flavors Or Colors Added.

It has 170 calories per 8 oz.

—-

They’re not using grapes that have 13% more sugar in them, they’re dickering with the proportions to make their juice sweeter.

This is just one particularly egregious example, but it’s all over the place – many “100% juices” are sweetened with cherry juice or other concentrates. It’s a complete sham. Even the Kedem is pushing it because it’s got preservatives, but at least the juice is actual juice. No way does that Welch’s bottle contain “100% juice”.

Our food labels don’t mean what they say anymore, they have very detailed technical specifications to go with them, and it’s impossible to know what they mean from common sense without understanding those specifications. This isn’t even about making dubious health claims – it’s about defining away the actual contents of the package.

Tags: grape juice, sham, 100% juice, welch’s, kedem

But I’m disappointed with a number of items in today’s keynote.

The Macbook Air is certainly pretty, but when you look at the limitations, who’s this really aimed at? No firewire, only 2GB ram, 4200rpm disk – this rules out mobile creatives. No replaceable battery – this rules out actual mobile executives. It seems to be an upgrade for the regular Macbook users – mobile browsing, email, writing, maybe a little video and music, but it’s far too expensive for that. So, I don’t get it – who’s this aimed at?

I can understand that new hardware sometimes makes old hardware obsolete. But a few of the “hardware upgrades” announced here are really software upgrades in disguise, but which nonetheless are forcing you to buy new hardware to take advantage of the new features. The Time Capsule looks good, but it’s really just an Airport Extreme with an internal disk. Why isn’t this feature available on existing Airport Extremes with external disks?

Note to Apple: your existing customers generally love you. They love you even more when you go the extra mile and suddenly update the stuff they’ve already bought with new capabilities. This makes them more likely to buy new stuff, not less, and even much more likely to recommend that to all of their friends. Are you really going to sell enough $299 Time Capsules to make up for the hate you just scored with everyone who uses an Airport Extreme with an external disk and wants to back up their laptop to it, who now think you’re being greedy and trying to force a $300 upgrade for no reason?

Same deal with the multitouch gestures on the Macbook Air – why aren’t they being backported to the existing Macbook line? The trackpads are multi-touch capable, and this is a software update, to applications that are already running on those machines.

And then there’s the actual software update for the iPod Touch. I’m the last person to say that all software should be free (free software should be free, but that’s a discussion for another day), but these are people who just a few months ago paid a premium to buy your top of the line product, and now you’re fleecing them for a bit of extra cash.

I don’t expect a world-shattering new product line every year, but these “announcements” look like the actions of a company that’s scrambling, not one that’s innovating.

[ Followup: Some suggestions for what I wanted to see instead. ]

Tags: apple, keynote, macworld, disappointment

I would very much like your website to stop redirecting me to a page that tells me that Im using an unsupported browser. I know I use Opera. I like it. I understand if you dont want to support it, but at least set a cookie so I can just tell you once that I dont care, instead of making me click through your tedious “only browsers we like are supported” splash page every time I want to check my queue.

Thanks. Have a wonderful day.

Tags: netflix, supported browsers, splash page, stopthatnow

An HD format war is simply the height of stupidity, given the nice example of how quickly DVD was adopted by… everybody.

This happened for a few reasons, none of which are being replicated by the HD formats/players:

1) One alternative with no difficult competing choices.

2) Fit into existing home theater setups easily.

3) Clear, obvious quality advantages, even if you set it up incorrectly.

4) Significant convenience advantages – pause with no quality loss (anyone here remember VHS tracking?!), random access, extra features, multiple languages, etc…

5) More convenient and durable physical medium.

So – let’s look at what HD formats offer over DVD in these areas:

1) Multiple competing incompatible choices. Not just between HD DVD and Blu-ray, but also between different HD formats. 720p/1080i vs. 1080p, HDMI/HDCP vs. component. People aren’t adopting HD formats because they’re confusing.

2) Does not fit into existing home theater setups easily. If you had a DVD home theater, chances are you’re replacing most, if not all of your components to get to HD – you need a new TV/projector, you probably need some new switches, you need all new cabling, and you need at least three new players to do it right (HD DVD, Blu-ray, and an upscaling DVD player so your old DVDs look good). Not to mention a new programmable remote to control the now 7 or more components in your new setup (receiver, projector/tv, 3 players, HDMI switch, audio/component switch).

3) Clear, obvious quality advantages, but only if properly tuned and all of them work properly together. I can easily tell the difference between even HD movies and upscaled DVD movies. Upscaled DVD movies look fantastic, but HD movies really pop off the screen. But if things aren’t properly configured or you’re using the wrong cabling, these advantages disappear.

4) No significant convenience advantages, with some disadvantages. Pretty much the same extras, but most discs now won’t let you resume playback from the same place if you press stop in the middle, and they make you watch the warnings and splash screens again.

5) Indistinguishable physical medium. Maybe the Blu-ray coating helps, but we’ll see about that.

I’ve gone the HD route, because I really care about very high video quality, and I love tinkering with this stuff. Most people don’t, and find it incredibly confusing and expensive.

Is it really any wonder that people are holding off?

The HD format war is already lost, by existing at all, and every day that both formats are available for sale just makes things worse. The only good way out of it is to erase the distinction between the two formats – dual format players that reach the killer price point and aren’t filled with bugs.

Tags: hd, hd dvd, blu-ray, format war

Tags: winter, iphone, gloves, cold, apple

Go read that for a while:

http://blog.pmarca.com

Tags: marc andreessen, technology, blogs

The thing is, I think they’re right. I mean, it’s stupid, but then so is the DMCA.

There are some other provisions (which seem to not apply), but the crux of it is:

“No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that–

`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of
circumventing a technological measure that effectively
controls access to a work protected under this title;”

It explicitly does NOT say “copy the work”, it says “circumvent the technology”. “Circumvent” is not the word they were looking for.

In fact, now that I think about it, convincing someone that DRM is bad is also a violation, as that may be interpreted as offering a service that is primarily design for the purpose of circumventing technological protection. Crap.

http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/afx/2007/05/10/afx3708595.html

(via boingboing.)

Tags: drm, dmca, violation

Be careful out there…

Tags: circo, dangerous, choking, hazard, target

This obviously benefits the consumer, because free is good, and there are plenty of places (VMs, especially), where it would be useful to run XP, but where the current price is cost prohibitive. Making XP free would open up the Windows market to those potential customers.

Anyone who’s switching to Mac or Linux has already made the decision to do it, and isn’t turning back because they can’t run Windows in a VM… because they already can. This would just make everyone’s life easier, and generate a LOT more goodwill for Microsoft than they have now.

Microsoft, despite being ridiculously profitable, is in danger of losing relevance. This is one way to combat that.

Tags: microsoft, xp, switch, free, mac, linux

From the press release:

New Logged-in Homepage

Log in and check out ‘your new homepage.’ Above ‘your conferences’ is the new ‘your network,’ a bird’s-eye view of bulletin board messages from within your network (more on that below), your online Confabb connections and any messages sent to you by those within the Confabb community. Click on ‘My Account’ to see the full range of search and connection possibilities. Post your own messages for everyone to see on “your bulletin board,” which will be broadcast globally—Confabb pings no fewer than 68 of the major alerting services—or have a one-on-one discussion with other Confabb members. You can also see what others are talking about and invite new people, either from within or outside of Confabb, to join your network.

New Search!

There are two new forms of search on the site (you’ll all remember that the search function was Confabb’s Achilles Heel when we launched). There is now an advanced search for conferences which drills down into multiple parameters such as location, keyword, location, category and when the show date starts and stops. That nullifies one of the biggest knocks we got at launch. People will love it. We’ve also added a “User Search” which lets Confabb users search for and connect with other Confabb community members. Of course that sets us up for connecting people within the community and that’s the best part.

MY Connections (or “buddy lists”)

Just as you keep a list of people with home you correspond daily, the “My Connections” tab is your gateway to the personal contacts you’ve made within the Confabb community–people with whom you’ve connected before and want to stay in touch with going forward. This is your personal network; friends, colleagues and other contacts whose whereabouts and doings you want to follow as they prepare for and an attend events. Attendees can view a list of other conference participants, check out their profiles, invite them into their personal network and email them directly through Confabb’s personal messaging feature.

Personal Messaging

This is the Confabb community’s personal email service. We respect everyone’s right to privacy so messaging within the community is handled by us; simply use the “contact” link to jot a note to the person of your choice and we’ll send the message to the email that person has registered within our system. Responses are handled by us as well so your information is never revealed unless you choose to do that outside of the community.

Media

This is cool. “Media” is just that: everything that interests you from across the web, from text-based articles and links to photos, RSS feeds for breaking information and even full blown videos. The content comes from the web’s leading sources of open information, including Technorati, Google and Yahoo!, Feedster, Flickr and YouTube. Simply click the “Media” tab at the top of the navigation bar and find information on just about anything by searching for the subject’s name or the subject’s tag in the desired content source. The Media tab lets you experience the conference through everyone else’s eyes, and they experience it through content you create, find and share with them.

Bulletin Boards

Confabb now provides all of its users with their own personal blogs, or bulletin boards, from which they can share their thoughts, opinions on the issues and experiences. This is the community member’s space; it’s intensely individual, consisting of the member’s content and comments from their readers. People can also read the musing of others within their network by clicking on the “Bulletin Board Posts within My Network” tab, which shows what others within their network are saying too.

Each board–the individual blog and the personal network bulletin board–are completely searchable by the major search engines. You will build traffic from within the community as well as anyone from around the globe with an interest in what you have to say!

http://www.confabb.com

Tags: confabb, social networking, conferences

DoubleClick has been doing this for a lot longer than Google has, and they have a lot of history there. In addition to their ad network, Google has also just acquired that entire browsing history, profiles of the browsing of a huge chunk of the web. Google’s privacy policy does not seem to apply to information acquired from sources other than Google.com, so they’re probably free to do whatever they want with this profile data.

[Update: In perusing their privacy policy, I noted this: If Google becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy. This doesn't specify which end of the merger they're on, so maybe this does cover personal information they acquire. I wonder if they're planning on informing everyone included in the DoubleClick database.]

Tags: google, doubleclick, privacy, logs

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14deal.html?ex=1334203200&en=d94eb7f788b32db5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

http://consumerist.com/consumer/cadbury/cadbury-our-eggs-arent-smaller-you-are-bigger-250559.php

Tags: creme egg, stupid, smaller, insulting, lying, cadbury

This completely destroys the rationale behind having any DRM at all. It can’t be because they’re afraid of the higher quality recordings getting out, because those are the ones they’re releasing without DRM. All that remains is shafting the customer, which is of course all that DRM is actually good for.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/02/itunes_store_will_se.html

Tags: itunes, drm, emi

I’ve talked about the dangers of breaking anonymization with leaking keys before:

• http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/30/flickr-pictures-web-beacons-and-a-modest-proposal/
• http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/

Short answer: It is not enough to say that a piece of data is not “personally identifiable” if it is unique and exists with a piece of personally identifiable data somewhere else. More importantly, it doesn’t even have to be unique or completely personally identifiable – whether or not you can guess who a person is from a piece of data is not a black and white distinction, and simply being able to guess who a person might be can leak some information that might confirm their identity when combined with something else.

This is also completely setting aside the fact that you have very little direct control over much of your clickstream, since there are all sorts of ways for a site you visit to get your browser to load things – popups, javascript includes, and images being the most prevalent.

Preserving anonymity is hard. This is an egregious breach of privacy. Expect lawsuits if this is true.

http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/29449

Tags: isps, clickstreams, privacy violation, seekingalpha

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/google_to_anony.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html

http://216.239.57.110/blog_resources/google_log_retention_policy_faq.pdf

Tags: google, privacy, purge

The science of politics is changing, and these are the people who are doing interesting things about it.

You can browse information about the conference (news, events, sessions, speakers, and more), and register from the site. You can use your existing Confabb login, if you have one (OpenID is coming, but not yet).

http://pdf2007.confabb.com/

(Disclosure: I’m one of the co-founders of Confabb.)

Tags: pdf2007, personal democracy forum, politics, pdf, confabb

http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html

The Penny Gap says that if your service is actually free, it will have a much greater uptake than one that is merely very very cheap. Rather than being a smooth curve up the value chain, there’s a quantum shift between “free” and “costs anything”. I think this is largely due to the implicit value factoring of the “cost” (in effort) of the transaction. If you could just wave your hand and pay a penny for something without getting out your credit card number or typing in your password, it seems like this gap would largely disappear.

There’s a similar effect at play when dealing with “unlimited” services. If you have to pay for usage, it takes a lot of mental effort to add up everything you’re paying and make sure you’re not over a certain amount. If you don’t, and have an unlimited plan, that mental effort goes away. Even if the unlimited service is more expensive than you’d pay with metered service, there’s less hesitation to use it because you never have to worry about keeping track of it. I feel like this effect is less prominent on services that give you constant feedback about how much you’ve used. Presumably the extra security of insurance of not ever going above a certain limit has some value to it as well.

Free and unlimited are obviously closely related, mentally and emotionally. I’ll have to think about this some more.

Tags: free, unlimited, unlimited chasm, penny gap

Okay. I think Windows is rotten to the core and always has been. Between Windows 3.1 and XP, there were no serious contenders. With Win2K and XP, it’s at least had the benefits of:

1) it being reasonably possible to hammer it into sufficient shape to be usable and secure “enough”.

2) running on significantly cheaper hardware.

3) being reasonably open for a closed-source product, and at least focused towards providing a good user experience, and aimed at the needs of the end user.

4) providing a mostly effortless hardware compatibility experience. Most of the things I’ve plugged into my XP box have simply worked, without too much trouble. Sure, I’ve had to install the driver, but there are a number of things where you have to do that with OSX, too.

5) having software exclusives, and existing in the world where virtualization/emulation on other platforms was at the end-user performance level of “barely usable, if you really need it”.

All of that seems to change with Vista and the fun 2007 world it inhabits:

#1 might have been good enough with XP, but I fail to see why none of those lessons have been learned, and we have to do it all over again with a new OS, especially one which otherwise seems to provide marginal benefits.

#2 the hardware requirements for Vista seem like simply an excuse to sell more hardware for overly bloated and inefficient software, because…

#3 they’ve totally sold out to the content industry and everything has been reoriented towards content protection, all of which eats hardware resources and diminishes usability, because of which…

#4 they broke the unified driver model and so we have to start all over again with hardware compatibility, and…

#5 now there are cheaper, better alternatives for running the same software, which actually seem to work this time around.

We’ve known this all along – Unix in any flavor is superior to Windows. We’ve finally reached the complexity point in operating systems where that difference is unmistakable even if you don’t have advanced degrees in Computer Science.

I’ve been a Windows user and defender for a very long time, because of the list of five advantages above. My primary desktop still runs XP. I expect that to be the case until I need to replace it, at which point I’ll probably get a Mac, for the five same reasons. Obviously, I haven’t hit all of the reasons, but this is a big chunk of why I have little interest in Vista. It’s the same reason I got tired of manually assigning SCSI ids to all of my disks. Tinkering is fun. Sometimes, tinkering is fun even when it’s mandatory and things don’t work unless you tinker. But after a while, you just want things to work.

Tags: microsoft, vista, linux, mac, better

I’ve only been a recent convert to the Mac, and the thing that was holding me back was that certain software that I absolutely needed was not yet available on the Mac. Until recently, things I needed to do my job wouldn’t run on OS X, or wouldn’t run well, or would run perfectly well under Windows and OS X but would require me to buy another license (and a full price non-upgrade license at that) to run what was essentially the same software as I was running under Windows.

But with the conversion of the Macs to Intel chips and the consequent advent of Parallels (and eventually VMWare Fusion, which is not yet ready for prime time in my limited tryout), this distinction essentially evaporated. I could run all of the great software I wanted natively for Mac, and anything else that wasn’t available or would cost extra for the Mac version I could run under XP on Parallels. Since then, I haven’t bought any new Windows machines. Virtualization technologies existed before, of course, but the difference this time around is that Parallels works.

And now, Adobe, I’m looking squarely at you. Your license permits me to run a copy of CS2 on my desktop (which is still Windows), and one on my laptop (which is OS X). I’m not going to buy another full $1000 copy of CS2 for the Mac, so the question now is this – the license permits me to run it on my laptop, so why are you making me run it under Parallels? You’re letting me preview the beta version of CS3 on the Mac, but now you’re just teasing me, since you’ve said that there won’t be a cross-platform license available for the full version. When CS3 comes out, I’ll have no option but to buy the Windows version. Notwithstanding the fact that I already own the Windows version, that’s the only option that will let me run it on both my desktop and my laptop, there being no way to run OS X in a virtual machine. But that’s a degraded user experience for me, for no gain for you.

So why are we still dealing with this inconvenient fiction?

Here’s my call to arms to all software developers: where you’re making a Mac and Windows version of the same software available and currently require two separate licenses, collapse and simplify. Don’t make me run the Windows version under Parallels. It just makes me love you less, and the extra love goes to Parallels instead. I want to love you more.

Tags: adobe, cs3, love, windows, mac, osx, parallels, vmware, switch, versions

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/corp_011007.html

Tags: apple, iphone, cisco, lawsuit, trademark infringement

Check it out!

http://www.confabb.com

If you’re at all interested in conferences, we should have something interesting for you. On top of the large conference database, we’ve got features to help you track conferences you’re interested in, review and rate conferences and speakers, plus some treats for speakers and conference organizers.

http://www.confabb.com/features

The application has been an interesting ride. It fills a real need, and provides solid, useful features. After 10 years of building CMS and intranet systems for clients, I’ve spent the past few years on viscerally owning the projects I’m working on. This is the first of those launches, but it’s not the last. Stay tuned in the next few months to see what else I’m working on.

Techcrunch covered our launch today:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/13/confabb-find-track-and-review-conferences/

Tags: confabb, conference, portal, social networking

Add this to AdSense, the Google Web Accelerator, Google Web Analytics, and Google Maps, and that’s a lot of data being collected about browsing habits, and the number of sites you can browse without sending some data to Google has just dropped significantly.

Previously:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/02/03/detailed-survey-of-verbatim-answers-from-aol-ms-yahoo-and-google-about-what-details-they-store/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/30/flickr-pictures-web-beacons-and-a-modest-proposal/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/27/google-does-keep-cookie-and-ip-correlated-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/26/does-google-keep-logs-of-personal-data/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/11/21/google-really-wants-your-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/05/05/google-wants-your-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/index.php?s=google&submit=Search

Tags: google, tracking, logs, surveillance

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox_to_cust.html

Amazon Unbox has the worst terms of service I’ve seen in a long time. Like Cory, I’m a longtime Amazon supporter, and I think their customer service is outstanding, and this is a travesty. Way to fuck over the people who won’t actually read the terms because they just want to download a movie.

I only really have one thing to add with respect to the “if it has value then we have a right to charge money for it” proposition. Does the MPAA reserve the right to charge more retroactively if you enjoy a movie more than you expected to? That’s hidden value, right? This madness has to stop.

Mr. Bezos, you should be ashamed of yourself, and also whoever you put in charge of this.

Tags: amazon, unbox, drm, travesty, unfair terms of service

Either they didn’t think this through, or this is the best way they could think of to raise a public outrage.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00027.html

Tags: privacy. data security, search, aol

Rawshooter is by far my favorite raw converter, and it’ll be great to see those tools integrated into the Adobe suite.

http://www.pixmantec.com/

Tags: pixmantec, raw conversion, adobe, acquisition

You all know how I feel about diagrams. This rocks!

http://www.gliffy.com

Tags: gliffy, diagrams, visio

We tried to go see the new Superman movie this evening. I bought tickets on Fandango a few weeks ago. We arrived at the theater about 45 minutes early, which would have been plenty of time, except that the machines for some reason couldn’t find my ticket. After being shunted around to three desks, I finally arrived at the Guest Services counter, where they told me I could just use my printed receipt (which I’d thoughtfully brought) as a ticket. Of course, by this time, it was only 25 minutes before the show, and the theater was already getting pretty packed.

There were plenty of empty seats, but they were all “saved”. Normally, I expect that a few seats will be saved. Maybe even half. But we’re talking several rows of more than 12 seats. Saved. I approached a manager who seemed to be guarding them, who simply told me that they were saved. He “informed” me that there were plenty of places where we could get two seats together, and he couldn’t release any of the seats. I asked him where, and he pointed out two of them. I went to check it out. Saved. I went back and told him that, and he pointed out two more. Saved.

Saved, saved, saved.

Sorry, AMC IMAX theater, but no. Just no. I came expecting some competition for seats, and I arrived early. But I didn’t expect to be denied seats by your staff for actually being there, and told that I was just shit out of luck. For as long as I’ve been going to the movies, there have always been rules about general seating. One of them is that you can’t save more than two seats, three tops. But twelve?
I got a refund and was given two free additional tickets, but I still feel shafted. After all of the complaining about how people aren’t going to the movies anymore, the theaters should be falling over themselves that there’s actually this excitement.

I wanted to go to the movies to have some kind of shared experience, and instead I encountered a complete lack of any hospitality whatsoever. To be honest, I’m still kind of confused by the whole situation. I don’t know if I encountered some kind of special VIP situation, or just incompetence. But I do know that my time was wasted in going to the theater and going through all this, and the whole thing was pretty frustrating and unpleasant. I suppose it’s naive of me to expect them to recognize that their business lies in providing pleasant experiences.

Tags: superman, movie, imax, frustration

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/06/frustrated_by_w.html

This is an interesting and correct observation, but let’s look at an analogous situation – unix command line tools.

Unix is designed around the pipe – the ability to string long chains of commands together, each of which only does a small thing, to accomplish what you actually want to do. There are some places where this breaks down, but by and large, this method has been spectacularly successful.

Web2.0 apps are much better positioned to emulate this than Web1.0 apps, but they’re still not there yet.

What’s missing is the switches that enable those apps to play nice with other apps.

You’re probably familiar with ls, which lists files in a directory:

fields@server2:~$ ls /tmp
mysql-snapshot-20060621.tar.gz mysql-snapshot-20060621_master_status.txt

ls also has another mode, that outputs a long listing, which includes more detailed information about the files:

fields@server2:~$ ls -l /tmp
total 841520
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 860863512 Jun 22 19:08 mysql-snapshot-20060621.tar.gz
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 382 Jun 22 18:50 mysql-snapshot-20060621_master_status.txt

Once you have that, you can pass the list to other programs that may want to filter the list by one of those pieces of data. The default mode is useful for dealing with the files themselves, but less useful if you want to interact with their metadata. What if the -l flag was left out, and that behavior was restricted to maintain ls’s competetive advantage (in the hypothetical situation where it’s something provided by your filesystem vendor)? If the information you’re looking for isn’t returned at all, you may have no other way to get at it. Maybe you’d have to use the vendor’s lslong, which costs money. You may be just fine with that, or you may be compelled to look for a filesystem competitor that does what you want. I’d argue that ls is less useful without that ability. That’s the situation we’re looking at when a Web 2.0 API is lacking certain core features to interact with the data it represents.

Is that an acceptable tradeoff? Maybe it is for a free service. It seems less so for a service you pay for, because fundamentally, you’re paying for the ability to manage your data, not for the ability to use the particular software – that’s the whole concept behind software as a service in the first place.

This is, of course, made more complicated by the fact that Web 2.0 isn’t just data sharing, it’s also about more dynamic interfaces. Theoretically, these two are interconnected and the dynamic interfaces work better because they can deal with small chunks of data that are in more standardized formats, and also theoretically, the data access mechanics are decoupled from the actual interaction semantics, which would have the effect of making outside non-gui access to your data easier with standard tools. In practice, that seems to rarely happen.

This is the only good rationale I’ve heard for using XML for gui/backend interchange.

These are good things to be thinking about when designing web applications. It’s not enough to think of them in a vacuum; we have to consider the implications of living in the ecosystem. It’s possible that that means opening up far more access to the underlying workings than we’re accustomed to. I would LOVE to see some applications that fully work if you take away the browser front-end, but still interact in exactly the same way via HTTP.

[Update: More on this discussion from Phil Windley.]

Tags: web2.0, software as a service, application architecture, interaction

The intention economy hasn’t really arrived. As a customer (no longer “consumer”), when you’ve decided what you’re going to buy, you still have to go find someplace to buy it. In the intention economy, you should be able to announce your intention to buy, and companies who are selling will come looking for you. We’re getting closer to that – shopping comparison sites help, but they’re still static snapshots. What’s needed is a dynamic marketplace around these ideas. Incidentally, that’s why I don’t necessarily think that blog search is a marker of the Live Web – RSS feeds aren’t interactive. They’re push, to be sure, so you get more updated static information, but like the shopping comparison sites, they’re still just static snapshots. On the other hand, getting people used to having some automated process working in the background is a step in the right direction.

The existence of branding is tied very closely into this. In a certain sense, a brand exists primarily to help make products seem better than they are, by associating them with other things that are known to be good. If you already know what you want to buy, maybe you’re past this point, and it’s more honest to do without. As a counter example, consider these two products, which are made by the same company and basically identical. One’s a piece of foam sex furniture for adults, and one’s a piece of foam gaming furniture for kids. Esse vs. Zerk. Same product, two very different uses. Brands serve to make the distinction. Does the fact that the same product has two different names for two different audiences make a difference? I’ll have to think about that one some more. Incidentally, if you switch the marketing copy on those two pages, it’s really funny.

(Who wants to help me come up with a brand for my spool-fed bacon-wrapped CPU cooling scheme? You have to refresh the bacon every once in a while, but on the plus side, it’s tasty.)

Tags: doc searls, branding, live web, syndicate, feeds, control, intention economy, liberator, esse, zerk, bacon

“Ideal Homes built the first zero energy home in the country priced under $200,000. The modest one-story, three-bedroom, two bathroom home produces as much energy as it consumes in a year, achieving net zero energy consumption.”

http://www.housingzone.com/article/CA6332828.html

Tags: zero energy home, efficient, housing, environment, photovoltaic, geothermal

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,27610,00.html

Tags: nokia, unmanufacturing, heat disassembly, recycling

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/03/14/google.hearing.ap/index.html

Tags: Google, privacy, search, records, surveillance

This is from an exchange with a client who has a problem which is, in my experience, not unique among small business leaders – they’re the bottleneck.

“I don’t like being the bottleneck but I am on most projects and I can’t seem to break the trend”.

The answer I gave him, and the answer I give you, is this:

Stop doing other people’s work for them. Stop being the customer. You’re the bottleneck because you have the vision. When someone does some work, they’ll reach a point where they have to stop and check it with you, because you have the vision for what it should be. If they had the vision, they’d know if their work was right or not, but they’re not sure. And when that happens, sometimes, maybe even often, instead of helping to transfer the vision, you get involved in their work more deeply because it worries you that they don’t have the vision and that means you need to do more oversight. That makes you busier, and takes away the time you have to approve the other things that are waiting for your approval of the vision. Maybe you’ll even take over some of those things, “because it will be faster if I just do it”, which sucks even more of your time, which makes you more of a bottleneck. As the boss, concentrate on transferring the vision instead of doing work that other people can and should be doing. You won’t always be able to, but wherever you can, it will help. Focus on giving people a template to check their work against, and you’ll have to do less of it.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be involved, but when people bring work to you for approval, it goes a lot faster if they’re already confident that it’s right.

Tags: business, management, confidence, boss

http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/atms/massive-citibank-alert-update-158628.php

Tags: ATM, international, security, fraud alert, class break

http://www.joegratz.net/archives/2006/02/23/schmap/

Tags: flickr, debate, creative commons, commercial, non-commercial

“I am writing to let you know that one of your photos with a creative commons license has been short-listed for inclusion in our Schmap Rome Guide, to be published late March 2006.”

And a link where I was given an opportunity to remove my photo from the queue or approve it for use in their guide. I responded to this before I had my coffee, so I didn’t capture the text from the page as I should have before clicking no. But it had a short blurb of text with something along the lines of “oh, even though some people may disagree, this isn’t really a commercial use, because it’s free to download and the ads support keeping it free”.

I might buy that if there was any sort of community sharing going on here. I don’t see the content of the site being released under a CC license, I see a big fat “All rights reserved” at the bottom of the homepage, and the terms of use (which also, incidentally, says you’re not allowed to use ad blocking software) contains this choice little gem:

The geographic data, photographs, diagrams, maps, points of interest, plans, aerial imagery, text, information, artwork, graphics, points of interest, video, audio, listings, pictures and other content contained on the Site (collectively, the “Materials”) are protected by copyright laws. You may only access and use the Materials for personal or educational purposes and not for resell or commercial purposes by You or any third parties. You may not modify or use the Materials for any other purpose without express written consent of Schmap (”Schmap”). You may not broadcast, reproduce, republish, post, transmit or distribute any Materials on the Site.

This is a gross perversion of what Creative Commons is about. Ad-supported “free” content is commercial (unless Google is “just trying to organize the world’s information and any money collected from selling ads is just helping keep that goal alive”). Taking CC-licensed media from other sources and roadblocking the license while claiming that the use is non-commercial is possibly deceptive.

[Update: there's more discussion on this Flickr Central thread.]

Tags: flickr, creative commons, commercial

When someone asks “what’s wrong with companies compiling huge databases of personal information?”, this is part of the answer:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/18/miller_hunts_down_pe.html
http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/inside_the_creepy_miller_brewi.html

Someone signed up for a Miller Brewery contest using a throwaway email address, and they tracked her down and signed up her “real” email address. The second link above concludes that they did it by using information collected by Equifax’s direct mail division, Naviant (which was supposed to have been shut down years ago). They own the domain from which the email was sent.

When we talk about privacy, it can mean a number of things. But indisputably, one of the definitions is “the right to be free from unauthorized intrusions”.

Maybe this is a small thing, but it’s a terrible precedent.

This person obviously didn’t want to be permanently signed up for messages from Miller. Letting an address expire is probably the ultimate form of “opt-out”. Yet, Miller thought it was okay to use personal information gleaned from who-knows-what sources to tie her to another email address, and send her more spam. Would they do the same thing if you changed your phone number to avoid telemarketers? What else is fair game?

Tags: privacy, email, spamming, naviant, equifax, miller brewery, databases

Currently, it’s hard to tell the difference between a human click and a robot click, but it’s still possible to make a reasonable guess, and cheap as they are, getting banks of low-paid clickers in 3rd world countries is still comparatively pricey.

But the ability to run a crawler that’s indistinguishable from a human blows all of that out the airlock. And if it’s impossible to tell the difference between an automated click and a human, the AdWords value proposition goes away.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70016-0.html?tw=rss.index

http://my.opera.com/community/blogs/corp-policy/

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=64

http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-5996531.html?part=rss&tag=5996531&subj=news

Dear Google: Please stop buying good companies/developers and ruining them with your consumer unfriendly terms of service and loose privacy policies. Thanks a bunch. – Earth.

And I quote from Opera’s privacy policy (http://www.opera.com/privacy/):

No personal information is collected or shared, and providing ad profile information in the browser is strictly optional. The Opera user’s Web usage is not tracked.

There’s nothing like this in any Google policy, because this very idea is antithetical to Google’s philosophy, which wants to collect and know everything about you and use that to “improve the Google user experience”/stock price. This phrase in the Opera privacy policy is critical to what makes Opera any good at all. Let’s all gather round and keep an eye on that if this rumor turns out to be true.

‘In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index – about 100 terabytes of data. It’s best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.’

http://battellemedia.com/archives/002116.php