February 2007 Archives

Cool, thanks to virtualization in the latest version of Parallels, you can now run Windows applications from within Mac OS X, with drag-n-drop from one OS to the other. No more dual booting just to check a site in IE!

Make sure everyone you know understands why net neutrality is important: Spread the word | Save the Internet.

I'm not the only one who doesn't get the appeal of Second Life: My Life Is A Crappy Star Trek Episode.

Now, frankly, I don't understand the appeal. At all. I mean not a single bit. Except for those who are chat-room addicts desperately starved for human contact, or people who want to live out their Furry Fetishes, the attraction of Second Life is completely lost upon me. I find myself regularly thinking to myself that all the jokes at this site ring true.

You want to play Star Wars Galaxies and pretend briefly to be in a sci-fi universe? I get that. You want to play World of Warcraft and pretend briefly to be in a swords and sorcery, good and evil, universe? I get that, too. You want to play Second Life and pretend to be... a normal person who has to buy clothes, and pay rent on land, and all that jazz? What the fuck dude, don't you get enough of that shit in the real world?

From Jeremy Zawodny, who adds:

Thankfully, I've not fallen victim to this plague myself. I've avoided trying out Second Life for two reasons: (1) what I've seen of it so far hasn't been compelling enough for me to plunge in, and (2) knowing me, I could easily get addicted and find hours of my days vanishing in a hurry.

I also love this funny description of what it's like inside SL:

Yesterday I downloaded something called Second Life. It is like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, except you can't shoot anyone, and you can't hit people. You just walk around. There are no prostitutes, and everything costs real money, and you can't rob anyone to get money. You have to use your credit card, with real money, to buy fake money to use in the game. It's not actually like Grand Theft Auto at all.

And the winner of the best laughingly comment of the day is this one:

This argument seems to go on and on. Why does participating in Second Life make any sense at all? I won't go into the mutitude of reasons one could state, but I can tell you how I justify my use of Second Life.

1) IT'S AN INTERESTING EDUCATIONAL MEDIUM - HIGLY IMMERSIVE AND INTERACTIVE (...if you know how to use it; )

2) PURPOSE - WHEN YOU HAVE PURPOSE IN SL, e.g. EDUCATION, THE MEDIUM TAKES ON COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DYNAMICS BECAUSE A GOAL IS BEING PURSUED - ONE IS NOT REDUCED TO A MERE "CHAT ADDICT".

PS - IF ONE ONLY SEES SL AS A CHAT MEDIUM, THEY ARE SORELY UNAWARE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE IN SL. TEXT-BASED COMMUNICATION IS NOT THE ONLY FORM OF COMMUNICATION POSSIBLE.

3) NETWORKING - HIGLY INTERESTING AND CREATIVE PEOPLE CAN BE FOUND "WASTING THEIR TIME" IN SECOND LIFE.

4) CREATIVITY - SL ACTS AS A WONDERFUL STIMULUS FOR CREATIVITY ( NOT JUST IN-WORLD BUT ALSO IN REAL LIFE)

Well, for crying out loud, get a first life and you'll see it's infinitely better at ALL those points than your virtual second life. If you know how to use it ;-).

All I really get is that, in this phony econnomics, there must be some real money made by selling virtual “stuff” to SL addicts. Which is cool.

MacNN reports that Apple and Cisco have settled over the iPhone trademark issue.

Expect iPhone to continue to evoke Apple's phone in everybody's mind, and Cisco's trademark to fall back into oblivion, as it's always been in both cases. Also expect nothing to come out in terms of exploring “opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications”.

Silly lawsuit, indeed, but that's just business as usual, isn't it?

I got this stupid alert when trying to close a web page from “Soapbox on MSN Video” in my browser. I can't believe it. Thanks to the web and clueless designers at Microsoft, the rest of us can now enjoy the Windows user experience silliness.

SMART, aka Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, is a built-in disk drive diagnostics technology to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It's pretty common in standard discs nowadays (the Macs I've used in the past couple of years have that feature built-in their discs).

Google, which uses millions of disc drives, has published an interesting study that shows that SMART diagnostics are not as useful as they are supposed to be. Their findings are:

- Very little correlation between failure rates and either raised temperature or activity levels. - Some SMART parameters (scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts, and probational counts) have a large impact on failure probability. Others do not. Out of all failed drives, over 56 percent of them had no count in any of these four strong SMART signals. - There was a lack of failure-predicting SMART signals on a large proportion of failed drives. - Taking all SMART signals and temperature readings into account they found about 36 percent of all failed drives had no predictive failure signals at all.

From Techworld: It ain't smart to rely on SMART.

The Register digs into what they call the phony economics of Second Life, “What the business press didn't tell you”.

In short:

• SL burnt $8M in its first three years, remaining invisible
• SL gained visibility after another $11M cash infusion, and hiring a professional PR agency — “It was now business journalists who began to spread the word.”
• SL's servers can only support between 50 and 100 avatars in one place at one time — “Melbourne's The Age reported Ben Folds launching an album before an "in world" audience of 25” (I'm curious about the ROI of that, at least they're getting free press)
• SL's front page now proclaims 3.1 million residents, El Reg reckons there are only 15,000 connected at any one time, and may be as few as 3,000 paying customers among those, “turning over only a token sum”
• Only 15% of those who became residents in October of last year ever logged in again after their first 30 days

I love the conclusion :

Second Life's "virtual economy" with "real money" has yet to be visited by the Feds. If it is, then Linden Lab will reserve the right to say that Second Life is only a game.

I've never been any further in SL than looking at their home page for a few seconds. I don't know why, but that phenomena —which occupies a preoccupying number of people I know and bloggers I read— fails to trigger any kind of interest for me. May be I don't need a second life to “get” my first one. This said, more power to them if they survive the next bubble, and it's not because I'm not interested that the game is bad. It's just that I fail to understand all the rage.

Really funny:

From Martin Hardee's blog.

Another change today at Google UK, now anyone can sign up for GMail — which used to be invite-only:

You'll note that they call it Google Mail, and that it's still in Beta (since 2004, that's a VERY old “web 2.0” service :p). French users are treated too, but here it's still called GMail (marketing probably missed the memo):

You'll also note the Valentine logo, for which El Reg shows little Luuuurv. The vu'tures have no sense of design ;-).

I got a little surprise when going to Google.com this morning:

The legendary simplicity of Google's home page has been replaced by a mashup that you can easily configure. You can get the old home page back by clicking on "Classic Home". Google.fr still sports the simple search home page.

Netvibes (and al.) got a new competitor, just one of the 800-pound gorilla type. It's going to be hard for them because Google is going to provide more and more services besides search, news and other content feeds, and make it transparent and simple. One example is GMail, it took me just one click to add the GMail gadget, while on other mashups I would have to provide my login/password information. Another is Google Calendar, and you can bet that Google Documents, their online office suite, will find its way in there. Google will also provide this to entreprises, packaged in an appliance for use on their intranet. We'll be quickly moving from information-centric mashups to personal dashboards.

Doug Kass writes that

[...] Google (GOOG - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) CEO Eric Schmidt has already begun low-level discussions with several Apple board members regarding his role as a possible temporary replacement to Steve Jobs should the options-backdating issues intensify at legal levels.

I find the idea both fascinating and scary, especially if he runs both companies at the same time.

Go read Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music.

John Gruber tries to read between the lines of Steve Job's open letter:

Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” essay is really quite a good piece of writing, and an intriguing and aggressive strategic move on the part of Apple.

Is it a challenge to the major record labels? An answer to the increasingly hostile European governments (Norway, France, Germany) that are pressuring Apple to “open up” the iTunes Store? A message to the press to clarify Apple’s stance on DRM? A big fuck-you to Microsoft?

It is all of these things.

The main points are, in redux:

• DRM protections were forced by the music industry upon those who sell music online
• Because of the demands of the music industry, DRM technologies are extremely difficult to control even for a company that has an extensive control over the whole distribution-player chain, and impossible if that control is shared among lots of different actors — That's why Apple doesn't license its DRM technology “FairPlay”
• Therefore, Microsoft does exactly the same as Apple, music sold from the Zune music store plays only on a Zune player — a big departure from the open model of licensing their DRM (“PlaysForSure”) to others
• The music industry sells 90% of its production on DRM-free CDs
• On average, only 3% of the music stored on an iPod comes from Apple’s music store. The rest comes from elsewhere (most notably from already owned CDs)
• DRMs haven't worked to halt music piracy, and may never work as the technology itself is broken and fixed in a permanent cat-and-mouse game
• The way out is to get back to what has been the model for decades: music that is free from DRM — The music industry will benefit from that, and Apple will switch to a DRM-free model in a heartbeat
• Most complaints come from Europe, luckily Europe also owns the majority of the big four music giants — Job can’t be blamed for passing the hot potato back.

Steve Jobs’s message is that there are only two options: status quo, or no DRM. Apple wouldn't suffer at all from such a switch (they make their numbers on iPods, not music sold), but others would, or would simply disappear, such as those based on subscription. And in my book, that’s precisely the ugly hidden agenda behind DRM: prevent you to own your music and listen to it when, where and as much as you want, but force you to continuously pay for the privilege of listening to the same things over and over.

By the way, my iPod is shock-full of music ripped from the CDs I’ve bought, some of them 20 years ago. Do you think you’ll have a chance of being able to listen to your DRM-locked music 20 years from now? Me neither.

To finish on a positive glimpse of what a good online music shop can look like, just go see Linn Records. They have an outstanding catalog for lovers of classical, baroque and jazz, and they sell DRM-free music in different formats, including CD-quality downloads. Those guys know how to satisfy the audiophiles (my hifi equipment comes from Linn).

We knew that Bill Gates has his own reality distortion field, but now we can see it again live in front of a camera with the return of the 1998 Bill Gates Deposition Video.

Ironically enough, the whole series is using Microsoft WMV proprietary format. I'm pretty sure there are a few execs in Redmond who are dreaming about a perfect DRM-driven world, where they could just press a button and poof! instantly make that video unplayable for all. Read your video player fine print, chances are that the legal provisions to do so are already there (they are, at least, in all recent versions of Windows Media Player, in addition to something akin to letting Microsoft do whatever they fancy with your computer and data, remotely and without any responsibility whatsoever [even better, you take the risk of being sued] — Same goes with Apple by the way, welcome to the dark side of DRMs).

[Via Tristan Nitot, aka Mozilla's Ballmer ;-)]

P.S. and there are some perls in the MS emails posted along with the videos: like Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.'

Simon Willison has a good write-up about the importance of unambiguous URLs, i.e. “that any logical piece of content should have one and only one definitive URL, with any alternatives acting as a permanent redirect”.

Simon gives a good example of how the exposure of one particular site is diluted within a social bookmarking service because its home page has four different URLs. Making sure that a resource has a unique URL has other benefits, most notably in facilitating site statistics and traffic analysis (although most stats packages will provide some way to aggregate "default" index names, aliases and missing trailing slashes, which in a way tends to hide the problem).

This is webmaster trivia, and — besides making them readable, reliable and hackable — good webmasters will knock two birds with one stone by also making their URLs cruft-free, hiding whatever technology they're using under the hood (and making everybody's life easier for future site redesigns or evolution).

(And, of course, I'm not applying the advice here, yet. www.padawan.info should redirect to padawan.info, I'm just getting lost at my own Apache redirect maze :p)

Bill Gates, trying to “turn their reputation for swiss-cheese security around on Apple” (as TUAW puts it), claiming:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

When I read that interview for Newsweek, I knew it wouldn't take long for John Gruber to respond: Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates.

It’s either an angry, slanderous lie, or Bill Gates is an uninformed jackass.

He he. Exactly as John points out, I've yet to see a single exploit in the open that allows a stock Mac OS X 10.4 to be taken over. Not that there aren't any security issues in Mac OS X (or risks in Unix if you leave the door open). But as far as I'm concerned, Apple stands way higher than Microsoft (and Unix vs Windows) in terms of security, and that has been true for a LONG time.

Oh, and I love to hear that the next version of Windows after Vista will be more “user-centric”. I guess we'll all get an idea of where they're heading when Mac OS 10.5 goes out this semester :p.