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Steve Responds to Norway

Last month I expended what were probably too many words in a discussion on a mailing list, making the point that Apple inherently values DRM-crippled music. How else to explain the fact the iTunes store attaches DRM to music even when the artists don’t want it there? Buy 100 songs from iTMS, I argued, and you’ve invested $100 in music that can’t be played anywhere but in iTunes or on the iPod. If Sony comes out with an iPod killer next month, you’d be reluctant to switch because you wouldn’t be able to take your purchased music with you. DRM is valuable to Apple, Sony, and Microsoft (who all exercise the same kind of data lock-in) even when there’s no direct profit in it, consumer convenience be damned.

Steve Jobs’ recent open letter to the music industry knocks a neat hole in my argument, making the point that, based on their data, 97% of music on all iPods is not protected, and that 3% is hardly sufficient incentive to prevent users from switching. Hmmm… Good point, but then why is some music available at eMusic (my favorite online music store by far) without DRM while the exact same music is sold as cripple-ware at iTMS?

Not sure what to think, but I appreciate that Steve is calling for an end to DRM. His letter is extremely cogent (one wonders how many lawyers’ hands the letter passed through before publication), and provides a great primer on the opposing forces with which Apple and other music providers find themselves wrestling. Of course, the fact that much of Europe is threatening to follow in Norway‘s footsteps in making the iPod (or rather the breakdown of consumer choice its DRM represents) illegal is likely a contributing factor.

Music: Kalama’s Quartet :: Kawika/Liliu E
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Megapixel Madness

Digital camera consumers tend to think of megapixels as simplistically as some car shoppers view horsepower: More must be better, right? Shoppers are blinded by increasing megapixel values, at the expense of better image sensors, higher quality lenses, image stabilization, etc. Result: Many people are wasting more storage and ending up with noisier images, rather than getting higher quality images, as they often think they are. c|net, calling the megapixel arms race on the carpet.

As the digital-camera market matures, consumers are becoming aware that lens quality, processor quality and image stabilization technologies are at least as important as pixel counts when determining image quality.” … “We went past the point where more megapixels made a difference years ago,” MacAskill said. “In the last 3 million prints we’ve made for very discriminating eyes, none were returned for lack of pixels.”

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The Pingo Problem

Pingos are small Arctic and Sub-Arctic hills – sometimes above-ground, sometimes submerged. Some pingos are formed when warming water thaws layers of permafrost, allowing mounds of methane hydrate to emerge from the hard ground below. Remember, methane is a virulent greenhouse gas. Pingos are appearing with increasing frequency, and that’s not good. When pingos pop, they release methane, which heats up the atmosphere, which warms the oceans and thaws the permafrost, which spurs the formation of more pingos, leading to more methane release… From a comment at Salon.com

Mankind’s emissions will be the fuse, rapidly melting permafrost will be the detonator, and melting ocean methane hydate will be the bomb. … Unfortunately, mankind’s emissions are a much stronger trigger than past severe runaway global warming episodes, so the chain reaction will happen sooner, faster, and therefore will be much, much more severe.

Suddenly I’m thinking of pingos like some kind of skin rash on the face of the earth, or as the geological equivalent of buboes, pre-saging worsening health.

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Superbowl Copyright Violation

A little after the fact, but this tans my hide:

The league’s long-standing policy is to ban “mass out-of-home viewing” of the Super Bowl except at sports bars and other businesses that televise sports as part of their everyday operations…

Which means that bars can show the ‘bowl to a group of people and profit from it, while church and other large groups cannot. Your old friend Copy Right at work.

via Milan

Music: Handsome Boy Modeling School :: Look At This Face (Oh My God They’re Gorgeous)
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Sawfish

Sawfish Every time some short-thinking state decides it would be a great idea to dam up a river and swamp dozens (or hundreds) of square miles of forest land, a kazillion trees are drowned in the backwater. Drowned, but not necessarily wasted. Forests die beneath the chilly water, but remain perfectly preserved for many years, and their lumber is still usable. Until recently, it was not possible to harvest drowned forests.

Triton Logging has created a remote-control submersible called Sawfish. Wielding a pair of giant pincers and a 54-inch chainsaw, the craft grabs hold of a tree at the base, jams a balloon into its trunk and inflates it, and cuts through its trunk in a few seconds flat. The tree floats to the surface, where it’s dropped into a “bunk.” Waterlogged trees are hauled off by barge, hundreds at a time. Wired, in Reservoir Logs:

There are environmental advantages to the Sawfish method as well. Conventional aboveground harvesting contributes to deforestation, a cause of global warming that’s responsible for the release of 25 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. But because underwater trees are already dead, cutting them down doesn’t worsen the situation. And with underwater logging, there are no unsightly clear-cuts and no spotted owls to worry about.

The supply of submerged trees is immense:

Most salvage loggers believe that reservoirs conceal 200 million to 300 million trees worldwide. “That’s a low estimate,” Godsall says. “We’re continually discovering reservoirs with trees in them. There’s one in Brazil called Tucurui with $1 billion worth of timber.”

Music: Gary Numan & Tubeway Army :: This Wreckage
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Software Is Hard

Andrew Leonard reviews Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg’s new book, “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. For several years, Rosenberg followed the (now largely stalled) development process of the open source PIM Chandler, and was also dragged through the development process for Salon.com’s custom content management system (a process I myself went through last summer). On why Vista and other large development projects are almost predictably over-budget and very late:

… the incredible difficulty of estimating the time it takes to do this stuff, whether you are building a little content management system for a relatively modest-size Web company or whether you are building the operating system that will be used by three-fourths of the known universe. The difficulty in saying, A) How long will it take to do what you want to do? And B) When are you done doing what you want to do?

The answer, it turns out, is incredibly elusive, and very few people are capable of estimating these things with anything approaching precision. On build vs. buy:

And the programmer who says “it will be faster for me to write it, rather than to learn it,” is usually correct. Except that what he will write, most likely, is something that will work but will not have its rough edges worked out.

Touche’. I’m becoming convinced that the ideal middle-ground on the build vs. buy spectrum is to use a development framework like Rails or Django. Then you aren’t building all of the plumbing yourself, and you still get to lean on the hard work of others, but you also aren’t constrained by the models and methods of fully-baked systems (like pre-rolled content management systems). The downside to frameworks is that, to be productive, you need more up-front training than you would when building from scratch, or when using an existing product. To that end, I’ll be doing another week of pure research/training next week – this time on Python/Django (after I get some molars removed, that is). Whether a week will be enough to start feeling productive with it is something I’ll soon find out.

Music: Arbouretum :: Sleep Of Shiloam
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Speaking of Hair

Culture jam: Two guys planted electronic viral marketing sign-age around various U.S. cities. After three weeks, Boston police suddenly found them, freaked out, and closed down Storrow Drive and and subway service along one route. That in itself is somewhat interesting, but when the suspects held full-court press with the press, they refused to answer any question about the devices or the absurd public panic that ensued, insisting that they speak only of hair. Amazingly, Fox News aired the dada hair-jam live for several minutes.

Questions: These things had been out there for three weeks. And now they’re worried? If they had been real threats, what does that say about civil security? More to the point: The police force can’t tell the difference between LED sign-age and bombs? They seal off major arteries because they find a sign with batteries attached? Officials are calling it a “hoax” (it wasn’t – it was a viral marketing scheme) and “not funny” (OK, not exactly hilarious or even particularly clever, but certainly not a cause for Defcon 1).

This is exactly what Moore/Chomsky are talking about re: Culture of Fear.

Music: John Fahey :: Lion
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The Public/Private School Dilemma

For the past six months, one topic of conversation has dominated over all others at gatherings of our friends with kids in pre-school: “So what are you doing about kindergarten?” Miles is only in his 2nd year of pre-school, and I confess that, until we reached this juncture, I had never given it much thought. I am a product of the California public school system, and had simply taken it as a given that private schools were financially out of reach. And I had assumed that private schools bred a culture of elitism, of which I wanted no part.

But it’s also true that many public schools aren’t what they were 2-3 decades ago. Did I want my child going to a school with no built-in music, arts, or sports? Would independent afternoon programs be adequate substitutes? Do test scores tell you all you need to know about a school, or do the socio-economics of a neighborhood skew scores to the point of being misleading? Are all private schools elitist, or was that just a media-fueled stereotype I had never questioned? Is kindergarten too early even to be asking these questions?

At this point, we’re looking at one public school (not the one we’re assigned to) and one private school (a relatively low-cost cooperative, structured similarly to the co-op pre-school Miles is in now). And I’m amazed to find that I’ve become not only open to, but enthusiastic about the prospect of private school. But much gnashing of teeth still surrounds the question, and we’re not there yet.

Close friends Roger and Paula have been going through similar contortions for months, but have held close to one conviction: The public school system should be great, but it can’t be great if caring parents abandon it. Their final decision to send their daughter to public school is profiled today in the Oakland Tribune.

“I was a complete mess,” Amelia’s mother, Paula Larsen-Moore, recalled. “I was anxious, I wasn’t sleeping, and I’m in a totally different place now.” This month, as she submitted her enrollment card to the district, Larsen-Moore reached the end of a draining ritual in which thousands of Oakland families take part each year.

I know that my parents never went through anything remotely like this. School was school, and you got out of it what you put in. Looking around at people I know and work with, I don’t see a correlation between public/private school attendance and success later in life (though there probably is one, statistically). But I do love the idea that we don’t have to accept the decline of the public school system lying down. It’s something you can fight for, and public school is still something parents can feel good about.

Music: Rickie Lee Jones :: Rorschachs (Theme for the Pope)
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Name That Tune

Voice recognition has come a long way in recent years, but what about melody recognition? Just spent 10 minutes at Midomi, a new search engine that lets you sing, whistle, or hum a few bars into a Flash-based recording widget, runs a whole bunch of voodoo analysis on your input, and spits back results based on what song it thinks you must have intended. Potentially great for those times when you remember how a song goes but not what it’s called, or any of the lyrics. The goal is to sell you downloadable versions of the search results, but based on the miserable output it generated for me, it’s back to whistling for friends and co-workers – Midomi batted nearly zero.

Started with PiL’s “Track 8” – Midomi thought I was singing “The Rainbow Connection.” Whether that’s a limitation of the technology, or a matter of the song being too obscure, or that my rendition would have been unrecognizable even to humans, I don’t know. But when I couldn’t get it to recognize “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” my confidence in the technology’s ability to recognize common songs plummeted. My attempt to render Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea” fell flat as well (Midomi thought I was humming “A Spoonful of Sugar” — yipes. Tried whistling the same song rather than humming, but no dice — Midomi interpreted that attempt as “My Sharona.” Captain Beefheart’s “Orange Claw Hammer,” according to Midomi, must be a drunken version of “Edelweiss.”

Amy’s a better singer than me, so turned her loose. When Midomi guessed that her version of “Fly Me to the Moon” must have been one of “Like a Virgin,” “Rhiannon,” or “Ebony and Ivory,” she lost interest. Finally hit paydirt with “Happy Birthday,” but sheesh.

Music: Loudon Wainwright III :: Just A John
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Harryhausen and the Cephalopods

Nice collection of early stop-motion animations by the great Ray Harryhausen.

Arguably, Ray Harryhausen’s creations aren’t the most realistic in the realm of special effects, nor will his films ever join the ranks of cinema’s classics. Yet Ray’s touch can be instantly recognized. His creations are absolutely alive; in each frame his creatures move, twitch, breathe, act with a personality and pathos that can only be ascribed to a direct connection to Ray.

CyclopsThe samples are brief, but quickly raise memories of lazy Sunday afternoons watching TV at cousins’ and friends’ houses in the 1970s, when this flavor of model/miniature animation was already old, but was new to me. Today the line between what’s real and what’s not in cinema is not only blurry, it’s gone. But through most of film history, the line was clear as day, so more suspension of disbelief was required on the part of the viewer. I think there’s something valuable in that. And also something enjoyable.

Update: Video collage of some of Harryhausen’s work (via Weblogsky):

Music: Stereolab :: Harmonium