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Microsoft

Yahoo! and me

I’ve read enough of the stories of Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo!, and I hate to contribute more, but Wired has a great story on the Flickr communities’ reaction.

I’m a Yahoo! user by acquisition. I absolutely adore Flickr, with over 4000 photos posted and viewed over 67,000 times. (My Foresight screenshot is #1 for me with 2000 views). I bought a Pro account when Flickr first launched, ages before it was acquired, and was rewarded for overpaying by gaining a year. I have hundreds of bookmarks at del.icio.us (which annoy Planet readers to no end as they auto-post to my blog). I applaud Yahoo!s recent OpenID implementation.

But I’ve seen first hand what Microsoft does with its acquisitions. If I was a Yahoo! shareholder, I’d take the money and run. Their stock has been declining for years. Their search market share is stagnant. Their media strategy, including music, isn’t really working.

But does it have to be Microsoft? Please, no. Anyone know how to migrate photos from Flickr to Picasa?

Microsoft's Linux patent deals

As a long time Red Hat stockholder, let me say thank you to Red Hat’s leadership for flatly rejecting Microsoft’s overtures for interoperability and protection from patent suits. From the Yahoo! News article:

Microsoft made its intentions clear on Friday: It wants to work out a cross-licensing deal with the largest Linux vendor on the market that would look much the same as its recent agreements with Xandros and Linspire.

Red Hat quickly dashed all hopes, standing on its previous statements from last November, issued in the wake of the controversial Novell deal. Red Hat left no room for misinterpretation when it said the company would not compromise on its open-source roots.

“An innovation tax is unthinkable,” the company said in a statement. “Free and open-source software provide the necessary environment for true innovation. Innovation without fear or threat. Activities that isolate communities or limit upstream adoption will inevitably stifle innovation.”

To Red Hat, Ubuntu and all the others in the future who reject this deal: Thank you.

Joost Beta Invites

Do you need a Joost beta invite? I’ve hooked up all the friends (I think) who want one, and still have a bunch leftover.

Drop me an email at pcutler _at_ foresightlinux.org if you want one.

Mac & Windows only now, thought there have been rumors of a Linux client sometime in the future.

It’s definitely interesting – and different. Joost continues to sign up content partners, and it’s getting better each week. I don’t use it all that often as I’ve been mostly using my laptop now rather than my desktop, but when I am in my den, I’ll run it on my extra Windows box from time to time just as background noise and to keep tabs on what the Joost folks are up to.

Microsoft Vista: 0 for 3

Microsoft is now 0 for 3 in trying to get me to try Vista. My recent Intel motherboard / Core 2 Duo processor purchase included a copy of Vista when Vista shipped. Surprisingly, Microsoft supplied Intel with both a 32 bit and 64 bit version to send out, each with unique keys.

It’s sat on my desk since it arrived in the mail a month ago, unopened. I have a friend who I think wants a copy. I looked at ebaying it, but I was surprised how low OEM copies really sell for, so so it sits here.

Today I bought a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite A135-S4467, with Vista Home Premium on it. I didn’t even boot it up. Plugged in the battery, a Foresight disc, reformatted the hard drive, installed Foresight and blew away the Vista partition without so much as even looking at what Microsoft is offering these days.

I then used Google a bit to search for tips and tricks to get my Microsoft refund from the OEM. I found some good sites, one in particular on Linux.com, that details what to say to a customer service rep and when to hold firm. The site makes it clear to be able to quote from the EULA, so after a bit of searching, I found Toshiba’s Master End User License Agreement.

They got me. I think Toshiba has figured out how to avoid that scenario, as the first paragraph, in glorious all capital letters, makes it clear you’re better off returning the whole thing than trying to get a refund:

…TAIS DOES NOT ACCEPT THE THE RETURN OF PRO-RATA REFUNDS ON INDIVIDUAL PC COMPONENTS OR BUNDLE SOFTWARE, INCLUDING THE OPERATING SYSTEM… IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THE TERMS OF THIS EULA, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY OR USE THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU WISH TO RETURN A COMPLETE HARDWARE PRODUCT STEYM, CONTACT…

Darn. Later on, in Limitation of Liability, again in all capital letters (what l33t hacker writes EULAs?!):

TAIS ENTIRE LIABILITY AND YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY UNDER THIS EULA SHALL NOT EXCEED U.S. $10.00….

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I think even if I sweet talked them into giving me money for this wonderful thing called Vista, I’m entitled to $10.00. Oh boy! A new CD! Wait, the RIAA makes us pay more than $10.00 for those too. Oh boy! A free lunch!

Leave a comment if you know a good work around or have some advice for me to try. If Spam Karma 2 kicks in and moderates the comment, please use the feedback form to let me know.

My thoughts and notes on installing Foresight on the laptop will be coming soon, too.

I hate Internet Explorer

Why, oh why, can Internet Explorer not conform to web standards?

I threw up a placeholder on Silwenae.com using Drupal, and put a transparent PNG as the header graphic.

Looks awesome in Firefox, but IE you see the background.

I hate IE. I don’t want to use a GIF due to patent issues, and JPEGs can’t handle transparency.

Grr.

Silwenae.com 5.0 is up, and a history of it is coming soon.

Napster 2 Go Reviews Start

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post review of Napster to Go. Let’s just say WaPo found it… wanting. Napster’s PR firm has been running full steam lately with numerous mentions in the press (after their post-Super Bowl Ad) where they’re trying to show the math hat an iPod with 10,000 songs = $10,000 or Napster can get you the same thing for $15 / month. That is, $15 / month for forever. Because once you stop paying your songs go poof.

Now I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, that loves Napster for their streaming service. He’s had various MP3 players over the years, but they were clunky, so he bought an iPod mini mid-last year. Loved the Apple experience when it came to digital music – he’s fairly technical but Apple made it easy to get and transfer music. Yet he comes back to Napster to use their radio stations. For $10 bucks a month (or whatever it is, somewhere in that ballpark) you can listen to any song Napster has. You want to burn it? Just like iTunes, that’s 99 cents please. So Napster to Go will be the premium version of their monthly fee based service.

I can see both sides – if you have a Microsoft powered (codename Janus) player, or in Microsoft marketing speak, Plays for Sure, Napster to Go can fill up your MP3 (or should I be saying WMA?) player until you stop paying for Napster. That’s pretty cool – I can get thousands of songs to go work out to, or listen to my car, my choice of songs, for $15 month. Compare that to Sirius or XM, and it could be a better option that satellite radio.

But on the on the other hand – DRM makes bad business sense as I’ve noted before. Think about it, as Xeni points out so eloquently on BoingBoing:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

.

I’ll let you figure out the allegory on your own.

Gates just doesn't get it.

Gizmodo has their interview with Bill

Gates Part Four: Communists and DRM up.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chariman has been getting flak for some comments at CES where he equates those who don’t favor copyright and DRM as communists. He more than proves that it’s Gates himself that doesn’t get it in the above interview.

Look Bill: No one questions that artists should be compensated for their work. Period. The fact that some of us may choose to create content, say, a blog, and not want to be compensated, and want to share it, is our choice. And when we do choose that, we can choose to use the Creative Commons licenses to share our work.

God forbid a music artist, or the spoken word, or the written word want to be given away at the artists’ discretion. It’s worked in the programming world, and more and more examples in the media world have started.

Viva la revolution.

Why DRM is Evil, and what it means to your DVD Collection

Cory Doctorow discusses why you can’t legally back up your DVDs and who is to blame. Suffice to say, DRM, Digital Rights Management, is evil.

Cory Doctorow, European OutReach Coordinator for the EFF, is a science fiction author, DRM expert, and blogger.

One of my favorite authors on the evils of DRM, he once even gave a speech, at Microsoft, on the evils of DRM. From the speech, introducing himself to the crowd, he sums up what he does:

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble.

Another stupid IE quirk

Can’t edit post categories in IE 6. Worked fine in Firefox last night. Categories show up fine for new posts.

Dumb dumb dumb.

Think I may install a Wiki tonight to run my FAQ and wishlist.

My Music

So I have a lot of music. With over 700 CDs ripped, and some other misc. music, it’s quite a bear to manage it all.

For the last few years, I’ve used Netjuke on my Linux server. During the upgrade process this past spring, I put my music on two seperate hard drives, seperate from the third which holds the OS. What I love about Netjuke is that it’s database driven, making it very easy to search, and a nice web interface, that is semi-skinnable. It’s also GPL.

The downside is that Netjuke 2.0 has been in development for almost (or just over?) a year. Netjuke 1 was released in Aug. ’03, and no updates since. Netjuke 2.0 development has been quiet for almost 6 months, with no updates, and the CVS is unusable. And there is talk that it will be propietary, not GPL, which doesn’t make me happy.

I’ve been looking at other projects, first Andromeda, which is a PHP script that is not database driven. I had used Andromeda before Netjuke, and purchased it again this past spring when I had some installation problems with Netjuke 1.0, but still wasn’t happy with it.

On the Netjuke forums, I came across Jinzora, which looks similar to Andromeda, but has more functionality through PHP scripting. Features include ID3 tagging, server side playback (which Netjuke can do kind of), file downloading, RSS feeds, and a slim version for adding via an iframe.

I still have some questions that the FAQ, Wiki and forums didn’t answer around multiple directories (I have my Ogg and MP3 files in seperate directories, but those directories have identical artists, but different albums).

I still have some work to do to finish cleaning up some ID3 tags, and getting some newer music on the site and syncing it all up, but this is another project to add to my list. I still have to figure out why the ID3 tags for some live Dave Mathews stuff isn’t working in Netjuke too.

In addition, I need to get a linux box up with a sufficiently big enough hard drive so I can rsync nightly or weekly to back it all up. My Mirra won’t back up a network drive, and I had mapped my music directories on my linux box over Samba to my extra Windows box hoping it would. Dammit.

Speaking of music, I need to find out how Windows serving works. A while back I received Omnifi for the car and my home receiver. While pretty cool to transfer my music to my car’s hard drive, the car version was way to sensitive and doesn’t work. I still have the set top box hooked up to my home theater, and that works streaming from my extra Windows box where I have some of my music duplicated from my server. The downside is that Omnifi uses software to manage your music collection called SimpleCenter. This is one of the worst designed music interfaces ever created. The one neat feature it has is “Watch Folders” where you point it towards your music folder, and it automatically notices when you add music to that folder and adds it to your collection. It does not support Ogg, but does support Rhapsody and some internet music stations.

I had purchased The Killers new CD, ripped it to MP3 (bleh) and put it on my Windows box. Firing up the Omnifi, lo and behold I see a Musicmatch server on it – sure enough, from my Linksys boombox installation, Musicmatch has the identical ability that SimpleCenter, including watch folders, and what not. So I import all the music on that Windows box into MusicMatch, and can use that on my Omnifi. From managing my music on my PC, I prefer the MusicMatch interface – it’s not my favorite either, but it has some better features built-in including ID3 tagging, and the interface is cleaner to use, but it has too many advanced features to get you to buy crap.

So the questions becomes what is the SDK that they’re using – terminology is identical (Watch Folders, etc) and what would it take to get it ported to Linux. If I could have my whole collection on my server serving my house (with the exception of Ogg dammit, and I’m not re-encoding that stuff), I would be golden.

So much work, so little time.