Is DRM finally going away for real?

October 24, 2008 by 2 Comments

Back in 2003, when I started working for AOL, there was a race to launch a digital music store for the Windows platform. The company to beat was Apple, who launched their Windows port of iTunes in October 2003. At that time, AOL was still claiming to have over 24 million subscribers. Clearly, if AOL could push out a digital music store offering as part of their service to that many customers before Apple, it might have made a difference.

But, wait … AOL launched its MusicNet offering as early as February 2003, you say? Beating Apple didn’t make much of a difference, after all, right?

I wasn’t directly involved in any of that work at AOL so I’m just speculating here, but I know a lot of effort went into rights management systems and DRM. I’m willing to bet a lot more effort went into getting all that stuff working than actual work on making the product–the music store–kick ass. I kept complaining that AOL should take advantage of its then-800-pound gorilla nature and spend its budget and manpower to invent and pioneer a business model that was DRM-less, rather than spend all that time trying to satisfy everyone’s wacky demands trying to implement DRM.

At the time, I kept hearing responses that all boiled down to: it’s not going to happen. I’ve learned that nothing happens unless someone makes it happen and AOL certainly could have been one to make it happen. This reminds me of a quote I love: “People aren’t resistant to change. Matter of fact, people will change just about anything in order to maintain the status quo.”

Fast-forward five years to 2008: Amazon, Walmart and even Apple (through iTunes Plus) are offering completely DRM-free music downloads. Somehow, things are changing from “not going to happen” to “it’s happening” to “it’s happened.” What makes me sad is that instead of rendering itself irrelevant, AOL could have pioneered this.

Regardless, I’m happy that we can finally start saying goodbye to DRM for real. Now, companies can start focusing on really innovating where it counts–identifying, funding, producing and distributing quality digital content–instead of on meaningless technology like DRM.

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Filed Under: AOL, Apple, Geeking out Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

It’s family picture time!

October 21, 2008 by Leave a Comment

We recently had photos taken at church for the upcoming printing of the church directory. I think the picture came out really nicely, so I’m posting it here, too.

2008-09-12

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Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy!, Family Leave a Comment

What is your favorite Bible verse?

October 19, 2008 by 13 Comments

Next week, our third grade Sunday School children each will receive their own Bible, which this year, my older daughter will be included. Part of the process involves parents selecting their favorite Bible verses and highlighting them, so that when the children read through their Bible, they will be able to share this with them.

Now, I imagine for most parents who have gone through Sunday School and otherwise grew up in a church already have a bunch of favorite Bible verses. For me, this isn’t the case; I was only baptized at the end of 2005. I suppose I could skim through and try to find meaningful passages, but for some reason it just seems wrong to do that.

So, I put out a call to my Twitter friends asking for their favorite Bible verses and several people responded! Here’s the first few responses that came in:

  • Micah 7:8 – “8Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy. Though I fall I will rise; Though I dwell in darkness, the LORD is a light for me.” [from @jaymartinez]
  • Proverbs 31:8-9 – “8Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. 9Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.” [from @jerseymomma]
  • Leviticus 24:15 – “15And speak to the people of Israel, saying: Anyone who curses God shall bear the sin.” [from @jgrossberg]
  • Exodus 21:17 – “17Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death.” [from @jgrossberg]
  • Matthew 6:28-34 – “28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you
Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: , , 13 Comments

Let Regina show you the gems of Wikipedia

October 7, 2008 by Leave a Comment

My friend Regina has started a new project, Things I’ve Learned from Wikipedia. She’s only just started, but she’s already uncovered some real gems.

Screenshot of http://thankswiki.blogspot.com/ on 2008-10-07

If you’re interested in learning more useless trivia and obscure facts but don’t have the time to surf around yourself, go and read her blog. As she says herself, “One day you’ll be on Jeopardy and remember something you read on this blog. And then you’ll thank me.”

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This is “high speed” EDGE?

October 5, 2008 by Leave a Comment

This is my BlackBerry Curve 8310 tethered to my MacBook Pro over Bluetooth:

Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

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Filed Under: Apple, BlackBerry, Geeking out, Piss and moan (Rants) Tagged With: , Leave a Comment

Thanks for all the comments!

October 3, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Last week, I upgraded from Movable Type to WordPress. Since then, I’ve received a bunch of comments on various entries, some old, some new. What’s surprising is the fact that in a week I probably received more comments (not even counting the spammy ones) than I have in the past three months! Wow!

I don’t get why, though. I did clean up the design a bit, but it’s fundamentally the same. I replaced my home-grown CAPTCHA implementation with reCAPTCHA. The comment form is pretty much the same. I can’t think of anything that I would attribute to this increase in activity.

Regardless of why, I’m thrilled that more folks are sharing their feedback with me. It’s one of the reasons I love blogging: being able to interact with people. Thanks, everyone.

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Sarah Palin is 2008’s Dan Quayle

September 28, 2008 by 5 Comments

While I self-describe myself politically as centrist–financially conservative but socially liberal–I typically lean towards supporting Republicans over Democrats. However, I have to admit that an Obama/Biden victory sounds interesting. But, the novelty of a black senator and one with a sob story is going to wear thin when they accomplish nothing positive of note like every other recent President and Vice President, and we’ll be stuck with them running the country. I will likely support them in the upcoming election, but before I do, I seriously need to find an answer to the question, “Can they possibly make things worse?” While it seems hard to believe they could, the only thing inifinte in this universe is stupidity.

On the subject of stupidity, I want to share this image with you:

Dan Quayle (1988), Sarah Palin (2008)

Clearly, McCain is taking a play straight out of Bush’s playbook. Why?

  • Both are clearly underqualified for the position.
  • If elected, no one would want the President to pass away for fear of the ascension of the VP to that esteemed position.
  • They are both physically attractive.
  • Both say things that are inconceivably stupid.

I’m sure there are even more similarities that aren’t even obvious yet, but if anyone doubts, just remember this worked back in 1988–just 20 short years ago. But, 20 years is a generation already; young, impressionable voters today are weren’t alive when the Dan Quayle play was run (think about that for a moment) and are just as stupid as the Vice Presidential candidate presented so they can better relate, and they all like a pretty face.

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Filed Under: Piss and moan (Rants) 5 Comments

Goodbye, Movable Type. Hello, WordPress!

September 24, 2008 by 4 Comments

So, after years of hacking custom changes into Movable Type 2.6, I’ve finally had enough. I’ve switched to WordPress 2.6.

Part of the move included exporting my old posts and comments from MT and importing them into WP. For that, I wrote a small Tcl script that reads the MT database and writes it out in WXR format. I stored my MT data in a SQLite database, so the script expects its input from a SQLite DB–it would be a bit more work to read the data from a MySQL DB, but it’s definitely possible.

I’ve kept the essence of the previous blog design in my WP theme, but it’s cleaner markup and CSS and I’ve tried to make the ads less intrusive.

Filed Under: Blogging 4 Comments

Public school is making my daughter stupid

September 23, 2008 by 13 Comments

I really don’t want to get into a whole rant about why the public school system in America is severely broken. But, towards the end of last year, I asked my daughter why she got something wrong that I knew she knew and her response made me cry.

“I did it because someone teased me about getting everything right.”

If you’re a parent of school-aged children, or have been, I don’t think I need to say much more than this. You should already understand why I despair.

I do all I can to educate my kids at home. I offer them as many learning opportunities as I can afford. But, all that work can be undone and my only remedy is to get my kids out of public school.

I wish I made enough money to keep my kids in private school.

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Filed Under: Education 13 Comments

I cancelled my SourceForge subscription today

September 19, 2008 by Leave a Comment

So, the AOLserver.com site, which has been hosted at SourceForge for years, is effectively “down” right now as requests to it are returning a “Error establishing a database connection” error. I’ve been a paying subscriber for SourceForge since 2004 because they claim to provide “priority support”–whatever that means.

Well, I went and opened “priority” support tickets to try and get the AOLserver.com site back online. To put it gently, the response I received was less than useful. I mean, three hours before I get a response–a canned response–which doesn’t even resolve my problem?

I recognize there’s not much I can do at this point, but what I can do is “vote with my wallet” … I’ve cancelled my SourceForge subscription today:

Screenshot of my cancelled SourceForge subscription, today.

The clock is now ticking: they have just under a year to show that they can seriously run a valuable service correctly, or I won’t be renewing my subscription next year.

Update: Jacob Moorman, Director of Operations at SourceForge.net, emailed me to point out that the IP addresses for SourceForge’s VHOST had changed. Sadly, the DNS for aolserver.{com,net,org} had been set up as A records instead of as CNAME records. :-( So, I’ve sent a request to have the DNS updated.

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Filed Under: Open Source Leave a Comment
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