Virgin Digital, Sony and Apple music problems

Interesting article on BBC Business News, about Virgin pulling out of the DRM'd music market. Lots of good points, highlighting Virgin tried to sell MS's WMA DRM'd audio format tracks without success, and Apple didn't let them make their tracks compatible with it's market monopoly iTunes format. Sony made the same mistake as Apple with its Betamax format (proprietary and exclusive), loosing out to the open industry standard VHS system. Sony did the same again with it's ATRAC (proprietary and exclusive DRM format), gambling it could win the monopoly war, but unfortunately Apple beat them too it! Winner-takes-all attitude is bad for consumers, Apple and Sony should have a win-win strategy which helps them and consumers.

All the files people have paid for on Virgin Digital will now be duff, money down the drain. Who would want to trust a vendor which might do that now Virgin Digital have showed they are prepared to do it (and Google did it a few months ago too!).

This is why consumers shouldn't go with proprietary formats, DRM and systems by Apple, Sony or whoever else is offering them. Adopt open format standards, with built in interoperability which gives consumers the choice to listen to the music they've paid for how they like, and on the player of their choice! ;)

So thanks Apple, you've made Amazon DRM-free downloads from the big four labels possible!

Commercial Maglev comes to Europe

The BBC reports that Europe is getting it's first commercial Maglev train, in the form of a service from Munich aeroport into the city centre. We could do with a Maglev in London. Now we only have the Heathrow express which costs £15.50, about 8 times more than other airport shuttle services, and still takes over 20 mins to get to Heathrow!

Time for Free Software addoption in whitehall?

Interesting article in the Guardian, Ignoring open source is costing us dear. Not making the most of these opportunities for cost savings does seem mad, spend the money savned on the front line services politicians keep talking about!. Hope the UK and Europe will consider adopting more Open Source/Free Software apps... what's good for Google, Amazon, Malmaison and Alfresco should at least be considered !

Mozilla "reply all" bug not fixed 5 years later

When I filed this Mozilla MailNews bug back in 2002 I never expected it would have been outstanding for so long. net users like me are often keen to contribute where we can to Free Software and Open Source projects, and the developers encourage us to help out where we can, so I was happy to file the bug info... It's a great feeling when you file a bug report, get an email back from a developer an hour later, and within a few days a discussion, and patch fixing the issue has been committed to the software for the next release.

Unfortunately it doesn't always work like this, and my Mozilla bug reports (I've still got loads outstanding at present) have largely never been touched by the hand of a developer -- which kind of makes we wonder if my time was well spent back in 2002? .. and raises the wider question of if developers should solicit bug reports and community involvement when there aren't the QA and developer resources to deal with that influx of requested bug reports? I think a little more upfront info would let people decide if they want to spend time contributing to something which may be never looked at, when they could be contributing their time to a project which will really make the most of the bug reports (KDE, GCC and Binutils projects spring to mind).

It's odd to think that even MS fixed IE6 and released IE7 before my bug reports got tackled. Can Mozilla Foundation really lead and beat Microsoft in the browser market when their ability to tackle bugs is so stunted? I expected more, bit of a disappointment when they fall short of what other projects achieve. Maybe it's time for a different development approach, passing on to the next generation the control of the Mozilla code-base.

This is probably one of the problems with the Free Software/Open Source bazaar development model. What gets attention is what is worthy of attention in the eyes of the developer, not a project manager who can maintain broad focus on the whole software package. Which means QA and bug triaging often get left by the way side, as they're not interesting or important enough to developers who don't have enough time as it is.

The real solution is for business backers to pay to fill in the gaps I believe, providing developers to work on documentation, and QA staff to test and triage bug reports. Distributions do this a little, but not to the extent we really need, they're largely just packagers and testing their own distros. I wonder how many companies relying on Firefox and Thunderbird have contributed coders or subsistence funds to either of those projects? At least this bug I reported to Mozilla got fixed.

UK fibre broadband

The UK Government is considering fibre broadband assistance. The thing is, we've been lagging behind Korea and Japan for some years now on this front. I'm sure it would drive our economy forward if we had 100 mbit/sec connections in each home! Certain areas have VirginMedia cable, which can offer up to these speeds, but without competition in the marketplace they don't really have any reason to ramp up!

Inefficient road usage (not making the most of our roads!)

I've noticed a few drivers don't follow golden rules of keeping traffic moving on normal A roads and even motorways recently:

• Not driving near the national speed limit (60mph). Trundling along at 40mph creates a tailback with often no safe overtaking spots. Solution: Drive the same speed as everyone else, like they do in the US, an evenly spaced convoy ;)
• Speed cameras and traps, at fixed locations and fixed speed limits delaying traffic 24hrs a day when they only need to rate-limit traffic during rush hour. I've been on dual-carriageways which are empty at midnight, still with a 50mph speed limit. Likewise driving past a school in on a Sunday is still a 30mph zone!
• On motorways some drivers forget to move back to the slower lanes when they've finished their overtaking manoeuvre. On four-lane motorways I see people trundling along lane 2 and 3 at 65mph, which bungs up the fast-lane with more traffic than the rest of the road (undertaking not being allowed!).
  

What's the solution? I think just a little bit of common sense, and polite reminding of those making the mistakes. Variable speed-limits which depend on traffic levels, like we have on motorways. Speed cameras can be replaced with interactive speed displays, with the polite "Thank you" when the driver slows to within the limit ;)

GNU/Linux needs to get on the environmental bandwagon

One area where GNU/Linux could really gain so much free publicity and market-share is by getting on top of the environmental "bandwagon". In the news is this Carbon-neutral PC running Vista. Interesting quote:

"PC World has attracted some criticism for its decision to base the desktop around Microsoft's Vista operating system which has been labelled by some industry watchers as the company's most power-hungry operating system ever."

FSF is linking up with environmental groups. Switching to free software would knock another £50 or so off the price, so come on PC World, don't cost consumers more by including Vista! ;)

No K800i driver hassles with GNU/Linux ;)

A funny thing happened when I plugged my mobile (Sony Ericsson K800i CyberShot) into a WinXP machine, it couldn't access the device at all! I had to go and download (and install as Administrator) a whole suite of Sony applications coming in at about 45MB just to be able to copy a my high-res photos off the phone.

Being a GNU/Linux user I'm not used to having all this faffing around and manually installing drivers (reminds me of the 90s), my K800i is fully supported out of the box, even on my old Kubuntu desktop! Just plug in the USB cable, and a window pops up with all the phones files for me to copy ;)