Month: February 2007

Microsoft : We blame everybody else!

Posted by DarkJedi – February 19, 2007

It hasn’t been many weeks since Microsoft proudly proclaimed that Vista’s copy-protection scheme and activation nightmare would ensure that its latest Windows version would stay clear of the dreaded hands of the pirates. Now Vista has finally launched for the private consumer and to the surprise of Microsoft it isn’t selling fast enough, with XP’s pulling away from Vista in terms of sales. Why Microsoft’s marketing department must have been working overtime in order to come with a way to market a product, that has no clear new features, is filled with DRM to the rim and is priced at a very high range, it is no surprise that the only result was: “Wauv”… That is “Wauv” in like how did we spend so much time on so little! Therefore it can be no surprise when the sale figures for Vista comes out into the open, and Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer has to defend his previous statement that Vista will be adapted in a pace never seen before. It is a pace that has never been seen before in a Windows launch, but only as the slowest ever… Steve Ballmer, who often are seen as the crazy, mad, chair-throwing person fended off any wrong doing by Microsoft and simply proclaimed that their previous so uncopyable software was loosing sales because of pirates! Well, back to the old excuse for any company that doesn’t follow the market… Like the music industry and movie industry before him everything can always be blaimed at the pirates! That, however, is easy to fend off, and shareholders can easily take a look at the companies that have chosen to adapt Vista already and see that it is not piracy that is the problem… So, Microsoft, embodied by Steve “Charming” Ballmer, has climbed to the low of the music and movie business by blaiming everyone else for their lack of innovation and foresight! Welcome to bottom, gentlemen! This place is already pretty filled up, but take a look overthere next to Sony – there seems to be a vacant spot!

Microsoft

Greedy Business ™ : The DRM Wilderness!

Posted by DarkJedi – February 19, 2007

After Steve Jobs wrote his now famous “Thoughts on Music” that openly issued a challenge to the current take on DRM the responses has been many and various in opinion. Many from the music industry agreed with Jobs on that the current DRM-schemes is not working and might even be inhibiting growth in certain markets. Others, like the RIAA, quickly feared for loosing another reason to sue and instead choose to misread Jobs, thinking that he was offering to license or even free the FairPlay-DRM. Perhaps the most funny one was the CEO of Macrovision, who makes a handsome living on DRM, who was quick to defend the wonders of DRM in what can only be described as tragic, if it was not made so funny by Daring Fireball. After the first canon fire has stopped the question still remains: Is DRM working in its current state?

The main reason the Greedy Business ™ (the music and movie industry) wants to add DRM to everything is said to be to avoid piracy of their intellectual property. Well, in spite of countless lawsuits, extremely questionable methods and the afterwards all-together completely alienated customers, nothing has changed in terms of piracy. Even though their methods can often be directly compared with that of the mafia (which at least tries to hide it!) there is nothing stopping piracy on p2p, newsgroups or darknets… And still the only one who are actually emcumbered by DRM is the paying, legal customer, who finds his newly paid for CD (it is often not a true CD in that it couldn’t even meet the standards of the Compact Disc format – or Red Book standard, as it is called) or DVD cannot be played on his audio/video equipment. Tought luck! The real pirates doesn’t suffer such setbacks… Instead they show people how the pirated products delivers what the legal ones cannot!

If you ask the Greedy Business ™ themselves they will, in surveys, admit that they think their markets will grow and their would sell more if DRM was removed from their products. Why don’t they get rid of DRM then? Well, at this point it is simply of matter of admitting the truth, but that can be pretty though. Imagine that you had spent the last six or seven years sueing your customers and at each confrontation showing a “fixed” analysis that “clearly” showed that this was reducing piracy. One survey or analysis after the other showed rise in piracy when it suited their means, then the next month a great fall in piracy, when they needed to show that their efforts had an effect. When any of these “analysis” came under professional scrutiny, none of them held. The latest example in this sad political tragedy is the obvious biased “proof” of “camera recorded movies in Canada” analysis by the MPAA. Meanwhile the CD sales keep on falling, and so are the DVD sales starting to do, but nothing is reducing the piracy factor… At this point the pill is simply too hard to swallow – how do you admit to being this wrong .. and for soo long?!

Even though the pressure is on the Greedy Business ™ to wake up and admit defeat they continue their efforts to pursuade the law that they are protecting intellectual property and acting against merciless criminals, who do not respect the basis of which our society is based. Naturally their responses are a bit mixed, when it is shown that their own respect for others intellectual property is almost non-existing. The best example is the current case with the intellectual work of Patrick Robin, who made a pierce of software for handling content on a website. The MPAA choose to use his software without abiding to his license and didn’t even tell him. He had to find out for himselves. Suddenly their content protection is shown as little more than a scam to control the markets and the political forces at work. Then when Patrick Robin contacted them their response was to remove the software and claim that, they were merely testing the software… How lame is that?! If they came knocking at my door and found a screener of their latest movie, an mp3-version of their latest hit and a pirated version of Adobe PhotoShop CS2 on a pirated version of Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium would they accept that I was merely testing the content?! Wake up, morons!

The nightmare for normal consumers continue. The marketing departments of the Greedy Business ™ is properly working overtime to come up with the arguments needed to avoid having to apologize for a decade of terror and mafia-like methods. They have shown time after time that they themselves are among the worst examples of double standards you can find and still they claim to be on some moral high ground. I, personally, stopped long ago buying anything that comes with a DRM-scheme of any sorts, which cannot be removed completely before use. In my country, Denmark, it is still legal to remove such protection if it hinders playback – and this is almost always the case on Linux, which I use on my laptop. The “high ground righteous priests” of the MPAA doesn’t care for Linux or anthing other than money and profits for that matter, customers least of all… The current wilderness of DRM is simply put the biggest bottleneck for the digital age, put there by a group of lawyers calling themselves content-providers, that would like nothing more than to keep this world trapped in 1988, a time when their sales were flourishing … I for one want to go forward… So lets leave the Greedy Business ™ behind us and find an alternative to the current content-providing business!

Statue of Liberty

Vista : Not for Customers!

Posted by DarkJedi – February 16, 2007

Microsoft’s latest Windows version, Vista, has hit the street and is now trying to prove its worth. Users are trying to find out wherter they should invest their money in this new pierce of software or wait it out. Is it worth the cost? Well to find out it is important to look at the features it will add and the drawbacks it has… This will be the focus of this article!

Hardware requirements – Vista isn’t easy on the hardware requirements. Often demanding more than 600 megabytes of RAM without any applications running means that you’ll need at least a 1 gigabyte to run normally without too much swapping. Furthermore it does stress your graphicscard rather hard by having a fullblown 3D application running as desktop constantly, so expect your cooler to be active most of the time. However, it is nice to get an operating system that supports much of the newer hardware. Windows XP is rather old, in this regard, and doesn’t even support S-ATA harddrives from the installation. Better underlying support of dual-core processing should benefit the current generation of processors better than XP did.

New Features – There are some new features in Vista worth noting, but not as much as you would expect from a new generation of operating systems. This is more the case of a large service pack, that tries to update XP to look more like its competitors (Mac OS X and Linux). Of course much of this couldn’t be made into an XP service pack, because the underlying structure of XP is too poorly constructed. Like Windows 95/98/ME before it sometimes Microsoft’s buggy code needs a complete rewrite – this just happens to be around every fourth Windows version. New features worth mentioning would be the better design of the core and underlying code, better hardware support, usability improvements (e.g. in navigation in the explorer and start-menu), better multimedia options, .Net 3.0 and of course DirectX10. The last two are a bit special. .Net 3.0 is also made available on XP, so it is not an “exclusive”. Microsoft needed an “exclusive” reason for people to move onto Vista and what they did was to make DirectX 10 exclusive to Vista. There is no real reason why they couldn’t have made it on XP, like they already have admitted, but as they say:

At some point, the question ‘to serve existing customers’ or ‘to get new customers is a question every business has to ask itself

Apparently Microsoft chose not to serve their existing user base and force these onto new systems instead. This is probably done because of the few real new features in Vista and Microsoft is having dire problems with their marketing on Vista – not knowing how to promote this product to customers is a bad sign, indeed! Of course a company as important as Microsoft has certain levers that can be pulled in order to press for a faster user-adaption of Vista, like increasing the price on service and support for XP. They have also tried to use a better security in Vista as a selling point, but that’s just a load of marketing hype. Vista is in some ways better designed, security-wise, compared to XP in its underlying structure, but it will annoy most common people and will be disabled by the rest – and its new firewall is an option that only tends to decrease security rather than improve it. All in all it isn’t a pretty picture on the new feature side… Let’s take a look at the drawbacks then!

The Drawbacks – There are two major drawbacks to Vista, in my opinion! DRM and price! Why would pay that much money for a product, that isn’t currently stable, that is filled with anti-consumer technology, which would alienate most people from their systems and irritate the rest?! In my opinion Vista is simply an expensive threat to personal freedom! Perhaps that is why Vista is currently being outsold by XP – a version that is almost five years older! There are many annoying things in Vista, as reported by Forbes Magazine and Fox News. However,I still think that when people discovers how little freedom they have left on their own machines, counting DRM, anti-piracy schemes and activation, Microsoft will have their support desk pinned down and the Internet filled with rage in a scale unseen since the Sony Rootkit Fiasco…

Conclusion: I cannot see a reason to shell out good cash for this product! Perhaps when Microsoft removes the DRM and lowers the price to a level that is comparable with the amount of new features in the product will Vista be a true replacement for XP. My advice is to wait it out – at least a year! Not just one service pack, because Microsoft knows the importance of this and my guess is that they will hurry something out the door that just barely resembles a real service pack. They know that businesses normally doesn’t adapt new versions of Windows until after the first service pack, and Microsoft wants a quick adoption of Vista, so they will push out something that resembles a service pack in a remarkable hurry! Wait it out and listen to people’s reactions to Vista and its DRM-ridden bowels… Then when Microsoft is finally forced to react or someone finds a way around all the DRM then you might start to re-evaluate the product once again!

Vista Logo

Greedy Business ™ : Into the Open?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 15, 2007

It has long been debated wherter the music industry was having all those dire problem because of piracy and especially p2p-technologies or wherter they just forgot to evolve into the digital age. The proces of changing a distribution model is a tough task and has proven difficult in many other businesses, such as shops, that were suddenly out-paced by webshops that did thinks easier and cheaper, newspapers taht suddenly the faced the horror of people having access to all the same news and more, freely – on the Internet. The Greedy Business ™ of the music industry’s first idea was to sue the entire world and every legal customer they had into hell, getting people “back in line”. Then the second action they took was to use statistics in a completely wrong manor to prove that piracy is hurting the business, like the movie industry is trying to prove in Canada currently. The problem for the Greedy Business ™ in this aspect is that every respectable survey and analysis show that there can be proven no correlation between the dwindling sales of CDs (a media that is currently more than two decades behind evolution) and piracy or p2p technology. This spin that the Greedy Business ™ is trying to put on things to legalize their mafia-like methods has turned the average customers against them and now they have suddenly been stabbed in the back by one of their major supporters… Steve Jobs! He was the miracle that showed the Greedy Business ™ that it was indeed possible to sell a lot of digital music and turn a nice profit in on it. The problem was that suddenly the power of the digital music market was in the hands of someone outside the Greedy Business ™’s four main music label members. This has been the thorn in the eyes of the Greedy Business ™ for years on end and all the sudden he choses to stab them in back. When Steve Jobs started to feel the pressure from the government in Norway and several other European nations, pressure groups and public opinion against the DRM in iTunes he simply sent the monkey back to the Greedy Business ™, claiming that they were responsible for demanding the DRM in the music in his essay “Thoughts on Music”. In the essay he says that he thinks DRM should be removed permantly and he, himself, would like nothing more than to be able to deliver DRM-free music on iTunes. This essay has been greatly debated and referenced on the Internet since its release. One of the more important blogs that discusses the essay is DVD Jon’s blog, where he points out that iTunes also sells music with DRM that are in other sites sold without DRM, hence it cannot only be the Greedy Business ™ that demands the DRM, but also the policy of Apple themselves. The government in Norway is not swayed by Jobs’ attempt to skip the responsibility either. Naturally the Greedy Business ™ has a say about this backstabbing. The RIAA has already misinterpreted Jobs’ speak in such a way that they claim it is an offer to allow the spread of the FairPlay-DRM, so that they can put DRM on every music fil out there. The chief at Warner Bros. has also come out and said that he wants DRM to stay. This is a bit odd, and shows how little these Greedy Business ™ bosses understand. If he took a small look at their latest financial report he would clearly see that Warner Bros. is loosing on physical sales side (CDs) and gaining on the digital music side. That should prove beyond doubt to any analyst that they need to focus on the digital market and getting their distribution model tuned into this – and this is not done by adding DRM. Instead he should go the way that EMI appears to be going. The rumor is claiming that EMI is preparing a DRM-free MP3-offering of their catalog. Their management is already saying that they know DRM needs to go, which shows unpresidented customer- and future-grasping by a Greedy Business ™ member. Perhaps they will get out of the Greedy Business ™ club in the future to come? Even a former lawyer at Sony BMG, Steve Gordon, knows that DRM was the biggest mistake ever done by the Greedy Business ™. Even though the Greedy Business ™ have proven their greed once again in this case they are not alone this time. The greed shown by Apple in this case has already been ridiculed by many, pointing out that Apple has a rather healthy business and are trying to escape its responsibility in a cheap way, and a very inconsistent way at that, since Apple is still betting fully on developing new DRM-technology. Why didn’t Apple just come out and say it like Microsoft do: Just say that you like DRM and the power it gives you over your customers? Then we all know that we should avoid dealing with either of you! It is that easy…

Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ continues to sue tin the wrong directions in their failing attempt at containing piracy in order to keep their distribution model above water a few minutes yet. They still continue to use their army of lawyers to make lawsuits that has nothing to do with piracy, but is a simple way to get rid of competitors in their arena! Why the court has ever allowed these mafia methods I simply cannot understand. In their latest case where they are trying to force ISPs to keep logs longer it is completely clear to anyone who reads between the lines that they simply cannot gather any evidence and keep on suing the wrong persons. They should understand that the world has changed since the mid-eighties, but no! Instead the Greedy Business ™ in Canada wants a HUGE tax placed on almost every pierce of technology that carry memory so that they can earn money without having to work for it – a nice substitute for their current distribution model indeed! Then what about the movie-business? Writers? Painters? Sketch-artists? Software industry? It isn’t only music that can be placed in digital memory… In the end it will end up being a 740% tax on almost every digital item on the market – quickly shutting down the digital age and perhaps returning to the wonderful eighties that the Greedy Business ™ want to do so badly! Luckily some of players in this market is starting to wake up, like EMI and like the CEO of eMusic says: Without DRM the digital music sales would explode! Hell, the price on digital music will also go down – boosting the sales further or boosting the profits (my guess is that they will go for the last one!). Currently we are instead moving towards a world where the Greedy Business ™ suddenly has great access and control direcltly in our homes! And like the Greedy Business ™ say themselves: They are not going to change unless they are forced by government action! They want to keep on living in the past, and force everyone back with them! Unfortunately common man and especially common politicians doesn’t understand this problem, or why DRM is hurting the customer. He is only listening to the many money he will receive from the Greedy Business ™ to keep things stagnant…

Steve Jobs has opened the debate once again, but I fear that his motive and the debate will run into the sands, like it has done in the past. If DRM was to go it would have done so after the terrible fiasco of Sony’s Rootkit. The Greedy Business ™ refuse to go the way of innovation and keeps on hanging to the straw of the eighties – and they will not change! They need to be called into the open – called and forced! This nightmare needs to end! If we want to embrace the digital age we need digital content as well… not just digital locks, frustration and lack of control. We doesn’t need a solution that gives the Greedy Business ™ direct control of our homes – we need a better alternative to piracy… Currently it is only the pirates that can give people what they want… a very strange situation indeed!

Statue of Liberty

Best Out Of Free

Posted by DarkJedi – February 14, 2007

Often people are not aware of the many free software solutions available for absolutely nothing on the Internet if one know where to find it. Instead they shell out loads of money for something they could have downloaded for free – and not the illegal solution… I hate piracy, personally! I live in the software business myself and know why it is important to pay for the software you use. Instead of piracy you should instead take a closer look at what you could get for free, legally, that will suit your demands! In this article I will take a look at a nice selection of different free software, that can be found and downloaded on the Internet – Programs and Games… I will not go into alternatives to operating system, but assume that you are using Windows, like the majority. Often you can get most of this software for Linux as well, so if you are smart you get used to using this software and then when you feel that you are ready you could switch to Linux without loosing your software!

Media Players – There is no real reason to use Windows Media Player and get locked in to its insecure handling of plugins and codecs or starting to use WMV/WMA. Instead take a look at VideoLan client which is a media player that plays almost every movie codec imaginable, while staying open source, free and fast (not a memory hog like WMP). Furthermore it supports unique streaming features that you are likely to find quite interesting if you have a media server in your home. If you are gunning for a more advanced product take a look at the Democracy Player, which is the perfect choice for the Internet generation. It supports the many features of VLC but also subscribing and handling the many options on the Internet, like YouTube and Video- and TV-broadcasting. It is open source, free and a brilliant pierce of software. If you are looking at a replacement player for your music files the obvious choice for most is WinAmp, which is a good program and has been my choice for a decade. Lately, though, I have uninstalled my WinAmp and are currently only using musikCube, which is the best player I have ever tried. It is the AmaroK player of Windows, lightweight, fast, flexible and stable! Believe me, WinAmp is not coming back now!

Utillities – There are a many small and useful free utillities that should be installed on every Windows computer in this galaxy. A couple of them are the following… FileZilla! and FileZilla! Server is an intuitive FTP-client and server. Fast, easy to use, supports SSL, open source, free and even cross-platform. FreeCommander is the free to use alternative to Total Commander, which is the popular implementation of Norton Commander for Windows. It is easy to use and getting better version by version. Personally I prefer Directory Opus, which I learned to use in my Amiga days, but this cost money, so if you do not want to pay, use FreeCommander. Miranda Instant Messenger is the true king of messaging programs. It is small, fast, free, agile and easy to configure and customize. It supports every protocol out there and does what it is suppose to do in little memory space, which is just what I want in my messaging client. If you use Windows you know what a complete reinstall is… Everyone hates a messy system, but also hates to reinstall and setup everything once again. nLite is the solution! Automate your Windows installation and have this program install windows updates, service packs, useful programs and setup the system with drivers and all by inserting a CD/DVD.. easy, free and will save you a lot of time! Everyone needs a small notepad program, and frankly the one that comes with Windows needs to be kicked back into hell… Notepad++ is the perfect alternative! Customizable, FAST, open source, fully featured and a nice tool for the casual programmer as well… This program is a must have on every Windows machine out there – There is no excuse! Naturally you would want an office suite on your machine. I personally received a version of Microsoft Office 2003 Pro through my job, but never use it. I hate Microsoft’s closed formats and therefore have switched entirely to OpenOffice.org. Yes, it is a bit slower at times, but it is getting better month by month. It has many nice features, like PDF-output and support for SVG and especially support for ODF, which is my document format of choice! For most people this office-suite will suit them nicely and it is open source and completely free of charge. Do you own an USB-drive? I do .. and I use it in many places, keeping my most important documents on it. Lately though I have found its use being improved highly, as I have found PortableApps. This is a brilliant program that allows you to install portable apps on your USB-drive and run them directly from the USB-drive. Easy, fast and free. I can now use my own personal and preferred programs on my documents when I visit friends. Occasionally I have to do some DTP for friends and organizations and as I can no longer find my long time friend, Adobe PageMaker, I have found a great alternative, Scribus. Support for SVG, open source and free with many professional options, like CMYK-colors and much more, this is a brilliant application in its own right. The last pierce of utility that people should own is the offspring of the Mozilla Project, The Internet browser: Mozilla FireFox + The Mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird. These two applications are the best in their class, no question about it. I could write page after page about them, but why waste my time and your time.. Go download’em now!

Graphic software – I do a lot of personal work on graphics, editing pictures, drawing, sketching and painting. Therefore I have used a lot of different graphical software and trust me there is hardly any reason to use that pirated version of Adobe Photoshop that almost every computer has. First I will mention ArtRage, which is the perfect digital version of painting in real life. The user interface is a masterpierce and shows how agile a program can be made if it focuses on the task it needs to perform. This is a must have for persons with a tablet pen, like me. However, if you do not like the user interface you can take a look at ArtWeaver, which is a more “normal windows-like” application that does mostly the same, which is making great paintings digital. Most people in the Linux-world keeps applauding the GIMP. However, in my experience the GIMP is a horrid pierce of powerful software. It has many features that you would only find in professional programs, but I simply cannot work efficiently with that user interface. The alternative, if you want the power of the GIMP, is the black sheep, GIMPShop, which is a modified version of the GIMP that changes its UI to look more like that of Photostop, which most people can fathom. However, there are good alternatives to this. Paint.Net is a powerful graphic software, that could be described as a free, lightweight version of Photoshop. It does not have the power of the GIMP, but is slowly getting there – and making your own plugins, if you know a bit of programming, is easy and painless. It is getting better fast and should be on a standard Windows machine, instead of Paint. If you want a more powerful pierce of software for doing graphics, but not pay as much as Photoshop costs, a good alternative is Pixel. It has enough power to support most of the editing and image-creating task of normal users. Of course if you want to do vector graphics you can also find alternatives to the popular Adobe Illustrator, which is a brilliant program. A capable and powerful alternative, that has already gone a long way towards becoming a full replacement, is Inkscape, which has full SVG support and long range of other features. Coupled with the power of Scribus you can make the best-looking magazines a non-professional user can make.

Development – For those guys out there that are also developers in their spare time I will mention a few of the applications I myself use in my sparetime programming. SharpDevelop is a fully-featured C# integrated development suite, that is fast, open source, agile and extremely suitable for developers that use unit tests, ant, coverage test and write proper documentation. Coupled with Mono it becomes an easy task to develop cross-platform C#-applications. If you swear by Visual Studio you should take a look at some of the free tools available to help you develop better code (NUnit, NCover, NDoc). Of course any good development proces starts by making a good design and for this you need StarUML, which is a free UML-modeller that simply works far better than Visio in my opinion!

Games – Normally I pay for my games. I already have a lot of games for my PC and have started building up a small selection for my Wii up as well. But there are a lot of free stuff out there that can give you a good time for no money at all. If you remember the Amiga days you most certainly know the name Alien Breed, and if you want to relive that time try out Alien Breed : Obliteration, which is a perfect remake of Alien Breed ‘92, with additional levels. If you want strategy you should take a look at Battle for Wesnoth or Dark Oberon. Especially Battle for Wesnoth is quite challenging and provides hours of fun gameplay – especially against your friends! If you have been with computers long enough you are certain to remember Masters of Orion, which has now become alive again with this excellent remake and improvment, FreeOrion. Perhaps one of the best simulations out there, and one that has taken soo many days of out my schedule, is Transport Tycoon Delux. Now there is a remake, that does it perfectly, and improves much of what was needed in the game, for example better game resolutions and network play. OpenTTD is one of the best games out there and it continues to become better day by day. If you are not looking for remakes you could instead download the entire game of Savage : Battle for Newerth that was once a commercial AAA title, that is now free. Microsoft also freed Allegiance and this can be downloaded for free, and is also being improved upon regulary in the FreeAllegiance project. Have you ever watched Babylon 5? Well, if you want to enjoy good gameplay in that world take a look at Babylon 5 : I’ve Found Her, which is a professional game, free for download and will keep you busy for many days on end. There is also a lot of free content if you already own a couple of the games, that come with a modifiable engine. If you own the original Half-Life be sure to check out Natural Selection. If you own Half-Life 2 be sure to check out Eternal Silence and Black Mesa. If you own Unreal Tournament 2004 be sure to check out Alien Swarm. There are a lot more, but those are my personal favorites :)

Well, that’s it… That should keep you occupied for a day or two! Remember that most of this free stuff is linked to from my blog! Enjoy…

News

Open Standards : The Writings On The Wall

Posted by DarkJedi – February 12, 2007

Many people, who use their computer daily, often doesn’t realize what their choice of software means to the world. There is a fierce competition to “capture the standard” and become what “everyone uses”. For software companies power lies in controlling the standard, licensing and developing software for such a standard. Microsoft and Adobe are two such companies. Microsoft, with their Windows operating system and their Office-suite, is often the deciding factor when a standard is chosen. This is mainly because a standard is often chosen by what people most often use. The problem with standards arises when the governing body chooses to give himself advantages that his competitor cannot archive. This problem is often seen when companies want to protect its influence over the standard and the products or licenses that comes with it. Lately there has been many great battles over standards: HD DVD versus Blu-Ray as the next-gen DVD standard, Metro vs. PDF and many more… When Microsoft entered Adobe’s domain with their Metro format Adobe suddenly faced a new kind of competition. In the past PDF has always won because it was the popular choice, but now Microsoft pledges to make this new format cheaper, better supported and a lot more! Adobe was faced with a dilemma: Either try to defend PDF themselves and give Microsoft a run for their money or let control of the the PDF format go. They choose the latter, handling over PDF’s future to a standards body. The reasoning behind this choice was to give the users something Microsoft would not – control over the format and ensuring that it would not be misused in the future to come! Why wouldn’t Microsoft do the same you might ask? The answer is quite simple: Microsoft has lost its innovative gift and are now betting on one single strategy: Controlling the formats!

When Microsoft launched its newest Operating System, Vista, they faced a great problem: Marketing! They simply couldn’t come up with arguments for why people should buy this product… and they need it to sell! Because like many versions before Microsoft is badly depending on Windows to keep its control over the market. When Netscape lost its browser-war to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer it was due to one issue: Microsoft had the perfect marketing channel for making a “standard” of popular use… Windows! Since then it started to focus on media players, and with Windows Media Player Microsoft got the perfect way to ensure that people would start to use their format in the video and audio format war: WMV and WMA. There were no real reason to choose WMA over MP3 or even Ogg Vorbis, but people did – simply because of Microsoft’s great marketing channel, Windows! How did this benefit Microsoft? Well, suddenly they started to include DRM into WMA/WMV and over night Microsoft became the number one supplier of DRM to the music and video industry.. Violá! Now every time you buy a portable media player, a car radio, a dvd player it supports WMA/WMV and guess who gets a license fee and keeps control at the same time? .. Yes, that’s right … Microsoft!

When you think of documents like text documents and spreadsheets you will almost automatically associate that with .Doc and .Xls from Microsoft Office’s Word and Excel programs… Over the years Microsoft has posted a lot of money into getting the public to buy their Office-suite. When you look at the last three versions of Office it is clear that Microsoft isn’t posting a lot of money into innovation in Office anymore. That would be a vaste of money! People will still buy it – why? Because Microsoft has by making it the popular choice and kept its document format under tight control ensured that the only way you can exchange documents with your friends and colleagues is to buy Office as no other solution provides full format support. If you are a competitor in the office-market you will have a very difficult time competiting since it is a very tedious task to implement something that can open nearly all the closed-sourced Microsoft Office formats. And when you finally get there (or almost there) Microsoft just released a new version with nothing really new, except for a new closed-source format, that doesn’t allow the competitor’s products to read or write documents once again! That way competition becomes quite easy… Unless someone proposes an open-sourced document standard that gains popular support!

The OASIS have already come up with the alternative, ODF (Open Document Format) and made this an open standard through ISO. Many office solutions, such as OpenOffice.org, Corel Office and KOffice has added support for the ODF. Suddenly pressure from governments, states and organisations starts to hit Microsoft to implement support for ODF in Office! Popular support also comes from citizens who wants their public sector to release documents in a format that does not require the purchase of a product from a single vendor! The pressure is suddenly on Microsoft, and not long before the release of their latest version of their “innovative” Office series. What does Microsoft do? They can’t simply give up control with people’s documents! That would enable their competitors to gain market shares and compete on equal terms! A better solution is to make a new format, call it something that sounds open standard-ish like “Open XML”, then write a 6000 pages long specification and force this through a standardization body and hope that governments and others non-technical people thinks that this is an open standard and once again places their money and control over their documents in the hands of Microsoft! It doesn’t take a technical person long to see that there is nothing “open” or “standard” about Open XML – especially compared to a true open standard like ODF. It is obvious that no one would ever design a specification for a format like this if they started from scratch. What Microsoft have done is simply to wrap their former binary formats into gibberish over 6000 pages and writing it in such a way that no one would ever be able to implement it, let alone a program that validates the standard – and should one ever do that they would probably find that Microsoft themselves doesn’t implement the standard fully :) When you read the truth about OXML you see what it is that Microsoft is trying to do… If you compare ODF to OXML you quickly realize that this is the latest poor attempt from Microsoft to keep control of people’s documents and thereby their digital future!

Already OXML has headed into trouble in ISO-standardization, while OASIS is preparing ODF version 1.1 specification to be standardized. You cannot expect people to read 6000 pages in 30 days :) There is a lot a stake – and I’m sure that Microsoft is adding all the political pressure they can to have the ISO adapt the OXML in order for them to keep control of the documents for a few years yet. When it comes to document formats it quickly becomes a political issue… Three american states have chosen to go the way of ODF to ensure its citizen that they can read offical documents and others should follow suit. This is a tide of change, the writings on the wall say it clearly: You are at the crossroad where you can decide on wether to buy the new version of Office once again and get vendor-locked in or look at the alternative and perhaps regain control of your own documents!

Statue of Liberty

Wii-nderful Wii-kend…

Posted by DarkJedi – February 12, 2007

Just to let you all know this friday I got my Wii in the mail! … After playing Wii Sports for a short amount of time (count that in hours will you?!) I must say that that little pierce of console is every bit as fun as one could expect! … It may sound cheap, but once you’ve had for more than 24 hours (of which 6 hours was spent on the machine, naturally) I have already ordered: Legend of Zelda, an extra Wii-mote and a classic controller… to begin with :)

Might also go for Wii Play and Far Cry shortly :-D

All in all this has been a Wii-nderful Wii-kend …

Nintendo Nunchuk

The Console War : The Price of Battle!

Posted by DarkJedi – February 6, 2007

News around the Internet is saying that Sony is about to lower the prices for their latest attempt at a console, The PlayStation 3 (even though it is not the easiest item to lower the prices on). Already the console is a big expense for Sony’s finances, but a price cut may be a way to get back into the game. However, recently the pricetag for the PlayStation 3 in Europe reached retailers ahead of the European launch in late march – and let me be the first the say that they are staggering! This should indicate to Microsoft that they have a good chance at beaten the air out of Sony once again by competing directly on the price.

If you take the country I live in, Denmark, as an example you could, if you choose to go the XBox360 way, instead of buying the new PlayStation 3, buy this for the same price as a new PlayStation 3 (based on the prices in Coolshop):

  • XBox 360 Deluxe (20 GB version, headset, cabels, wireless controller, etc.)
  • Extra Wireless Controller
  • Final Fantasy XI
  • Need For Speed : Most Wanted
  • Condemned: Classics
  • F.E.A.R.
  • FIFA 06: The Road to World Cup
  • GUN
  • Kameo : Elements of Power
  • Hitman: Blood Money
  • King Kong
  • Madden NFL 06
  • Perfect Dark Zero
  • Ridge Racer 6
  • Tomb Raider: Legend

Then, if you wanted to buy a PlayStation 3 you would naturally want to buy and extra controller and a game… On your alternative XBox360 yoy could instead add the two major entertaining game titles: Gears of War and Lost Planet : Extreme Conditions! The choice seems pretty clearcut for me, if you are a gamer and buy the console to play games on… There are no really good games for the PlayStation 3, it is more expensive, it has less of the real community-features and there are tons of problems with it…

If you want a multimedia hub the answer is more tricky. The XBox360 already has DVD playback ability, but the software behind the scenes make it a poor choice. However, it does not suffer from the freezing problems troubling the PlayStation 3 during movie playback. Furthermore the PlayStation 3 has had a big problem with downscaling instead of using the 1080i output. Sony has tried to fix this problem, but coul not fix the hardware and was forced to make a software solution, which is certainly not the ideal solution to that problem!

As game consoles the two are almost evenly matched. The XBox360, in my analysis, is the strongest and the one with the best technical design. The PlayStation 3 suffers from poor design and limitations (not only in memory). The thing that sets the two apart, that in my opinion is the most critical choice is the fact that Microsoft understood that this generation of consoles are different from the last generation in more than horsepower. The main difference is not HD or better graphics, but the fact that our consoles are no longer isolated game machines that you only play with your friends when they come to your house – it is an online community connector! … And Microsoft understood this and did it right with Live!, which Sony only saw this too late in the designs and are now trailing far behind trying to catch up!

The game is already on between the two contender for HD gaming on the next-gen consoles and cost-efficiency is an important factor. Both Sony and Microsoft knows that improving the manufacturing process is the key to gaining some better margins – especially if the competitor lowers prices and you need to follow suit… For this reason the battle for reaching the 65 nm. manufacturing process is ON! Microsoft is well in the lead and has been since they started a year before Sony with their launch. They hold the key, both in terms of price and in terms of game titles! Sony is struggling to get exclusive titles, especially titles that could prove that the PlayStation 3 is a more powerful machine than the XBox360. Meanwhile Microsoft can sit back and wait on Sony to try and lower prices, which they would immediately meet with lowering prices on the XBox360 or making good-valued bundles, like they did during the Christmas sales. It isn’t funny being Sony these days!

PS3

Greedy Business ™ : Digital Rights or Wrongs?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 5, 2007

Day after day the Internet media is filled with news upon news that tells how yet another DRM-scheme has been circumvented. Every time a company comes out and explains to the world in large, bold statements that it has finally made the DRM-scheme that cannot be broken a 12-year kid with a PC and a book called “Reading Hex-values 101 for dummies” circumvents it the very next week. First came falling down the infamous CSS for DVD, cracked by Jon, now AACS is well underway down the drain, which has now been confirmed…

Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ is looking for an alternative to DRM. Why? For several reasons… One is that the legality behind DRM is being questioned, iTunes for example is heading into serious problems in Norway these days. Another is that customers are frustrated and feel that the digital music market is annoying, as they cannot use their music like they have been used to with their CDs. This ensures that the digital music sales doesn’t flourish. The biggest reasonis of course Apple, who has taken the Greedy Business ™ by their nose and stolen control with the digital music market. The sales on iTunes is massive in scale and the Greedy Business ™ knows this. The only way they can regain some of that control is to offer what Apple will not (unless forced by legislation or angry customers, like in the EU) – the DRM-free alternative! The only power the Greedy Business ™ has left is to allow DRM-free MP3 files on their music sites and prohibit Apple in using DRM-free music on iTunes. This would ensure that the sales will start to go their way – unless they ruin everything by rising the prices to much. The music industry already has a serious problem understanding what a fair price is. Even though CD sales are failing fast they still want higher prices – for something that costs a buck to make!

Some music store have already begun to offer DRM-free, MP3 files in high quality, like CDon, eMusic and Yahoo! Music, who is adding that they will continue to experiment with DRM-free MP3 files. It isn’t easy finding a solution for a problem when everything is available for free on BitTorrent these days, but wasn’t DRM suppose to prevent that from happening? The real problem is that the Greedy Business ™ isn’t even using DRM to prevent piracy – they already know that this cannot be done… They are using it to degrade the user’s right and to control the market! It is not like artists are starving because of piracy and all this fuzz about DRM has made a big business in creating useless DRM-scheming technologies, that will be broken the very next day!

Something is very wrong in this market segment! Normally you would expect the prices to drop as the manufacturing process eases, but not in this business. Today it is cheaper to buy a DVD player than a DVD for it – How can that happen?! The answer is simple: In a market where free competing forces aren’t allowed! The big cartel of the Greedy Business ™ and their army of lawyers make sure of that by suing and blackmailing! Of course sometimes you end up getting countersued for something like that!

The battle for DRM is on – both high and low… In the EU iTunes is under great scrutiny because they will not allow the big companies to screw customers and blaim piracy the whole time.. And consumer-groups are joining in on the fight! In Holland things are turning the tide towards legalizing file-sharing – and idea that the Greedy Business ™ would have barked at and sent out thousands of lawyers at a couple of years ago! In italy it is already legal if it is not done for profit! Meanwhile people across the Internet is trying to fight DRM and make people aware of the consequences, which are often lost on average joe! RIAA and other members of the Greedy Business ™ isn’t exactly popular on the Internet… Like Sony, who forgot completely about their customers’ rights when they installed rootkits on normal music CDs – a move that is not forgotten on the Internet and will haunt Sony for the rest of its years .. and through its earnings!! The content-providers are aware of the problem and tries to deny that it is their problem. However with every ounce of common sense they have to know that they have to go for DRM-free content to turn the tide their way again… and perhaps cutting a bit of the large expenses, like they do in other businesses! They need to start thinking about a new distribution model … to everyone else it is clear that the old one doesn’t work anymore! The Internet has done away with the big signing-away-all-your-music-rights-forever and pay-for-the-many-bosses-of-the-recording-label-strategy..

The future is here – and is has been for quite a while now! If the Greedy Business ™ fails to see the big potential of the Internet and digital music sales they are doomed… smaller, more agile companies will go in and grow a niche that in the end will be the death of the Greedy Business ™… Sure, their army of lawyers will do all it can, pursuade congress, buy off politicians, sue more customers… but in the end they will fall – and no one will look back at them and say that they contributed to this future – only tried to keep the past going as long as their lawyers would allow them!

Statue of Liberty

The Console War : Sony’s “Supercomputer”

Posted by DarkJedi – February 5, 2007

The marketing department at Sony has had a busy year in 2006. They had to ensure that people kept the interest in the upcoming PlayStation 3 console – even though Microsoft had already released its XBox360 console. They couldn’t come out and say that they had based their designs upon a series of bad decisions, like forcing the Blu-Ray drive into the PS3, which meant that only a ridiculous amount of consoles could be produced at any giving time. Instead they had to keep people interested and suddenly the hype went to high heaven. Suddenly the console wasn’t just a little more powerful than the Xbox360 as they had claimed earlier – now it was a supercomputer, which was almost a generation ahead of the newest XBox… We have all read reviews from “tech-savvy” reviewers who without any form of criticism to their source calls the PlayStation 3 a supercomputer because of its Cell-processor (which they call a “supercomputer on a chip”) and the Blu-Ray drive. Let’s take a closer look at those two “amazing” technologies then, shall we? Unlike the many tech-reviewers out there I tend to look at the hole picture instead of just pushing Sony’s hype onto my blog…

The Blu-Ray drive: It is not a secret that Sony is one of the companies that stands to gain the most if they for once win a format war. The Next-gen DVD format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray is fierce and ruthless and Sony saw a great potential in fitting their PlayStation 3 with such a drive. They assumed that the console would be a massive and instant success and therefore there would very quickly be a Blu-Ray drive in many homes, thus ensuring a win in the long haul in the format war. Unfortunately that decision had to made for Sony’s best, not the customer… What the customer got was a very expensive gaming console that suddenly could not be produced in large enough number because it depended upon a technology that Sony wasn’t ready to produce. The problem with the combined Blu-Ray player and gaming console is that it is aimed at two different audiences. The Blu-Ray player is a new format and one for early adapters, as the war is far from decided. HD is still only in its infancy and for the highend buyers, who want the best sound and the best picture. Only problem with this is that they usually doesn’t want a gaming console to play these things – they want a real player from a professional company like Denon, Harman/Kardon and so forth – not a gaming console aimed at 14-year old kids. The second audience is for the gaming console. They are for the largest part kids or young people, who wants a console that plays the games they and their friends want to play. They want gameplay and good titles, not high prices. Unfortunately the Blu-Ray drive (and the fact that game developers has to develop in HD) has made both the console and the games rather expensive. This means that Sony will be loosing a lot of these customers, who instead will go for the cheaper alternatives, such as the PlayStation 2 or the Wii (or to some extend the XBox360). All in all the Blu-Ray drive missed its purpose. It is not a good or fast drive for spinning games and it is not the solution for playing HD content on a serious scale, but simply adds to the cost and ensures that they cannot produce enough consoles. I simply cannot understand why Sony would want to make it obvious to whole world that Blu-Ray cannot be produced easily, and therefore is a bad choice?

The Cell Processor: To many it was hailed as the newest miracle in computing. To reviewers who heard some of the hype it made up the sure winner-technology of the next-gen console war. To people who understand computer design and processors and especially the structure and performance demands for games it made up a bad choice… First of all it is very difficult to produce. Why did Sony not launch at the same time as Microsoft? The Cell processor was to blame at first since IBM (the big winner of the console war, as they are producing all the processors in every next-gen console) couldn’t produce the Cell properly. The yields were simply too small for it to be economically feasable. They still haven’t perfected the production, which means that when Sony decided to accept the quality they accepted that some of the units didn’t have all 8 SPEs, but only 7. That means that you might be sitting with a console that doesn’t have the full processing power promised from Sony. Furthermore Sony expected too much from the processor, expecting it to be a supercomputer-processor, which could run graphics, sound and everything all at once. Therefore Sony didn’t include a DSP or a GPU at first, but then it become obvious: The Cell processor was fast, but not a floating points, which is the most essential part of the GPU. So in the last minute they had to call up Nvidia and have them supply a Geforce 8-GPU for the PlayStation 3. They never made a true console design with integrated video-memory making the communication between the processor and the GPU very inefficient – even compared with the PlayStation 2-design. Furthermore the 8 SPE-design of the Cell processor is very difficult to program to. This makes up for the biggest design flaw Sony has ever made. When you make something that the game developers cannot fully take advantage of you end up with a poor performing machine. Sony simply didn’t supply the developers with good enough tools, a difficult platform to program to and not enough support. The result is that developers won’t develop exclusive titles for the PlayStation 3. Instead almost every game development company today develops the game for the XBox360 and then ports it to the PlayStation 3 – ensuring that it performs optimally on Microsoft’s console. The Cell processor isn’t a super-computer. It does have its uses. When the price drops enough it will be a useful processor in many integrated systems, such a mobiles and advanced appliances.

The PlayStation 3 isn’t a super-computer. It is a very expensive and ill-designed console, which already today suffers from production issues, memory limitations and simply not enough game titles… This isn’t the great step in computing Sony promised. In terms of raw power and more efficient design Microsoft’s XBox360 got it beaten hands down. It will be years before developers learn to take advantage of the Cell, if there is anything left to take advantage of – and by that time the battle of the Next-gen console is already in the hands of Microsoft and Nintendo, who both knew who their audience were and what they wanted to create!

PS3