- Wow. Dig with a backhoe, and then spray a target with a machine gun. Only $384. Writers should get out and do all kinds of things that aren’t part of everyday life for writers. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas, but I could see myself doing this.
- Ok, this is clever. Forgive me if I don’t believe it will work.
- Here’s a service that the world needs, but I don’t give it even a year, especially now that Wired has launched it into high visibility. Big Print doesn’t want us too comfortable with the notion of scanning books we own to ebooks.
- Here may be one reason why: A consortium of tech book publishers is going after two anonymous Usenet posters who have posted literally hundreds of thousands of books (including several of mine) on alt.binaries.e-book.technical, not once but many times over the past several years. I’ve monitored that group since 2008 or so. It’s astonishing.
- Yes, I’m a crank. I hope to be a crank who lasts awhile. Shorting sleep will kill you. There are some excuses (small children at home being the biggie) but I also wonder if college life makes us night people. Most of the morning people I know (Carol and myself included) lived at home during college. (Thanks to Alan Zeichick for the link.)
- And though I’m not a necromancer, I know that you’re bound to answer when I propose: Everything’s SCO’s!
- Baby armadillos are cute, but I’m not sure I’d hold one, because they can carry leprosy. (Ok, ok…just wash your hands afterwards!)
- After all, armadillos are all that’s left of my favorite Pleistocene megacritter, the glyptodont. (Pssst: Mister pinch-hitter, that’s not a good stance to take!)
- Paywalled, but read it if you’re a subscriber: Ford is putting buttons back on their dashboard. I’m having some reliability problems with my new knob-less car stereo, and if I return it I may insist on something with a volume control knob at very least. They exist.
- And they exist in half-height too. Now I’m wondering if I can get a 2M/440 mobile rig that will fit in the other half of the bay…
- I had one of these once. I was called a “young punk” on occasion, by those who had reason to think it was true. So I was a steampunk long before it was cool.
- I was a little early for the Lego phenom, and was quite happy to be a Meccano kid. Here’s a great overview site for all the metal constructions sets I’ve ever heard of. (Except for Buildo, which was obscure even in 1960.)
- That said, don’t tell Certain Small Girls, but one of these may be under A Certain Christmas Tree this year.
- Colorado and Washington State will make this at least possible. But…but…what if your dog is under 21?
piracy
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Well. Amazon (finally) pulled my name off Garth Williams’ book Baby Farm Animals. Years of polite complaints didn’t do it. Making fun of them in the comments did. Thanks to my friends Eric, Steve, and Dave for working the magic. Poor Garth can rest in peace now without having to learn x86 assembly language.
- Erik Klemetti has a good overview of the 1783-84 Laki eruption in Iceland, which caused a sulfuric haze that Benjamin Franklin said reduced the intensity of the sunlight so much that a magnifying glass could not concentrate it sufficiently to ignite paper.
- Here’s a good if technical discussion about what’s wrong with X and why Wayland almost can’t help but be better.
- Yet another force pushing print magazines into the torn-off-cover return racks of history: People are checking Facebook on their smartphones while waiting their turn in supermarket checkout lines. Good-bye to starting a story in People and then tossing the mag in the cart to finish at home.
- I don’t always agree with Stallman. But this time I sure as hell do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Bruce Eckel pokes holes in a couple of recent SF films. I hate to think of what he might have said about Independence Day. (Thanks to Jason Bucata for the link.)
- I’m not sure that Beowulfing boxfuls of Raspberry Pi boards makes sense, but it can be done.
- As can using a Raspberry Pi to take video through a telescope.
- There will be another perigee moon on June 23. It’s not especially close as such things go; for a really close perigee moon, consider January 14, 1930, when our lesser light was only 356,397 km away. It won’t be that close again until 2257. Nice page on the topic here.
- And the sunspot count of our greater light was down to 27 this morning. This sure doesn’t look like a sunspot maximum to me.
- Tor has been publishing DRM-free ebooks for a year now, and reports that piracy has not increased as a result. They’re mostly mum on how they measure piracy rates, but it’s encouraging that a major print player would even do the experiment.
- Nice reminder that nobody died at Fukushima, and according to the UN it’s unlikely that many will even get sick. Nuclear is not the demon that Certain Parties insist it is.
End of the Road for CS-in-a-Box
Big news today: Adobe’s CS6 product is the last one that you’ll be able to install “out of the box” from a retail copy. Much fuss is being made about a move that was lead-pipe predictable after Creative Cloud went live last year. Some of today’s new stories give you the impression that there’s some dazzling new browser-based whatchamacallit technology behind CC, but after reading the Creative Cloud FAQ I’m not sure there’s any radical re-engineering going on at alll. Creative Cloud is not a browser-based technology. It’s just a new release of a digitally delivered client-side app suite, with a difference: You have to connect to the Internet at least once every thirty days to authenticate it.
So calm down. It’s just stronger DRM, and a leakproof end-run around the First Sale Doctrine.
The DRM, like all DRM, is probably crackable. Having to re-crack it every thirty days will slow the pirates down a little, but I wouldn’t bet on it being impossible. DRM is less significant than then other half: You can’t resell bits the way you can resell discs. There’s a pathway to de- and re-registering an Adobe boxed product, but it’s a nuisance and I’m sure Adobe has wanted to eliminate the whole process for a long time. This’ll do it.
Going to a subscription model means that people will no longer be able to buy a box for $500 and then use it forever. Big shops may be able to justify the cost. Smaller shops may stick with old versions. Doesn’t matter. Adobe obviously wants to eliminate the perpetual-license home market, which has always cost more in support than it generates in revenue. Going to subscriptions means a predictable and mostly reliable revenue stream. Losing individual users and very small shops isn’t much of a loss, money-wise. I also wonder if this may be the end of the road for Adobe Resellers. CC may do for boxed software what self-published ebooks are doing for books: eliminating the middleman.
Now, one final point I haven’t seen others make so far: Without a boxed product for pirates to steal, Adobe will lose a certain number of sales from people who tried it illicitly, liked it, and then bought it. (Most people credit this model with giving Microsoft a lock on the office suite market back in the 90s.) This makes me wonder if the otherwise-puzzling release of non-authenticating copies of all CS2 apps back in January was intended to keep the piracy-driven sales channel alive. In a sense, Adobe provided a pre-stolen copy of CS for people to install and fool with, no risky cracking required. A certain number of those people will like it enough to sign up for CC for better apps and sync services. Also, don’t underestimate the value of skills developed in using a product line. Unlearning a product and learning a different product is a pain in the butt. (This is why student versions at breathtaking discounts make sense in the long run.)
And for all the talk about CC being the future of software, c’mon. There are maybe four software companies in the universe that can pull this off. The future for $20-$50 apps like Atlantis is bright, and open source software has never been better. Adobe has kicked itself upstairs. That leaves a whale of a lot more room for everybody else down here.
Odd Lots
- Older people apparently lose some of their ability to retain memories via poor sleep. So how much worse will it be someday for younger people who simply refuse to be in bed for more than six hours at a shot?
- Related, and also from UC Berkeley: Refusing to sleep makes you selfish and grouchy, and in some cases incapable of sustaining a relationship.
- Steve Jobs may have died from a high-fructose vegan diet. We were killer apes long before we were peaceful farmers, and we became peaceful farmers because it was that or go extinct. I’ve made peace with my inner killer ape; in fact, he’s got a chain around his neck and he does what I tell him–which is mostly shut up and eat your steak.
- Or krill. The total mass of all humans on Earth is far less than that of all krill. (287 megatons vs. 500 megatons.) So get out there and eat your krill!
- The World Trade Organization has given Antigua permission to ignore US copyright law and sell copyrighted works (movies and music, I’m guessing) without paying squat to copyright holders. The provision under which this was granted was approved by most nations, including the US.
- A standard deviation here, a standard deviation there, and sooner or later you’re talking new physics.
- The alphas doth protest too much, methinks. (See yesterday’s entry.)
- For more on tribal psychology and how alphas use it to dominate and exploit their people, see Colin Wilson’s book Rogue Messiahs. Also, virtually anything by the formidable Jared Diamond.
- If I didn’t love Newegg before (I did) I sure love them now.
- What? Pez still exists? I broke my last Pez dispenser by trying to fill it with candy corn in (I think) 1958. I might be a little more careful with one of these.
- Why do women hesitate to date short men? My theory: It’s a primal worry that short men may be Neanderthals. (I’m serious. Ok, half serious. 47% serious? What percentage of Neander/Sap pregnancies were sterile? That serious.)
- The Neanderthals were all over Siberia, and scientists have found that present-day Siberians have cold-climate adaptations that most of the world’s population do not have. Now, where d’ya think that might have come from? (Dating short men?)
The Adobe CS2 Copyright Conundrum
People have mostly stopped talking about the link page that Adobe exposed a few weeks ago, allowing the download of an activation-free copy of the entire Creative Suite 2. The page is still there, still wide open, and you no longer even have to sign in to your Adobe account to get it. What they’re up to remains unknown, though the firm has said many times and in many places that the downloads are for customers who already own the software. Adobe turned off the CS2 activation servers late last year, for reasons that remain unexplained. I’m thinking that they did the math and realized (duhhh!) that activation has its costs, and just cutting off paying customers who legitimately need to reinstall will only make those customers hate them, and very likely turn them into pirates.
I’ve said this for years: There’s no better way to teach honest people to be pirates than by “grabbing back” the use of content (software, ebooks–1984, anybody? music, anything) that they’ve already paid for. It’s untested in the courts as best I know, but to me this is very clearly fraud.
So the mystery remains. This morning, a backchannel friend (“backchannel” means email or texts relating to something on Contra) pointed me to all the original used copies of CS2 that can be had on eBay for as little as $40 or $50. He asked if it would be legal to buy one of those copies, which are original CDs in their original packaging, and then download the activation-free images from Adobe and install them.
Good question, and with a lot of questions pertaining to copyright, subject to interpretation. Big software firms have furiously fought the First Sale doctrine on software, and have pretty much won on products that are pure downloads without any physical media. They can deny activation on used software, and claim that it’s their right to do so. Adobe is very fussy about transferring ownership of their licenses, which is one reason I have not upgraded my 2002-era copy of InDesign 2.0. I consider this a sort of “hardass tax” that firms like Adobe seem willing to pay: They don’t get money I would gladly pay for an activation-free product.
Here’s the real question: If I have the original physical CDs for CS2, is my use of the activation-free download images legal? I don’t know. Could Adobe come after me (or anybody else) in court for doing so? There is some way-thin chance that they might, but it would open the gates of Hell upon their heads.
Will I try this? Still thinking. When I come to a decision I’ll let you know.
Pirates vs. Ebooks: A Webinar
Very quick note here: I will be giving a webinar today on ebook piracy and DRM at noon Mountain Time (11:00 Pacific Time, 1 PM Central Time) to a site called Book Street Cafe, based in Phoenix but not geographically limited except by time zones. It was founded by some of my friends from the now-folded Arizona Book Publishing Association, which I belonged to all the time I lived in Scottsdale and acted as president for two years. The webinar is scheduled for 45 minutes, with another 15 minutes for questions and discussion.
Book Street Cafe is a paid membership organization, but they’ve given me a one-time link for my webinar that I can post. If you want to participate, click here.
You’ll have to either have Java running or download the Citrix app that underlies the GoToMeeting technology. You’ll be able to do the download when you click to the site. I know that Java is in a bad odor right now, but the Citrix app is relatively small and only takes a few seconds to download and install.
The presentation is oriented toward print book publishers who are nervous about ebook piracy and are considering DRM. It is not a techie show. It draws on research and positions I’ve presented on Contra for several years.
We’d love to have you. Try to log in a little early so that you make sure you’re properly connected.
Odd Lots
- Dear Abby: God love ya. Go in peace. –Signed, Appreciative.
- Dear Appreciative: He does. And I did.
- An interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal indicates that magazine publishers are successfully charging much more for their digital editions than their print editions. Lots more–like, twice the price. It may be the upscale “tablet demographic.” We’ll know as tablets work their way down the food chain.
- Many thought that a silent ride would be one of the great advantages of electric vehicles. Alas, no: People want to hear cars coming, so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will eventually force manufacturers to build electronic noise systems into new EVs. The mandated noise makes them sound like internal combustion cars. Better than ice cream trucks, I guess.
- I’ve been testing bottled sangria lately, and after much grueling testing, I declare this one the winner.
- That goofball Kim Dotcom is trying again, and I give him points for balls: He’s opened Mega, a new cloud storage service that might be construed as designed to protect Mega from its customers. As best I can tell, it can work perfectly fine as a file-sharing system, along the same lines as the other bitlockers. It’s distributed, redundant, and entirely outside the United States. An insight: The war on piracy mainly creates better pirates. We’ll see.
- Why do we seem to remember our 20s better than any other period of our lives? First of all, I’m not sure we do. (My clearest memories are of my Coriolis years, from age 37 to age 50.) But if the phenomenon is about the time when we define ourselves, it may simply be that most people define themselves earlier than I did. Or it may all be nonsense.
- Admitting that he used a $5000 metal detector, this guy struck major gold. In eighth grade, I built a $0 metal detector made of parts pried out of dead transistor radios, and my big strike was three chicken bones wrapped in aluminum foil at Illinois Beach State Park. Maybe you really do get what you pay for.
- Of course, if you’re just looking for quarters in the sand, Hammacher Schlemmer’s $60 metal detecting flip-flops may be just the thing. I might have thought of that, but flip-flops barely existed here in 1966.
- Tribal epicosity metafail: Declaring silly little shit an “epic fail” because your tribe disapproves of it.
CS2 Flies In From Adobe’s Left Field
Colds are like…well, you know what colds are like. Right now, everybody has one. I’ve been climbing out of this one now for about six days, and the top is not yet in sight. At least my flu shot worked, or I could have been in lots worse shape. If I’ve been quiet, that’s most of it.
But something remarkable happened yesterday that still has a lot of people scratching their heads. Michael Covington and several other people alerted me to the fact that Adobe had opened a download link to an installable instance of Creative Suite 2 that didn’t require activation. Rumors were thronging like Illinois mosquitoes that Adobe was just turning it loose. This is outside of type for them, let’s say.
The truth is subtler: Adobe is shutting off CS2’s activation servers, and once it does, people who have legitimate licenses to CS2 will not be able to reinstall it after a hard disk crash or whatever. So they’re providing an activation-free instance to those customers.
Why, then, did they put the download links to the installer files right out where anyone could see them? The links have been live for several days and were still live this morning, though the server has been choked here and there by activity that suggests more than just CS2 atavists clicking on the links. One would expect at very least a requirement for users to log into their Adobe accounts to get the install suite, but not so. Any code monkey could suggest four or five other ways to do it that would not present all of CS2 on a platter to the whole world.
Adobe insists that they’re not giving CS2 to everybody. So what’s really going on here? I’ll hazard a guess: They’re afraid of the Gimp, and to a lesser extent, Scribus. I think they’ve been afraid of both programs (and a scattering of others) for a long time. At some point, a bean counter probably did some spreadsheeting and realized that activation support on a long-tail product isn’t worth what it costs, and told the techies to shut it off and send the phone reps home.
Faced with that decision, somebody there may have gotten clever enough to realize that people were leaving the CS plantation for cheaper realms. The Gimp is good enough for most Photoshoppish work, according to people I respect, and if I didn’t already own InDesign 2.0, I’d probably be laying out books in Scribus. I think Adobe may be quietly trying to get more people hooked on the CS product, which is a huge revenue-generator for them. Photoshop is probably the most pirated non-OS in software history, and I wonder if they’re just making CS2 easier to pirate and looking the other way to pull a little pressure off CS6, while allowing the curious to give Creative Suite a go. There are legal reasons why they won’t admit to a strategy like that. Furthermore, as many have said, never attribute to cleverness what is better explained by incompetence. It may just be a booboo. If it is, it’s one of the longest-lived booboos of its sort I’ve ever seen.
I won’t post the link here, out of respect for Adobe’s copyrights. Trust me, you won’t have to flatten your nose to find it. I have only one more point to make: I’d like to buy that software. Yes indeed: Adobe, I’ll give you money! I won’t pay several grand for CS6. But I’ll pay a couple hundred for CS2. Alas, the product is not for sale. So what could be a revenue generator for Adobe is just another gift to the pirates, with people like me who’d like to remain legal looking on enviously.
I respect their copyrights. But still. Dumbasses!
SATA as the New Thumb Drive
I’m giving a webinar next month to a publishers’ group on the challenges of ebook piracy. So I’ve been taking notes and making sure that things haven’t changed much over the past year. One thing that surprised me a little came through on the backchannel (that is, email comments from people who for whatever reason don’t want to use Contra’s comment system) in June, concerning the resurgence of “sneakernet” piracy. I posted a link to a piece on TechDirt indicating that only 15% of music acquisition is done through all P2P technologies together. The bulk of piracy happens between friends, off the Net, where Big Media can’t see it.
What’s interesting came in through a backchannel correspondent whom I didn’t know and haven’t heard from since: Much or even most of the in-person file trading is done by treating entire high-capacity SATA hard drives as thumb drives. He saw my post on the Thermaltake BlacX case with a 2-drive SATA toaster dock built into the top panel. He has one too and wanted to see how common they were. He and his friends swap files by copying entire SATA drives onto blank drives via toaster docks, whether built into cases or standalone. I’ve had a 1-slot Ineo toaster dock since 2010, but it gathers dust now that I have the BlacX. I do my monthly off-site backups by copying everything onto a pair of 750 GB SATA drives using the docks on the top of the BlacX. I keep the backup drives in plastic flip-top cases made precisely for that purpose.
The correspondent (known only as “Don”) pointed out that there are now 2-slot standalone toaster docks that can clone drives from one to another without requiring any connection to a computer. Here’s one example (which even looks like a toaster!) and another. They’re evidently sector copiers and do not send files individually through a file system. Don and his friends get together and watch movies while popping SATA drives into and out of the docks.
I asked him if the drives ever fail by being plugged and unplugged so often. After all, internal SATA connectors are rated for only 50 matings. (ESATA connectors are rated for 5,000.) He hasn’t seen it happen so far, and if it happens, new drives are only $60-$80.
My experience with thumb drives goes the other way: I’ve had more USB ports fail on me than thumb drives. SATA drive connectors are really just etched PC board edge connectors, which can get scratched or dirty. (This is one reason I keep my SATA backup drives in plastic boxes.) I think with careful handling, drives should go a lot longer than 50 plug/unplug cycles.
Every time I think piracy can’t get any scarier, somebody comes along and says “Boo!” even louder. I keeping wondering what’s next. My hunch: Seedboxes, which still don’t entirely make sense to me. Once I figure them out, I’ll report back in this space.
Odd Lots
- Juggling, thing-throwing robots are a major theme of my newly completed novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s a good bet they’ll be deployed in Disney theme parks eventually. I’m not sure why, but I find this very depressing.
- I read this when it first appeared ten years ago and I still think it’s true: DRM does not and cannot do what it’s supposed to do. This from Microsoft, heh. I sure wish they’d quit trying.
- Here’s a good quick survey of Linux window managers, starting out by explaining the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment. (We don’t have this problem in the Windows world.)
- Smilodons and bear dogs somehow managed to coexist. What I don’t understand is how I lived sixty years without ever hearing the term “bear dog.”
- I dunno. This reminds me a little of Cold Fusion: We all want it desperately, but it just seems so damned unlikely. (Thanks nonetheless to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Facebook enforces a sort of least-common-denominator social behavior on people, and is thus stressful. In other words, everybody’s got a hot button, and if you have enough friends people will get pissed at you no matter what you say. The people who don’t care are probably the only ones who should be on Facebook.
- Not space-efficient, but very cool in its way: the Moebius clothes hanger. (Big question: If you buy two will they breed in the closet?)
- This is the heaviest thing that Amazon will ship for free. It weighs a ton. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- If you still have a Commodore 64 (or something like it) try this one-line BASIC program. Amazing.
- Yes, except that if I drink as much as I want, I wouldn’t sleep. (I barely sleep without drinking it at all.)
- Everything you didn’t really want to know about Gangnam Style and didn’t feel like asking. The funniest thing about the video is that it doesn’t go anywhere near the ritzy Gangnam area that it’s named for, though I would expect only Koreans to get that part.
- Oh–and the name of the dance that PSY and his gang are doing is (as best I can tell) “the invisible horse dance.” It’s a natural at weddings. Watch out, chicken dance–your days are numbered.