not42

Occasionally I read an article on a website and just feel sad for people. Today that person is the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries) chairman John Kennedy. In this BBC News article he is quoted as saying:

DRM “helps get music to consumers in new and flexible ways”

Clearly something must be wrong here since I have never purchased music online, and currently never will. Why? Because of DRM.

Ironically he says

DRM was a “sometimes misunderstood element of the digital music business”

Yes it is John. By you. I enjoy music. I enjoy purchasing music. I would probably purchase more music given the ability to buy unprotected CD tracks online, however while you guys keep forcing DRM on me, and millions like me, you are in effect restricting your sales to those CDs that I buy. You are loosing out on all the opportunities of me hearing a good track on the radio and going and buying it as a spontanious purchase. Not only that, you are probably loosing out because some people will go and find those tracks that are unprotected and download those instead of wasting money on something that is restricted in personal use.

Believe me, the world will come to hate DRM even more than it does now. There will be users who download gigabytes, spent hundreds or thousands of $ on iTunes music, only to have their hard drive crash. They will be pissed, believe me, and guess what they’ll do? Will they re-purchase it, or will they quite rightly feel they own that music, and will then go and download it from sites where the tracks are unprotected. And guess what? Do you think they will then stop with only the files they previously purchased?

You need to get it. You need to realize that people who download a music file expect to be able to do what they want with it - to be able to download it multiple times if lost, to burn it to a CD for their car, to load it on their MP3 player. To use it on a Mac or Linux PC that doesn’t have the same DRM system.

Basically you need to realize that the only way to grow music sales is to offer freedom with that music sale. That and find quality artists that your consumers enjoy listening to. Go spend your time finding the next sound. The next disco, pop, rap, whatever. Give us something new to buy!

Remember. People don’t like being controlled. It is human nature to revolt against controlling forces, and DRM comes into that category.

In 2005, the music industry lowered themselves again. People don’t like stories of corporations suing children for downloading a few files that they can’t afford - for goodness sake, I bet as a child you recorded your favorite songs off the radio charts to enjoy. What is difference? Nothing to the child. It’s not that every kid is out to get you, far from it, they are your future market - so I hope you like the picture you are painting of the music industry.

Give us freedom John. Freedom to buy and do what we like with our music. Don’t give us DRM. And don’t give us some story implying that you understand it, because the truth is it is harming your business.

For the last few months I’ve been getting really frustrated with my computer randomly running slower than it should, using 100% CPU usage in the Explorer.EXE process. Now this process is critical to the way Windows works, it being the taskbar at the bottom of the screen as well as the directory browser, so when it uses 100% CPU, suddenly things take a lot longer to work, or lock up and appear to stop running.

In the past when things have slowed down, I’ve either waited until CPU usage reduced to 0%, or in the event that it didn’t, have terminated the Explorer process and restarted it using Task Manager. Tonight however I decided to investigate what was happening, and by using the SysInternals Process Explorer, have discovered that the cause was Explorer opening this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
UserAssist\{75048700-EF1F-11D0-9888-006097DEACF9}\Count

Manually opening this key from regedit took about 15 seconds - Yes, that’s 15 seconds to open one registry location!!! - and while I didn’t count the exact number of items, I believe it contained hundreds of thousands of keys. No wonder the Explorer process was going slow when it kept opening this key!

This site here discusses this registry key: http://www.utdallas.edu/~jbs024000/articles/explorer_spy.html. Basically the guy has investigated what information is stored there and it includes things like websites visited, files accessed etc. ever since you installed Windows. Amazing stuff.

For me, the biggest issue was the performance hit rather than the privacy issue. I guess the registry has problems when more than a certain number of keys are stored in a single node, perhaps from fragmentation or just the sheer number of items, however I found that deleting the key immediately made Explorer.exe run at 0% CPU and it’s behaved perfectly ever since.

Quite why Microsoft decided to store all this information infinitely is beyond me, but if you are suffering from performance issues, or simply don’t like the Big Brother style logging system, then might want to consider tidying up your registry. I’ve not noticed any bad side effects, but be warned - editing your registry can have bad consequences, so delete keys at your own peril!

I’m looking forward to enjoying Windows working as it should do again - it was almost at the point of me reinstalling from scratch, but I feel I can put that off now until something else comes up! Enjoy.

Since the early 90’s, a select few have participated in annual competitions, pushing the limits of computers and programming. This is known as the demoscene.

An example of this can be found here: http://www.farb-rausch.com/fr08_final.zip

This demo runs from a mere 64k disk file which is basically unbelievable but true.

You can find more at sites like these: http://www.pouet.net/ http://www.scene.org/

For those of you who have never lived in the UK, you’ve probably never had the opportunity of watching the BBC Top Gear TV programmes. Some would say you’ve not missed much and are better off watching Dallas, but most would say you’ve missed some fine entertainment, including the US who just gave the show a Global Emmy.

Google video comes to the rescue once more with a short clip for your entertainment:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6784354703472305949&q=top+gear

If you enjoy Clarkson’s humour in this episode, check out your local TV guide as episodes do play all over the world.

The guys at Xiph.org have been working hard and have now released a Windows version of the Quicktime 7 OGG plugin. Essential if you enjoy using iTunes but have a library of OGG files.

You can download it here.

Spotted Google now has a video search engine up.

This one made me smile for some reason, perhaps it was the culmination of watching several other people try to dance too

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5184484629705931447

This one took some time but is very good, much more serious:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2451231318029772790

You could spend all day on here just find nuggets!

Today I finally got annoyed enough about one of my pet hates to ask the source for a solution - CD protective sticker glue.

I hate it! I do the honest thing and buy products and am treated like criminal in that I have layers of wrapping and gunky stickers sealing my CD inside an environmental catastrophe. It often takes me 5 minutes to actually get into a CD case without destroying it, and then I’m left with a ruined product - a case that is completely unsuitable to sit on the shelf due to all the glue spoiling it.

I’ve tried using hot water and soap to remove the glue, but that doesn’t really budge it, it just smudges the glue flat.

I’ve also tried an alchohol based gunk remover, but that destroys the plastic and it all goes white.

Today I finally decided to phone my latest CD supplier - Sony BMG. I have to say that their automated helpline (800-222-7669) is rubbish. They have an automated system called Max whose needs reprogramming. He’s irritating. You try calling with a problem with a CD and you’ll see what I mean.

Eventually I made it to a human who was actually really helpful, although at first we had troubles in identifying the product to be supported. I had to point out that it was something you bought in a shop and had music on it. Comes in a little case with annoying stickers before they grasped that I wasn’t talking about a CD player. I can be real sarcastic at times. Sorry!

Unfortunately there appeared to be no recommended method of removing the glue. I said that the product was damaged by the packaging and if I wanted a customer repair procedure or wanted to return it for repair. I think they thought I was joking at one point but the guy kept his cool and tried to find a solution.

After two pauses on hold, he said to try oil with a swab. Just a little oil. Motor oil I asked? Baby oil he said. Well I didn’t have any baby oil, so I tried some vegetable cooking oil, and after lots of rubbing, sure enough it did the job. Obviously it is worth dismantling the CD case before trying to clean it, otherwise you destroy the paper in it. You also need to wash the case in soap and water to remove the oil. Full immersion appears to work best there.

So there you go, Sony says to use oil to remove the CD case glue, and it really works! Now I can enjoy my CD collection again. It is a pity about the time we have to waste in cleaning up their mess, along with all the enironmental waste generated. Ironically, no protection stops thieves - when will they learn that and stop wasting our time and money and just focus on finding good music?

A couple of months back I tried to use Linux and my first task that failed with a resounding thud was trying to play my music files. All the default installed players like xmms were a disaster. That’s not to say they’re bad; I’m know that they were amazing in their time, but things have moved on, and my demands were quite straightforward: To play OGG, AAC and MP3 files, but with a graphic equalizer to compensate for my bass box sound system.

On my last attempt I gave up, but not before someone had commented that I should try amaroK. I finally had time to give it a go, and tried a new flavor of Linux too - Ubuntu. I’d recommend trying that if you want a simple Linux, but that’s another story. amaroK. I’m impressed. It installed using the built in package manager, and well, does exactly what I want. Even better than that, it scanned my drive and found all my files, has organized them into albums and provides a really simple but powerful user interface to manage them.

Some neat features are the Lyrics tab, which sucks down the lyrics for the song playing, nice if you like to sing along (cover your ears!) or can’t quite catch the words and want to know what on earth the song is singing about. You also have the media device browser which looks like you can use an iPod with it too. Visualizations, graphic equalizers and the ability to minimize to an icon rounds the program off.

All in all it is amazingly useable, and unlike many Linux programs, amazingly stable. If you need a Linux audio player, look no further.

http://amarok.kde.org/

This article really shows why buyers should be considering suppliers that are not Intel only providers such as Dell.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=paxville&page=1&cookie%5Ftest=1

The review puts Intels latest offering against AMDs, and the results are quite amazing. Rather than Intel pulling ahead in some benchmarks, AMD blows away the competition, providing much more efficient, higher performing servers for lower prices.

If I was Dell, I would really be thinking about my choices at the moment… corporate IT will look at reviews like this and see the savings.

You just have to love it when a big corporation (Microsoft) that wants to sell services (Mappoint), just has no concept of what the world wants.

I just tried to sign up for a developer account for access to the Mappoint Web Services, but on visiting their website I just get a raw aspx error page! Contacting their support staff and they say”

“It is only compatible with IE 6.0 and once IE 7.0 is released it will be compatible with that as well.

MPNET”

Wonderful. I told you that myself. No care or thought about fixing it? Or perhaps changing the error message to an error page listing compatibility etc.

They don’t deserve an application being written that uses their services if that’s their attitude. Doesn’t look good when a product that claims to provide ‘web services’ can’t even provide a W3C compliant signup web site.