Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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It’s something to think about when disposing of your obsolete technology.

If you’re a reader of the usual sites with links that nerds like, you’ve probably seen the video or read the writeup of Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 on “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”.

In his presentation, he describes a conversation with a TV producer, in which he talked about the effort that people put into the “Pluto” entry in Wikipedia. The producer, hearing this story, rolled her eyes and asked “Where do they find the time?”

Clay suggests that the producer believed that “free time”, which he refers to as “cognitive surplus” or “social surplus”, was TV’s by divine right. He posits that the mental energy once devoted to television watching and other equally passive ways of filling one’s spare time is being better spent — on the internet.

(I’ve always found that saying someone has “too much time on their hands” is an intellectually dishonest way of dismissing someone: see my entry Too Much Spare Time? and Cory Doctorow’s essay, Too Much Time on His Hands.)

If you haven’t seen the video of Clay’s presentation, here it is — it’s 16 minutes of your free time well spent:

The TV producer reminded me of a record executive whom I encountered at my first job out of school. It’s an interesting story about programming work and technology in the mid-90’s, the music industry and how predictions about technology can be way, way off.

My First Job Out of School

A screenshot from the 1991 version of the Mackerel Stack, a HyperCard stack the promoted Mackerel’s design work.

My first job fresh from getting my computer science degree at Crazy Go Nuts University was developing multimedia applications in Director at a little company called Mackerel Interactive Multimedia.

The year was 1995, when Myst still defined the cutting edge of multimedia, CD-ROMs and sound cards were still fairly novel peripherals and the only other opportunities for a wet-behind-the ears developer seemed to be at a bank or insurance company, neither of which seemed to be appealing. While the pay wasn’t great — I used to call us the “hos of technology” and did a Full Metal Jacket-esque routine that ended with me shouting “Me so geeky! Clicky-clicky! Me hack for long time!” — the place wasn’t soul-killing like a bank or insurance company might have been. I could wear whatever I wanted, I could dress up my office space however I pleased, the hours were flexible and the co-workers were great: a hip and cool set of young people, with a near 50:50 gender balance. It seemed like Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, which had just been published at that time, right down to the ill-advised office romances (one of which was mine).

While the dream at the company was to write the next Myst, we paid the bills by writing multimedia apps for clients — typically interactive advertising or educational pieces that would eventually be distributed on CDs or even multiple floppies.

The company went under after a disastrous merger in 1997. Its story was covered by Cory Doctorow wrote an article for Wired about the Mackerel’s demise; unfortunately, it never got published in the magazine. The Mackerel story is told from a different angle by co-founders Dave Groff and Kevin Steele at the Smackerel site, which is subtitled A Biased History of Interactive Media.

Enter the Record Exec

One of the bands represented by the record exec’s company. You can try to guess who they are, and you should be able to figure out the record company as well.

One day during the summer of 1996, one of the founders came into the area where the developers hung out and told us that we’d landed a contract with an independent record label belonging to a major record company.

“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” I asked.

Apparently it wasn’t. The indy label turned out to be merely a new branch of the major record company. It would sign up-and-coming underground and alternative acts and use the major label for distribution. If the major label was pin-striped and buttoned-down, the indy label was its edgier nephew, clad in faux Hot Topic-esque cred. In spite of their trying-too-hard-to-be-cool aspects, we thought they’d make an interesting client.

The record company exec was a woman who was about five years past their twenty-something demographic. She gave off more of a business school vibe than a rock vibe. She peppered her speech with business-school-isms like “target audience” and “units sold”. She used the word “product” several times and didn’t use the word “music” or even “album” once. Everything she knew about music didn’t come from being a fan; it came from what she’d read in her market research reports.

“That’s why they don’t call it show art,” one of us quipped.

The Brainstorming Session

The CD player application from System 7, the version of Mac OS from 1996.

One of the goals of this initial meeting was to brainstorm some ideas for interactive apps that we could build for them. I had been working on an idea that I was rather proud of: CD player apps customized for specific albums. For any CD other than the one for which it was customized, it would show a mostly plain interface, plus some promos for the album. However, if you used the player to play the album for which it was customized, it would “come alive” with lyrics, liner notes, album art and so on. It was an attempt to bring back what was lost in the move from LPs to CDs.

“Nice try, kid,” said the exec with great disdain. “We did some market research and we’ve determined that no one will ever listen to music on their computer. People see them as machines for getting work done. We’re aiming for the rec room, the den, the living room and the bedroom, not the home office. You computer guys are aiming for home office.”

“You sure about that?” our production manager asked. “We all use the CD players on our machines. For some of us, our computers are in our bedrooms and living rooms, and they’re also our primary stereos now.”

“That may be true for you,” she replied, “but you guys are the exception. Computers are great, but they’re office equipment. You don’t keep a typewriter or photocopier in your living room, so why would you have a computer there? And that’s where people listen to their music. Office equipment and entertainment: apples and oranges. Trust me - I’ve been in the music industry for a while - no one’s going to listen to music on their computer.”

I listened as a few other people had their ideas shot down in similar fashion. It was a matter of her knowing the music industry better than we did.

The Hail Mary MP3 Play

At some point during the increasingly futile brainstorming session, I remembered something that I’d brought back from the Macromedia User Conference. I reached into my laptop bag and fished out a floppy disc.

“Here, check this out,” I said, slotting the diskette into my laptop. “It’s something called Shockwave, which lets you embed multimedia applications inside web pages.”

“We don’t think there will be much interest in the world wide web outside of technical people. The pictures are tiny, you’re stuck with default fonts, and your customers have to go buy a modem. Too much tech hassle, too little payoff.”

“You should give this a look,” I insisted. “The company that makes the tool we use to write multimedia software is using MPEG layer 3 [the term “MP3″ hadn’t made common parlance yet] compression to squeeze music files into less space. There’s a small multimedia program on this floppy, and a whole three-minute song. It would normally take about 8 floppies to hold this song.”

I put the disk in my laptop and launched the Shockwave application, which started a tune playing.

“Sounds like crap,” she said. “And who’s the band? The Spin Doctors? They’re so over.”

“Ignore the band,” I said, trying to remain patient. “Just think of the possibilities. This three-minute single is only a megabyte in size. It fits on a floppy, which you can hand out, or you’d be able to download it in a reasonable amount of time. The download will be even faster on the new 56K modems.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” she said, making that opening-and-closing hand gesture signifying pointless chatter. “It only means something to you because you’re a techie. I’ve seen the market research, and I will tell you now: people are not going to be getting their entertainment from computers or the internet. It’s going to come from set-top boxes and MiniDisc recharging stations at their record stores.”

At this point, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. “Well, you seem to have all the market research, so maybe the best thing would be for you to come up with ideas for an interactive application, and then we can hammer out the details with you in a later meeting.”

“I think that would be a good idea,” she said. She rose from her seat to leave the room, shaking her head.

“I don’t know about you,” I said to the others after confirming that she was out of earshot, “but I think the music industry needs to be destroyed.”

…but I think I’ll wait for the Mac version. The ThinkPad may boast that it’s the “no-compromise” machine, but the lack of Mac OS X is a big-ass compromise in my books. Especially when the OS likely to be bundled with this machine is:

Creative Labs’ PR nightmare (you can find out more here) continues. Consumerist covers the story in their piece, Creative Sparks Customer Revolt When It Tries To Silence Third-Party Programmer, in which they make the astute observation:

Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it’s buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don’t infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours.

A boycott site has been set up: BoycottCreative.com.

And finally, the Creative Labs forum posting that started it all, Message to Daniel_K, has grown to 171 pages as of this writing, most of it being “I will never buy a Creative Labs product again”-type messages.

The Audigy series of Creative Labs’ Sound Blasters lost some functionality with the release of Windows Vista:

• EAX: “Environmental Audio Extensions”, a set of digital signal processing presets that are meant to make sound in games seem more realistic.
• 3D Audio
• Sampling rate conversion
• Audio mixing

Creative’s story is that Microsoft removed “the ‘Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation,’ which is what Sound Blaster Audigy relied on to generate EAX effects and other audio processing.” Without this bit of code, Sound Blaster Audigy cards produce regular 2-channel stereo sound and not the supposedly more realistic-sounding, spatially-localized sounds for which people bought Audigy cards in the first place.

If this development wasn’t enough to upset Audigy owners, Creative stirred the pot last July by charging $10 for software called Creative ALchemy (that’s not a typo — the first two letters in “ALchemy”, when referring to the software, are supposed to be capitalized). Here’s the description from its page on Creative’s site:

Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D audio, sampling rate conversion and audio mixing for certain DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.

Quite predictably, some users were quite annoyed at being asked to pay for this software. In the words of this Gizmodo article, Creative was effectively “charging 10 bucks to fix something that should work in the first place.” A commenter in this CrunchGear article on the issue made a point that the charge could reflect the extra development effort required in making Audigy cards work under Vista, but also suggested that Creative could’ve eaten that cost “for PR purposes”.

For more commentary on Creative Labs’ charging $10 for what some saw as functionality that they had already paid for, see this ZDNet article titled Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?.

The Good Deed and the Punishment

In the comments for the Gizmodo article I cited earlier, there’s a reference to a free software workaround that enabled the features lost with a Vista upgrade. The workaround was posted to Creative’s forums and the commenter felt it necessary to note that the post “surprisingly, hasn’t been removed yet”.

It’s quite likely that the workaround in question was a solution posted by one “Daniel_K”. Here’s what a Gizmodo article posted yesterday has to say about it:

Developer, good-guy and all around hero, Daniel_K stepped up to the challenge, putting together his own drivers and asking for non-obligatory donations in recognition of his effort. Daniel_K’s drivers restored functionality, and added some extra features to boot.

You might think that Creative would be pleased: here’s a user with the will and the skill to develop a software fix that restores functionality to their hardware under Vista — essentially crowdsourcing at its best.

However, they were not pleased. Here’s a message posted to their forums by Creative’s VP Corporate Communication, Phil O’Shaughnessy. I’ve emphasized the part of the message that really grind my gears:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Simply put, Creative is saying that by fixing stuff that they’ve broken on purpose in order to gouge more money out of their customers, you’re stealing from them. It’s just another case of a vendor seeing its customers as “batteries for their Matrix”, or a Jay Michalski puts it, gullets that live under the end of the distribution system’s conveyor belt, where they gulp down products and crap out cash.

Oddly enough, there are a couple of commenters to the Gizmodo articles who come to Creative’s defense, one of whom brings up the fact that if Daniel_K did any reverse engineering of Creative’s drivers for Audigy cards, he broke the EULA. These people are the sort that Dante was thinking of when he wrote about that part of the 8th Circle of Hell reserved for evil counselors.

Links

• Creative Labs’ Forums: Message to Daniel_K
• Gizmodo: Creative Presents Cease-and-Desist Note to Developer Hero
• Wired: Creative: Fixing Our Crippled Sound Card Drivers Is “Stealing our Goods”
• Articles from July 2007 on ALChemy:
  • Gizmodo: Creative Charging $10 to Restore EAX Effects in Vista
  • ZDNet: Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?
  • CrunchGear: Creative Charges $9.99 For Enhanced Vista Drivers
• Want to email Creative Lab’s VP Corporate Communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy? He’s at poshaughnessy@creativelabs.com
• You can still get your hands on Daniel_K’s fixes — here’s a page featuring a torrent containing them.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the latest revisions to Apple’s laptop lines.

For the MacBook Pro:

• There are slight speed increases. The last revision featured “Merom” versions of the Core 2 Duo processors running at 2.2 and 2.4 GHz; the new ones feature the “Penryn” versions running at 2.4 and 2.6 GHz.
• More RAM. The last revision featured graphics cards with 128MB and 256MB RAM; the new ones’ graphics cards have 256MB and 512MB. The new versions also boast new larger L2 caches.
• A new trackpad. The new versions of the MacBook Pro feature the same multi-touch trackpad as the MacBook Air.

The only change made to the MacBook was processor speed - the last revision has speeds ranging from 2.0 to 2.2 GHz; the latest revision has speeds ranging from 2.1 to 2.4GHz.

Unless you’re one of those people who can sense the difference a few hundred megahertz makes and who absolutely must have the latest and greatest revision, this refresh of the Mac laptop line means that the machines supplanted by the just-announced models are now selling is today’s slightly cheaper special. There’s also a tiny bonus in that from this revision on, the Apple Remote no longer comes “free” with your laptop — it’s now a $20 add-on.

The now-previous generation of Mac laptops are selling for a couple hundred dollars less than they did a couple of days ago, and the refurbished ones (here’s the U.S. page for refurbished Macs; here’s the Canadian page) are even cheaper. If you’re looking for a new Mac and are trying to get as much bang for the buck as you can, this is a good time to go shopping.

(Initially I thought it was James Bond who said it, but it’s actually Goldfinger’s line. Still, it’s an impressive line if you say it in a Sean Connery-esque voice.)

PC World takes a look at the 10 Worst PC Keyboards of All Time:

• Commodore 64 — I don’t recall this one being so bad.
• Timex Sinclair 2068
• Commodore PET 2001-32-N - my high school had a room full of these, and as with the Commodore 64, I don’t recall this one being so bad.
• Texas Instruments TI 99/4
• Tandy TRS-80 Micro Color Computer MC-10
• Atari 400
• Timex Sinclair 1000
• Mattel Aquarius
• Commodore Pet 2001
• IBM PCjr

If you’re looking to both laugh and cry at the same time, looking no farther than an article written by Robert Graham in the Errata Security blog titled Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism, which should be a contender for the most insane tech article of the year. It’s so filled with the type of over-the-top pronouncements that one normally sees on extreme right-wing blogs that I had to reread to make sure that it wasn’t parody, and even now I’m not 100% sure. (Next to this article, Zed’s rant sounds rather restrained.)

The article’s two main points is that the OLPC is evil because:

• The design of the OLPC reflects the needs of its creators rather than its users, which to rob third-world children of their dignity.
• It’s a tool to indoctrinate third-world children into the preferred ideology of its designers, which is rabidly communist.

The article has:

• Bizarro statements: “The processor is more than fast enough to run software written in capitalistic programming languages like C++, but the majority of the user interface is written in slow left-wing languages like Python.”
• Reasoning that would make Bill O’Reilly proud: Graham states that features like mesh networking feature are meant to reinforce the notion that individualism is bad and socialism is good.
• A pointless conclusion: “Yet, at its core, it’s still a computer than people can use to hack the United States. It is a weapon that can attack our nation’s infrastructure much more effectively than a gun would. Here is a picture of us installing Metasploit on it” — as if Metasploit only ran on the OLPC.

Graham’s preferred machine for the third world? Intel’s Classmate PC: “[It] runs the same Windows or Linux desktops that everyone else in the world uses. Intel’s computer has no enforced educational agenda. It doesn’t have communist software on it, yet the children collaborate with each other anyway without software forcing them to.”

Graham’s article has a couple of things I agree with:

• The OLPC is not without its problems and is not above criticism
• I don’t see anything wrong with Intel releasing a competing machine, in spite of Negroponte’s huffing and puffing to the contrary

…but for the most part, it’s FOX News-style insanity. If you’re a techie looking for a laugh, Graham’s article is the place to go today.

…it was created, and it continues to expand, not through Non-Governmental Organisations or charity or development grants but through the market, with much of it financed by some of the poorest people on the planet.

I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.”

I’m of the opinion that shutting off display models on the showroom floor might be an acceptable prank, but interfering with a live presentation by shutting off the TV being used for slides crosses the lines of etiquette and ethics. A number of people agree, and the flak that Gizmodo has received led editor Brian Lam to write an article defending their reporter’s actions. Here are a couple of excerpts:

But bloggers and trade journalists, so desperate for a seat at the table with big mainstream publications have it completely backwards: You don’t get more access by selling out for press credentials first chance you get, kowtowing to corporations and tradeshows and playing nice; you earn your respect by fact finding, reporting, having untouchable integrity, provocative coverage and gaining readers through your reputation for those things. Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. And no matter how much access the companies give us, we won’t ever stop being irreverent. That’s what this prank was about and what the press should understand.

…

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work. All of these examples are offenses from the last year. And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. As one reporter put it while chiding me, “Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.” Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers. In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience. Every tech journalist has to decide whether or not he’s writing for companies or for readers. When they start writing for the companies, covering all their press releases and regurgitating marketing jargon, you do no one any favors (not even the companies, which already hire press release machines).

To borrow a quote from Tom Waits: Get off the cross; we could use the wood. There’s a difference between “civil disobedience” and “asshole”.

The “I’m keepin’ it real” defense is the resort of idiot rappers and performance artists who’ve come under fire for going too far; it’s the mark of a mind that lacks the will or the wherewithal to get past those unresolved “rebelling against Mommy and Daddy” issues. As far Lam’s implication that if you’re not rude to “the companies”, you’re kowtowing to them, that’s a lame high school debating tactic called a false dichotomy.

In his weak defense of their use of the TV-B-Gone device, Lam seems to have forgotten Gizmodo’s earlier stance on the device. Here’s their October 2004 review of TV-B-Gone: (thanks to Webware and Zoli Erdos for pointing this out!)

Mitch Altman is an asshole. And not just any asshole, but one of those snotty holier-than-thou types who has nothing better to do with the money he made as a founder of 3ware than to develop a device with the sole purpose of imposing his viewpoint on others. See, Altman hates the television and its encroachment into public space. Rather than just doing what most everybody else has done—which is either not really caring or, failing that, getting the fuck over it — Altman has invented a device called the ‘TV-B-Gone’ (obviously having expended every last vapor of his creative ability developing the product, he was left to co-opt the most obvious name schtick ever). Essentially a universal remote that cycles through every possible code, the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.

Read the Wired News profile, where Altman wanders through a city, turning off other peoples’ televisions, peppering his behavior with such gems as, “We just saved him several minutes of his life.” Maybe after making his tens of dozens of dollars on the TV-B-Gone, Altman can invent a gadget that transports self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war to a log cabin coffee shop where they can reassure each other how awesome they are for hating television. Free berets for the first 100 pricks to use the word “Sheeple!”

“Power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick”? “Self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war”? How eerily prescient, yet unaware!

I’ll leave the last word to Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb:

Toward the end of today’s post, Lam mentions his blog’s interview with Bill Gates. “We got the guy to open up and talk about Windows and its shortcomings like he never has before, not even on 60 minutes,” Lam says. “If that’s not journalism, I don’t know what is. If we had been in the pocket of this industry, we never would have asked such a risky question.”

That is the sort of thing that makes you a journalist. And what’s wrong with letting the questions you ask prove your independent spirit? No amount of silly pranks will ever do so much to prove your integrity as will the actual reporting you do. That’s something that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist must learn. Actions might speak louder than words, but not if your actions are juvenile stunts that obscure your reporting.

The problem with being a satirist in this day and age is that reality often leapfrogs you. Case in point: this “MP3 Ready” George Foreman Grill, with integrated amplifier and speakers:

This promotion for Windows Home Server is done up in the style of “Mommy, Where Do I Come From?” childrens’ books, and it is high-larious. Gizomodo’s got scans of the entire book — check ‘em out!

Ooh! Daddy’s going to Mommy a server! Watch for the follow up book, Why is Daddy Sleeping on the Couch?

Talk about the “Multicore Crisis” isn’t new in programming circles. What is notable is that it just got mainstream coverage in the New York Times, in an article titled Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust:

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

Aside from a minor quibble I have with their use of the word “manycore” (which sounds more like a music genre rather than a processor type), I think it’s a decent layperson-friendly article on the topic.