Global Nerdy

You know you’re living in the 21st Century when you’re accused of murder and your computer is seized for evidence, but it become even more painfully apparent when they find a history of Google searches for incriminating phrases like:

• how to commit murder
• instant poisons
• undetectable poisons
• digoxin doses

…as well as searches for gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

(By the bye, those search links above will run a Google search, so if you’re planning on icing someone, don’t click on them, mmmkay?)

The moral of the story, from a Machiavellian point-of-view: when Googling for murder techniques, use an OS that you boot from a USB stick.

“In the new world of network-enabled information gathering and dissemination,” writes Tim O’Reilly in the O’Reilly Radar post Journalism Through Computer Programming, “programming is as critical a skill as writing and photography.”

Tim wants to keep recent programmers-as-journalists meme alive (see our previous posts, Newspapers Need Nerds! and Nerds and Newsrooms for more), and it’s an interesting idea. In a world where computers have found their way into just about every facet of life, it only makes sense for people with computer programming skills — even if they’d never think of themselves as computer programmers — to follow.

Maybe I should have saved the Bizarro World graphic from my article about American mobile web use being higher than European for this one instead. This Information Week article quotes Microsoft Business Group president Jeff Raikes as saying “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else.”

“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” says Raikes, “what you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Such statements may fly in the face of the Microsoft credo that every non-sanctioned copy of their software translates into a lost sale and the effort and money they’ve put into things like Windows Genuine Advantage, DRM and the BSA. However, Raikes is acknowledging a truth put eloquently by Tim O’Reilly: obscurity is a far greater threat to creators than piracy.

Joe from TechDirt comments:

[Raikes] said the company wants to push for legal licensing, but doesn’t want to push so hard so as to destroy a valuable part of its user base. The company recently got a stark reminder of this lesson when a school in Russia said it would switch to Linux to avoid future hassles with the pirate police.

Simply put, today’s Microsoft Office pirate stands a good chance of becoming tomorrow’s Microsoft Office purchaser. The benefits extend even further when it comes to Microsoft’s development and server tools: as the recent admission of Romanian president Traian Basescu showed, piracy can create a tech boom, which in turn drive paying customers to companies like Microsoft.

We here at Global Nerdy have a couple of things in common with Romania. One is George. The other is that I too have benefited from pirating Microsoft development tools when I was an indie coder with barely enough money to buy a development machine. After landing a couple of contracts, I made the transition that Raikes talked about: from pirate to paying customer of Visual Studio as well as ancillary products such as books, third-party ActiveX components and leigt copies of Windows. Microsoft also benefited from my developing software for Windows, thereby feeding into their business ecosystem.

On both a macro (Romania) and micro (me) level, I think the benefits of piracy far outweighed the revenues from theoretical “lost sales”.

Who knew that CDs and DVDs had a scent?

Pictured to the right is one of Malaysia’s two black labradors who have been trained to detect the scent of polycarbonate, the primary material for optical media. According to the Reuters story titled Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight movie pirates, the dogs will be used to find discs in “unlikely” or unregistered containers.

If I were a Malaysian DVD pirate, I’d try to smuggle my contraband in durian shipments. That oughta throw the dogs off the scent.

Back in December, I wrote in Game Development Called on Account of Vista that Windows Vista was not supported by XNA Game Studio Express, a game development tool built on top of Visual Studio Express for students and hobbyists. The fact that it lets you build write games for Windows is one thing, but the really interesting thing to me is that you can also develop games for the XBox 360 (which I own, thanks to a trivia contest at the last Ajax Experience conference).

The good news — at least for those of us with machines running Vista — is that an update for XNA Game Studio has been released, now with support for Windows Vista. I plan to download it later this week, subscribe to the XNA Creators Club (required to develop games for the 360; sounds dangerously close to the Super Adventure Club from South Park) and take it for a spin.

The prevailing wisdom is that European mobile web use is higher than Americans’, but a survey by the Online Publishing Association says that the opposite is true. Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the Bizarro World.

In the survey, roughly equal numbers of American, British, French, German, Italian and Spanish people were interviewed, with some weighting to reflect the mobile phone-using populations of each country. In the survey, they found that while 77% of the European respondents had mobile web access compared to 71% of the U.S. respondents, a higher percentage of the Americans made use of it. 41% of the Americans with mobile web access were regular users, compared to 31% of Europeans overall.
Here’s how the countries in the survey compared in regular mobile web use:

• United Kingdom: 54%
• United States and Italy: tied at 41%
• Germany and Spain: tied at 40%
• France: 34%

More survey results are in the article.

The recent New York Times piece about Palm’s response to the iPhone made me all nostalgic for the days when the Handspring Visor with phone attachment (pictured right) was the phone I really wanted.