Archive for May, 2005
Music industry greed created Crazy Frog
At least, that’s what industry watcher Mark Mulligan suggests. He explains:
A key (though not the only) reason for ring tone providers like Jamster (the home of Crazy Frog) churning out the likes of Cray Frog, Nessie and Sweety is because of the size of the license fees being commanded by record labels for true tones. The result is that mobile content providers seek out content which they can own and therefore take a much larger share of the pie. Hence the great irony that the net result of this process is that the labels end up paying for the rights to ring tone content.
Will the labels start being less demanding with their license fees? There is a risk that if they don’t, what was a booming revenue stream for them will become the near exclusive domain of animated crooning animals.
“They don’t want you to have stuff archived in your house”
Darknet’s on a blogging frenzy today, and there’s some excellent content to chew over. First up, an interview with the former CTO of ReplayTV talking about the studios’ attitudes towards digital recording:
[The Hollywood studios] essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed.
There’s also an excellent piece about the people who trade movies online (don’t bother with the interview transcript with the movie pirate, though, it’s a load of crap):
College students who run similar private file-sharing networks have been busted for less, but Forest does not fear the copyright cops. When he negotiated his contract, he insisted on an indemnification clause, a hold-harmless provision that shields him from being prosecuted for downloading pirated movies belonging to the major movie studios. He also consults for the music industry and has been indemnified by the Recording Industry Association of America. Forest may be a spy, but he is no snitch, and he takes pains to make clear that he will not fink on anyone in the scene.
Indie aliens
As game development budgets get higher and higher the games industry looks more like Hollywood every day, with mega-budget blockbusters and lots of me-too titles following in their wake. Alien Hominid bucks the trend: it’s a quirky platform shooter with impeccable indie credentials.
Alien Hominid started life as a Flash game on Newgrounds, and it proved so popular that the developers rewrote and expanded it for games consoles. It’s an absolute hoot and you should buy it now :-)
Digital liberties under attack
I’ve been following the Darknet blog for a while, which is designed to accompany the book of the same name. The subtitle - Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation - makes it pretty clear which side of the fence it’s on.
In today’s update, Darknet lists the top 10 digital liberties under assault, which includes stupid laws such as the INDUCE act and wheezes such as trusted computing. I’d add a few of my own to the list, such as the way in which copy protection is likely to kill the second hand market for music CDs and other media.
We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is*
I’m disabled at the moment: I can’t walk properly, and even simple things like going to the corner shop take a lot of effort. It gives you an interesting perspective on things, and on people: it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, as Slipknot put it, people = shit.
To take just a few examples: I went to see Eels play at the Carling Academy the other night, and I was quite relieved that it was a seated gig - until I saw the seating. I’m not a particularly big chap (I’m 6′1″ with a fairly slight build) but I could barely fit into my seat; when two very large blokes sat next to me, the only way I could sit was to twist my back - which is a no-no, as it hurts like hell to do that. There was no way I could have stayed seated; I ended up spending the gig slumped over a railing, which spoiled the gig somewhat.
It was my wife’s birthday the other day, so we went down the road to look in jewellers. Because I can’t walk properly, we got the bus; by the time we got off the bus, I was close to tears. The bus driver was one of those frustrated boy racer types who accelerates like a maniac and brakes like a demon, and as we got to our stop he braked so hard I was thrown halfway across the bus, seriously wrenching my back (we had to call off the shopping trip in the end, I was in agony).
On Friday, we went to see Derren Brown at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, a rather genteel venue with a grown-up audience - nice people who barged happily into me as I shuffled my way through the exit door.
I could go on forever, having been barged into or shoved in bookshops, on the stairs of underground stations and so on, but the point is: I’d never really noticed this before, but now I’m temporarily disabled I’m getting a vivid illustration of how thoughtless people can be and how awkward many public spaces can be for anyone who isn’t completely mobile.
A little bit of thought would make a big difference. If the bus driver had thought about his passengers, he’d have realised that half of them were pensioners or people with mobility problems, and he might have toned down his aggressive driving. If the person who put the seats in the Academy had thought a bit more, they’d have realised that the seats were inadequate for adult audiences. If the crowd at the concert hall had thought a bit more, they might have realised that no matter how much barging into people they did, they’d only gain a second or two at best. And so on.
I don’t really think that people = shit, but I do think people are often too wrapped up in their own concerns at the expense of thinking about others. I’m not asking the entire human race to start being lovely - I’m not that naive - but as the various examples above demonstrate, people’s lack of thought can have painful consequences. While my symptoms will (hopefully) vanish post-surgery, I’d like to think that my experience of disability means I’ll be a bit more considerate towards others in the future.
* The title’s from Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a pretty good explanation of the meaning of life.
Queasy Tiger
I upgraded to Apple’s Tiger operating system a few weeks ago, and while there are some fun things in it - Spotlight, the new QuickTime player and a slight performance boost - I can’t say the experience has been particularly positive. I’ve found Automator almost unusable, Safari even more crash-prone than it used to be, and I’ve found a few ongoing irritations: for example, when you drag folders to the Finder sidebar, they’ve disappeared from the sidebar the next time you log in; waking the Powerbook from sleep kills the internet connection nine times out of ten; dashboard widgets aren’t as flexible as Konfabulator (unless you download the Amnesty program, which itself is a bit buggy), and so on.
Some of the problems are no doubt because I did an upgrade rather than a clean install, but my entire life is on this Powerbook and I really don’t have the time to strip down the system and start from scratch. And anyway, aren’t full OS reinstalls something you do on Windows, rather than on the Mac?
There’s not really any point to this post. I just fancied a whinge.
[Update, 31 May] If you’ve come here from MacSurfer, welcome. I’m not entirely sure why my whinge has been picked up by the site, but it shows how good MacSurfer is at finding every concievable Mac-related item on them thar interwebs…
A vision of Hell(gate)
The forthcoming Hellgate: London game looks fantastic, and the developers have uploaded some hi-res video clips to whet your appetite. They’re cinematics rather than in-game footage, but the current clip is worth a look if you’ve even a passing interest in computer animation. You’ll need broadband, though: the full-size clip is around 200MB.
Facing up to your own mortality
Today was a sad day. The barber looked at my eyebrows and said, “would you like me to give them a trim”? I’m now officially old :(
Under the knife
That’s my back op rescheduled: tentatively, 3rd June. So I’ll either be completely AWOL for two weeks afterwards, or blogging like a demon because of boredom ;-)
Why I’ve been quiet
Once again, sorry for the lack of updates. I haven’t been able to blog for a bit because I’ve been:
* very, very, very, very, very busy
* going to see Eels live
* lying on the floor feeling sorry for myself and waiting for painkillers to kick in
* redecorating the flat
* trying to rearrange the back op
* buying a house
* losing pub quizzes
And so on. Normal service will resume eventually…