Archive for September, 2006
Six-word film review escapes from underneath Deadline Mountain
Children of Men is pretty good.
Achtung, baby
My first column for .net is now online. Naturally, it’s a rant about DRM.
Firefox 2 is (nearly) out
Firefox 2 RC1, the nearly-finished version of Firefox 2, is available for download. It’s quite nifty, and on the Mac the interface has been tweaked to look much more pleasant (the Mac beta looked rather unfinished). Usual beta warnings apply but on this Mac at least, the last beta was generally rock-solid.
Wish I could say the same for iTunes 7, mind you. Stable enough on the Powerbook but an absolute crashy nightmare on my Mac Mini. Bleh.
Attack of the spambots
Ah, the joys of the Internet: over the last week or so, the amount of comment spam I’ve been getting on this blog has started to rise. Previously I’d get one or two attempts per week; now, it’s between 15 and 40 per day. And no doubt it’ll get worse.
Thank crikey for Akismet, a free plugin that spots and zaps the spam without any intervention. I’ve been running it for a few months now and it’s currently achieving 100% accuracy with 0 false positives. If you’re running WordPress like me, go and get it - it’s free for blogs generating less than $500 per month.
Something kinda woo
Hello, hello, it’s good to be back. Apart from the massive amounts of comment spam, junk emails, letters from the taxman and other joyous things to wade through. So while I get on with housekeeping, a few quick thoughts:
* The forthcoming Girls Aloud single, Somethin’ Kinda Oooh, is one of the funniest pop songs I’ve heard in ages. If it doesn’t go to number one, the country’s in worse shape than I thought.
* Vauxhall makes an Astra Estate with a 1.4 litre petrol engine which, even when there’s only the driver in it, often needs first gear to get up hills. Given that estate cars are designed for lugging loads, I can only assume that the 1.4 Astra estate is designed for the small but important group of people who need lots of room to transport fully inflated helium balloons. Or ghosts.
* Dolphins are cool. And by cool, I mean really, really cool.
* Now that Casio’s added RSI-friendly anti-shake processing to its Exilim range, its titchy wee cameras are utterly superb. Especially if you want to take photos of dolphins. Which are cool.
* Flying sucks, and each time I fly it seems that the experience sucks that little bit more. I really don’t think it’s just that I’m getting older and more curmudgeonly (I was curmudgeonly in playschool, I suspect).
And that’s it for now. But enough about me. How’s you? Had a good week? I must say you’re looking very well…
We’re all going on a summer holiday
Well, I am anyway. I’ll be back in a week…
Zune launches today
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Engadget has (most of) the details, although somehow I don’t think the launch will attract quite as much online attention as this week’s iPod stuff. Still, looks quite nifty with good file format support and a nice screen. Until we know the price, though, it’s hard to say whether it’ll fall into the “want one!” category.
Interesting colours, too. Brown, anyone?
Update
Microsoft’s main emphasis with Zune is on social networking, so the idea is that you’ll be able to beam tracks to your pals for them to check out. They’ll be able to listen three times to those tracks, and when they get home they can - of course - go online to buy the songs. It’s not clear yet whether that sharing applies to all your MP3s or just your purchased ones; if it’s the latter, it’s considerably less interesting.
The thought that immediately springs to mind is that Zune exists to sell music. That’s very different from Apple, whose iTunes basically exists to sell iPods (the figures of paid downloads per iPod are still tiny - 20ish per player. Most music is ripped, with illegal downloads coming second and legal music a good bit behind).
Update, 15th Sept.
Still no news of pricing - Microsoft says “competitive” - or battery life (still testing that, apparently), but it seems the sharing feature applies to all your music. Unfortunately that means unprotected files you share will be DRMed before they land on someone else’s Zune.
Interestingly, Zune Marketplace will use Microsoft Points, the currency currently used on Xbox Live. Points will be interchangeable between Xbox and Zune.
iTunes DRM cracked then fixed then cracked again
Tuesday: iTunes 7 breaks the Hymn DRM crack. Wednesday, the Hymn Project cracks the DRM again. They don’t muck about, do they?
An open letter to online shops
Dear online shops
When you offer - and charge extra for - next day delivery, the customer quite reasonably thinks that means “we will deliver your order the next working day”.
If you take it to mean “we will deliver your order the next working day after we actually get some of the items in stock, which won’t be for at least a week, and we’ll pretend your order’s still being processed in the meantime, and we’ll ignore your emails and refuse to sign on to our snazzy live online help system” your customers will call you names (and cancel their orders).
Love and kisses,
Gary
Printing
There’s a rather snarky piece in today’s Technology Guardian, moaning about how computer magazines don’t dare talk about the cost of printer cartridges. The writer obviously doesn’t read computer magazines - here’s some excerpts from a piece I did for PC Plus in 2004, and similar pieces are in the tech press all the time.
Inkjet printers have plummeted in price, and if you buy even a cheap PC you’ll often get a state-of-the-art inkjet for free. However, as with mobile phones and razor blades, it’s not the hardware that hurts: it’s the cost of using it.
For printer manufacturers, the cost of consumables is the story that won’t go away. In 2002, the Office of Fair Trading investigated allegations that printer ink was a rip-off, and concluded that manufacturers needed to provide more information about the cost and longevity of replacement cartridges; in 2003 Which? Magazine reported that some inks were more expensive than the very best vintage champagne, and in early 2004 the story was resurrected all over again. This time the story came from a specialist magazine whose editor warned that “consumers are still at serious risk of being ripped off”. The magazine calculated the running costs of several inkjet printers and concluded that one particular model, a £35 Lexmark inkjet, would cost a staggering £1,775 over an 18 month period.
There’s no doubt that the Lexmark in question – the z605 photo printer – is expensive to run: Lexmark suggests that you can expect 205 pages from a £15 black cartridge or 140 pages from a colour cartridge, also £15. However, while £1,775 makes a good headline the z605 is marketed as a low volume printer for home users; to spend that much money on ink, you’d need to replace both ink cartridges 57 times. That’s a replacement black cartridge and a replacement colour cartridge every nine and a half days, with a print volume of more than 1,000 pages per month.
If you opt for a bottom of the range inkjet with low capacity ink cartridges to handle that sort of volume, you need your head examined.
…
We’re all familiar with the way in which mobile phones and razor blades are sold: when you buy a mobile, most of the purchase price is subsidised by the manufacturer and recouped over the course of your contract – which is why you can pick up a new Nokia for nothing on certain tariffs, but if you want one without a SIM card you’ll pay several hundred pounds. Similarly, when you buy a Mach 3 razor it’s being sold at a loss; the manufacturer gets its money back when you’ve bought several packs of replacement blades. These days, printers are sold in exactly the same way. “HP has publicly announced its need to make 15% profit for its printer business and this is collectively achieved through hardware and consumables sales,” says [HP's] Grice.
If your printer costs £50, you can guarantee that the manufacturer isn’t making money on the sale; that 15% profit has to come from somewhere, and in most cases it’s recouped from sales of ink cartridges. Because of this, the retail price of a printer isn’t the key cost: it’s not what you pay now, but what you’ll pay over a year, two years or three years that’s important.