Legal Downloads - Even Apple Get Ripped Off

The few visitors I get will, by now, know my dislike of current legal download providers, with the exception of the ace Russian AllofMP3.com, because you pay over the odds for crippled music files. Well, it turns out that Apple, owner of the biggest, iTunes - they're not exactly raking it in from them either. The lion's share goes, surprise surprise, to the record companies providing the back catalogue.

The Independent has discovered that, for each 99 cent download from iTunes in the US, Apple get 4 cents, whereas the record label takes at least 62 cents and the publisher (which more often than not is ALSO the record label) gets 8 cents.

This proves a couple of things I had suspected. Firstly, the cost of the shop infrastructure isn't all that expensive - it couldn't be on a 4% commission. And secondly, record labels are ripping us all off - taking a bigger slice of the money coming in, but without having to pay for any physical manufacturing or distribution. Scum bags!

Interesting article. Give it a read.

Best Pun Ever

Manager Aled mentioned that he keeps getting a Jewish newsletter turning up in the catch-all email, presumably due to ex-colleague Rob going out with a Jewish girl and wanting to learn more about the faith before getting engaged (and having a little operation).

I felt obliged to add that it was a rare form of Kosher Spam.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's all downhill from here.

News from the Front

Update time. Yesterday Star Wars finally arrived - huzzah - and the cross I bought for Jayne for our anniversary next week. And the book she got for me arrived to, although the useless postman delivered it to the wrong house (the cretin).

Two websites of note to report... an insane German genius has built a Pong machine. The emphasis should be on machine - it's entirely mechanical, no electronics more advanced than relays are involved. It's awesome. The computer, being made entirely of relays, makes a lovely clicky noise, and sound effects are performed by solenoids hitting percussion blocks. It's a thing of true beauty.

The other website is a resource for distributing Gmail invites. In case you're not up to speed, a Gmail address is the current must-have in the world of the interweb. The thing is, you can't just go to Gmail.com (or rather gmail.google.com) and sign up, you have to receive an invitation to join, and invitations are passed to existing users after so long. So your only chance of getting one is to know someone with one already, hence the exclusivity at present. What this site does is accept invitations from Gmail users who don't know what to do with their allowance, pools them and dishes them out to visitors. Simple and effective.

As a result, I now have a Gmail account. And it's great! Most web-mail systems are a bit slow and clunky compared to their regular PC-hosted counterparts, and pump so many adverts down your eyes that it can induce nausea. Not so with Gmail - it's fast, clean and sleek. And the way it organises emails into threads is beautiful. So, I'm actually going to use it! I've even added the address to my blog header, so I can see how the anti-spam features work.

Rumours abound that Google are looking to develop a web browser as well, possibly based on Mozilla. If they're going to continue to develop things as swish as Gmail, and Blogger for that matter, I'm not going to be complaining.

Legal Downloads - More Expensive and Less Flexible than CD

I went to the Manics website yesterday and spotted that they (as in Sony Music) have put 'Digital Albums' on sale in the 'official shop'. Yes, for £9.99 (or £13.59 in one case) you can legally download a Manics album. What does that crisp tenner get you though?

Well, there's three regular albums to choose from - they're the ones that are £9.99. Gold Against The Soul, This Is My Truth[...] and Know Your Enemy are there for that price. A look at the Digital Rights information - what they say you can do with what you're paying for - is eye opening. (This is copied directly from their website, with 'Alt' text showing.)

Play Count: Number of times you can play the music before it stops working.
Unlimited plays

Expiry Date: Date on which music will stop working.
No expiry date on the music

Platform: Number of PCs the music can be played on.
Can be played on 1 PC

CD Burns: Number of times the music can be copied onto CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R as a CD audio file.
Can be burnt onto 3 CDs

Transfers to Portable Player: Number of times the music can be transferred to a Device with Windows Media Player installed.
Can be transferred to 3 portable devices

Due to incompatibility issues between Microsoft and Apple, WMA9 files will not play on a Mac.

So, £10 gets you a collection of files that one PC can play, and that you can upload to play on a WMA-compatible player no more than three times. But you can make three copies on blank CDs of your WMA files that you'd be able to play in a regular CD player. Shame WMA files don't typically have fidelity comparable to CD-Audio, especially when packaged for downloading. And don't even think about trying to play it on a Mac, not these crippled files at any rate. Microsoft is incompatible. Don't think about playing it on a Linux box either, unless you use a Windows PC to burn them as an audio CD and play that instead.

Before you type in your card details and sell your soul to Digital Rights (-stripping) Management, as you no doubt are itching to do, a quick visit to perenial favourite Play.com shows a different set of prices - the same albums on CD, without the strings attached. Okay, you'd have to wait a few days for it to turn up, but if you're an old-timer with a modem, you'd be waiting for the tracks to download for almost the same amount of time.

All the CDs are cheaper than the comparable downloads from Play.com, with the exception of This Is My Truth, which is the same price (but can be picked up cheaper from Amazon and just about everywhere else that sells CDs). Not only that, here's the Digital Rights Management for the CDs:

Play Count: Number of times you can play the music before it stops working.
Unlimited plays

Expiry Date: Date on which music will stop working.
No expiry date on the music

Platform: Number of PCs the music can be played on.
Can be played on anything

CD Burns: Number of times the music can be copied onto CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R as a CD audio file.
Pffft. Whatever.

Transfers to Portable Player: Number of times the music can be transferred to a Device with Windows Media Player installed.
Can be transferred to any portable devices that can play any format

Due to compatibility issues between CDs and computers, CDs will play on just about anything you like.

It's scandalous. They try and charge us more for an inferior product and expect us to be grateful. They want us to pay for them to tell us what we can do with our purchases. It's just plain wrong.

On a side note, here's some information that violates the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in America, because freedom of speech there has been pissed up the wall in favour of corporations controlling everyone's moves, and this apparently is circumventing a copyright protection system, albeit a very ineffectual one. I've yet to find a protected CD that I've not been able to extract the audio from to turn into MP3s or OGG Vorbis files, provided I'm using a Samsung CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) and the CDex ripper...

Royal Mail watching

I've decided to observe our mail deliveries at work, seeing as I'm still waiting for my Star Wars DVDs and Dawn of the Dead CD.

Our office is next door to the sorting office. It is 1pm. We have not had a post delivery today. If the Royal Mail was a horse, it'd be a lame horse with asthma, one eye and an infestation of blow flies in its shanks. And a rich owner, who doesn't care too much. I think it's time to ditch the pretence and first- and second-class monickers, and rename both eighteenth class.

Update - 3pm
The postman's just been. And he went to the wrong door on the building, the cretin. Can't get the staff. Anyway, no Star Wars but my Dawn of the Dead soundtrack album is here - I want to go zombie blasting RIGHT NOW!

Royal Mail Toilet

Royal Mail are toilet too. Two things that should be here today aren't: the box set of the Star Wars trilogy and the soundtrack to the version of Dawn of the Dead known to us in the UK and US (not the bonkers mad European version).

Our office is next door to the Royal Mail sorting office, yet we've been getting our post delivered at about 11am. Things were fine until the other week, when they very publicly failed to achieve any of their targets and scrapped the second post (despite the chief exec getting a handy dandy bonus - one can only assume that one of the conditions of employment is that you get paid extra for being 'ace' or something). Since that happened the service has sunk to new lows, almost like they're trying to prove that they're crap - or maybe they've accepted it and given up trying not to be.

Yours sincerely,

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

Microsoft Toilet

A couple of good reasons why Microsoft is toilet.

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column
Respected tech journalist Robert X Cringely on how Microsoft can bugger up an open standard for the rest of us, namely USB. If they can take their 'driver signing' idea and apply it to USB protocols, they can milk licencing fees, and explicitly lock-out competing operating systems. Like Linux and Mac OSX, then.

Net security threats growing fast
Note: not Linux PCs, or Macs, or *BSD PCs, but Windows PCs. 30,000 of them a day being added to networks designed to send spam. Microsoft again.

The drivers that Microsoft supply with Windows XP are also toilet. Their HP Deskjet drivers work perfectly provided you don't want more than one copy of anything printed, and the drivers for the onboard Ethernet on one of the PCs we have here at work are great provided you don't mind it deciding to ignore the essentially unique hardware address fundamental to the design of Ethernet, and allow it to install a driver that sets the hardware address to 00:00:00:00:00:00.

Toilet, I say.

Contiki

Some people acuse me of having too much time on my hands, because I build PCs in picture frames and sometimes do things just "because it's cool." Poppycock, say I. It's not like I've breathed new life into obsolete computers by writing an operating system for them designed to get the on a network, is it?

Not like the people behind Contiki, which is a new networking operating system for severely reduced-power computer systems, ranging from single board embedded microcontroller things to old (mainly Commodore) 8-bit computers. I think it's cool, so it passes the one test, but I can see how most people would point and stare like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

High points, in my opinion: the web browser running on a C64 that has the following user agent string...
User-Agent: Contiki/1.0 (Commodore 64; http://dunkels.com/adam/contiki/)
... imagine finding that in your access logs, geek friends; and the embedded microcontroller-based port that gives you a VNC desktop of 120x56 pixels because that's all the memory that it can spare. (In case you've not guessed, that's the screenshot at the top of this post.)

There's a port for the Gameboy, which is interesting, but not the Spectrum, which is disappointing. Hey ho.

Boiler Woes

Yesterday we had boiler problems. Again. Last year our old boiler died a death, and had to be replaced. To get to more or less the same time of the year, one year on, and to have your new boiler pack up is somewhat disheartening.

Somewhat disheartening to a normal person, at any rate. To someone with clinical depression, it's utterly mortifying. Hello, that's me then. So, instead of having a fun day with my cirucular saw, buiding ends for kitchen cabinets, I found myself unable to do anything but lie semi-motionless on the sofa.

There's work being done on the gas mains nearby, so I figured maybe it'd knocked off our gas. I tried some neighbours' houses, but they were out, so I couldn't cross reference. I figured this by running through the installation manual, available as a PDF on the manufacturer's website - they had a handy flow-chart for problem solving - and looking at the gas meter, I could see that nothing was being drawn.

So, I phone Transco, just to find out if there was a problem in the area. Typical call centre thing - the bastardisation of Welsh placenames, and the inability to vary from a script. I didn't want an engineer coming around particularly, just wanted to know if my gas supply was okay, but he despatched one anyway. Engineer arrived, supply was fine (and apparently our meter is a 1977 vintage that should really have been replaced by now), all eyes return to the boiler. I sulk and panic for a bit, then decide to try the hot water again...

...and, after about 30 seconds of running, this time it sparked up, and we had glorious hot water, so I turned on the central heating, and that worked as well. Briefly. The warning light that had come on when I was trying to shave that morning came on again, and the flame went out. I explained to Jayne that it'd done that earlier and apparently it was an overheating warning.

At this point, Jayne solved the mystery completely. She said, "Do you think those brambles at the side of the house could be blocking the flue or something?" I should explain to those who haven't seen - our house is an end-terrace; the front half meets a car-park for the chiropractors' building, and the back half meets a piece of waste ground that we can't get into. It used to be owned by the university, but it seems to have been sold on, and as such the people from Estates in the university no longer tend the brambles that grow on it.

I leant my head through the dinky opening in the bathroom window and was immediately surrounded by brambles, and yes, some seemed to be a little too involved with the flue. I managed to chop lots back with my secateurs, but with it now being nighttime, there wasn't much that I could see clearly. I could just reach the flue though, and saw there was a bramble that had got into the system, and a big leaf just inside the covering. So, I got the leaf out but had to leave the bramble - secateurs, gloves and even pliers weren't getting it out, it was just too clingy. I decided to have a go today, in the light, and see if I could get into the wasteground somehow.

Today came, and I had an idea. I have a pair of plumber's grips for tightening radiator valves and things, and they have a tremendous amount of leverage on them. I figured I could lean through the window with these and apply far more leverage to get the bramble out. Tried it, and although the grip was good it needed me to get my other arm out for more strength - this bugger wasn't going without a struggle...

...and then this thing came out.

For scale, that's my 60cm steel ruler it's against - 24" for yanks. That was the source of the problem. Held straight it's 70cm long and 15mm wide at it's widest part. And the last 2 cm was all I could see, the rest had grown into the boiler. You can tell looking at its colour that most of it had never seen the light of day. This parasite was the cause of a completely ruined day, much despair and a chilly me.

So, if anyone has some Agent Orange to spare, I'll gladly put it to use.