Jobs wins at DRM

Almost exactly eleven months ago Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry entitled Thoughts on Music.

In it he pointed out what every good tech person knows: if someone gives you an encoded message and also gives you a technical means to decode it — no matter how temporarily or fleetingly — then it's totally impossible to prevent you from decoding it permanently. The most they can do is to make it take a while to figure out how and then when you have succeeded replace it with something else, in a classical arms race.

He also said Apple would put DRM-free music in the iTunes store "in a heartbeat", if the labels would allow them to.

The reaction was sad, if predictable.

The RIAA managed to (deliberately?) misread the letter as an offer to license FairPlay. The labels said Jobs was naive and impractical. Various freetards claimed that Jobs and Apple were the biggest beneficiaries of DRM and were not serious (viz the iPod bondage image).

So here we are eleven months later and it is today reported that Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM, the last of the four major labels to do so.

A lot of news stories are spinning this as some kind of loss for Jobs and Apple — pretty much because that's what several of the labels are saying, as they take their shiny new DRM-free ball away from the iTunes store and play with their new friends Amazon and others.

I don't know why they think Apple cares.

Apple makes all its money from selling iPods, not from selling music. They opened the iTunes store essentially because they weren't going to sell many iPods if the only music available for purchase online used Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media DRM and was for sale in stores that used Windows-only software. And they developed FairPlay DRM because the music labels weren't going to let them sell DRM-free files.

If the music is available in standard unprotected MP3 (or AAC) then it will work perfectly well on iPods, no matter where people buy the music. The Amazon MP3 store works perfectly well in Safari on a Mac. In fact it's quite nice.

Apple's hardware customers are catered to. Apple will continue to sell boatloads of iPods.

Jobs wins.

Joost

Thanks to Rod I've just been checking out Joost, a free (ad supported) internet-based TV service.

I just checked out Vicki thrashing a few cars around the racetrack (e.g. old vs new EVO and Volvo vs Legacy) and a few other random things.

The instant start on programs is nice. There is the ocassional fraction of a second pause which is a bit annoying -- it could do with a *tad* more buffering out here on this side of the Pacific. But unlike QuickTime Player, deliberately pausing it for a few seconds to let the buffering get ahead doesn't help. Hope they fix that.

The picture quality is decent when blown up to (the default) full screen on my 17" (1680x1050) MBP. Plenty of detail but some visible blocking if you look closely -- but fine if you sit back at a sane distance. Much the same quality as the typical stuff you find on bittorrent these days. And it's sooo much easier than bittorrent. And legal too!

There are ads in between the programs, but they're less intrusive and shorter than real TV. And the random-access to any show is of course far better. You can also just sit there on a "channel" and it will play shows continuously, just as real TV will.

Watching the OSX Activity Monitor's "Network" tab while playing a show, it seems to average about 80 KB/sec, or around 640 kbps (on my 4 Mbps cable modem). So that's 5 MB per minute, or 300 MB/hour, or a gigabyte in just over three hours of watching. Or 200 MB for a typical 40 minute TV episode. Which is a bit over half that of the typical programs on bittorrent which are usually around 350 MB for a 40 minute ("one hour" with ads) US show such as BSG or Lost. So the H.264 is doing a good job compared to the usual divx encoding you find. Watching a typical 40 minute TV episode is going to cost you about $1 of your initial allocation on a TelstraClear hi speed 10G or 20G cable modem account (or you can watch 30 or 60 hours a month within your initial allocation). It'd be 50c on one of the 10 Mbps 40 GB or 80 GB accounts. So pretty reasonable compared to getting Sky unless you're a *total* TV addict.

The best thing, of course, is that this is internet TV that my grandmother could use.

Alan Gibbs Interview

This is a really terrific seventy minute interview with NZ businessman Alan Gibbs. There is also a thirteen minute documentary spot with short snippets from the interview, but worth watching first to get some of the context of who Gibbs is and what he has done.

The interview is wide ranging. It starts off perhaps a little slowly, with talk about art and Gibbs' holiday property on the Kaipara harbour, but eventually gets into a lot of great insight and retrospective analysis of what was happening in NZ in the 60's and 70's, how NZ was transformed for the better in the 80's and early 90's by successive Labour and National governments, and how that transformation has not only benefited the country but has become so much a part of the Kiwi mindset that it is politically impossible to roll it back (though Helen and Jeanette are fiddling around the edges).

It is inconceivable that the vibrant Silicon Welly environment in which I now find myself could exist if not for the restructuring brought about twenty years ago.

Most of the people I'm working with now will have no memories of things ever being any other way. I have few enough myself, having emerged from the usual sheltered life in school and university just four months after the 1984 election, right into the thick of things.

I must have already gained some clues by then though: in 1981, my first election as a voter, I'd done the typical feel-good socialist thing and voted for Social Credit. By 1984 I'd actually read the Social Credit monetary theories, and not only understood them but realized they were a crock. I'd read a few other things by then too, such as Friedman's "Free To Choose" (1980) and Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1944). Even Hofstadter's philosophical and mathematical "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (1979) had caused me to seek out Alexrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation" (1981 paper, 1984 book) which had obvious bearings on economics.

All of this left no choice but to vote for Bob Jones' "New Zealand Party", and then sit back in astonishment as 90% of their policy was implemented by Labour of all people!

As Gibbs says in the interview, this was one of the rare moments in history where politicians cared more about principle and doing the right thing than about getting reelected (even though they did, until Lange's infamous "cup of tea").

And thank goodness for that.

First Post!

It's a new year so perhaps it's time to start blogging instead of just lurking on other people's blogs.

I posted on Usenet a lot for many years (as a quick trip to google will confirm), and on BIX before that, but one is long gone and the other seems to have lost its charm.

Assuming I manage to prevent this from being the last post as well as the first, you're likely to find anything and everything here from pointers to interesting stuff, to family or personal happenings, work, programming languages, flying, politics, community wifi, motorcycling, movies.

I call it "Multiple Dispatch".