semaya.net

MPAA Propaganda

2008-12-20T17:00:00.004-05:00

I’m not sure what to say about this other than this is complete BS. It also shows just how much the big content industry has a stranglehold on our government. The fact that they convince them to spend $1 billion on this, especially in this economy, is tragic.

High School student suspended for his own football hoax

2007-08-30T18:52:00.000-04:00

I haven’t written in a while but I wanted to point out something I just saw on digg. I have previously written about great college football game hoax by Yalies at Harvard in 2004 and the original Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961 by Caltech. A high school student in Ohio decided to copy this prank and was suspended for three days and banned from extracurricular activities for a semester. A video of the gag was posted to You Tube so you can see for yourself that this was not something that should warrant a suspension. There was no profanity involved, the prank didn’t cause anyone physical or monetary harm either. This didn’t happen during class time but between quarters at a football game. I can’t see how the principal of this school can justify the suspension. These kids were just having fun. This student is in his senior year so a suspension could be disastrous for his applications to college and the principal should know this.

From the dark side we can see the glow of something bright

2006-04-04T23:04:00.000-04:00

Apparently hell has frozen over, or at least Coran has finally figured out this internet thing. The Dave Matthews Band is finally on iTunes. All studio albums are available, as individual tracks. This is after the band originally stated that they wanted to preserve the album format by not allowing individual track downloads. The band’s previous experience with online music includes an agreement with Napster that requires users to download and purchase full albums, sale of music from dmband.com in Windows Media format as whole albums, and sale of select live releases from dmband.com in unrestricted FLAC and MP3 formats.

I see this as the DMB playing catchup with the rest of the industry. Fans have wanted this for some time, however I am still not impressed. First of all, these are only the studio albums, which are all 6 albums recorded for RCA (Under the Table and Dreaming, Crash, Before These Crowded Streets, Everyday, Busted Stuff, Stand Up) plus the two Bama Rags releases (Remember Two Things and Recently), and Dave’s solo release (Some Devil). Boyd Tinsley’s album (True Reflections) has been on iTunes for quite a while.

The problem is that the band is not really embracing this technology. Instead it seems like they are being dragged into it, kicking and screaming. It is understandable that the band wants to have more control over their online presence and they feel that through iTunes they lose some of that control. It is NOT understandable how they could blame Apple and iTunes for being incompatible with their proprietary DRM-encumbered CDs. This shows that the band is being reactive and not proactive with technology. Ten years ago this was not the case, as the band was an up-and-coming group that valued the community of internet fans who traded live performances. Today that philosophy seems to be escaping the band as they take measures to prevent fans from trading their live performances online.

So what should the band be doing? Live content is a good place to start. How about next-day live concerts on line and by the track? That way if there is a new tour highlight, new song debuted, any fan can check the setlist on iTunes and immediately download a track of the song. Fans can pick and choose their favorite tour highlights and create iMixes that highlight each tour and the evolution of songs over time.

If I were Coran Capshaw I would be trying to get Steve Jobs on the phone to pitch him an idea, a Jam-band centric portion of the iTunes Music Store. Bands like DMB and Pearl Jam can have years of live archived shows available within a custom portal for each artist. The store would act as a setlist archive were fans can post not only reviews of the recordings but of the concert performances themselves. Apple would still take their standard cut of the sales, but the interface would be designed for the "live band" that has hundreds, or even thousands of shows to sell, BY THE TRACK. The Grateful Dead have already expressed interest in this concept. If Coran couldn’t get this done through iTunes then he should do it through Musictoday, and make the store entirely DRM-free and use itpc podcast URLs to integrate right into iTunes.

One can dream….

Note: I am experimenting with iTMS referral links in this post. Will report the results soon (if there are any).

Class action

2006-03-03T04:10:00.000-05:00

This is interesting. Looks like Sony is actually responding legitimately to their incompetence. I’m not sure how they got my email address though.

From: class.settlement@sonybmg.com

Subject: Class Action Settlement/Software Update Notice

Date: March 2, 2006 6:45:42 PM EST

To: dsemaya@Princeton.EDU

Reply-To: class.settlement@sonybmg.com

***IMPORTANT LEGAL NOTICE/SOFTWARE UPDATE NOTICE***PLEASE READ*** (Please do not respond to this email. Responses will not be read.)

If You Bought, Received or Used a SONY BMG Music Entertainment CD Containing Either XCP or Media Max Content Protection Software, Your Rights May Be Affected By a Class Action Settlement, And You Should Download Updates For That Software.

What is this about?

A settlement has been proposed in a lawsuit brought against SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Inc., SunnComm International Inc., and First 4 Internet, Ltd. ("Defendants"). The lawsuit, In re SONY BMG CD Technologies Litigation, Case No. 1:05-cv-09575-NRB, is pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and relates to XCP and MediaMax content protection software installed on certain SONY BMG music CDs.

The Settlement resolves claims that the Defendants manufactured and sold CDs containing XCP and MediaMax software without adequately disclosing the limitations the software imposes on the use of the CDs and the security vulnerabilities it creates. The Defendants have denied that they did anything wrong.

Who Is Included, And What Does The Settlement Provide?

The settlement provides relief for persons who bought, received or used SONY BMG CDs with either XCP or MediaMax software. Under the settlement, any person in possession of an XCP CD can exchange it for a replacement CD, an MP3 download of the same album, and either (a) cash payment of $7.50 and one (1) free album download from a list of 200 albums, or (b) three (3) free album downloads from that list.

Purchasers of CDs containing MediaMax 5.0 software will receive a free

MP3 download of the same album and one (1) additional free album download. Purchasers of CDs containing MediaMax 3.0 software will receive a free MP3 download of the same album.

The settlement also requires the Defendants to stop manufacturing SONY BMG CDs with XCP or MediaMax 3.0 and 5.0 software and, until 2008: (1) make available updates to fix all known security vulnerabilities caused by XCP and MediaMax software; (2) provide software programs to uninstall XCP and MediaMax software safely; (3) fix any future security vulnerabilities discovered in MediaMax and any other content protection software placed on SONY BMG CDs; (4) provide independent verification that personal information about users of SONY BMG CDs has not and will not be collected through XCP or MediaMax; (5) waive certain provisions of the end user license agreements for XCP and MediaMax software; and

(6) ensure that any other content protection software will be clearly disclosed, independently tested and readily uninstalled.

At 9:15a.m. on May 22, 2006, the Court will hold a hearing at the United States District Court, Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street, Courtroom 21A, New York, New York 10007-1312, to decide whether to approve the settlement and the class attorneys’ fees and costs.

How Do I Participate In The Settlement?

If you bought or received a SONY BMG Music CD containing XCP or MediaMax software and want to receive the relief you may be eligible for under the settlement, you must submit an online claim form at www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com, or mail a claim form to:

SONY BMG CD Technologies Settlement

P.O. Box 1804, Faribault, MN 55021-1804

All claim forms must be submitted by December 31, 2006.

What Are My Other Options?

If you bought, received or used a SONY BMG Music CD containing XCP or MediaMax software, and you do not want to be legally bound by the settlement or receive a replacement CD, cash, free downloads or other relief, you must exclude yourself by May 1, 2006. If you do not exclude yourself, certain of your claims against the Defendants that were or could have been asserted in the lawsuit will be released, meaning you may not be able to sue the Defendants for those claims.

To view the detailed legal Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement, Motion for Attorneys’ Fees and Settlement Fairness Hearing and to download the software updates, visit www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com.

You may obtain further information by contacting the claims administrator at the address above or by calling toll free 1-800-242-7610.

My Butler suggestions ignored by Princeton

2006-02-22T00:43:00.000-05:00

Last week Princeton released the plans to renovate Butler. Unfortunately, they aren’t going with my original suggestion of renovating the existing buildings by adding essential amenities, such as tunnels with skylights and enclosed bridges to connect all the buildings underground and an underground pool in the center of the courtyard. Instead they will level the place and make new dorms that match the other new dorms on campus.

It seems that they may still connect the buildings together, but from the current descriptions it is unclear at this point. I must say that I now officially feel gypped. I spent two years isolated in a single in Butler and I wouldn’t wish that on any incoming freshman (especially against their wishes like myself). Maybe I should withhold gifts to the university until I save up enough to cover the cost of room and board for two years. Although on second thought that may mean that I don’t get to drink beer at reunions, so maybe I’ll just rant about it on this blog which no one reads.

On that note I should mention that the new Butler will be a four-year residential college, an idea that I do not agree with. We all know that the 4-year residential college concept is designed to weaken the street, regardless of what the administration says. Someday I will explain why this is bad and how it will hurt the administration and the university in the long run.

No, I’m not crazy

2006-01-31T21:14:00.000-05:00

It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty frustrated with the record industry’s use of CD copy-protection schemes and their tendency to blame the fact that they don’t work with the iPod on Apple. Needless to say, when reading Freedom to Tinker today I was excited to learn that Ed Felten and Alex Halderman agree with me.

Freedom to Tinker has been a favorite blog of mine for the past 18 months. It is run by one my Computer Science Professors at Princeton, Ed Felten. I took Ed’s Information Security class in the fall of 2003 and I was fascinated by security design and policy. DRM has also been an interest of mine, as I wrote my Junior Independent Work paper on the future of DRM. Needless to say that paper is now very outdated (although cited across the internet in foreign-langauge papers that I do not understand) thanks to Apple turning the DRM world on its head just 4 days before my paper was due in May 2003. For my Senior Independent Work (the jukebox) I chose to ignore the DRM issue altogether. I was in some CS classes with Alex Halderman ‘03, who is now a graduate student under Ed. Alex has written some great papers in the past about DRM technology (he’s the one that caused SunnComm’s stock to tank) and has focused on issues that are important to me in the areas of computer privacy at Princeton. Alex is now a guest blogger on Freedom To Tinker as well.

Ed and Alex have been posting draft excerpts from their upcoming paper on CD DRM technologies to their web site in order to solicit feedback. I have enjoyed reading this information so far as it offers a great overview of both the technical and political issues involved and the hidden business agendas of the players involved. Today’s excerpt contains a section on the iPod-compatibility (or lack thereof) with the copy-protected CDs using XCP and MediaMax technology. The following excerpt clearly sums up what I’ve been saying all along:

Conspicuously absent from the XCP and MediaMax players is support for the Apple iPod—by far the most popular portable music player with more than 80% of the market [citation]. A Sony FAQ blames Apple for this shortcoming and urges users to direct complaints to them:”Unfortunately, in order to directly and smoothly rip content into iTunes it requires the assistance of Apple. To date, Apple has not been willing to cooperate with our protection vendors to make ripping to iTunes and to the iPod a simple experience.’’ [citation]. Strictly speaking, it is untrue that Sony requires Apple’s cooperation to work with the iPod. They ship thousands of albums that work “smoothly’’ with iTunes every day: unprotected CDs. What Sony has difficulty doing is moving music to the iPod while keeping it wrapped in copy protection. This is because Apple has so far refused to license its proprietary DRM, a system called FairPlay.

The labels don’t need Apple to support the iPod, they just need to stop treating their customers like criminals. As I’ve been saying for months, if they would just ship normal CDs there wouldn’t be an issue. The labels obviously have a (not so) hidden agenda here. I consider Ed and Alex the leading academic authority on DRM so it means a lot to me for them to have the same position.

On a related note, Ed and Alex will be appearing at an upcoming Spyware workshop at NYU in March. Seeing as how I work with NYU regularly and live fairly close I’ll be attending. There are some high profile speakers and panelists. It should be interesting.

Grand Central Terminal Departures

2005-12-13T00:04:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered that the MTA posts Grand Central departure information on their web site. This is essentially an electronic version of the big board. For years I have been waiting for something like this but for Penn Station not Grand Central. Nowadays I don’t commute from Long Island but I would still like to have this.

If anyone knows if this information is available somewhere please let me know. I’d very much like to create a dashboard widget for it, very much like a similar Konfa—ahem, Yahoo! Widget that I found here, which alerted me to this whole thing.

I’ve this creeping suspicion that things here are not as they seem…

2005-10-09T22:15:00.000-04:00

Waldo Jaquith of nancies.org posted an article last week claiming that DMB is undermining RCA’s copy protection. This is hardly the case and nancies.org, which claims to be “the best stop for DMB since 1998″ is about 4 months late to this issue. The instructions that Waldo links to are the same that I’ve discussed before. These are not circumvention directions. The directions that Switchfoot posted (which have since been removed by Sony) are circumvention directions. DMB instead tells you how to burn and rip a CD, which causes a very noticeable loss in quality, the intended consequence of the DRM-stricken WMA files that are included with the Stand Up disc. DMB is giving the company line here, nothing more.

It would be nice to see the band grow a spine and recall the disc, replacing all copies with a standard audio disc, but it’s pretty clear that it won’t happen. I’m lucky to have bought the dual disc version, although the copy protection technology does not effect Macs. However I think we’re all going to have to remember now to hold down that shift key whenever inserting audio CDs into a computer.

I can’t recall myself how I went down…

2005-09-30T18:48:00.000-04:00

So it seems that my prediction as to how Sony would react to Switchfoot’s public insubordination is partially correct as well as completely wrong. I was right in predicting that Sony would remove Switchfoot bassist Tim Foreman’s directions on circumventing the copy protection measures on their new album from Sony’s own discussion boards. However what I was not expecting was Sony to recall every copy of the cd.

At first look it seems that Sony is owning up to their mistake, but upon further reading it seems as if it may be just a ruse. This article states that, "according to Leigh Ann Hardie, VP of strategic initiatives and publicity for EMI CMG Label Group, ‘incorrect setting were used during the CD’s mastering process which inadvertently bars the consumer from making burns or digital copies – a result that was not intended.’” Sony is playing it all off as a mistake, which we all know not to be true since Sony-BMG is shipping the exact same technology on DMB’s Stand Up album.

New discs will be available in-store. I highly doubt that this will completely free of copy-protection. Let’s see what these new CDs are really like when they hit. My prediction, again skeptical, is that they will still include the same technology, but with WMV files that carry less restrictions (most notably, the ability to be burned to CD a limited number of times). It seems that my predictions jive with those in the Switchfoot forums on Sony’s site.

Hopefully this will be the last time that I quote christian rock lyrics on my blog.

Adding To The Noise

2005-09-19T19:25:00.001-04:00

It seems the band Switchfoot is quite a bit smarter than the Dave Matthews Band. The band’s new album Nothing Is Sound shipped from Sony with the ultra-convenient and super-friendly copy protection hacks that we’ve grown to love from our friends at Sony BMG. While this is no way surprising, I now have much more respect for Switchfoot in regards to this issue. Instead of hiding behind their label and blaming Apple for the problems that their fans were having (who has nothing to do with the fact that the fans are being tricked into buying something which is NOT actually an audio CD), Tim Foreman, the band’s bass player, actually took the time to post detailed information on the band’s discussion board (hosted by Sony) that explains how to import the album into iTunes, without any loss of quality or any DRM restriction.

I am very proud of Foreman for posting this information. As a musician who actually cares about his listeners, he realizes that the record label has unjustly restricted the use of the music that he has created and he has taken the proper steps to correct this. He even apologized for putting his fans through the annoyance of the copy protection scheme. That being said, Tim Foreman either has some large cahunas or is not too up-to-speed on the current copyright lawn in this great (yet sometimes misguided) nation of ours. (Or he’s not too bright, but I’ll assume that isn’t the case.)

You see in our land we have this pesky little law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This law, pushed through congress by the motion picture and recording industry cartels during the Clinton administration, severely limits the First Amendment rights of the American people by making several important actions illegal and punishable by huge fines and/or imprisonment. These huge fines were the basis for the $97.8 billion in charges brought against Dan Peng while I was in school with him. I gave him $20 from my Pay Pal account to help him out. I doubt he felt it.

The DMCA’s supposed intention is to stifle piracy of music and audio content. There are sections of the law that set the penalties for "primary infringement" at $150,000 a pop and introduces a new crime, that to my knowledge doesn’t really exist in the real world, "contributory infringement" at $125,000 a pop. The majority of Peng’s charge was for contributory infringement for running a web site that indexed the campus network. On top of that the DMCA also makes it illegal to circumvent any copy protection technology. The tools that Foreman links to in his discussion board post are most likely interpreted as circumvention devices by the RIAA.

By posting the aforementioned information to the internet, Foreman has just exposed himself to criminal prosecution by the RIAA’s army of lawyers. Right now Switchfoot is a relatively popular band, but they’re no superstars. Yes, they’ve sold over 3 million albums, but I’d be interested to see what the label does here. Do they try to shut up Foreman? Do they threaten to drop the band from the label? Are there contingents in the band’s contract that will penalize the band for what the label sees as aiding music piracy? I would think that if Bono decided to pull a stunt like this, the industry wouldn’t be able to stop him because he’s the frontman of one of the biggest bands in the world. Switchfoot, while a profitable investment for Sony, does not bring in U2’s cash.

My prediction is that within 72 hours Sony will remove the post from their web site and pretend like nothing happened. I would prefer if they just acknowledged the fact that the world doesn’t want this copy protection crap and stop wasting their money. I don’t even have to look myself in order to say in full confidence that the entire album is already available through the major file sharing networks. That is because no copy protection technology has ever prevented copying. There will always be a way around it. If someone wants to steal the content they will find a way.

I could go on about how the DMCA has already stifled innovation and academic progress in several key research areas (and we wonder why our country is falling behind in technology). Instead I will just say that while I predict Sony will take typical RIAA-style action, I hope they will instead realize that what they are doing is wrong and change. One can dream.

While everything is open... Everything is shut down, down, down

2005-05-19T20:04:00.000-04:00

So just when I thought that the Dave Matthews Band had finally seen the light, it looks like they really haven't got a clue.

I had seen some scattered reports of fans having problems ripping the new DMB album, Stand Up, I originally thought that it may be due to the new DualDisc format that was offered. A DualDisc is a single disc that is an audio CD on one side and a DVD disc on the other. The end result is a fairly nifty contraption that lacks the nice printed artwork surface of a standard CD or DVD, but offers the two discs in the space of one. Stand Up is offered as a CD or DualDisc option. The last album, Busted Stuff, included a DVD in addition to a standard audio CD, an option which I would have preferred, as evidenced below.

It turns out that fans are having trouble with both the DualDisc and compact disc version of the album. I only have the DualDisc version so that is all I can comment on so far.

I noticed on the back of the album there is the following disclaimer:

*The audio side of this disc does not conform to the CD specifications and therefore not all DVD and CD players will play the audio side of this disc.

Notice that the FBI warning is much larger and easier to read than the compatibility disclaimer.

Also notice the lack of the Compact Disc logo that is usually found on CDs. The disc shipped in a different-shaped casing than the standard jewel case that audio CDs usually ship in. The case is the same size but one edge is curved instead of straight. I imagine this due to the fact that the jewel case is associated with a standard audio CD, which this is not. However this is all still a bit fishy.

The strangeness lies in the fact that, by its description (as described on a little flyer found inside the case), DualDisc itself doesn't change the Audio CD spec. There may actually be some sort of DRM layer applied to the audio side, in addition to the DualDisc technology. It seems this DRM technology is what is causing ripping problems for some users. The problems people are reportings are still inconsistent so it is unclear if the DualDisc version actually contains any DRM technologies, or if some optical drives are having trouble reading the CD surface. By some reports, it appears that the audio-only version of the disc contains DRM technology.

Recently the DMB posted a notice on their official site with information on how to "move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod". Interestingly the directions tell you to rip the CD in iTunes normally for Mac users, but Windows users must allow the CD's proprietary software to load (and agree to its license), and burn the protected Windows Media Player files that ship on the CD, then rip that newly burned CD into iTunes. This process of course severly degrades the quality of the audio from the already degraded Windows Media compression, is time consuming, actually costs the listener money (in the form of a blank CD), and is quite annoying. Also, if you want to burn using a different program (like Winamp) you must "obtain a license to do so." So the ~~felons~~, err, fans now must "obtain a license" to burn the music that they've already paid for.

This DRM solution sounds quite a bit like SunnComm's DRM technology, the same technology that Alex Halderman (funny picture of Alex) discovered could be circumvented by holding down the shift key while loading the CD into your computer. While I am still unclear about the origins of the technology, the workaround is still the same. I personally can't really talk more about the appearance of the proprietary Windows software used because I don't use Windows regularly (and my PC is currently running Linux). Ironically, owning a Mac has made me MORE COMPATIBLE with the CD than PCs. This after I've ranted on and on about how DMB is igoring Mac users by selling Windows Media Player tracks on their web site. Maybe I should be happy to be ignored.

Yet the directions on dmband.com don't stop there. Here's the kicker, they are actually BLAMING APPLE for this incompatibility:

Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html

So let me get this straight. You decide to ship a non-standard audio CD and then complain that Apple won't support your proprietary music files on their player which supports all standard audio CDs as-is? Wouldn't it have been a whole lot easier if you just shipped a standard audio CD instead of a DRM'd disc? Why ship a non-standard CD that costs more to produce and is known to be incompatible with the iPod, when you know that your listeners will want to load the tracks onto their iPod? The band is purposely shipping a CD that isn't compatible with the iPod, when it would be easier to ship a CD that IS compatible, and they still blame someone else for all the problems that they are causing!

I've been pretty critical of the band's business actions in the past, but this really takes the cake. The band is now treating their fans like criminals. Apparently we're not mature enough to handle their audio recordings without the protection of DRM or they might end up on some of those nasty file sharing services out there. Well guess what? It's alredy there. The album leaked long before. Not only that, but the whole album was up on VH1.com as a protected Windows Media Stream and a bunch of fans extracted the supposedly *protected* audio and then spread the files all over the internet. That shows just how useful this protection is.

For a band that has been so liberal with their taping policy (allowing fans to record their shows for free) this really hurts. They obviously knew there was going to be some backlash from this. This is evident in the form of a notice that shipped with the bonus companion CD that was offered to DMB fan club members who pre-ordered the CD. (I'll avoid the rant on how ridiculous the shipping charges were with the pre-order, since someone else has already covered that.) The companion CD shipped in a cardboard sleeve, sealed in plastic. This insert was included inside the sealed sleeve:

So Musictoday is basically giving a big finger to all those people who complain that the CD is un-rippable since that isn't a "manufacturer defect" (it's actually the manufacturer's intention). What bothers me even more about this notice is that it is included in a separate bonus CD. The actual Stand Up album itself is sealed separately. I opened the album first, and then opened the bonus CD and found the notice, meaning that Musictoday did not inform me of their policy until I had already opened the album, at which point they will not take it back. This seems like a catch-22 to me, a catch-22 where Musictoday always wins and the ~~criminal~~ customer always loses.

To reiterate, what the band is doing here is shipping a non-standard audio CD that intentionally causes problems and is laying the blame on someone else for the problems which their users are experiencing. They are essentially causing a problem and blaming someone else for it. This is the same thing I used to do when I juice on the carpet as little kid and I blamed it on my sister. The big difference here is that the Dave Matthews Band/Musictoday/Redlight Management/Coran Caphshaw/RCA Records are grown adults and should be held accountable for their actions. The only contact email address that I can find for the band is fanmail@davematthewsband.com. There is also a feedback address for Musictoday, Red Light Management and RCA Records.

I recommend writing a brief, poignant email to the band and CCing the other addresses. If you would like help you can start with mine:

Dear DMB, I am offended and insulted that you would ship an album that is non-standard and intentionally difficult to rip to a computer or iPod. I am insulted that you would provide "directions" on a workaround and have the nerve to blame Apple, a company that is not at all responsible for this problem, and even encourage me to contact Apple about the problem, which was entirely created by you. I am hurt that you would infringe on my first amendment right to free speech by limiting my use of the album. I am also hurt that you would violate my rights as a consumer set forth by the Supreme Court Sony Betamax decision of 1984 that gives me the right to spaceshift the content that I purchase (transfer the content to another device). For a band that claims to have such high regard for civil liberties, this is a most dissapointing action. Sincerely, ---
Click this link to open up the email and cut and paste the message above to get started.

UPDATES:

In response to some more information that I've been reading, I've changed the above to reflect the possibility that the DualDisc version contains no DRM and that the audio-only version does.

I also want to respond to the idea that I'm somehow angry about DMB looking to screw Mac/iPod users in some way. That is not the case. What bothers me is the band's inability to take responsibility for their own actions. If this was the label's call, and not their own, then the fan community should be just as concerned. The band renegotiated their contract with RCA last year and the band walked away with one of the best contracts in the industry for an artist. So if the band's contract allows for the label to ship these discs, in favor of giving the band more money, then the band obviously does not put the rights of their fans very high on their priority list.

Here we have been standing for a long, long time...

2005-04-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

The Dave Matthews Band has finally made an appearance on the iTunes Music Store. As I have discussed earlier, the band had previously opposed the store. So far the band has one song, the new American Baby single, but it seems more are coming. I will refrain from any speculation on exactly what music will be added or how the band will allow it to be sold, and just say that it's about time. Now hopefully they'll get rid of those stupid Windows Media tracks from dmband.com.

Caltech vs. MIT

2005-04-11T08:39:00.000-04:00

More on those great college pranks. It looks like Caltech did a great job messing with the kiddies at MIT's prefrosh weekend. Very impressive.

What's wrong with this picture?

2005-04-03T19:35:00.000-04:00

Below we see Daniel J. Peng, Jack Valenti, and Alex Halderman.

Dan Peng (Princeton '05) is infamously known for being sued by the RIAA in 2003 for $97.8 billion, for running a network indexing service.

Jack Valenti is the former president of the Motion Picture Association of America and is one of America's most influential pro-copyright lobbyists. In 1982 he testified before congress, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Since then the home video market has become the major source of income for the movie industry.

Alex Halderman (Princeton '03 and GS in Computer Science) is famous for his 2003 analysis of SunnComm's CD copy protection technology, which could easily be circumvented by holding down the shift key while loading the CD into your computer. After their stock fell by 25% in 48 hours, SunnComm, threatened to sue Alex and Princeton claiming the paper was "erroneous", but eventually shied away from the accusations. Alex's previous papers were partial inspiration for my own junior independent work in Computer Science on DRM.

So in this picture we see Dan Peng, one of the biggest victims of the entertainment industry's reckless crusade against college students, Jack Valenti, one of the leaders of this crusade, and Alex Halderman, one of the industry's biggest nuisances through his continuous work in revealing the stupidity of the industry's actions.

I wonder how they even got Valenti to pose.

Taping Vaco

2005-01-22T16:00:00.000-05:00

I took the train down to Princeton last Tuesday night to see Virginia Coalition at Colonial (I've blogged about them before). I of course graduated back in June, but I've become a big Vaco fan as of late and I couldn't pass up a free show in my old house. I brought down all my computer gear, hoping to be able to record the show but luck was not on my side.

I have recorded quite a few shows at Colonial and other Princeton locations. Most of the time the sound guy (usually one of DJ Bob's henchmen) would let me plug into the sound board with an RCA cable. I recorded a bunch of shows this way including three Pat McGee Band shows, my own Open Mic performances, and a few campus bands. I was used to recording at Colonial since I knew where all the power and connections were, and Bob's sound guy seemed to always remember me and was willing to help me out.

In order to pack light, I didn't bring my XLR cables because they're pretty heavy and I've never needed them to record at Colonial before. Of course, what is the only kind of connection that the sound guy is willing to give me? You guessed it, XLR. Even if I had XLR, I probably wouldn't have been able to record because the outlet on the wall near the sound board was off (it is apparently controlled by the light dimmer in the room, yet in the past I was able to use it with the lights off so I don't really understand that). So I had no power or audio in that location.

So I needed two things - power and audio. Unfortunately with audio my only real option was a crummy computer microphone that I had. I don't own any real mics. I always think about buying one but it would have to be for taping only since a vocal mic like an SM58 isn't great for recording performances. Also one microphone creates a mono recording, which is kind of crummy. I also can't run a mic like that directly into my computer without a preamp to power the mic. Therefore I'm looking at about $400 minimum for the two mics and the USB preamp, never-mind the stand.

As for power, I searched high and low, everywhere I could, to try and find a wall outlet that actually worked. My PowerBook battery doesn't last too long while recording since it is spinning the hard disk the entire time. My computer probably isn't the best thing to record to, now that I only have a 15" PowerBook. A 12 incher was much easier to manage but I don't have one anymore. A DAT recorder is $800 so I really don't want to drop that much on something that I'll only use a couple times each year.

I finally found power in the kitchen of all places. The kitchen was right next to the dining room, which is essentially "stage left" since they put a stage up in the dining room which faces out into the large fireplace area in the front of the club. The power outlet I found was about six feet off the ground and occupied by two things. I discovered the first was this eerie blue light fixture that I tried unplugging but I soon realized that the light would be more useful if on, so I could see what I was doing. I traced the other cord to a big box which looked like a fridge with glass doors but I think it was actually a food warmer. Since it was off at the time (it was the middle of the night and there was no food to warm) I unplugged it set my computer atop the warmer to keep it close to the outlet (I also neglected my extension cord while "packing light") and to keep it out of the way of the bands and crew walking by. I then plugged in my cheapo microphone and tried to find a way to position it to record the band.

I eventually settled on sticking it to the top of the doorway right by the left speaker stack. The mic obviously wasn't meant for this type of recording so it was clipping and overloading like mad, so I connected it to my Mac using my iMic and turned off the switch that powers the mic. I thought maybe with just a little bit of power it would pick up the signal fine and I could mess with the sound later. That was a poor decision because now listening to my recordings, the clipping recording wasn't all that bad and the no-power recording (which is what I used to record all of Vaco's set) really isn't audible at all. Maybe with some work I can bring the volume up loud enough and filter out all the massive buzzing noise but I'm not too confident that it will work.

Note to self: buy some recording gear. This ghetto stuff isn't cutting it anymore. If only I could record on my 4G iPod. Maybe soon the iPod Linux project will progress far enough with 4G support to allow me to use my iPod for recording with an external battery pack. That would solve much of my problems. Until that time, I could look into another recording device, but anything that would suit my needs would cost just as much as an iPod since I would need over 2 GB of recording space for any show that I record.

Macworld Fun

2005-01-14T11:02:00.000-05:00

Tuesday was the big day at Macworld San Francisco. Steve Jobs unveiled some great stuff and I feel like I've got plenty to comment on. It took me a while to get to see the keynote because I made a detour down to Princeton for a night to see and record Vaco (I'll have something about that later), but here goes, in order of presentation:

Apple Stores: The London store looks incredible. Much cooler than SOHO.

iMac G5: It is interesting that the iMac is Apple's best selling Mac right now since the iMac G4 didn't sell well and that was largely attributed to the increase in price. The new iMac isn't really any cheaper yet it is moving fast. This is most likely due to the iPod styling and marketing.

Tiger features: Most of this stuff we've seen before, but it is clear that the new features of Tiger are continuously being refined. The Mail-iPhoto integration looks great, especially the slide show features. The Spotlight and smart folder features look awesome as well. Dashboard seems to be moving ahead of Konfabulator in some ways but still lags behind in others (since you can only view your widgets if you're in the Dashboard mode). I can't wait until the release, but Apple offered no more details on the actual release date. Steve maintains that Apple is on schedule for the first half of 2005, so my guess is a June release.

Just a note on the application crash in Steve's demo. While demoing Tiger Steve somehow got into the slideshow mode of Spotlight by accident and couldn't get out. He made the comment "that's why we have backups" and he switches a KVM to a different Mac and picks up where he was. The crowd loved this. In contrast, last week at CES when a Media Center 2005 machine "crashed" on Bill Gates the web was buzzing with news of the blunder. While it is certainly unfair that Steve gets applauded for mistakes while Bill gets ridiculed, in this case there is a big difference. Bill was showing off a currently shipping product, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 while Steve was showing Mac OS X Tiger, a product that will not ship for at least another three months (most likely). That situation hurt Microsoft even more because they were reluctant to quickly switch to the backup device and admit defeat. The comparison is still interesting nonetheless.

Steve also got some laughs while demoing Dashboard. He first showed a slide of the stock ticker, which showed Apple and Pixar up and Microsoft down. The crowd enjoyed that one. Then when actually demonstrating Dashboard he saw Apple's stock and mentioned "We're down a little bit today. Well, we've still got a lot more to go in the keynote, don't we." The crowd also loved this one. Bill Gates needed to bring in a professional (Conan O'Brien) for laughs but apparently Steve can hold his own with the comedy.

Final Cut Express HD: The most important part of FCEHD (not a fan of that acronym) is the upgrade price, $99. Apple is trying really hard to get people into HD and this price is very competitive. It's also great to get Soundtrack (recently discontinued as a separate application) as part of the upgrade since Soundtrack and HD functionality were two features of the more expensive Final Cut Pro HD package.

iLife '05 apps:

iMovie 5: I'm hoping to get back into iMovie with this revision. I would often get frustrated in the past by the speed (or lack thereof). My dad keeps remind me that I was suppoed to make that movie of our European trip from August 2001 (yes, I know). As for HD, if the cheapest HD camcorder is $3500 then we're not going to see any iMovie users making HD movies, especially since you can't burn these things to disc yet. It looks like Apple is trying to get a head start on HD, but I highly doubt that 2005 will be the year of HD, more like 2008. Kinutake Ando, the CEO of Sony America came out and rambled about the expensive camcorder and Apple working together but he said one very interesting point towards the end, and it was that Sony was working hard to bring down the price of HD camcorders. This is the big news for iMovie HD since until these camcorders hit the market there really won't be many HD home movies being made.

iPhoto 5: Looks like a great upgrade. I'm going to try and bring back in my old iPhoto libraries of about 2000 pictures (which is still too slow in iPhoto 4). The calendar view looks most convenient to me. Nice to see Apple making their prints more cost competitive, and the books look nice but I don't think I would ever buy one.

iDVD 5: Basically its more themes. Not much else in terms of functionality, but since the themes are THAT good, it's a nice upgrade. The problem still remains that with the current formats, there is really no way to burn HD discs to play at home so there's no HD for iDVD. This is one of the main reasons why I don't see HD taking off this year.

GarageBand 2: WOOHOO! 8-track simultaneous recording, built-in instrument tuner, auto-tune vocals, automatic pitch shifting/key change, automatic time expansion/compression of audio with tempo change, track locking to save those CPU cycles, music notation, more automation features… can you tell I'm excited about this one? GarageBand has been my favorite application since day one, but a couple of annoyances have bugged me. It seems like Apple has given GarageBand the mythical "ProBand" features, most important of which is the multi-track recording. They've also addressed performance by allowing us to lock a track down so that it isn't processed in real time, effectively freeing up CPU cycles for other tracks. I'm loving the tuner idea since my current tuner solution is the Amplitube Live demo application. Notation is going to be very helpful for editing midi data, especially those drum tracks. The current midi editing interface is pretty lame, so I'm looking forward to the improvement. The automation features (like automated panning, in addition to volume) is definitely a "pro" feature in my mind, so I'm glad to see Apple including it. Auto-tune (they don't call it that) is an expensive plugin for the big apps like Pro Tools, and it is commonly used in commercial recordings by Ashley Sim- I mean, the big pop stars . It is great to see Apple giving us the ability to do what the big record labels do: turn a mediocre singer into a great vocalist.

The one big issue that Apple completely ignored is the fact that there is a lack of moderately-priced multi-channel audio interfaces available for the Mac. Steve was recording John Mayer and his pal play the song "Neon" in four tracks, but how was he doing it? He most certainly wasn't using the G5's line input since that device is stereo. Apple has added the M-Audio FireWire 410 to the GarageBand accessories page, which is $500 from the Apple store and that's probably what Steve was using, but it wasn't mentioned. 8-track recording means nothing without the hardware to support it. There were those prominent rumors of the "Asteroid" FireWire breakout box, which are apparently true since Apple has sued the rumor sites about it. Apple really needs to offer some aggressively-priced hardware to make multi-channel recording accessible to us "mere mortals" because right now the additional gear required to make GarageBand useful is pretty expensive. I've been putting off buying the M-Audio MobilePre USB interface because of the rumors of Apple's box. I can't stand the waiting.

I've got a theory as to why we didn't see the "Asteroid" firewire audio interface this week and it has to do with Tiger. AppleInsider has reported that Tiger will have the ability to aggregate multiple audio interfaces to allow applications to see them as one multichannel interface. So you could plug in 4 Griffin iMic devices, which are stereo devices, into your Mac and configure it to give you 8 input and 8 output channels over USB and any application will see this one device. Since the rumor was that Asteroid is stereo, I'm thinking that Apple is waiting for this feature in Tiger, that way they can offer you two, or three, or fifteen Asteroids, all working together simultaneously in GarageBand. That's big money for Apple and it would be great for us amateurs who don't have the big bucks for expensive multi-channel devices but are willing to spend slowly to add capacity. I hope I'm right about this one, but I can't wait anymore.

iTunes: It's interesting how Apple has now taken the iTunes updates out of the iLife product cycle. iTunes isn't exactly an iLife application anymore since it is so heavily dependent on the iPod, and vice versa.

Overall package: The price has increased by 60% to $80. This is a pretty big increase. The educational price has doubled from $30 to $60 (in contrast I was able to negotiate bulk licensing for iLife '04 at Princeton for $15 per copy). Yes, it IS free on all new Macs, but there are plenty of us who already have Macs and want all this great stuff. One increase isn't so bad, but if Apple plans on setting a precedent with annual price increases then we'll have a problem in the future. Last year's upgrade to iLife was much larger, adding an entirely new application with GarageBand yet this is the year they hike the price up.

iWork:

Keynote 2: Nice update to Keynote. I've only done one important presentation in Keynote and I found it to be a great app, but performance was lacking. It doesn't seem this issue has been addressed. The presenter display seems like the biggest addition, but the big question is if it will work on iBooks, since they don't support display spanning like PowerBooks and can't show different things on each display. We'll find out soon enough.

Pages: The templates look awesome but Apple didn't really focus on the basic word processing features. It doesn't have inline grammar checking, sadly a feature of Word that I have come to rely on. Spell checking is a system service so it is there "for free", but auto-correction also seems to have been ignored. Pages is looking like a low end Quark competitor, not so much like a Word processor. I'm writing this now in Word 2004, and I would love to toss this app due to it's non-standard UI and fake Aqua controls. So far we don't know if Pages can fulfill my needs.

Overall package: For $80 the package is competitively priced but there are some major problems here. Steve mentioned "building a replacement for AppleWorks" and that is what it seems like Apple is doing, but the AppleWorks replacement is nowhere near done. There is no drawing or painting capabilities, and no spreadsheet. Ideally the replacement would also include a database program (iFileMaker is a mouthful) like AppleWorks has. If Apple is pulling AppleWorks any time soon (probably not yet since the page for the program still exists) then they are creating a serious hole. Not to mention that the new Mac mini does not include iWork OR AppleWorks, meaning that this new Mac meant for switchers has no word processor, which brings us to...

iMac mini: I personally think the term miniMac sounds a whole lot cooler, but I'm not Steve Jobs, so what do I know about cool? In general Apple did a great job with this one, but there are some glaring issues that may or may not cause trouble for Apple. Steve's BYODMK (bring your own display, mouse and keyboard) idea is somewhat of a double-edged sword. Most budget PCs include a mouse and keyboard and most of the keyboards and mice that people have in their homes are PS/2, not USB. Apple's USB mouse and keyboard package for the iMac mini is $58. While I am a big fan of Apple's current USB keyboard, $58 is very expensive for a $500 computer. Any USB keyboard and mouse would work, but using Apple's input devices is very much a part of the Mac experience, especially the keyboard. On a PC keyboard the option and Apple keys (alt and Windows) are swapped. This is a nightmare when you switch between machines frequently. There are a couple of third party companies (Logitech, Macally) that support swapping these keys but those are not the budget keyboards that the potential customers for this computer would be buying. I hope those companies start offering inexpensive keyboard and mouse sets specifically designed for this machine, with a proper command/Apple key. CompUSA and other retailers seem to stand the most to gain by bundling these packages with a new Mac mini, since we know Apple will never bundle someone else's input device with their computers.

The second issue is TV connection. This device is practically screaming for you to hook it up to your TV. Yet Apple doesn't seem to want to help you with this task. There is so sort of software or hardware available from Apple designed to use your Mac from your TV and the adapter costs extra. I'm going to predict that a year from now Apple will be introducing a media center edition of this machine (with a flashy title like Mac mini TV) to really make this thing the center of your digital hub. It is very clear that OS X is the best platform to build a media center device on top of, due to the unrivaled multimedia capabilities, slick graphics and video features, and of course Apple's incredible style. However, so far Apple has left us high and dry in terms of actual functionality.

Hobbyists and enthusiasts may want to use this box for projects and devices (like a DVR, home media server, or even in your car). Apple has of course limited the expandability of this machine, which makes sense, but I have one question that I cannot find the answer to. Is the hard drive 2.5" or 3.5"? Dell makes some very small desktops (a little larger than the Mac mini, and sit vertically) but it uses entirely notebook components. If the drive is a notebook drive it severely limits the hack-ability of this thing, especially as a media center. There are tons of geeks itching to put a 500 GB drive in there but there has to be the room for it. Does anyone know the answer?

As I mentioned before, Apple is not bundling iWork OR AppleWorks with this computer. This means that a new customer who buys this machine for his kids will be ripping his hair out when his daughter has to write a paper only to discover the only thing that closely resembles a word processor in OS X is TextEdit. I think that Apple really needs to include either Pages or AppleWorks on this machine to make it a suitable entry level machine. Windows users think that a word processor is free since most cheap PCs at least include Microsoft Works with Word, or a low end Word Perfect. Even the AOL PC includes an AOL office suite based on Open Office.

One other small thing, I'm an IT manager and I see great applications for this machine in the corporate world since a Mac is now initially only a little more expensive than a PC, but after about a year the difference should pay for itself in support costs. A company can buy/build/scrounge together a PC for about $400 including Windows XP Pro. Add Microsoft Office on top of that and its about $600. A new Mac mini with iWork is cheaper, with Office it's a little more expensive, but factor in the $50 annual antivirus cost, and the many hours that are needed to support the beast and the Mac mini looks pretty competitive. It would be great if the Mac mini could be a drop in replacement for a PC box. Pull out the PC and replace it with a Mac, leave all other devices and cables in place. It's a little tougher with this box because the power supply is external and the aforementioned lack of PS-2 ports (CompUSA and the like would be wise to aggressively push those PS-2 to USB keyboard and mouse adapters). It's a little bit more of a process. I would have been willing to sacrifice the weight and size for a single-box computer. I'm sure any clips that might come out to carry around the machine with the power supply attached will make the computer comparatively expensive (any accessory for this thing is expensive since the computer itself is so cheap).

There is also the display issue. Apple only makes high end flat panel displays. If a new customer walks into an Apple store to buy a Mac mini they can't even walk out with a display. Apple offers nothing in the way of a low end CRT. Apple has reasons for doing this and I understand that, but it makes the sale of this machine particularly difficult at Apple's retail stores. Again, I think CompUSA is best positioned to sell this machine for that reason.

Another thing that irks me about Apple's consumer-level devices is the lack of analog audio input. Apple seems to believe that audio input is a pro feature. This I cannot understand. In 1990 Apple introduced the very first computer ever with audio input, the Macintosh LC. I had one (actually an LC II). It was tons of fun to record all sorts of sounds using both the PlainTalk microphone and line input from my discman and VCR. The LC was Apple's budget computer at the time, coming with practically zero software and was aggressively priced. Apple now believes that only pro users should have this feature and consumers need to purchase additional hardware for this basic feature. This effectively makes Apple's consumer level machines more expensive when you have to add $40 for an iMic. I was happy when Apple started bringing back analog audio input with the eMac and iMac G5, but the Mac mini and iBook still lack this feature. If a kid wants to use GarageBand with the Mac mini they are required to buy more hardware. I don't see how Apple can justify not spending the 30 cents on this "feature" when every PC in the world, no matter the price, has it.

All of that being said, I am trying to find an excuse to buy one of these things as soon as I can. It will certainly make my collection of old iMacs that I am using for various projects pretty useless.

iPod shuffle: On paper this thing doesn't seem all that impressive. Apple has a price advantage in terms of storage but it is lacking many of the features of other flash players, including an FM tuner, and the ability to actually see what song you want to play. The iPod shuffle certainly has a purpose though, and considering my 1 GB USB JumpDrive Sport drive cost me $45 after rebate, and they usually go for about $70, this thing isn't all that bad since it works easily as a key drive. Unfortunately Apple doesn't seem to have learned from the mistakes of the other USB key drive manufacturers with the use of the plastic cap that can easily be lost. Even worse, the included lanyard attaches to the cap and not the iPod itself, so it seems very likely that it could fall off when hanging around your neck. The last thing Apple needs is another "iPod's Dirty Secret" video showing iPods falling off peoples' necks and getting stepped on. I just wish it had some sort of display, even if it only showed the track number and time elapsed. Regardless it is still cool. There will most likely be a lot of nay-sayers in the press and Apple will most likely prove them wrong when demand will be so high that no one can get their hands on one.

Non-existent items:

I already touched on why I think Apple didn't introduce the Asteroid box, but there were also rumors of an Apple phone last month. All Apple really showed was a Motorola phone running an iTunes client that looks a lot like the iPod Photo interface, and Steve mentioned that there will be a whole bunch of Motorola phones running iTunes this year. That's all great but I personally dislike using Motorola phones. The interface on a Motorola phone pales in comparison with that of a Nokia phone. In general most cell phone UIs are cumbersome and I think Apple would be the best candidate to fix this problem with an iPod-like phone. I envision it similar to last year's Kyocera slider phone, which has a slide out number pad. Apple could make the device function just like an iPod when closed and transform it into a phone when the number pad slides out. It certainly is much more complicated than just combining the two, but if there's any company that can do it right, it is most certainly Apple.

There are rumors of a PowerBook G4 update in the near future, which I believe. While there are geeks worldwide anxiously awaiting a PowerBook G5 I think we all know that it is an extremely difficult task right now. At Apple's financial conference call Wednesday, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said that getting a G5 into a PowerBook will be the "mother of all thermal challenges." This is most certainly being done to cool the excitement and speculation about the PBG5, since everyone knows that it will arrive eventually. What makes this comment more interesting is what Oppenheimer said back in October, "To date, we have chosen not to compete in the sub-$800 desktop market and have put that R&D investment in expanding our products in the music area, in software, and in hardware." This was a very deceptive statement, although not exactly a lie. I think the same can be said about the PowerBook G5 and Apple will probably unveil it at WWDC in June, but it won't be readily available until September. This morning The Register is reporting that the PowerBook G5 is on track for Q2 of this year, which is pretty close to my estimate. We shall see.

In all this was one of the most fun Macworld keynotes. I wish I could have seen it live but it is clear that QuickTime isn't all that great for streaming live events and it costs Apple a bundle. I think Steve's "Reality Distortion Field" (his ability to distort reality in order to convince you that whatever he is saying is "insanely great") is starting to affect more than just the Mac die hards. Wall Street is loving Apple, which they rarelly do, and the analysts are jumping all over the rumors, hype and speculation that us Mac fans love.

I'll probably have a lot more to say about this stuff, especially GarageBand, when my copy of iLife arrives. If you made it this far, thanks for reading this whole thing.

This warehouse frightens me. . .

2004-12-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

I am a member of “The Warehouse” which is billed as “The Official Dave Matthews Band Fan Association.” I am not a member of said fan club because I need the gratification of being in the official fan club. In fact, I avoided joining the fan club during the first two years of its existence because it seemed useless to me. However I joined the Warehouse when it became apparent that the band was becoming too popular. By too popular I mean that it is practically impossible to obtain concert tickets from Ticketmaster and forget the box office since with most venues the tickets go on sale via Ticketmaster long before the box office opens. The Warehouse offers advanced ticket pre-sales to fans, which is supposed to allow members to avoid the Ticketmaster hassle.

The Warehouse sends out annual packages to its membership. These packages contain mostly useless garbage (stickers, pictures of the band, postcards) and one very valuable item, an exclusive live CD of Dave Matthews Band tracks, often mixed and mastered by the band’s longtime engineer, John Alagia. Today I received the 2004 Warehouse package and the Warehouse 5 Volume 4 CD. Shockingly, these packages were released before the end of the year. The Warehouse has been notoriously late with these packages in the past.

My first gripe is that this year they decided to do something “nice” for the senior members of the fan club and send them a CD with 8 tracks (“Warehouse 8”) instead of 5 tracks. This is all nice and good except that I am SUPPOSED to be a fourth year member, but due to a dispute after my first year (Warehouse claims I didn’t renew in time, I claim that I did) I am only a third year member according to them. This snub leaves me with a shorter CD, which is annoying. Although not as annoying as consistently being shafted in the ticket “lotteries.” More on that later, first lets focus on this year’s Warehouse fuckup, the holographic mouse pad.

This year’s gimmick is a holographic, or more accurately a motion card, mouse pad, showing one of two images of the band in concert, depending on the angle you look at the pad. This is all fine and dandy until someone actually tries to use one of these things, only to discover that they don’t work with an optical mouse. Just try moving your mouse around on the surface and watch your cursor jump about the screen like a fly on speed. It’s not pretty, and even worse to try and use. Good job Warehouse, way to test these out. You sent out over 100,000 of these mouse pads in the past two weeks and only about 10,000 will actually be useful to their recipients. Another job well done.

You see, this isn’t the first time that the Warehouse has figured out a way to disappoint 100,000 fans. Let’s not forget the 2003 Warehouse package, which included a carabiner key chain along with the year’s CD. The 2003 CD was a memorable disc, not just because of the song selection, but because half of the CDs arrived to fans cracked. It seems that sending a keychain and a CD in a cardboard, non-padded sleeve, with the CD in a dinky cardboard sleeve and not a jewel case, is a recipe for disaster.

The Warehouse’s earlier screw-ups are relatively minor. In 2002, the disc included tracks that had already been on a labor day radio show, and widely distributed among fans several months before the release. The 5 songs chosen were supposedly the result of a fan poll on the Warehouse web site, but the resulting tracklist does not seem to show it. (It’s well known that the song “When The World Ends” is not a fan favorite by any means). In 2001 the disc included absolutely no music and instead was a video CD containing clips of the band during the creation of the Everyday album. Most of these clips were freely available on the album’s web site and it is no secret that Everyday is the fanbase’s least favorite album. It seems that the Warehouse set themselves an extremely high standard with the first release in 2000, which contained five very special tracks from the December 1998 tour.

I keep referring to this organization as the Warehouse, but the company is actually just a phone number at the offices of Musictoday, a wholly owned subsidiary of Coran Capshaw’s companies, Red Light Communications, or Red Light Management, or MMF, or whatever its called now. It’s Coran’s company, based in Charlottesville. The merchandise machine that’s responsible for such memorable innovations as the Carter Beauford soccer jersey and the remarkably stupid "I LUV DMB" t-shirt. I feel the need to call and complain when I am treated unfairly so It’s no wonder that all of those companies seem to hate me. I feel like a light must go off in their offices every time I call them to complain, and oh do I have reason to complain.

As I mentioned, I frequently get shafted in the ticket “lotteries” that the Warehouse has. These so-called lotteries are supposed to be equal opportunity for all members but this is most certainly not the case. There are people who manage to get great seats regularly while I often get no tickets for shows. For example, for the Dave and Tim 2003 tour I put in requests for four shows, and I got declined for all four, yet there were plenty of people who got tickets for multiple shows. It used to work that more senior members had seniority in getting tickets but a few years ago they changed the system so that all members have an equal chance of getting tickets to shows but senior members are supposed to get priority seating. In my own experience this all seems like a bunch of bullshit.

The Warehouse ticketing policies and algorithms are extremely secretive. No one has any clue how they work. For $35 a year, I think we deserve more than that. Would it really be so hard to explain to members the odds that they have of getting tickets? Shouldn’t we be allowed to know exactly how many members requested tickets to each show and how many tickets are available, so we have an idea about what our odds are? Right now we are given no explanation for why we do or don’t get tickets and are expected to just sit there scratching our heads and accept it. Well maybe the fact that I don’t accept it is why they don’t like me down there in Charlottesville. I'm pretty sure that once the Warehouse sees this blog entry I'll never be getting tickets again. No surprise there.

So people have often asked me, why do you keep paying the $30 (now $35) fee? Why keep renewing if you hate this fan club so much? The honest truth is that it is so extremely difficult to get tickets to shows and while the Warehouse has slighted me on tickets in the past, my tickets have still been better than what I've been able to get through Ticketmaster for the same shows. Unfortunately if you're a DMB fan and want to see multiple shows each year, the only way to do it is to join the Warehouse.

It's not like I'm demanding something for nothing here. I pay my annual membership fees, and what do I get for it? A cracked CD and a useless mouse pad. It's not as if the tickets from the Warehouse are any less expensive than those from Ticketmaster. Its actually often a hassle to obtain your tickets since the Warehouse only sends tickets via Fedex, requires a signature, and waits until a few days before the show before mailing out the tickets. So if no one is home to get your tickets then you're just screwed. The Warehouse claims that these actions are to prevent ticket scalping but I don't agree with that. I pay my dues and as a member of the organization I feel like I have the right not to be treated like a criminal. Apparently Coran thinks otherwise.

I have often been critical of the band's actions with their marketing and such. I usually refrain from criticism of their music simply because I am most often quite impressed with that (most important) aspect of the band. I guess my interest in the music is what makes this all so difficult. I just want to see the band in concert, a lot, but the Warehouse seems to be set up with the sole intention of exploiting my want. I'll be sure to let everyone know how my ticket requests turn out for next year's tour. For some reason I don't think I'll be making many shows next summer. . .

The Great Rose Bowl Hoax

2004-12-04T22:13:00.000-05:00

So it turns out those Yalies aren't so original. The most famous incarnation of this prank was The Great Rose Bowl Hoaxof 1961. The "Fiendish Fourteen", a group of Caltech students, managed to modify the instructions on 2,232 cards for the Washington Huskies fans to change the picture of a husky to that of a beaver (Caltech's mascot), "HUSKIES" to "SEIKSUH", and the next image to "CALTECH". The image changes were actually coordinated by the Washington marching band and cheerleaders as part of their halftime show, but the band walked off the field after seeing the CALTECH image, afraid of what the next image might be (which apparently wasn't going to be altered). The entire crowd was silent for quite a while, not completely understanding what was going on (maybe college pranks weren't so big back then). This was seen by millions of people nationwide as the Rose Bowl was broadcast nationally by NBC. The funniest part is that Caltech wasn't even playing in the Rose Bowl, the Huskies were playing against Minnesota. The Caltech students were just angry that the Rose Bowl stadium was right down the street from their campus and the school never got enough national recognition to make the Rose Bowl. Pretty funny.

Harvard Sucks

2004-12-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

I have to hand it to those Yalies, at least for the effort. They printed up 1800 colored papers, dressed up as the "Harvard Pep Squad" and convinced half the stadium (the Harvard side) to hold them up at once. The video doesn't really show the W so well but the photo makes it look like they got it, at least for a moment. Although I don't know if I would ever want to put in such effort for something like that, since I'm sure people will forget it very quickly. Check it out.

Princeton Portal Project

2004-11-30T10:39:00.000-05:00

On September 12, 2002, a bunch of Princeton computer geeks met in room 412 Brown Hall to discuss the future of "Sleep", the popular network search system run by Finn Calabro '02. There were fears that since Finn had recently graduated the new proprieters at Quadrangle Club were going to charge for the service. The people in the room consisted of myself, Matt Stack '04, the infamous Dan Peng '05, Niraj Bhatt '03 (my former MAA and 2-year hallmate), Joe Barillari '04 (who was slashdotted for his paper on the RIAA suit against Peng) and a few other computer geeks. Of course I was present to represent the "Mac people" since I was the Apple Campus Rep and president of the Mac user group at the time.

The discussion turned to other ideas for campus web services. I brought up the idea of creating a campus portal with student-specific information. The first couple of ideas I had were to display the events going on at "the street" that night and student-submitted campus jokes (although that seemed to brush too close to the Nass's territory, although in my opinion Verbatim is no longer as funny as it used to be).

We all left the meeting with projects to work on (the most pressing of which seemed to be a lobby to convince OIT to give all users PHP on university-hosted web sites, which Barillari spearheaded but it ultimately never happened and for good reason), the portal project being a long term goal that seemed like we would all collaborate on. Yet within a week Stack, who didn't have a specific responsibility since two other search sites were being started by others (Gank and Wake), registered the find.princeton.edu dns name with the Princeton hostmaster and began work on a site which he called the "Princeton Portal Project." The site first simply had links to the three search services. Stack put up flyers around campus with the text "Search the Princeton Network/find.princeton.edu".

Stack's site quickly became popular when he added street information, which showed what parties are going on and where (my idea). Other features included an advanced directory search which allows more advanced searching of the Princeton people directory than the university had provided on their site (although the Princeton site now offers most of these features) and a calendar of student events information. Stack requested help from a number of people, including myself, on November 1, 2002, showing that he wanted this to be somewhat of a community effort. In my own laziness I didn't contribute too much.

In March I submitted an event to the site directly to Matt via email (as opposed to using the web form). I was about to submit the event, a non-alcoholic Colonial Club party, via the web form when I noticed a credits page on the site. The page had a description of the site and the process by which Stack created it. He had a picture of himself in front of all his computers in his room and at the bottom of the page he listed some people who had helped him, all of which seemed to have very minor roles. So I emailed Stack with the event:



On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 22:59, Daniel P. Semaya wrote:

Dude.  Didn't I give you all the big ideas for the Portal site?  You could at least show me some appreciation on the thank you page.



Also, add that tomorrow night at colonial that there's DJ Bob and FOOD from 1-3 AM. 



Dan

Stack's response ten minutes later was:



On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 11:19 PM, Matthew Stack wrote:



HA HA HA HA HA



Oh shit :) Of course ....



Thanks,





-stack

After that I got a small credit line on the bottom of the page that mentioned something to the effect of "general idea and concept" if I remember correctly. That satisfied me since I was too lazy to do any work at the time.

Fast forward to the following fall, senior year, Stack and I are in AST 205 together and did homework together on Wednesdays after lunch at Colonial. At one point we discussed the idea of a campus calendar. I had worked on a project over the summer for the Last Week web site which syndicated the band's tour calendar in iCal format. It allowed users to do such nifty things as syncing the tour calendar with their PDAs and emailing and modifying tour dates for their own personal use. Stack again organized a meeting with myself, and a couple of USG people who were working to create an official online calendar for the school. Stack didn't show up, so the meeting never took place. The university apparently went on to purchase some calendar software. I was told that they didn't like the idea of Stack's web site showing street events and wanted to be the official controller of the public calendar for the entire school.

I later brought the idea up to Matt about doing a spring independent work project with him to create a "real portal" where users would log in with their netIDs to get personalized information. It would show the user's class schedule, and their favorite social events. weather, customized news feeds, a discussion board, etc. I explained how the only way a site like this could succeed is if it was separate from the school. We had seen how the most popular calendar that students cared about was the street calendar and I had just the idea on how to create such an independent system. Stack was concerned that only the university had (and still maintains) the server power to run such a system and to maintain it indefinitely (after we graduated), however P-SMUG, the student Mac user group, which I ran, had an iMac running OS X 10.2 as a web server, with PHP, MySQL, and all the other tools necessary to host the site. The server sat, and still resides, in the third floor networking closet of Colonial Club, and it will remain there indefinitely, as the host database subscription is generously paid for by OIT Student Computing Services. My idea was that P-SMUG and PUG (the student unix group, which was mainly an email list at the time) could run and operate the site, therefore maintaining the interests of the students, which were largely different than the interests of the university.

My ultimate goal for the site was to charge nominal fees to campus groups for advertising, since the way most groups would advertise would be with 8.5"x11" flyers posted on lamp posts around campus. Creating and posting these flyers was a long time consuming process (I know this all too well from personal experience) and Joe Barillari even created a guide to creating such flyers. Yet the flyers would soon be covered up by other flyers and students would often ignore them. I thought that if advertising on the portal site was cheap and effective enough, student groups would turn to it over other advertising forms. Some student groups even went to great lengths to have large color posters created for their events. Portal advertising could have been faster, cheaper, and more effective. Also, groups such the Alcohol Initiative (or whatever group posts the large anti-alcohol flyers around campus), which have large budgets, could run public service ads (as an example of this in the real world, the Ad Council has adopted internet advertising as a major avenue for public service announcements). I thought that through the revenue the portal project could eventually spin off from P-SMUG and PUG and be a student agency, employing students to do the work necessary to maintain and upgrade the site for the future. I never intended for the site to be a profitable business, but instead would be required to break even in order to pay its employees and in the future move up to a dedicated web server (hosted in OIT's server room at 87 Prospect). In contrast some student agencies, such as the more recent incarnation of the Tiger Computer Agency, were clearly businesses run by students out to make a buck (or many bucks, but more on that in another blog entry).

Unfortunately none of this ever happened. I wrote an email about my ideas to the group, which included Ryan Walsh '06, who responded to my email, largely agreeing with my ideas. However Stack and I never did the project and Find remained largely the same for the year. I discovered a few weeks ago that the site was not dead. It was being run by Ryan, who picked up the find dns name. It appeared that Stack handed over the site's code to Walsh. The site now (apparently no longer up) had customization features that required a netID login, many of which are features that I had brought up with Matt months (and years) earlier. On the site's info page Walsh has a description of his motivations for creating the site and thanks Stack for pioneering the site and passing it on to him. The site is not complete so I will refrain from any criticisms at this point.

Enter the USG's new site "The Point." In today's Prince there is an article about the site, which is a slick-looking school-sponsored portal site for students, created by Clay Bavor '05, partly for his COS 333 project last year. The article states that the USG paid Stack $3000 for Find. It seems like that purchase didn't really do much since it appears that none of the code was used. The school payed Clay the same amount for Point, plus some more for a dedicated server (which apparently isn't up right now since the site is running off Clay's Mac in his room).

So two people each got paid $3000 for ideas that I had first, but failed to capitalize on. So why am I blogging this? I certainly have no one to blame for this but myself but I thought I would at least tell the world (or at least the 4 people who read my blog) about the role that I played in the creation of Find/Point/etc. No one really "stole" my ideas, since they weren't all that original. But I certainly had the ideas and the knowhow to create a great Princeton portal years ago and didn't do it.

This isn't the first time that I've done (or not done) something like this. Last summer I had the idea for a social networking site based around Princeton. I got the idea while planning personalization features for the Colonial Club member web site. Six months later Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard rolled out such a site as the thefacebook.com. This site has become phenomenally successful at over 100 schools. Yet another example of my inability to take an idea and do something with it. I often have ideas like this, talk about them, write about them, but never CREATE them. Now that I'm out in the real world I think it's about time that I do some creation. And maybe I'll be a bit more secretive with my ideas until I do so.... just in case ;-)

Also, I want to clear up a few things mentioned in the article. The last line of the article is:

"I had a seven-computer cluster in my room to run all the sites I was managing, but I didn't receive any University resources," Stack explained. "I didn't care about my personal funding. I cared about resources."

Stack's "seven-computer cluster" was a bit of a joke. He was abusing his (and his roommates') dormnet subscriptions by hosting sites using each of their host database entries and masquerading multiple computers behind each subscription. He was running all of these sites from his room in his dorm, on a 10Mbit network, all behind hubs and routers. That is no way to run a server room (I'm sounding like an IT manager here). It was clear that he didn't really plan ahead with these projects because he would have had very little problem getting the USG to give him one dedicated server in OIT's server room (all he would need is one). Instead he had a room full of old frankenstein PCs running various Linux distros. In contrast I got my student organization a dedicated computer, with a host databse subscription ($11/month) and found a proper location to host it in. I'm not criticizing Stack's work on those projects, since he did do some good work, but the IT guy in me has to point out that he didn't demonstrate a proper understanding of how to host sites.

Considering the big budget-ness of the Point, you'd think that they could afford an SSL certificate for the site. I do give them credit for actually using SSL, but self-signing (not paying for a certificate) throws up a warning in most web browsers and makes your site look pretty ghetto. Decent certificates cost $100/year. I think that the USG could afford this and the people running the site right now should not even have considered self-signing for such a high-profile site. I won't even go into the fact that everyone on campus is sending their passwords directly into Clay's computer in his dorm room.

I'm sure that there's more I could find fault with but considering that I didn't even have the brains to see any of my ideas to completion I should probably shut up now.

VACO to GO

2004-10-01T11:58:00.000-04:00

I caught the Virginia Coalition show last night downtown by City Hall. I didn't even know about the show until yesterday afternoon and I made last minute plans to see it instead of watching the debate. Vaco is a band that I never really gave a chance until recently. They would play houseparties at Cottage every year but I would avoid them due to their stereo-typical fan base consisting of the fraternity (what many DMB fans call "crash-head") types. I therefore dismissed their music and equated them with other DMB wannabe bands along with OAR, Guster, and Pat McGee Band. I have recently changed my mind about many of those bands.

Back to Vaco, the band released a new CD last Tuesday on independent record label Bluhammock Records (which apparently has some serious distribution power since my cousin was able to find the CD on the shelves in Virgin). This album has a slightly different feel to it, most likely related to the departure of guitarist Steve Dawson who also sings lead on quite a few of the band's older songs. The only other time I saw the band was in May at Cottage this year and in both shows it seems clear that the band is missing something. That isn't saying that the performance was lacking or that the band can't survive without Steve. However, stylistically, Dawson's vocal melodies and guitar stylings gave a distinctive country twang to the band's jazzy rock grooves and provided a very interesting blend of sounds. The band now avoids performing most songs where Dawson sings lead and on other songs that rely on Steve's guitar riffs, such as "Green and Grey," guitarist/vocalist Andrew Poliakoff and keyboardist Paul Ottinger are left scrambling to fill in. "Green and Grey" now has a very different sound to it, as do the band's other songs. Even the band's choice of cover songs have been affected by the linuep change. The band would often cover the song "Africa" by Toto, and introduce it as an 80s song. Last night they used the same introduction, but for The Clash's "Rock The Casbah" (which was very well done). The new album, OK to Go, features songs in which a second guitar part is added by Ottinger, and sometimes bassist Jarret Nicolay. These guitar parts are very different than Dawson's and give the new songs a more straightforward rock feel. On some songs it even seems like the parts aren't necessary. Poliakoff's guitar solos seem to be choppier than Dawson's, so it is no surprise that the new album doesn't feature Andrew's guitar playing.

Dispute the loss, Vaco is still going strong. Their live shows are exciting, energized experiences. The band often breaks into fun percussion jams and the inter-song banter is candid and funny. It is clear that this band makes their living on live performances (something that Pat McGee knows quite a bit about, and apparently Pat was at the show last night but I didn't see him). Some think that Vaco is destined to be a college act forever and will never be able to break free into the mainstream music scene. I don't know what the future has in store for this band (although I don't see many new bands breaking through these days thanks to the economy and the colossal failures of the music industry). It seems that Vaco has the right idea with touring, slowly building a fan base, mostly on the east coast. This approach has worked for Guster, a band that has finally made it into the public spotlight after a decade of touring and incremental progress in the music industry. These stories are rare, however, since most bands that do not make it big within their first few years often call it quits soon after. An example of this is the band Georgia Avenue, which I have seen at Princeton a couple times (Charter regulars). The band had generated some modest interest with the labels but would have been destined to be signed to a bad deal with a low-level A&R rep, which often spells doom for bands. The band chose to break up in 2004 and their guitarist has joined a new outfit (I saw them this summer at the Lion's Den but I forgot their name).

Another thing I like about Vaco's decision to go with Bluhammock is that the album was released relatively quickly. The band posted a message to their web site in the early summer (either late May or early June) with a large blowup of a cicada saying "Vaco seeks refuge from the cicadas, goes to LA to record new album." The album was released last Tuesday. That's a four month turnaround time, which is unprecedented in the music industry. Today, major labels delay albums for months, even years at a time. For example, Dave Matthews' solo debut, Some Devil, was recorded in the fall of 2002, yet wasn't released until September 2003. Pat McGee Band had been working on their followup to Shine for four years, as the label kept delaying the album release (although that's another story). The major record labels are massive bureaucracies that do not know how to manage talent, let alone find it. Yet to an unsigned band, the lure of one of the big five, with their massive marketing budgets, and their hands permanently installed in ClearChannel's pockets to ensure radio play is too tempting to pass up.

I wish Vaco all the best. I like the new album and hopefully it will sell well. It's already up on iTunes, as is their entire catalog. Definitely worth checking out, but more importantly is their live show. If you're still in college I recommend trying to get them to come to your school, since their college shows seem to be even more energetic.

My plan for Butler College

2004-09-20T18:17:00.000-04:00

I spent the first two years of Princeton in an area that they never showed me on the tour that I hitched on to when I accidentally visited campus 5 years ago. Butler College, known to many as "the butt", is one of the five residential colleges at Princeton (where freshman and sophomores live and eat). While many people's first impression of Butler is related to the ugliness of the buildings. While this is certainly true, and the dreary brown colors can be depressing to stare at for months at a time, this is not the worst problem with Butler by any means. Even the waffle ceilings aren't so bad.

The biggest fault of Butler College is the anti-social design of the rooms and hallways, separating students from each other. The majority of rooms in Butler are singles and doubles, with a handful of large suites for 6-8 people at the end of hallways (which are essentially hallways of rooms with a door on the end). This is not the only problem. To add further segregation and depression to the mix, hallways are very short, containing at most only six rooms. This is because the geniuses behind the Butler architecture decided to put bathrooms in the middle of hallways, essentially diving each hallway into two. In order to get to the next hallway you must walk through the bathroom, which is not pleasant. The bathrooms are all paired (male and female) so if a couple were to walk through a hallway they would need to separate to walk between different bathrooms if they wanted to avoid walking in on anyone of the opposite sex. The final problem of Butler is that the dorm buildings are relatively small in comparison to the older dorms, meaning even further isolation from fellow students. These small buildings are separated by a courtyard that is mostly concrete, with only small patches of grass, to add to the dreary feeling.

It was announced back in January that Butler will be knocked down and replaced with a new residential college upon the completion of Whitman college in 2006. While many people feel this is a fitting end to the colossal waste of space that is Butler, I feel this ending is inappropriate. First of all, if Princeton were to knock down Butler, the university would be admitting that Butler is an inadequate residential college, and does not live up to the promise and mission of Princeton's residential college system. The university may have already admitted this actually. When I was a freshman, I noticed that a number of Butler residents had an AIM away message that went something like this:

"In the fullness of time Butler College will cease to exist as dormitory space. We must all realize that we make mistakes and we must take measures to correct those mistakes." -Harold Shapiro

Shapiro was the University president for my freshman year. Now I don't know if he actually said this, as I can't seem to find the quote on the internet, I did manage to find another quote which is similar in effect,

“It’s as much a matter of the way the buildings are arranged, in terms of planning, as it is their architecture or design that is the problem,” Wright said. “The buildings do not create Princeton-like courtyards and Princeton-like vistas.” - former Vice President and Secretary Thomas H. Wright ’62 (retired January 1, 2004)

So they're going to knock down Butler and replace it with a nice new, modern, old-looking dorm, that matches Rocky, Mathey and Whitman colleges. I do not agree with this move. First of all, if they go ahead with this plan then I want a partial refund of my housing fees for the first two years of Princeton. I was randomly assigned to Butler (so they claim, yet all famous people's children always manage to end up in Rocky or Mathey, not so sure how that works...). The school is admitting to us former Butler residents that they screwed us, so I want compensation.

Well the likeliness of this happening is very slim, since the university does nothing for alumni, and instead expects us to do everything for them (according to Tighlman we have 24 hour access to the university's endowment, deposit only). So instead I will now outline my plan for improvement to Butler college. The majority of these improvements are not meant to address the ugliness of the buildings but instead to remedy the anti-social layout of the structures.

First off, the walk-through bathroom thing needs to end. Instead of two bathrooms in the middle of each hallway, there should be one larger bathroom, male or female, since the bathrooms are so close this is not an issue. And instead of walking through the bathroom, there should be a nice walkway to walk AROUND the bathroom, preferably with a large out cove window that has a nice view of the courtyard. This would solve the problem of the small hallways as now the hallways on each side of the bathroom would essentially be connected.

Second, to address the problem of the small buildings, connections should be made BETWEEN buildings to allow students to enter the Butler quad through one door and access any room in any building without needing to go outside. This would help foster greater social interaction between students. There are several ways in which this could be done, but I vote for underground tunnels. Yes, you read correctly, underground tunnels. Here's how it would work:

The Butler courtyard is not one flat surface but two. The western half of the courtyard is about 10 feet higher than the eastern side and is separated by steps. There should be one large underground level, with ground level underneath the eastern side, hence the ceiling will be dramatically higher in the western half, which is ideal. A number of skylights would be installed so that students who are underground have a very good perception of the outdoor environment (time and weather). This common space, filled with couches, kitchens, computers, study spaces, televisions and the like, would be connected to each building through one or more large tunnels connected to each building's basement. I'm not talking about the strange small tunnel in the basement of McCosh that has pipes running through it and is dark and scary. I'm talking about large tunnels, 15 feet wide, with 10 foot ceilings, and skylights above them. Ideally, every entrance to each building will have a tunnel just below it, making it easy to find your way to the center common spaces. If security is an issue it is certainly possible to require a prox in order to move between buildings underground. And as a final touch, this entire underground system would be connected to the basement of Wu hall (where the Wild Wu Cafe is currently), so that students can get to the dining hall, college office, mailboxes, and other resources more easily. Other perks may include a large window, fishbowl-like room looking south from the hill under 1942 hall. It would have been a nicer view before the ellipse dorm was constructed.

Of course, it would also be nice to improve the look of the buildings. Removal of the strange barbed-wire shaped structures off the top of the buildings would be good, and would eliminate the concentration camp comparisons (yes, people do compare Butler with a concentration camp). Instead those metal structures could be replaced with railings and maybe even finished roofs. Imagine roof access from any Butler building. That would be awesome, but not likely on a college campus.

More of the courtyard should be grass and not concrete. Those raised grass patches look very artificial and are used for not-so-great purposes. When I was in Butler we used those patches as fight club rings and as dividing patches for taking the "gallon challenge" (if you don't know, don't ask).

So that's most of my plan. I used to talk about this plan with my friends, but I would jokingly also mention that there should be an underground pool in the middle of the courtyard. I admit a pool is too extreme. A hot tub would probably be more appropriate.

On one final note, Butler should be a 2-year residential college, not four. But that's a topic for another blog entry.

iMac G5

2004-09-01T03:48:00.000-04:00

Late last night Apple introduced the new iMac G5. Overall it is a very nice looking machine. Apple was able to create a very compact G5-based machine for a great price. While the boxy shape isn't as Apple-like as the previous iMac, and probably not as aesthetically pleasing to most. There is also very little to this computer that is "new" to the world. Often Mac launches would be paired with other technologies (iMovie, iDVD, etc) but this iMac is pretty much just a computer squeezed into a small space. Regardless, it still seems like the right approach. However I do have a couple of gripes with the iMac, most of which are minor, and Apple could have easily avoided:

First, why can't we have headphone inputs on the front of the machine? The dual front headphone jacks on the original CRT iMacs was a great feature. Additionally, I feel like a front USB and FireWire port should also be present. Reaching around the back of any computer is annoying, even the G4 iMac. Obviously it wouldn't be used for permanent devices, like a keyboard, but instead for temporary devices, like plugging in a friend's iPod or camera to your iMac.

FireWire 800 seems to be lacking on this machine. I have FW800 on my 15" PowerBook and in some ways I am a bit annoyed by it (I would prefer to have 2 FireWire 400 ports instead of 1, I know I can get an adapter). However in a desktop model it is trivial to add another port. I feel like a FireWire 800 port will be a great feature for the future, when (hopefully) there will be FW800 iPods, camcorders and digital cameras. If that ever happens then this iMac will be stuck in second gear. It won't be as bad as the Windows users with USB1 that are using iPods but Apple could plan a bit better. Does this decision mean that Apple is easing their push of FW800? It can certainly be interpreted as that.

The speaker system looks stupid to me. As Phil Schiller explained in the keynote, the speakers are on the bottom of the unit, facing downwards. The sound is reflected off the desk (or other surface) and back at the user. I can tell you from my experience with a similar system on the 12" PowerBook that this is a bad idea. The sound is always muffled and/or tinny. I'm not sure if Apple could have easily mounted larger speakers facing forwards but I would certainly have preferred that.

Also, what's with the power button on the back of the machine? Phil explained that it was lined up with the sleep light on the front and is the only raised button on the back, so it would be easy to press, but why even bother? It seems completely illogical to me for the button to be on the back.

Forrester Research believes that the iMac should have more media center features, specifically Airport and Bluetooth standard, and a TV tuner card. While I understand why Apple doesn't include the wireless features standard (they make higher margins as add-ons) I think there is some validity to the TV tuner idea. Apple could offer some pretty impressive DVR software, integrated as part of the iLife suite. However there are big copyright issues with recording TV. Apple has shown with the iTunes Music Store that they will use DRM to appease the rights holders (RIAA and MPAA), but this is a big project. the DRM system for a DVR application would be pretty convoluted and Apple probably wants to avoid those headaches for now.

Lastly, there has been much criticism of the graphics card. While I don't play any games, I still agree with the criticism that 64 MB is just not enough. Many new games state 64 MB as the minimum, and considering that the iMac G5 is not intended to be a "minimum computer" the graphics card should have 128 MB and not 64. Since the iMac is intended to be an all-purpose, digital lifestyle and family computer, gaming is an important aspect. If the kids in the house want to play games they may find the iMac to be a slug. Also, as more and more of the OS X interface becomes dependent on the graphics card (the resolution independent UI coming in Tiger will probably be vector-based and heavily tax the GPU) Apple's flagship machine should be prepared.

Those points aside, the new iMac looks like a winner. I just hope Apple can keep up with demand. I also like the comparisons to the iPod. Hopefully Apple will make a big marketing push to get the general public interested. This has always been a difficulty for Apple as most PC users out there are unwilling, for whatever reason, to switch to Mac. Maybe the iPod-iMac relationship can change that.

The Family Band Reunion Tour

2004-07-06T02:40:00.000-04:00

On Sunday my cousin Jason got married. Last year when his older brother David got married we played a song with the wedding band. This "family band" consisting of myself, David, Jason and brother Jeremy (often billed as "The Nanus Brothers") had usually been confined to jamming upstairs in my aunt's house on thanksgiving.

We played I'm A Believer, mostly in the Monkees style, but with a little bit of Smashmouth flavor. Check out the mp3 of the track. Jason sang lead vocals and played acoustic guitar, Dave on keys, Jeremy on bass and I played electric guitar. Dave and I sang the background vox. We played with the drummer from the wedding band.

DMB Digital Downloads

2004-07-02T04:04:00.000-04:00

After much press and even more waiting, the Dave Matthews Band has finally gotten into the digital download business. Their first offering was actually not a Dave Matthews Band release but a "Dave Matthews & Friends" set from Bonnaroo. I was pretty excited and immediately went to livebonnaroo.com to inquire about downloading the show, however I was quickly disappointed to see the extremely high pricing. While this particular show was mixed by John Alagia, so it should sound better, it is still over priced. LiveBonnaro/MusicToday (read:Coran Capshaw) wants $17.95 for the FLAC version and $12.95 for MP3s. To me this just isn't worth it, considering that I already had a free recording of the show that I had downloaded and burned several days before, which is certainly good enough to relive the Bonnaroo experience. And this recording is just the downloads, no actual media, CDs, etc. Plus you are required to buy the entire concert and you can't just download the highlights of the show (which would be possible if the show were to be offered on iTunes on a per-track basis).

The disappointment does not stop there. The next offering from the DMB is a digital download of the Gorge boxed set, all 3 nights. This set ranges in prince from $37.99 to $49.99, which is pretty damn expensive for a digital download, especially considering that the CD costs the same price as FLAC! What's the point of downloading the thing? There is absolutely no advantage. Pre-ordering the boxed set would get it in your hands long before you would be allowed to download it on the release date and with the digital download version you lose the nice packaging of a boxed set.

But wait, the disappointment continues. The DMB store now has the entire DMB catalog up for digital download. Now, unlike the Gorge and the Bonnaroo show, the rest of the catalog (including True Reflections and Some Devil) seem to be under tighter restrictions from the record label (unless Coran and the band are a bunch of paranoid freaks). All of the albums are available only in Windows Media format (128kbps or lossless), which locks the buyer into the evilness of oppressive DRM, limiting the fair use rights that the Supreme Court gives us. Each album has the very friendly restrictive disclaimer attached to it:

"With this download you have permission for: unlimited transfers to portable devices, download to 1 computer, and 5 CD burns."

This pretty annoying. The Dave Matthews Band, one of the few major artists that allows live concert taping, one of the few major artists to avoid the iTunes Music Store because they want to preserve the album format, is selling their music with a more restrictive license than any of the major online music services. Plus, they are selling music in ONLY Windows Media format, meaning that the songs are only playable on PCs since Microsoft has yet to release a version of Windows Media Player for Mac that can play DRM'd files. This is pretty ironic for several reasons:

1 - We know that the band uses Macs (Stefan has said so in interviews and there is a picture floating around the net of Dave using a PowerBook).

2 - They are selling songs by album only, online, for the same price as CDs. Again there is no advantage to downloading the music since anyone can roll up to Best Buy and get the real CD, complete with nice artwork and rip/mix/burn until their heart's content. Who is going to buy this? The whole point of the digital music revolution is the idea of buying single songs. Right now DMB's record sales are hurting due to the millions of kiddies out there downloading Crash Into Me and The Space Between, because those are the only two songs that they want to hear from the Dave Matthews Band. These people are not going to buy these digital albums! First of all, they won't even know that they exist, and second, downloading them is nowhere near as convenient as iTunes or similar services. Plus, they are required to download the entire album, which will immediately tell Johnny Q that he should go pick up "Crash Into Me" on KaZaA instead of forking out $10 - $14 for a download.

Seriously, Dave and the boys need to get off their high horse and realize that iTunes is the future. It's no secret that the band's record sales have been a disappointment. After the 6-7x platinum success of the band's first two major label releases in 1994 and 1996, the band has yet to come close to that mark with any studio album (Everyday and Before These Crowded Streets each went 3x platinum and Busted Stuff only 2x)*. Everyday's sales would have been close to double if it weren't for the digital download services. The Space Between was a huge hit on MTV as a single, but the album's sales weren't raised by the hit. RCA can make some good money if they start offering DMB tracks on a per-track basis on iTunes.

On that note, imagine if every DMB show was offered by track on iTunes, within days of the concert performance. Imagine the debut of a brand new song, available to the world for just a dollar. Fans can buy their favorites from a show they attended or just pick up the highlights from the tour. DMB is really missing out here.

* Interestingly, DMB DVDs seem to sell well, with the Central Park DVD going quadruple platinum and Listener Supported selling 3 million, and with practically no promotion (DMB live releases seem to be ignored by RCA's marketing department). With this proven success it would seem to be a no brainer for the band to release a full DVD boxed set of the Gorge concerts from 2002 as a companion to the 6 CD boxed audio set of the shows. Instead the genius in charge over in Charlottesville decided to only release one DVD as part of the 2 CD set and no DVDs with the 6 CD set. Plus the DVD only has a handful of music tracks and has more documentary and music video footage. The DVD is truly the gem of the Gorge release, extremely well produced and directed (puts the Folsom Field release to shame, but that shouldn't be hard). Again the DMB miss a huge opportunity.