Status-Q

From Robert Cringely: "A U.S. Government Panel Has Recommended a Royalty System That Will Probably Kill Internet Radio and Make Possible a Better System to Follow"

But, sadly, his ‘better system’ wouldn’t work. At least, not to kill off illegal copying. As far as I can see, no matter how much software encryption you try to throw at the problem, music copying will always be with us, for a simple reason:

At some point in the decoding of the music, it must be converted to plain digital amplitude samples to be fed to the digital-to-analogue converters on the sound card, which in turn create the voltages which drive the loudspeaker. All it takes is for somebody to write a bit of software which sits between the music player and the soundcard and siphons off the plain amplitude samples and, hey, you’ve got a WAV file. This bit of software can masquerade as a soundcard driver. Many such utilities already exist and they work regardless of which particular bit of music-playing software you use.

The only alternative is to require the decrypting code to be built into the soundcard hardware so that no software can get at the plain bytes. Only people with the decrypting sound hardware would be able to hear the music. This is just about plausible, but then people would just copy at the analogue level. The resulting quality would be fine for a world which is happy with 128kbps MP3s. It would, however, be rather less convenient.

You see, the convenience is the key. The reason I use Napster and its clones is not that I’m not willing to pay for music. It’s that if I hear a song on the radio, like it, remember a few lines from the chorus and want to hear it again, there is no other easy way to get a copy of it. The way for the recording industries to control this is not by trying to legislate against all distributors in all the different legal systems around the world. They can’t win that way. What they should be doing instead is coming up with a really good service which is so convenient, high quality, and reasonably priced that for most people, using anything else simply isn’t worth the bother.

Perhaps that’s what Cringely meant, actually.

A bit more hacking, and the comments are now handled on my server by a PHP script and stored in a MySQL database. Congrats to Userland for coming up with such a simple scheme.

There’s a new Comments feature for Radio Userland. This is basic, but very cute and very easy to use. I’ve enabled it as an experiment. Now, if you should so desire, you can leave comments on Status-Q!

I don’t think, in this incarnation, that it’s obvious when people have done so. That’s not quite so easy to implement especially when, as on this site, the main pages live on one server (mine) and the comments on another (Userland’s). Fixing that could be a real test of Web Services!

Here’s how to do the CSS thing whole-heartedly:”This is the official accessibility statement for diveintomark.org“. Well done, Mark – that takes some dedication.

Mmm. So much for pushing the envelope. Two late nights of hacking and I’m still fiddling with my experimental CSS layout. Not only have I failed to get it exactly how I want it, but I’ve also failed to get it even close enough to this to replace what I’ve got at present. Getting a reliable sidebar on the right margin is most of the problem.

Now, I could certainly change my formatting to make it easier to do in CSS, but that seems to defeat the object. CSS is supposed to give you more flexibility, not less. And it does so, but I can’t make it do so reliably across more than one browser.

So I’ll keep playing, but for now, the basic formatting here is CSS but the layout stays as tables. There’s lots of tasteful CSS layout here to divert your attention…

testing 3

and four

and five

testing2

OK, in the great CSS debate that’s going on in the blogging world at the moment, I’m definitely on the pro-CSS side. I’ve used it in a half-hearted way for some time, but as Mark Pilgrim says,

“…weblogs are the perfect breeding ground for CSS. Here we’re working in our free time, free of all the usual commercial pressures…. We can afford to draw a line in the sand, push the envelope a little, move the web forward. It’s time.”

I agree. After all, it’s nearly 4 years now since CSS2 became a W3 recommendation. 4 years! And that’s the second version. When CSS1 was approved the web was only half its current age.

I converted this site to be largely CSS-based a few days back, but it’s still heavily reliant on tables. The finer points of CSS layout are something I haven’t played with much yet, but I’m about to try, so if the site looks a little weird for the next couple of days, please be patient. I’m just drawing a line in the sand (from 0,0 to 10px, 100px), pushing the envelope (to the right margin) and moving the web forward by a pixel or two..

Henry Jenkins: Blog This. Just in case you thought this site was mere trivia.

A concise summary of the foolishness of the BT Patent claim in John’s Observer column.

On BBC Radio 4’s comedy programme ‘The Now Show’, the Winter Olympics was described as “38 different kinds of sliding”.

The Patent system is completely out of control. We all know this, but the frequency of foolishness is increasing. The current BT case does seem particularly silly. Is nothing sacred when it might be patentable?

On a related note Dave Winer has been very upset by the pressure on him to use Cascading Style Sheets, a technology which is a W3C web standard, and which I think he would agree is a good technology, but which he is worried is too closely tied to a Microsoft patent. (For Dave, who is normally a great standards-promoter, this is notable, but I think he went too far here. I, like many others, had almost forgotten about this patent issue. See Mark Pilgrim’s more reasonable summary).

The more fundamental our reliance on anything (like the axiom that the W3C should be looked to for web standards), the more it is a target for patent-hunters and hence the less we can rely on anything. The situation is very neatly commented on by this article in The Onion.

At some point, one hopes, the whole system must collapse and be laughed out of court. It’s not widely known that I actually own a patent which covers the whole patenting process, and so every patent really belongs to me…