wabson

This is a great example of why I love free software - with the latest version of GNOME out the door, Evolution now helpfully warns you if you try to send an e-mail containing the word “attached” or similar but neglect to actually attach a file to the message.

Is that not the kind of simple, yet brilliant feature that when you hear about it makes you wonder why nobody’s thought of it before? Amazing.

I read this evening that Apple have once again resorted to blocking third party software from accessing the song databases build into every iPod.

Last time it was over Real cracking their DRM and I didn’t care so much given that I can’t use most of their proprietary-ware anyway, but now Apple have completely broken the main Linux-based library used by the fabulous Rhythmbox and Banshee, amongst others.

What I find most sad is the fact that the changes they’ve made - involving some kind of checksumming built into the latest iPod firmware - serve no useful purpose whatsoever other than to limit the ways in which consumers can use their own players.

That Apple would spend engineering dollars in order to make iPods less useful - arguably completely useless to anyone using Linux - is appalling. But not surprising to anyone who’s followed their moves in recent years.

I was seriously considering buying an iPod up until yesterday. I’m certainly not any more.

On Apple.com’s new look-and-feel, discovered via Laurie.

First thoughts: it looks like someone’s just found the Colors > Invert menu item in Photoshop. Is black really back in again? I thought we’d seen the end of back of white-on-black text, banished along with circa-1998 websites and MS-DOS windows. Sure, it looks different from the old design, but not vastly so and I’d actually say it’s a step back in terms of the nice minimalistic look they previously had going on.

Their news ticker is neat, although it looks rather similar to our own.

Overall I give them seven out of ten - but only because it was so good before, they haven’t changed it that much and their small army of graphic designers seem to be able to make anything look good. Even if it is in black.

Congratulations to the guys at Canonical following today’s joint announcement with Dell. Having used Ubuntu myself since the first release over two-and-a-half years ago I know it’s a natural fit for Dell, but given their relationships with Red Hat and Novell I’m still slightly surprised they’re not offering Fedora or SUSE options as well.

That aside, this is great day not just for Linux but for anyone like me who doesn’t want their new computer preloaded with a bloated, proprietary, DRM-embracing hairball of an operating system like Vista but really can’t face the hassle of going the self-build route. I think I’ve worked out where the next PC is coming from.

I meant to write about this yesterday, but apparently trying to squeeze a week’s worth of work into four days prior to my day off today and fit in a trip to the gym meant I didn’t quite get round to doing so.

So Adobe have released Flex under the MPL, which is great news for the following reasons:

• Building rich web-based user interfaces sucks at the moment. Creating anything vaguely useful means working with a bunch of semi-related standards such as HTML, CSS, AJAX that between them just about manage to do what you want them to today. It’s a mess and we need a better solution.
• As Miguel commented on his blog, Microsoft have now consolidated their next-generation framework (now dubbed Silverlight) and I have no doubt that they will try hard to woo developers with this latest weapon in their proprietary arsenal as they look to take over more and more of the web. Mozilla may finally be helping to claw back some of the browser share from M$, but if open standards can’t win the battle to define the technologies that are used to build the next generation of applications then we’re all in trouble. Unless you run Windows, of course.
• Having Adobe choose an open source license to release their code under provides further validation that this is a model that works for businesses. As if we needed that, though

Even more encouraging is Adobe’s promise that as well as releasing the source code under the MPL, they will allow others to contribute to this code. That’s when you start to get the full benefit of being an open source outfit, and Adobe have obviously twigged that.

There’s no mention of their Flash player in the release, the lack of a full open source implementation of the player obviously being a significant barrier to the take-up of Flash on Linux in particular, which will limit it’s usefulness on these platforms. Releasing this code under a similar license would no doubt win Adobe a lot more kudos in the open source community, but the Flex announcement will still be warmly welcomed by many. Maybe not by Mr Gates, though.

So the folks at OpenedHand have tied together their Dates and Tasks apps into into a nice-looking GTK suite called Pimlico, all licensed under the GPL. Assuming I can get a decent 3G (and ideally Wi-fi-enabled) phone running Maemo in eighteen months’ time when my next contract is up, I will almost certainly be making the switch back to Nokia. Perhaps not on Orange, though :-).

Could this be the beginning of the end for DRM? Steve Jobs surprises everyone by revealing that he wants rid of it. Or as ZDNet put it:

“You’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs; he knows how to attract attention and how to deflect attention,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “He turned the whole European DRM question on its ear. ‘You want me to open up FairPlay? Well, I don’t even want FairPlay’.”

I think he needs educating on why MP3 and AAC are not open formats (even if you do put the word “open” in quotes) and his calling on all European citizens to protest to their local big evil record company does come across as a rather thinly veiled attempt to deflect the criticism that certain countries have directed towards Apple on the issue. But overall really encouraging.

The RIAA’s response to Jobs’ post was… Interesting. So interesting in fact that you have to wonder if they even read it through.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, issued a statement interpreting Jobs’ letter as an offer to license the FairPlay technology. “Apple’s offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a licence to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time,” it said in an emailed statement.

Apple clearly have a lot still to do to actually convince the record companies that this is the right way forward, but clearly it’s a step in the right direction.

Brought to my attention by a reference in a ZDNet article I was reading this weekend was an event Oxford’s Saïd Business School hosted on Monday, curiously titled event called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford. Chaired by the FT’s Enterprise Editor Jonathan Guthrie, the event gathered together a varied group of Valley experts to look at how innovation and entrepreneurship can be better fostered in the tech sector.

The article linked to a webcast of the evening panel session which featured a number of luminaries including Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Matt Cohler from Facebook, Chris Sacca from Google and Allen Morgan from Mayfield. This is well worth a look for anyone interested in building Internet technologies, businesses or both.

Some interesting business-y points that came up:

• As Matt Cohler pointed out, HE institutions need to find a compromise between pure theoretical research favoured at for instance Yale and Oxford and the more applied approach taken by Stanford (and drawing similarities myself, Warwick) in order to give people the right skills they’ll need as entrepreneurs.
• Anecdotal evidence presented by the panel suggested that this year’s students have a lot more confidence and entrepreneurial energy than in previous years, but turning their ideas into a reality may be challenging. Most of the time it comes down to having the right contacts, which in turn relies on having the kind of culture that encourages that.
• VC isn’t dead, but there’s a lot of “scar tissue” around, according to Morgan. People are still investing in start-ups, but they need to have a solid model behind them. Encouraging stuff, given that Alfresco is one of the companies that Mayfield have funded in the last year.
• Guthrie came up with some interesting comparisons between the technology sector over the last ten years and investment in the railways and canal infrastructure in Britain in the 17-1800’s. Unlike the canals, the railways at least lasted longer than fifty years, but in both people lost a lot of money that they’d poured into flawed and ill-conceived projects in both. Sound familiar?
• The failure of a business can be a positive thing in some cases, if you can spot when it’s going wrong before it’s too late.

And on technology:

• Everyone talked of how social networks are increasingly important on the web and will become even more significant over the next few years. Most communities are based on users gaining some form of notoriety or reputation for themselves, such as on LinkedIn and MySpace. The best way to build a community is by giving it’s members something in return , i.e. there must be some form of self-interest.
• Matt Cohler talked about how monetising a community online requires you to focus on a particular demographic, but while still making that target group as big as possible. Maximising value requires that you find the right balance between the generality and specificity of a service.
• Chris Sacca looked at how users can be divided by either their generation or their age group and the distinction between the two. Services can be designed across these divides, and Google Talk was given as an example.
• There was agreement that we’re still in the early days of the web and we need to develop more advanced systems of authentication and accountability in order to build trust between people. Morgan summed this up well when he said that “Anonymity doesn’t always bring out the best in people”.
• As ZDNet discussed in their analysis, Sacca referred to the “gated communities” that currently exist on today’s wireless and mobile networks, comparing this with the net neutrality issue in the US. There was general speculation (mostly gloomy) on what will happen to the providers once IP finally becomes ubiquitous on mobile devices, with lots of analogies contributed about dams coming down and various techies in Silicon Valley trying to work out how to take them down faster.

Update: There’s also a webcast of the lunchtime panel sessoin available here.

The Ubuntu team released Edgy Eft - otherwise known as version 6.10 - a few days ago so last night I took the plunge and upgraded my previous Dapper build that I’d been running (mostly) happily for the last few months.

The package manager took care of downloading all the updated packages and installing them while I went to the pub (although it did need a couple of pointers when it came to overwrite a couple of config files that it thought I’d modified, for some reason). It offered to restart the system for the kernel upgrade (2.6.17) to take effect, which I dutifully did.

But then things started to go wrong - the X server failed to start up, leaving me with only a command prompt. Gah! Several attempts at reconfiguring X failed, until I managed to reinstall the Xorg ATI driver which at last gave my a graphical login screen. Not bad after three beers, a G&T and a cointreau on the rocks, eh?

Now, after a brief struggle with my wireless drivers this morning I’ve just about got everything working, other than the ‘improved’ boot-up screen which fails to output anything sensible to my monitor. But the updated software bundled with the release more than makes up for that, with Firefox 2, Rhythmbox 0.9.6 and Gaim 2.0 beta 3 all crammed in there. Pretty impressive considering the final FF2 was only actually released two days before Edgy. And it’s prettier than Dapper, too.

So overall worth upgrading. But I think there might be a reason why they called it Edgy.

According to today’s Guardian (complete with poster of salad greens - what’s with that?) Keane are to launch their new single - Nothing in My Way - on a USB memory stick through HMV at the end of the month.

HMV are doing a lot at the moment to improve their offerings in a world dominated by the likes of MySpace and Apple and where digital distribution of music is becoming the norm rather than the exception. In the last few months they’ve launched a new download service at hmvdigital.com - which allows users to download tracks without installing the HMV Music Player required by their older subscription site, introduced new access channels such as Txt2Buy and in-store kiosks, and in a desperate move to halt their recent decline in profits have even started slashing prices.

In short, these guys are desperate for our business, and as a result they’re increasingly looking for alternative ways to reach consumers - and most importantly that crucial 16-24 year old demographic.

But they’re not the only ones - further up the food chain, the record companies are too looking at new distribution models, and as a result you can buy many newly released tracks via CD, download or even your mobile phone. That’s great, right? Because surely with more ways to access music than ever before, more people are therefore able to enjoy that music?

Sadly the reality doesn’t always match this and often that choice isn’t there. So-called “exclusive” deals such as the Jamiroquai greatest hits album shortly to be available on a mobile phone near you a whole three weeks before you can get hold of it via CD mean that people are actually being stopped from listening to music - in this case for three weeks but in others for longer. The mobile operators signing deals with the record company licensing clips of concerts for exclusive use by their own subscribers are playing an even more dangerous game, competing with each other on who provide the most “exclusive” content.

So the net result is that people get locked out of content - “you can watch this music video, but only if you have the latest mobile phone” or “you can listen to this track, but only if you’re on Network X”. Add to this the fact that you need a credit or debit card to access most online music services, and 99 percent of music sold on those stores comes encumbered with DRM crap that will stop you listening to your collection if you ever stop paying for that service (or if your PC or iPod dies) and you’re increasingly slamming the door shut on legitimate consumers. These are people who want to listen to music and are happy to pay, but who if they can’t get at it easily will either download it illegally or worse - not bother at all.

So go ahead Mr Greedy Record Company - you go destroy your whole business through a series of misguided and short-sighted strategies that determine how you distribute the content that you so protectively guard. That’s fine. But remember that there are some people out there who actually are struggling to make a living out of selling music. People like HMV and of course the artists, who would probably rather that you didn’t destroy the whole entire industry when you eventually keel over like the big huge dinosaur that you are gasping your last dying breath.

Ahem.