Technology

DVD Format Wars

It’s interesting to watch the DVD format war continue to unfold. Interestingly enough, it’s rare for any articles on this issue to mention the cost to end businesses (such as video rental stores) or end consumers. Ask any store owner how much it sucked having to buy two different formats of each new video release back in the eighties. Ya, fun.
[…]

vs Transponder/DLMax

I was had just started checking my mail via web-based email at a friend’s place today and out of nowhere a window popped up advertising cheap airfares. Just before I had been watching aircraft videos on FlightLevel350.com with my friend’s son. Coincedence or not, in a perfect world windows shouldn’t just pop up on their own. I was using Internet Explorer for some reason, I think because I was upgrading their Firefox at the time.

I immediately redirected the browser over to doxdesk.com, which has long been my source of testing IE for “parasites”. The result for my friend? Transponder/DLMax, which is just one of many such parasites. Luckily, doxdesk.com has instructions on removing the parasite, which I proceeded to do.

Unfortunately, the parasite was smarter than me. It really wasn’t my fault though, since my friend had several (read: nine) instances of the parasite on his machine, and although I would get rid of one, the others would replace the one I had just removed. Finally, I broke down and, on suggestion, installed Microsoft’s new AntiSpyware program, which identified all the parasites and nicely removed them all.

After that, my friend vowed to never use Internet Explorer (except for Windows Update) and has permanently switched to Firefox.

But it brings up an interesting discussion point around software development. At what point should the developer protect the users of his software? Microsoft’s response to things like ActiveX and such is that it’s a great technology and that you should be careful what you install. But how does my Mum know what is safe and what isn’t? Should she only run Microsoft products that must be purchased? Or should Microsoft have thought things through a bit more and said “maybe we shouldn’t let critical libraries be overwritten”. I’m not sure which is right, but I do know that saying it’s all the user’s fault when the underlying platform is seriously flawed is not right at all. And it’s enough to continue to keep me away from the Windows platform for that much longer.
[…]

Code of Conduct

It seems now that “the big guys” now want to decide what is inappropriate behaviour with regard to your Internet consumption. According to the article, the draft code of conduct wants ISPs to “enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities.”

Apparently I should be expecting the police to be knocking on my door since I run two servers (I have a production and a development/test server) and have fairly heavy bandwidth consumption. But I don’t have any illegally downloaded music on my laptop, I’m a developer that runs a couple of web-based applications with large databases and high-traffic. But in a civil case there is no public defender, you’re on your own. So if you can’t afford a good lawyer, you can likely kiss your assets goodbye.
[…]

To Encrypt or Not To Encrypt?

I’ve always been a big fan of encryption ever since I discovered PGP in the early nineties while at university. Of course, before that there was the secrey spy stuff I got by collecting the top flaps of Rice Crispies boxes. But ya, in a world where you never know who’s watching or snooping, I always thought of encryption as a good way to go. Plus there was the geek factor.

But my attempts to go almost completely encrypted thus far have thwarted. This is mostly due to a lack of awareness and a lack of technical knowhow on the part of your average Windows/Outlook user. But given that there’s an article on Wired about one persons lack of encrypting, it might not be long before more and more people realize the importance of encryption. One can only hope at least.

Of course, time is almost always another big factor. I recently discovered that it’s relatively easy to set up an encrypted hard drive partition under Linux (at least using Gentoo). So I set up my swap drive to be encrypted. Perfect. And I created a non-system partition which will be encrypted so all my personal and work files on my laptop will be secure. Have I done that yet? Nope, been too busy. Crap; hope my laptop doesn’t get stolen.
[…]

RSS; my new favourite technology

Up until a week or so ago, my morning routine on arriving at work consisted of opening a web browser (Firefox of course) and reading through the lastest news. I typically started with general interest and business news courtesy of CBC and then moved my way through various technology news sites, such as Wired.

However, since I upgraded to KDE 3.4, I’ve now converted to an RSS junkie, via Akregator, KDE’s built-in RSS reader. As a result I no longer have to visit each news site to see what’s new as Akregator does it for me. That also means that if a site doesn’t have an RSS feed, I no longer visit it.

I suspect that many news sites are resisting RSS as they fear it will reduce traffic and thus reduce income for advertising. I suspect that would be the case if they included the entire article within the feed but if they go a route similar to Wired, traffic will likely not be affected. For each feed article, Wired has a brief overview and if the story sounds interesting, I can click on the link for the complete story, which takes me to the Wired site. Voila! I’m back on Wired’s site as if I had visited the site via a bookmark.

I love making my life easier.
[…]

From One Extreme to the Other

When I first started registering domain names, back in 1996, the .CA domain was very restricted. Domains registered in Canada could basically only be done by Canadian businesses or organizations. And if you weren’t federally registered (or registered in more than one province) you had to settle for a province based domain, such as mydomain.ab.ca instead of mydomain.ca. And if your company name or a trademark you owned wasn’t “mydomain” you couldn’t register mydomain.ca. It wasn’t ideal but it’s far better than what we have now. And it didn’t cost anything to register a domain back then either (as far as I remember).

Then along came the idea that the domain should be opened up and CIRA was created. Suddenly, with all this overhead and a bunch of registrars wanting to make money, .CA domains cost money. Oh, and so long as you were a Canadian citizen, you could now register whatever you want. And this has turned our coveted .CA domain into a big <insert explicit words here> money grab.

Today I was thinking that it would be cool to a have a Canadian-focused site about flying. Unfortunately, flying.ca is taken. But the site is simply a facade to an American company called Domain Sponsor, based in Los Angeles, with a bunch of useless links and pop-up ads. What’s the point? A perfectly good domain wasted, all for $50 (most of which goes to the registrar anyway).

So we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. I would have much preferred some sort of happy medium in the middle, where some clown with a lot of money couldn’t simply gobble up a bunch of good domains in order to hopefully make money from click-throughs or whatever.
[…]

only a quarter?

For the longest time I had been wondering how it was that registrars like GoDaddy could charge $10 USD (or less) for a domain when the going rate was around $30-50. Of course, I hate the GoDaddy site; I find their site far too cluttered and a gongshow overall. Of course, Network Solutions isn’t much better anymore.

I used to have all my domains registered with Network Solutions, believing that since they had been doing it for so long that they could be trusted not to mess up anything to do with my domains. I’ve since smartened up and moved all my domains over to webnames.ca, the spin-off of the original dot-CA registrar. They have a partnership with register.com and I get a bulk deal since I have so many domains.

But then I read an article that mentioned that ICANN gets 25 cents for each domain registered and my immediate reaction was WTF? But upon further investigation (you can’t trust newspapers these days) it seems that Network Solutions also gets $6 per domain to run the “big database”.

Whatever the case, one has to wonder how it costs $24-44 per domain to register a domain and support me as a customer, especially if I have many, many domains.
[…]

vs iPod Mini

I ran across a link to the Minty MP3 player this afternoon. Very clever. I’m not sure how much time was spent designing and building the final model or how many other revisions were made but if one guy can do this, you have to wonder why so many people need to be involved in product development. Okay, yes I realize that you need more than just one person, still… makes you think doesn’t it?
[…]

Google Maps

I’m sure that by now this has been over blogged, but in case you’ve had your head in the sand today, Google has unleashed their latest beta, Google Maps.

Blake Ross commented “How has MapQuest innovated since AOL purchased it five years ago?” is his blog about Google Maps, which (once again) raises an interesting (yet usually forgotten) point. And I’m pretty sure that this is written in some business textbooks somewhere but still, early to market companies seem to constantly forget it. If you don’t continue to innovate, someone else is going to come out of nowhere and do what you do, only they’ll do it better and they’ll probably do it faster. Oh, and probably cheaper too.

The same is true of Internet Explorer. Microsoft brought IE out of nowhere and continually gobbled up market share, not only because they started shipping it with Windows but because they took what Netscape was doing with Navigator/Communicator and did it better. It loaded faster, rendered pages faster and it was free. But then once Microsoft had the majority of the market using IE, they started their slowdown. And since IE 5.0, there has been very little in the way of updates other than security patches and no innovation whatsoever. All this despite that there is still an IE development group with more than a few people.

So the problem Microsoft faces now is that people have already started switching to other browsers. And it’s unlikely that people will switch back. Even if IE matches Firefox’s feature list they will still need to “one up” Firefox, which won’t be easy to do if Firefox continues down it’s current development path.

Update: fixed incorrect spelling of Google… I had written “Goggle Maps”.
[…]