Just Don’t Bite

So for some reason dispite avoiding Warhammer Age of Reckoning, until the day before launch. I watch The Escapists review of Spore and see the Warhammer trailer afterwards. So I decide, oh yeah… that looks fun. So I do the EA Digital Download. I run home over lunch and install the little beast and start the download.

Rock, only 5 hours. 8 hours and 7 gigs later it hangs on me. Just stops getting anything. I google in vain, I find nothing. But I do see something about trying to reinstall the download manager. So I try this… WRONG! I lost the 7gb download I had and had to restart. On the plus it is working now.

Now before anyone says anything about “Oh it uses bittorrent.” Bullshit. Yes you can got to something like torrent2.eamythic.com:8085 and get a torrent, but guess what. It downloads at shit speeds. Getting it from the other torrent sites seems risky.

Here’s my issue though. EA got a lot of cool credit for deciding on using Bittorrent for a distro method. Guess that was just for the beta/pre-order crap. So why not keep doing it for the rest of it? In fact if you do a digital download why not let you just get a fucking torrent and get it from any trackers you can scrape from? Seriously… pirates can distribute your stuff better, faster, and cheaper than you can. Let them. If your business model relies on per month subscriptions; take a key, a CC# and make an account. Let me get the damn code how ever the flying fuck I want.

Thank you. Now hopfully I’ll have the damn game by the time I get off work tomarrow, just in time to go and help take pictures.

So we all take pictures right?
**yes you all nodded didn’t you**

Do you know your rights when you take a picture? If you’ve ever stopped shooting when told to than I’m going to guess you don’t. Well please go read your rights and use them. Also extrapolate on them. Remember that if it can be photographed than you are IN PUBLIC and should you do something stupid you cannot relay on any form of privacy to protect you. Also the same rules would apply to cops. If it can be legally photographed you can be busted for it.

At the same time when dealing with pictures remember the license that you grant them. Please read the MySpace TOS, Flickr (pretty easy), or YouTube (tell me, a google gives a high SNR). Thing is, you should look at the liscense that you use to put you pictures on the web. Pick the one that is least restrictive and host there. If you must, host them your self. Hide the copy right using CSS. Don’t let yourself get sued because you used something that you shouldn’t have. Don’t let fear keep you from using something you could have.

Also known as DRM or by the proper name it is Digital Rights Managment. Or maybe it is just a Damn Retarded Method of annoying your customers and unless you work for a media company you’ll probably agree. They like to argue that DRM is a must for digital media since you can make perfect 1:1 copies and a copy of a copy doesn’t degrade the quality. Also with the advent of the Internet you can share them at a really nice speed. Now that we’ve got the “but what about just coping tapes” argument killed we can move on as to why DRM and this mess is suddenly a problem and a waste.

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Time and time again I get asked about mp3s and how to deal with them. This might have something to do with having a sizable mp3 collection and the fact that I keep it very well maintained and clean. What will happen typically is someone will get a new mp3 player, and not surprisingly want to add music to it. Now I love mp3 players, I really do. I just hate how they deal with media most of the time. For me it has always made sense to organize my mp3s as follows.

\Artist\Cd\Track-Title.mp3 -or-
\Artist\Cd\Track-Artist-Title.mp3

Thats how they’ve always lived on my hard drives, it makes using just about any media application a snap. I can quickly and easily locate and load a cd. Now when it comes to things like iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the newer Winamp you get these nice library functions. This can make for a mess if your mp3s are not organized or were not ripped properly. You see these application rely on the ID3 tag to get info about the file, and (possibly) the file name to some extent. Or course when you throw things on your mp3 player, they like to use the ID3 tag.

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It’s sad to think that a fair amount of the influences on my musical tastes come from a handful of people. But it’s a bit scary to think that two very distinct people had a HUGE influence on how digital music took off and worked. One of them has been on the cover of WIRED magazine, yet failed to make a recent list. I’m not sure the other has ever got much of a mention in WIRED.

Ask yourself, where would your mp3’s be without Shawn Fanning. They’d be on someone else’s computer and you’d never had accessed them. This is the guy that originally wrote Napster. Back before it was a pay service. This was the application that brought mp3 sharing to the masses. Suddenly what had been done over other channels was easy enough for the average person to access it and to find the music they wanted. It worked, and it worked so well that the law suits came and down it went. But he was small potatoes compared to the other guy, of course I’m talking about Justin Frankel.

What did this guy do? Very simple, he made Winamp, and later with someone else developed SHOUTcast for streaming music. After all what good are mp3’s if you don’t have a robust player to play them? Eventually he was bought out by the cooperate drones and hired by AOL. It was there that he wrote Gnutella, a step forward in P2P. I’m going to guess you’ve not paid a large amount of attention to the protocols that are used by your applications, but if you’ve ever used Limewire, Bearshare, or iMesh (to name a few). You have used his design.

Maybe I’m wrong. But if it had not been for these two guys, mp3s and file sharing would probably have never taken off like they did. At the same time, had napster never been forced to filter mp3’s someone may not have made a wrapper for it. They may not have decided to develop a new method. Never know. But one thing I do know, had these two not done what they did Apple wouldn’t have a group of people so addicted to digital media that they’ll buy over priced mp3 players.

My reply to TJ’s Rock Music Owes…