Category Archives: Technology

Why Microsoft isn’t supporting the Sony DVD format

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Well, well. Here’s an interesting interview in The Daily Princetonian with Bill Gates. The bit that grabbed me is this:

Q: There has been a lot of debate about the next generation Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies in recent weeks. It seems more and more companies are backing the Blu-ray standard. The current debate seems to harken back to the Betamax vs. VHS format war in the 1970s and 80s, where Betamax was ostensibly the superior technology yet it did not gain wide acceptance. Why is Microsoft not backing Blu-ray today — a technology that many consider to be superior?

Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

    It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.

    For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.

At first sight, this looks encouraging. At last, a major computer technology company is standing up to the copyright thugs. The only problem is that the same Bill Gates has ceded veto rights to Hollywood studios over some features of the forthcoming Vista (aka Longhorn) release of Windows. Not much evidence of concern for consumers there. So either Redmond’s right hand knoweth not what its left hand doeth; or Mr Gates speaks with forked tongue.

Update: Cian Ginty of Gamestoaster.com writes:

Possibly overlooked by many people, Microsoft’s main reasons for not supporting the format may be because Sony is to use Blue-ray in their rival PS3 games console, which is to launch within a year after MS’s Xbox 360 console which should be out for Christmas.

United States Patent: 6,947,978

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Awarded 20 September to the US National Security Agency. Details here.

Method for geolocating logical network addresses on electronically switched dynamic communications networks, such as the Internet, using the time latency of communications to and from the logical network address to determine its location. Minimum round-trip communications latency is measured between numerous stations on the network and known network addressed equipment to form a network latency topology map. Minimum round-trip communications latency is also measured between the stations and the logical network address to be geolocated. The resulting set of minimum round-trip communications latencies is then correlated with the network latency topology map to determine the location of the network address to be geolocated.

In plain English… How to find the geographical location of a networked computer from its IP address. Now I wonder why they’re interested in that? And wouldn’t the RIAA and MPAA just love to licence the patent… (Link via Bruce Schneier.)

Music on tap

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Today’s Observer column about the long-term future for recorded music.

Rock star David Bowie wrote a thoughtful piece in the New York Times in June 2002 about the future of music. ‘The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years,’ he wrote, ‘and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity…’

Later… Bill Thompson writes to point out that however perceptive Bowie may be, his lawyers are the usual troglodytes. Here’s a quote from a Thompson column on the subject:

David Bowie, or those of his advisors who shape his public image, has always been interested in the internet and launched a website and even an ISP long before any of his peers.

Now there is a competition for fans who are invited to make a mash-up of two or Bowie songs and send their work into the site.

At first this seemed like a brilliant idea. EMI is trying to suppress Danger Mouse’s Grey Album and getting lots of bad press, while Bowie encourages his fans to appropriate and reuse his music.

It seemed that the man really understood the ways in which digital technologies can encourage creativity and new forms of artistic expression – the site even suggests that you rip songs from the older albums you own to use in your work.

But if you go to the trouble of reading the terms and conditions you find that it just is not so.

The lawyers have got to them, so everyone who enters “irrevocably grants, transfers, sells, assigns and conveys to the sponsors, their successors and assigns, all present and future right, title and interest of every kind and nature whatsoever in and to the Mash-Up(s) for exploitation throughout the universe, in perpetuity, by means of any and all media and devices whether now known or hereafter devised”.

Suddenly it is not so friendly at all – you can take the stuff, make something really great with it, but it is still theirs.

Don’t you just love that phrase “all media and devices whether now known or hereafter devised”!

Our broadband world

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Amidst the hoo-hah over the video iPod, two interesting developments have been overlooked. Both concern the new iMac G5 range. The machine now comes with an iSight video camera built in. And it ships without a modem (an external modem is available as a high-priced optional extra). What this tells us is that Apple is now assuming that the majority of its customers have broadband connections.

Something’s up

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Sun Microsystems has announced a link-up with Google.

What’s going to come from this?

Nobody knows — yet. But here’s a quote from the Blog maintained by Sun’s President, Jonathan Schwartz:

Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they’d rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they’d all give up the latter without a blink.) All these trends show a slowing upgrade appetite calling into question the power of traditional distribution. In stark contrast to the value of volume, community and participation.

Now, I have been nothing if not tediously repetitive in stating my belief that volume begets value – best demonstrated by the rise of the free software movement (whose volume is derived from its price, its value from innovation, in all forms). The cost of reaching customers, traditionally the most expensive part of building a business, has largely been eliminated – resulting in massive, global participation. Value’s literally everywhere the network travels, on every device it touches (and it’s subsidizing some very interesting ideas.)

But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?

If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change. And that what just happened in Massachusetts, when a state government made what was to me a very rational statement – we will pick an open standard to protect the right of our citizens to access data and services; we will then buy from vendors that support standards – will be a shot heard ’round the world.

What will they produce? Here’s John Paczkowski’s guess:

If Sun and Google do uncrate an office productivity solution — say a Sun Ray ultra-thin client optimized to run “Google Office” — that shot will definitely be heard up in Redmond, along with a lot of expletives and an anguished scream or two. Because if anyone can shift personal computing out of Microsoft’s domain and into the open, it’s Google.

Interesting times. Watch this space.

On this day…

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… in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, and in doing so set in motion a chain of events which eventually led to the Internet (because it spurred the US government into setting up ARPA). See here and here for the gory details. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds. It was 23 inches in diameter and was made from steel.

I was 11 at the time, living in Kerry, and I remember the day vividly. I spent the evening glued to the radio listening to recordings of the satellite’s strange, disembodied beeps from the Jodrell Bank radio observatory and from amateur radio operators. (Later, we learned that the Russian designers originally wanted the device to broadcast a message in morse code, but weight limitations precluded all but the most elementary oscillator.) The signal continued until the transmitter batteries ran out on October 26.

I also remember feeling frustrated by cloud cover which prevented us from scanning the night sky.