This Week: on Animal Cruelty Theater

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Wow. Just wow.

Tom just made me listen to the Progressive Folk Metal station on last.fm. It’s fucking rad. Make sure you read the descriptions.

Orphaned Land is a progressive metal band from Israel. It combines oriental elements and Jewish tradition with slow doom/death metal. Orphaned Land is in the core a doom/death band, but it was highly influenced by the folk music and tradition of the Oriental Jews (Mizraḥim), making their sound much more progessive than typical doom/death bands. Their album Sahara (1994) was the first to include a combination of death metal and traditional oriental music. In their second album El Norra Alila (1996), Orphaned Land elaborated the combination of metal and oriental music, including the addition of song with traditional oriental Jewish piyyut and Arab melodies.

Wow.

I should have posted this on my blog…

…before I IM’d it to Brian.

Also, poor hamster:
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The myth of DRM and piracy

My old friend Ken Fisher at Ars Technica just posted an editorial where he states that “DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenue by minimizing your rights and then selling them back to you.” The thing is, that’s just half the story. Sure, the content providers want their buck, but so do the hardware vendors.

The thing that’s always puzzled me about the rise of DRM is that the hardware vendors used to side with consumers, rather than content providers. In the early 80s, the movie studios sued Sony to prevent the introduction of Betamax recorders. Sony went to court to defend the consumer’s right to use content however they want–as long as they don’t violate copyright. Thus was the doctrine of fair use born.

Ken very clearly outlined what the content providers get from DRM, but he missed the hardware side of the story. After all, why would the hardware vendors voluntarily include any technology in their products that will annoy their customers and cause potential support calls? It doesn’t make sense, until you look at the hardware vendors little side businesses–music and movie distribution.

In order to convince the content providers to let hardware vendors distribute media, hardware vendors had to include DRM tech in their hardware and software products. But media distribution is a relatively minor sideline for a hardware company–the content providers take the vast majority of money from every sale on iTunes. The real benefit for hardware vendors is that their DRM schemes lock consumers into their hardware platform.

If you’ve bought all your music from the iTunes Music Store, you’re not going to suddenly buy a player that won’t play the music in your collection, will you?

Christmas pics + Corgi videos

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Hardy relaxing + a surprise

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Chloe, Trudy, and Hardy playing

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Dad playing with the golf ball puzzle

Chloe relaxing in her elf costume. (More photos)

Japanese UI designers rock

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Why is it that I’m not surprised that the forefront of user interface design is Japan? My buddy Brian is in Toyko now, and took a video tour through one of the famous gadget/cell phone stores in Akiba.

I love that Japanese phones have cool, power-user interfaces–exactly the kind of thing I’d like on my PC. Right now, there are essentially two UI options for computers: universal newb-friendly UI and crazy, complex Unix-style UI. OS X and Windows fall into the newb-friendly category, while most types of Unix and many Linux variants are much too complex for a normal user.

Microsoft tried something similar to this in the past, you probably remember the punchline that was Bob. Designed to be a newbie front-end for Windows 3.1, Bob was unusable for most people because it didn’t expose necessary functionality. Worse, it condescended to adults who found Windows too complex. Essentially, Bob said “Hey, it’s not that I’m too difficult for you to figure out, you’re just too stupid, moron.” It was a complete failure in every way.

That said, I think that if a vendor rolled the other way, by adding cool and useful power-user functionality to the existing UI, without sacrificing performance (like you do with the Desktop UI replacement apps for Windows XP), it could be successful. Maybe that’s just me though.

Back in San Francisco

We just returned to San Francisco after a long trip back to TN. (I’ll post some pictures to Flickr later tonight or tomorrow.)

We spent a lot of time with the families, watched the dogs alternately sniff and fight each other, and then ran them all over my parent’s farm. Definitely a good time, but it was an exhausting trip, and I’m really glad to just be sitting back at the desk for 8-10 hours a day.