record labels…

Posted on October 11, 2007 by ward

Last Monday, Nine Inch Nails announced that they are no longer under contract with a record label, and intend to sell their music directly to the public.

Yesterday, Radiohead released its latest album online allowing the buyer to decide how much she wants to pay for it, and without DRM. There’s also a ‘discbox’ version which is a physical release with a fixed price (GBP 40) that comes with all sorts of extras. Radiohead’s contract with EMI expired in 2004.

This move was very well received – the album shot to the top of the digital download charts, and Oasis and Jamiroquai have announced that they intend to follow in Radiohead’s footsteps.

Meanwhile Yahoo Music’s Ian Rogers posted a presentation titled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends”, which basically says that Yahoo Music will not accept any further ridiculous DRM requirements from the labels.

And today the news breaks that Madonna is dumping the major labels. She’s not going to sell her records direct, but she signed a deal with a concert promotion firm.

EMI and Universal have already started dropping DRM. Can Warner and Sony/BMG be very far behind, or are they going to go the way of the dodo? Judging by the recent comments by Sony/BMG’s chief antipiracy lawyer that copying cds you already own is stealing, and Warner’s Edgar J. Bronfman’s widely reported refusal to drop DRM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. These people seem to live in an alternate universe.

The beginning of the end, finally, for record labels? I certainly would not mind. It’s been almost 10 years now that the labels have had their head in the sand – seems to me they’ve had more than enough time to change their ways. Move over, record labels, you’re finished. If you don’t adapt, you go extinct.

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dear Wired

Posted on September 29, 2007 by ward

I understand you like to send out subscription renewal notices. You like to keep your subscribers. Well, I like subscribing to your publication, so that’s ok.

What I don’t understand, however, is why you keep sending me subscription renewal notices to extend my subscription by another 2 years, when my current expiration date is already more than 2 years in the future. Your notice even prints the date in a very helpful fashion: ‘EXP DEC 09′.

You wouldn’t happen to a have a small software bug now would you, where your expiration notification system only looks at the expiration month but disregards the year?

Posted in Completely clueless | Leave a comment

bluetooth on the 1420N

Posted on September 28, 2007 by ward

When I purchased my Dell Inspiron 1420N with Ubuntu pre-installed, bluetooth was not offered as an option. It seems it still is not as of today.

The machine does have a nice built-in slot and connector for a bluetooth module. It seems the Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module is the right one, even though the Inspiron 1420N is not listed under compatible systems. I purchased one – it fits perfectly, and it works pretty much out of the box.

I installed the gnome-bluetooth and bluez-gnome packages, and was able to pair my phone (just type any code on the phone, only then the corresponding dialog will show up on the laptop) and send files from my phone to the laptop.

And if you install gnome-vfs-obexftp, you can simply browse to obex:// with Nautilus, and browse your phone as a hard drive. Works like a charm, and again, out of the box with my Nokia E70.

Which makes we wonder why, exactly, this bluetooth module is not a preconfigurable option on the 1420N?

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more DRM-free music – and Amazon needs a clue

Posted on September 25, 2007 by ward

Amazon has launched Amazon MP3, a DRM-free music store. From the press release:

Amazon MP3 Offers Over 2 Million Songs From More Than 180,000 Artists and Over 20,000 Labels, Including EMI Music and Universal Music Group

So that’s the second label (Universal Music Group) that is starting to get a clue. Welcome to the party guys. Two more to go :)

Here’s the URL for the actual store: Amazonmp3, which is missing from the press release (?!).

I wanted to buy some music – the prices are good, and DRM-free music needs to be supported. So I clicked over to the new Interpol album, only to be greeted with this page about the handy little Amazon MP3 downloader application that is required for album purchases. It’s proprietary software, of course, and on top of that, only available for Mac OS X a and Windows.

Hello Amazon? Have you gone out of your mind? What is wrong with a downloadable archive file, which is how Audio Lunchbox sells its music (including cover art)? You’ve just lost a sale, guys – I run GNU/Linux, and this is ridiculous.

Posted in Completely clueless, DRM | 1 Comment

scanning a multipage document into PDF on GNU/Linux

Posted on September 17, 2007 by ward

Xsane works quite well, even if you want to scan a multipage document into a PDF. Just select ‘multipage’ as the target:

and then this window will pop up, where you can select an output format; the default is PDF.

I had a 17 page document to scan, which I (foolishly, perhaps) did at 150dpi. That resulted in a 30MB PDF, which was a bit larger than what I was looking for. So I changed the export format to Postscript, and then used ps2pdf to create a compressed PDF like this:

ps2pdf -dUseFlateCompression=true input.ps

That PDF clocked in at 4.5MB – not bad as a compression ratio! It’s possible to compress the PDF even further by using ‘target devices’ like so:

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen input.ps

/screen is the most heavily compressed ‘target device’, and that gave me a PDF of 1.5MB, but pretty crappy quality. There are more target devices, and a lot more options, some of which are outlined here.

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gigabyte m57sli-s4 and linuxBIOS: now easier

Posted on September 16, 2007 by ward

I checked in some code to add support for the m57sli-s4 to buildrom, the LinuxBIOS kconfig-style configuration tool that allows easy building of rom images. FILO and linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB – i.e. a linux kernel + busybox in the ROM chip) are now supported via buildrom, and the build tutorial has been updated to reflect this change.

Using buildrom makes building a ROM image very simple – it’s a matter of doing

make menuconfig

and then selecting the relevant options, followed by

make

The major obstacle for this board remains the hardware – some soldering is required, and the newer revisions of the board have a new kind of ROM chip that flashrom can not handle yet. But we’re going to work on that.

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overheard on the T

Posted on September 15, 2007 by ward

On the green line, near Park Street station:

People pay a lot of money for rides like this in Disney Land

… while commenting on a particularly bumpy ride on the green line.

Posted in Personal | Leave a comment

happy software freedom day!

Posted on September 15, 2007 by ward

Today is Software Freedom Day! Events are being held in 90 countries, organized by 330 local teams. I’m looking forward to the Boston event this afternoon.

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ruth is here

Posted on September 8, 2007 by ward

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a promise of full specs for R500+ from AMD/ATI

Posted on September 6, 2007 by ward

LWN and Christopher Blizzard broke the news that AMD is planning to release full documentation for their graphics chips, R500 and newer. This is awesome. With specs, I imagine it will take the community 6 months or so to write a functional accelerated 3D driver…

This is particularly nice because it means that the ultimate free software machine is now a big step closer: AMD based (for LinuxBIOS support) with ATI graphics. The remaining problem is the availability of wifi devices that don’t require binary firmware – the older ralink-based ones seem to be unavailable now.

So, Nvidia, what are you going to do now? Your two main competitors have GPL’d drivers and/or full public specifications for their graphics chipsets. And you?

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