Why DRM is different to Physical Incompatibilty

Imagine this.

You want to buy a water filter jug. You like the (say) Brita jug, because it's just the right shape to fit in that empty space in your fridge, but their replacment filter cartridges are more expensive than (say) the Kenwood filters. And the filters aren't compatible. So either you compromise on your choice of the main item for the sake of cheaper consumables, or you are locked in to expensive replacementsfor the sake of the initial investment.

Now go one step further. Imagine you want to buy a printer. The (say) Lexmark prints very well, but the cartridges are expensive. The (say) Canon has cheaper cartridges, but isn't as quiet. The cartridges are slightly different shapes, so you can't buy the Lexmark printer and
the Canon ink. Again, you have to base the initial, long term, investment on the the price of the consumables. After all, when your first ink cartridge runs out, you're more likely to buy more ink than another printer.

But lets take it another step. Say the physical ink cartridges are compatible, since it's a generic plastic casing. But the printer manufacturer has some code in the printer that interrogates the chip on the cartridge to find out if it's made by the right manufacturer, and won't let you print if it isn't.

A small step further: you buy a dvd player, but that restricts your choice of dvd providers because of the region encoding. And in this case you don't even have a choice - if I live in South Africa, the dvd player I buy there will be encoded for that region. If I then want to buy some dvds that aren't available there from Amazon, I can't becausethey're encoded for a different region.

Now think about music. Maybe you like the iPod, but music available on msn is cheaper, or there's a wider range. Again, you're locking down your choice of future suppliers by your choice of player, sinceDRM schemes are not inter-operable.

In the case of the water jugs, it wasn't so bad. The jugs are fairly cheap (compared to iPods, anyway) and unless you buy a couple of dozen filter cartridges in one go, you won't be losing much if you decide to switch your investment (the jug) to another supplier. So while it might be nice if all the filters were compatible, it's not something that would be worth mandating by law.

But with the dvd player (region encoding is just another form of DRM) or the mp3 players, it becomes an issue. The initial investment is high, but the bigger investment is the future purchase, the music and the dvds, since they aren't consumables. Switching supplier means
losing the entire investment, both the initial one and the investment on building up a library.

People arguing for DRM often use comparisons with physical objects to show that enforcing interoperability is ridiculous. Why shouldn't a car manufacturer specify that only their genuine, proprietary parts be used as replacements? The answer is that generally, in the physical case, the initiL purchase is the major investment, and any future purchases are consumables, meaning that the cost of switching is limited to the initial investment. Whereas with DRM, the cost of switching is both the initial investment plus the non-consumablefuture investments.

Update: Here's a further analogy, though, using the physical analogy the other way round this time. Suppose that water filter cartridge almost fitted in the other jug, except for one little piece of plastic that didn't contribute anything to the functioning of the cartridge, and was there purely to prevent it from fitting in any other jugs - that's DRM. Then imagine that there was a law to prevent you from filing off that piece of plastic to make it - that's the DMCA. Seems silly, doesn't it?

Resetting a StreamReader

I've been doing a lot of personal posts lately, so here's a techie one for a change.

Firstly, an article on El Reg about why Bill Gates isn't quite the saint that everyone's currently making him out to be.

Secondly, though, a useful piece of code that I'll probably lose if I don't post it here. Sometimes it's necessary to reset a file pointer; you've read a bit of the file, but you need to go back to the beginning again. With most languages it's pretty straightforward, but with C# it depends on what kind of stream you're using. With most streams you can just seek to the beginning of the file, or set the position of the stream to 0. When using a StreamReader, though, you need to do both of those and discard the data that the stream has already read in and is holding in its cache:
fileReader.DiscardBufferedData();
fileReader.BaseStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
fileReader.BaseStream.Position = 0;

Still pretty simple to do, but it's easy to forget the cache, or just seek to the beginning and forget to set the position to 0.

Bon Jovi at Milton Keynes!

So as I mentioned in earlier, I went to the Bon Jovi concert at Milton Keynes on Saturday, and it was such great fun that I keep wanting to talk about it!

Sure, it took longer to get there and back than we actually spent at the concert, but it was awesome. Sitting around in the sun on the grass talking to friends was great; Nickelback were great; Bon Jovi was just totally awesome. They played a lot from the new album, which I haven't heard yet, but they alternated one new and one old song, and they played most of the classics. Obviously there's a lot that they could have played but didn't have time for, like Bed of Roses and Always, and Blaze of Glory, but they had a good balance of old and new.

I can't remember all the songs they played, but here's a playlist based on what I do remember. They're only very roughly in order, so if you remember more or what order they were played, please leave a comment to let me know and I'll update the list. Luckily someone got a clip of when he took the English flag and wore it like a cape - the crowd went nuts, and the video's here. The quality of some isn't so good, but it's fun to watch.

Nickelback - I don't remember many of these, but they played, amongst others:

• Photograph
• Far Away
• Savin' Me
• This Is How You Remind Me

Bon Jovi - they generally played one new, one old, but I don't
remember most of the new ones since I don't know the new album. The time went pretty fast, but now that I look at the list they actually played a lot of songs:

• In These Arms
• Runaway
• Radio Saved My Life Tonight
• Born To Be My Baby
• You Give Love A Bad Name
• Bad Medicine
• Living on a prayer
• Sleep When I'm Dead
• I'll Be There For You
• The Boys Are Back In Town
• Have a Nice Day
• Bells of Freedom
• Story of My Life
• Dead or Alive
• Who Says You Can't Go Home Again
• It's My Life
• Saturday Night
• Keep the Faith

It was an awesome concert :-) Still can't get my vario to connect to my pc, but suddenly realised I could just email the photos to myself! So here they are:




Update: There are a bunch of photos of the Saturday night concert on the Milton Keynes National Bowl site.

And I finally found a set list, and it looks like I got most of them:

Last Man Standing / Rockin' All Over the World (John Fogerty cover) / You Give Love A Bad Name / Captain Crash & the Beauty Queen From Mars / I'd Die For You / Born To Be My Baby / Story of My Life / I'll Sleep When I'm Dead / Runaway / The Radio Saved My Life Tonight / In These Arms / Have A Nice Day / Who Says You Can't Go Home / It's My Life / I'll Be There For You (electric, Richie on vocals) / Complicated / Bad Medicine / Raise Your Hands / Livin' On A Prayer
Encore: Bells of Freedom / Wanted Dead Or Alive / Everyday / Keep the Faith

It definitely seemed like a lot more at the time! And I'm sure the second to last wasn't Everyday; it was one from Young Guns, although I'm trying to find which one. I think they did play Everyday, because it does sound familiar, but not then.

Update: Actually, looking at that list, it's definitely not complete. They did play The Boys are Back in Town, which is on my list but not that one; there's also a video of Living in Sin on YouTube, so they must have played that as well. And it looks like they played different songs on the 11th; there are videos of Always and These Days, which they definitely didn't play on the 10th. Here's a playlist of videos from the 10th - there are a million more on YouTube, but these are some of the best.

A Summer Evening in London

Everyone I know back in South Africa has this picture of London as a grey, dismal place where it rains all the time, and even when it's not raining it's cloudy and miserable.

I knew that wasn't true, but the past couple of days have really proved it. It's been beautiful and sunny, and yesterday at the Bon Jovi concert it was really hot - it was so nice sitting on the grass in the sun with friends :-) And today it's been really hot, really sunny again; too hot, actually, but now it's about 9 in the evening and it's starting to get a bit cooler; the sun's going down, but it's still nice and light and it's just perfect for going a for an evening walk.

I just wish I had someone to walk with, or someone to walk to.

I was standing on the balcony of my flat, looking out over the houses, and it just looked so perfectly London - sometimes I still can't believe that I'm actually here.

Post New York

I've been back from New York for a week now, and still haven't posted any pics. It's been a long week.

It was a great trip - didn't get to do too much during the week, since I was there for work, but the weekend was awesome. I went out to Coney Island, which is somewhere I've read a lot about (okay, read some stories set in) but never thought I'd get to see. Sure, it's past its heyday, and it's all a bit old and faded, but that's the charm of Coney Island. It's just what I pictured (but smaller):




I saw a lot of places in New York, although I didn't go to a lot of places - I did the touristy sightseeing bus tours, so like I saw Central Park, but didn't actually go to Central Park, if that makes sense. But I did go to FAO Schwartz on 5th Avenue, and saw their life size baby elephant plush toy; I went to the huge Toys R Us on Broadway, and saw their giant indoor Ferris Wheel and, even more awesome, their giant animatronic T-Rex (I have a video of it, but I'm not quite sure how to post it here. I'll look into it). I had cheesecake at Junior's, saw the Empire State Building lit up red, white and blue for Fleet Week (and saw the fleet sail in, and the fly-bys!). I saw the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Governer's Island. I went out to Staten Island on the ferry, and saw South Street Seaport. I took the ferry to and from work (which was across the Hudson in Jersey City). I got caught in a thunderstorm, and bought touristy souveniers (including a NYPD t-shirt, NYPD sweat pants, and even NYPD socks). I tried to take a helicopter trip, but every time I booked it the day turned out too hazy to see anything. Basically I just had an awesome time :-) Oh, except that I didn't get to see Winnie the Pooh :-( I mailed the library to ask if they were open on Memorial Day, and they said they weren't - they neglected to mention that they weren't open the entire Memorial Day weekend. So the wandering around trying to find them was a bit of a waste of time.

Here are a couple of the best photos (I took hundreds, literally, and typically now I don't remember what half of them are of. That's the problem with the sightseeing tours - the guide says "there's the house where .... lives", or "that's where they filmed...."; you take a photo; you look at the photos later, going "why do I have a hundred photos of buildings?").

(I'm using Yahoo! Photos for photo storage, btw - it seemed pretty cool, but I can't figure out how to get a link to just a photo, rather than the album, so I'm still using Flickr for that. If you want to see all my photos, you can view the hi-res or low-res albums.

But now, I'm off to the Bon Jovi concert (with Nickelback!) at Milton Keynes. Pity it's not at Wembley (apart from the fact that it would be cooler, it would be so much easier to get home from afterwards), but I'm so excited, I'm sure it'll be great fun anyway! :D

Update: The concert was great! Sure, it took longer to get there and back than we actually spent at the concert, but it was awesome. Sitting around in the sun on the grass talking to friends was great; Nickelback were great (they played my 2 favourite songs of theirs, 'Savin' me' and 'How you remind me', and I heard some new great ones too, like 'Far Away'); Bon Jovi was just totally awesome. They played a lot from the new album, which I haven't heard yet, but they alternated one new and one old song, and they played all the classics - Keep the Faith (my new theme song), Living on a Prayer, and others that I can't remember right now but were really good. I'm so tired now, though - it was like a two hour aerobic class, jumping around and clapping and I had a really, really good time :-) If I can get my Vario to connect to my PC, I'll upload the two photos I took.

Thunderstorms in New York

So I've been in New York for the past two weeks, and I just haven't had time to blog - I'll do a summary post once I'm back in London and have caught up on some sleep.

But I had the worst evening tonight, and since everyone I would talk to is asleep (given that there's a 5 to 6 hour time difference), I figured I'd use the blogging-as-catharsis approach and talk about it here.

Being my last full day in New York, I was trying to figure out what to spend the last of my money on and came across the iHome - basically an alarm clock that your iPod plugs into. Very cool, cost almost exactly the amount of money I had left, so I thought I'd get one after work.

Amazingly, I actually managed to find a Radio Shack fairly easily, they had them in stock, and I got one. Walked down the block to catch the bus home... wait .... wait... no bus. Then the thunder starts. And the lightning. And then the rain. Big, heavy, wet drops. So while I'm huddled in the bus shelter trying to keep my new iHome dry, I realise: the US uses 110V, while the UK is 220 to 240V. But hopefully the ac adaptor can handle the full range, like my laptop and mobile and camera ac adaptors can?

So while I'm worrying about this, the thunder is getting louder, the lightning more continuous, the rain harder, and the bus's absence more conspicuous. Can't catch a cab, since they only take cash and I spent the last of my cash on the iHome.

Still no buses.

Decide to walk to the next bus stop, in case the buses are making a detour around this block for some reason. Get totally soaked, but the bus pulls up just as I get there. So now I'm soaked, freezing, trying to keep my iHome dry, and hoping that I haven't just wasted my money on something that won't work in the UK.

Halfway back to the hotel, the bus driver announces that the next stop is the last one. And it's taken us 2 or 3 times as long as normal to get this far, since the traffic's hectic with the rain. So I've already panicked, then been relieved when a bus turned up, and now starting to panic again. Luckily, though, I wasn't the only one going further, so we got off and eventually another bus turned up and took us all the way to my stop. But by now I look like a drowned rat, and feel worse.

Get to my hotel room, open the box - nope, the ac adaptor only takes 120V. And I don't really have time to return it tomorrow, since I'm working in the morning and don't want to chance missing my plane.

Eventually, though, I did some research on the net (which, by the way, costs me 9.95 per 24 hours, even if I only use it for 5 minutes in those 24 hours). And after getting myself a bit confused over what the inputs and outputs were, it looks like I should be able to get a step-down transformer for about £12. So all is not lost, but it hasn't been quite the fun event that it should have been.

But now I have to go pack - it's been fun, but I'm glad to be going back home (although I'm not sure where home is anymore - is it London, or is it South Africa? And since I want to move out of my flat in London asap, is that still home? Aargh, I need to stop moving around and settle down for a bit!).