Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).

A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.

When a subject (like DRM) is talked about and analysed to death, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. DRM has gotten its fair share of coverage here at franticindustries, but I always feel the need to reiterate certain points due to the music and movie industry constant barrage of hypocrisy, confusion and false information on the subject.

While doing some research I’ve searched through my backlog and bookmarks to find the info that really shed the right light on DRM during the years. The result are the following 15 articles on DRM, which I think anyone interested in his digital rights should read. The articles are presented in chronological order with the latest being on top:

• 2007, TechDirt: An Economic Explanation For Why DRM Cannot Open Up New Business Model Opportunities - a great explanation of how DRM can only be a hindrance to a successful business model.
• 2007: TechDirt: Saying You Can’t Compete With Free Is Saying You Can’t Compete Period - again, great article from TechDirt, explaining why competing with something that’s free is exactly the same as competing with products with higher marginal cost.
• 2007: Steve Jobs on DRM: Thoughts on Music - whether you believe his anti-DRM arguments or not (and you have reason not to, since Apple probably did more for the spreading of DRM than any other company), Steve Jobs’ memo might go down in history as the beginning of the turn of the tide.
• 2006, Technocrat: Is DRM Just a Consumer Rights Issue? - a quick and to the point article explaining why DRM affects more than just your record collection.
• 2006, The Register: Lessig, Stallman on ‘Open Source’ DRM - Richard Stallman explains his argument against open-source DRM.
• 2006, The Guardian: ‘A lawyer who is also idealist - how refreshing’ - an interview with Eben Moglen, one of the founders of the GPL software license, in which he explains the concept of open-source DRM. A similar article can be found on ZDnet.
• 2006, Ars Technica: Hacking Digital Rights Management - a very in-depth article explaining how different types of DRM protection were hacked.
• 2005, Freedom to Tinker: Is DRM Good for You? - an analysis of why agreeing to DRM is not the same as agreeing to copyright laws (featuring both sides of the argument)
• 2004, NYTimes: Share the Music - one in the long line of proofs that music sharing does not hurt CD sales, contrary to what the major record labels would have you believe.
• 2004, Boing Boing: Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM - the finale of the interesting exchange between Wired and Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, who criticized Wired for not taking DRM into account when reviewing some multimedia players and for being lax on DRM in their article on BitTorrent. Cory brings a number of important points, most important of which is the fact that “DRM isn’t protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition.”
• 2002, The Register: File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers - an interesting study coming from no other than Microsoft which concludes that DRM doesn’t stand a chance against the “darknet”.
• 2001, Wired: Licensed to Bill - Wired has been known to give good and compelling commentary on current IT issues. Not on the topic of DRM. This article from 2001 predict DRM’s future and it’s an interesting read because of how naive and wrong it is from today’s perspective. The only part of the article that looks right to me is this quote: “In the short run, whether consumers embrace the paradigm (of using DRM) barely matters.“.
• 200x, Downhill Battle: The reasons to get rid of the major record labels. - an outline of reasons why we should simply ditch the major labels, together with a list of related articles.
• 2000, CNN, LinuxWorld: Meet the kid behind the DVD hack - an interesting insight into the mind of Jon Lech Johanssen when he was only 16 year old and facing hacking charges for his reverse engineering of CSS and the release of the DeCSS tool.
• 199x, Negativland: The Problem With Music - a great insight into the inner workings of the music industry by one of the greatest music producers ever - Steve Albini. Many more articles related to copyright can be found here. A similar in-depth rant about the music industry was written by Courtney Love for Salon.com back in 2000.

——————————–

Besides these 15 articles, you might be interested in the coverage of DRM-related topics here at franticindustries:
The solution to the DRM problem
Can DRM ever be good?
Why pirated software is better than bought software

Of course, if you know any other great articles related to DRM that aren’t listed here, please post them in the comments.

The announcement of the online version of Adobe Photoshop got me thinking about what exactly do Web 2.0 applications and services need to do to be competitive to desktop applications. It’s obvious that in most cases, simply being a web application isn’t going to be enough: the online photo editors that I’ve reviewed are nice enough, but a software giant that has a huge user base might often be able to wipe them all simply by releasing an online, light version of their desktop application - and this scenario is very plausible in the case of Photoshop Online.

So, what conditions do Web 2.0 startups have to meet to make sure they can’t easily be replaced (because of zero switching cost) by another application, or to make sure that they add enough value over their desktop counterparts to be competitive?

To analyse this we’ll have to remember what comprises a Web 2.0 application in the first place (with a lot of help from Tim O’Reilly). Although not all Web 2.0 applications and services meet all of these conditions, some subset of these is what is generally thought of as Web 2.0:

1. Using the web as a platform
2. Built around a platform that gives the users an experience similar to a desktop application (AJAX, Apollo, WPF)
3. Applications are updated continually
4. User data stored online
5. Data can be shared among users
6. Data can be remixed and mashed-up with other services
7. Intrinsic value growing with the number of users

The order in which these characteristics are presented is important. Numbers 1 and 2 are the basics. 3 to 6 are derived from 1 & 2, while the last one is only present if conditions 1, 2, 4, (probably) 5 and 6 are met. Due to the diversity of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, there will be exceptions to this, but this list in exactly this order is in my opinion a good representative of what the majority of Web 2.0 applications and services are about.

The question is, which of these conditions must a Web 2.0 service or an application meet to offer significantly more value than its desktop counterpart? Numbers 1 & 2 are, by itself, most often not enough. The advantage that they offer is that this service is available from any computer connected to the Internet, which is great, but they also have the disadvantage of not being able to (yet!) offer the robustness and the features of desktop applications. The web as the platform, as well as programming platforms like AJAX simply cannot stand up against advanced applications built for a desktop environment. As exceptions to this rule I have to mention Netvibes and Google Reader. Everything they offer can be done with a desktop application. However, the reasons for their success are simple: they are very competitive (for me personally, Netvibes is the best) compared to other applications of their kind, offline are online. The second reason would be the fact that they’re very closely tied to the web itself so it’s a very logical choice to users to use an online application for this type of functionality.

Number 3 is a tough one. Its advantage is the fact that users don’t have to worry about upgrading. Its disadvantage is the fact that you cannot go back to the previous version, which is not unimportant. I still use ACDSee classic (version 2.43) simply because its faster and less bloated than the current version. Can I do this with an online application, such as Netvibes? No. It’s a problem. Web 2.0 companies could offer old versions of their products online, however due to hosting costs and raising cost of development and support I sincerely doubt it’s ever going to happen. Still, some Web 2.0 apps and services will have to address this issue, because the users’ uncertainty of what a new version might bring is going to be a major problem for them.

Number 4 is going to be enough for some services which base their entire functionality on this, like DropBoks. Others, however, won’t benefit much from it. Sure, it would be nice if you could store your photos at Picnik’s servers, but it’s still not a killer feature that would make you switch to it from Flickr. Which brings us to number 5.

Data sharing among users is a key feature of Web 2.0 apps and services. This is the part that builds communities. This is the feature that made YouTube and Flickr so popular. This is the killer feature that you cannot replace with a desktop application, no matter what you do. The desktop applications stop here, and even if they try to win some users with an online version of their product, they still can’t buy themselves a community. However, the communities are fluid, ever-changing entities. Managing a community, keeping it satisfied, making it grow and profiting from it is a complex task which will stop many business decisions in their tracks.

The big question here is: can any Web 2.0 service really thrive without a community? Is the community an essential part of the Web 2.0 experience, the one without which you might go on for a little while, but you can never expect greatness? Since it’s hard to quantify the success of Web 2.0 apps and services, because many of them are free and many of them aren’t actually earning any money, it’s too early to say. But based on Web 2.0 services which have really become huge - Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Bebotarget=”_blank” , and others, I would say that your choice is simple: you either have to have the best application compared to desktop or online competitors, or you need to have a thriving community.

Possibility of making mash-ups - number 6 - is icing on the cake. It enables users to create new services which are dependant on the primary service, which creates a network of services with your service on top. It definitely increases the value in the long run, and might prove as important for some services (Google Maps springs to mind) as the community itself. How do desktop apps compare? Simple: they don’t. Creating an open API and giving others the possibility to benefit from your service is definitely a way to be a step ahead of the desktop application.

Number 7 - value of an application growing with the number of users - is directly derived from and tied to the community. Flickr would still be a usable application if it had only 10 users, but it would be good for storing photos online and little else. With millions of users, it’s also a fantastic place to browse for photos, learn about photography, meet friends, and a thousand other things. The bigger the community, the bigger the gains. It’s important to notice here that this happens with offline applications too. Try to find tutorials for Photoshop - you’ll find thousands within minutes. For some competitors, you’ll be hard pressed to find a dozen. The community that uses Photoshop increases the value of this product, because they can help you when you’re stuck and they can show you how to do tricks you would never think of yourself. However, in the case of online applications, the benefits are much greater. Let’s make up an example and imagine for a second that there is an online application very similar to Photoshop, which enables the users to share their images, brushes and layers, or collaborate on images. I assure you that Photoshop would be left in the dust very, very fast.

The conclusion is simple. If you have an idea for a new Web 2.0 service, make a check list similar to mine above. If you can check all 7 points, your Web 2.0 startup has potential for greatness. If not, you must be wary and weigh all the possible scenarios very well, lest you be stomped over by someone else simply because your service doesn’t give enough value to become what every application and service strives to be - irreplaceable.

Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury to pay $1.52 billion to Lucent-Alcatel for violating their MP3-related patents. Basically, Microsoft products (Windows Media Player) play MP3s. And now they have to pay for it.

If you’re wondering what does Lucent-Alcatel have to do with MP3, the answer is: not much. But MP3 was developed by Bell Labs, which was bought by Lucent. Bell Labs developed the MP3 format together with the Fraunhofer institute, and Microsoft (and others) have settled the matter with them, however Lucent-Alcatel also hold patents for some aspects of the technology, and now they want their share.

The consequences of this decision are immense. Anyone who ever used MP3 technology might have to pay millions (or billions) of dollars to Lucent-Alcatel simply for using the format. For some, it may mean abandoning this format, which in turn means that the users will suffer the consequences, too.

As much as it’s nice to see Microsoft nailed for software patents, something they’d very gladly do to someone else whenever they have the chance, this is a good time to remember what a smart guy has to say about software patents and why they shouldn’t exist.

Reviewing offline software is a bit out of the scope of this blog. But still, since I’ve been spending a couple of weeks with Vista, I thought I’ll write a detailed review. But I won’t. Here’s why.

The thing is, it has some good points, it has some bad points, and it has some mediocre points.

But my overall impression is that it’s just not that important. Not Vista or Windows, but a desktop OS in general. The world has changed in the last 6 years. Desktop OS is not the be all and end all of your computer experience. Six years ago you wanted to start your computer up, open up your applications, and work as fast and as efficient as possible. Now, you don’t really want that anymore. You need that. You expect that. Those are the basics. You want something else.

What you want now is to get online, and you want the web to work the best it can, because the web is your new playground.

Of course, you need your applications and games to work. But let’s get realistic: they worked in WinXP, they (except the games) work in OS X, and they work in Linux. New versions of applications will come out and they’ll work with Vista perfectly even if some of them stutter at this moment. But all that is nothing to get excited about. Are you excited when a plumber comes to your house and swaps some old pipes with new ones? Didn’t think so.

You know which applications I used mostly in my couple of weeks with Vista? Besides Firefox, they were: Gmail, a couple of CMSs for the sites I work for, Netvibes, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, a text editor and a bit of Photoshop. Although I write all day (and night), I’ve barely felt the need to open Office 2007, although I have it installed. And you know what? All those worked exactly the same in WinXP. If you’re a gamer, you can get mildly excited over Vista and DirectX10. But not right now, as the games don’t work any better yet. I did, though, try out over a dozen really cool new Web 2.0 applications. But I didn’t need Vista to do that.

The analysts which predict that this will be the last ‘big’ version of Windows are probably right. It’s just not a big deal anymore. Let’s get over it and enjoy the web, cause that’s where the fun’s at.

I’ve been testing the final version of Windows Vista in the last couple of days and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. I’m trying to figure an objective approach to it, but it’s really hard, because I simply don’t like most of the things I see. One of the reasons for this is the fact that Windows Vista doesn’t offer anything new for Windows power users - actually, it’s only taking away from them.

I could make a long list, but basically, all the problems stem from several simple facts:

First, there are no more expanding menus. Instead, you have a system similar to web browsing - one menu at a time is visible, while navigation is done with back/forward buttons. Result? Start - Program Files - Accessories - System Tools takes 4 clicks now. In WinXP, it was one click (and a short wait for menus to expand), and going back was just a small movement of the mouse. Sure, you don’t really have to click the items in the new menu, you can just hover over them and they will expand after a second, but most power users don’t want to wait - they want to do things fast. Moreover, the new menus (especially the Start Menu) offer less information because it’s all crammed in a small space. I can’t see any benefits to this new approach - all I see is drawbacks. Of course, you can turn this off in most places and go back to the good old expanding menus, but it means you’re going to have to do it every time you fix someone’s computer.

Which one do you prefer: the old version, or the crammed up version?

Then there are the task oriented menus. Questions, wizards, and tasks everywhere. When you want something done, you don’t want to ask questions. You want to go to that particular option and do something with it. Yet, in Windows Vista, everything is task-oriented, which may simplify things for some, but only complicates things for advanced users. For example, open display properties. You get several subsections, which you have to click again to get to the actual options. However, the option for changing the font size, is - for no apparent reason - listed as a ‘task’ in the left pane of the window. Why? Why is it a task, and why can’t it be with the other options? Why have two panes in the first place? It’s going to confuse the newbies, and it’s going to annoy the pros.

Also, there’s the placement of the options. It’s even harder to find some of them than before. I swear, most power users would probably be happiest if all options in Windows were just a long list with checkboxes, but Microsoft is doing their best to put the options in a million different places. And when the same application appears in several places, it usually opens up with different options available. The worse thing is, the options are pretty much the same as in Windows XP - it’s just a little harder to find your way around.

Here’s an example. The Resource Monitor is one of the most useful new applications in Vista - it monitors all system activity: CPU load, memory usage, disk access, network usage. You would expect this new tool to be in the Control Panel, right? Nope. OK then, Control panel, then System? No. Control Panel, then Performance information and tools? Surely this has got to be it? No.

Resource Monitor. From here you can also get to Performance Monitor and Reliability monitor, but not if you’ve opened it from Task Manager. I guess we’ll just have to remember that.

So where is it then? Two places. Start, right click on Computer, click manage. Expand System Tools and click Reliability and Performance. The other place is under the performance tab in Task Manager, but if you open it from here it will open in its own window. So, what I’m interested in is: why couldn’t this option be added in the Control Panel? It’s the logical place for it to be. Everyone is going to look there first. The name ‘Control Panel’ implicates that an application which lets you control your resources will be there. But no. For no reason at all, it’s entirely impossible to get to this option from the Control Panel. *update: it is present in the Administrative tools also, but there it’s not called the Resource Monitor, it’s called Reliability and Performance monitor. And in all the three instances I’ve mentioned here, it opens in a different window, with slightly different options on the side. Go figure.

This is a great example of Microsoft’s continuing strategy of obscuring certain important features (remember Disk Management in WinXP, and tell me how many casual users can find it? Yet it’s pretty damn important, don’t you think?), probably with the idea of simplifying things, but achieving the exact opposite effect. Microsoft engineers sure spent a lot of time thinking about the clueless users, but they haven’t added a single option that would cater to the needs of the pros. The options are reduced; menus are removed, important options are obscured. I bet many seasoned WinXP users will probably be struggling just to get things back to work as they used to, and it makes you wonder: what kind of progress is that?

There’s a saying in the IT journalism world: if there’s no news, go after Microsoft.

So, by pure accident (yeah, right) here’s more Microsoft (and comic-related) news: Microsoft has a new anti-piracy campaign. It uses an animated form of what is essential a drawn comic, and it can be seen on Microsoft Software Piracy Protection site.

My guess is that the comic form is chosen to better communicate with the young crowd. The comic (or the cartoon, whichever you prefer) is, of course, laughable - the dead-serious music, the evil look in the piracy advocate’s eyes, and the panic that spreads in the office when the viruses and trojans start spreading - it won’t convert any kids (kids really don’t care about tech-support, you know), and it sure as hell won’t leave an impression on intelligent adults. It’s drawn quite well, though.

I’ve finally received a copy of Windows Vista final (Business Edition) for testing purposes, so I’ll be spending some more time with it in the next couple of weeks. I didn’t have a very positive opinion of the Vista RC1 when I first tested it, and while the final version has improved as far as bug and software incompatibility goes, Vista still fails to impress me - at least in the visual sense.

The first thing you notice when you launch Vista (other than the pretty slow boot, slower than Windows XP on both my new and old computer) is, of course, the GUI - Aero. Well, on my testing laptop (Dell Latitude D820 - Intel Core 2 Duo T7200@2 GHz, 1 GB DDR RAM, nVidia Quadro NVS 120M, 15.4” display - not a bad machine by any means) Aero stutters. After half a day’s work, I had to turn the animations off, because every time I closed or opened a window CPU meter would go crazy and everything would freeze for half a second. I know that with a better video card this wouldn’t happen, but still - did it have to be that demanding? Even dragging the transparent windows around on the screen seemed slow.

Even without this issue, I’m generally underwhelmed by Aero. It does look nice, but it has the feel of a WindowBlinds skin over the old Windows XP GUI. The animations and the effects seem like bloat on top of the old interface. This is a subjective opinion, but I think that it illustrates one of Vista’s biggest problems. In the 6 years of development, so many applications that can customize and enhance Windows XP have appeared that much of what Windows Vista has to offer seems dated or even obsolete. If you take Aero as an example, all you have to remember is the smooth animations of OS X, or thousands of WindowBlinds (a program which customizes the standard Windows XP) themes, or dozens of alternative Windows shells (DesktopX, LiteStep, BB4Win and others), and you’ll understand that Aero simply didn’t bring enough to the table.

And this goes for many other features that Windows Vista has. Sure, advanced system monitoring that Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor offers is nice, but there are dozens of WinXP applications out there which do it just as good or better. Photo gallery? Cool, but I already have Picasa. It goes on and on. In other words, as Microsoft’s team was developing new Vista features, in the 6 year long process pretty much everything that Vista has to offer has been done - and done better - for Windows XP.

Now, going back to Aero, I’ll give you my personal reasons why I plan to turn it off and never look back. One of the reasons for this is that I’ve never liked the Luna Windows XP theme - I would always go back to standard Windows 2000 look. However, after a while I started experimenting with alternative Windows shells. These are programs that replace the standard Windows XP shell - explorer.exe (not the file browser, but the shell with the same name), which is responsible for pretty much everything you see on your desktop. After some experimentation I’ve settled for Blackbox for Windows - BB4Win. It’s way faster than explorer.exe, uses up less memory, has more options, it supports plugins, its themes are cross-platform (Blackbox was initially (it still is) a shell for Linux - the Windows version is a port of some sort). It only lacks one thing - the drag and drop desktop functionality. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re interested, the place to start would be here.

In Blackbox, you can change the entire look of the GUI with a simple text file called style. I’ve created quite a few of those back in the day. If you’re interested in how they all look, you can see all my Blackbox styles here.

This brings me to my initial point. After spending some time with Windows Aero, I still don’t want to exchange it for the current look (and speed) of my desktop GUI. Would you? Here’s a couple of screenshots of my desktop:

This is a very specific and personal example. However I think it shows that much of Vista’s bling might not be that exciting to seasoned Windows XP users. All this won’t change my overall opinion on Vista much, as I firmly believe that GUI and bundled applications aren’t all that important for an OS - what’s important is under the hood, and I’m going to thoroughly examine it in the next couple of weeks. Still, it definitely kills the excitement over something Windows users have been waiting for over 6 years.

I installed it, I started it, and in 5 seconds I was watching television.

I did it for an hour before I remembered that I’m actually supposed to review the thing. I guess there’s no greater praise, but for those who like details, I’ve included the details as well. So, here’s what I think about Joost, the latest project from the authors of Skype, formerly dubbed as the Venice Project, for whose beta I was lucky to be invited a couple of days ago.

Introduction and installation

Joost is a streaming P2P platform for television. It brings you TV or near-TV quality content in an application that uses P2P protocols to fetch the content, but it’s not really transparent to the user, who simply has to start using it and needs not worry about how it does its thing. The app is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. It’s ad-funded, and from what I understand you won’t be able to simply share content on Joost like you can on YouTube. It’s TV in the old fashioned sense of the word - they give you content, you watch it; only on internet. It makes up for this with the quality of the content and the features of the software.

The installation is simple and smooth. Joost was behaving very nicely and it never crashed or stopped responding. I’ve noticed that when playing a video, Joost, on average, eats up around 35% of CPU time which is not that bad, but it’s also not negligible, as my Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.8 GHz is a relatively speedy beast.

GUI

Joost starts in full screen. Unaccustomed to this kind of behaviour, I was startled for a few seconds before I remembered that this is nothing like YouTube or BitTorrent. It’s television. The general idea is that you fire it up and start watching, and in this Joost succeeds immensely.

In accordance to this, the GUI looks more like a media center interface than your standard Windows application. The icons are big and easy to hit, and while the scrolling may be a little slow at some points, it’s perfect for using on the TV screen. The GUI consists of the main controls at the bottom, channel chooser on the left, info link on top and a link to My Joost, your customized Joost screen where you can load up plugins, on the right. A button for making the menu items invisible is on top left, and double click switches between full screen mode and window mode (in window mode Joost looks like a detached window of a media player such as BSplayer). It’s not the most beautiful GUI design I’ve seen but it’s good enough, and what’s more important, all of it’s transparent and made with the idea of not getting in the way of your viewing experience.

Video quality and content

I’ve got a 100 KB download connection - definitely not the fastest in the world - and the videos did stutter, but rarely. This was my biggest concern, and I can say that Joost passed this test, although not with a perfect grade - I expect further improvements in this department in the future. The actual quality of the videos varied quite a bit, but it was definitely much better than anything on YouTube or Google Video. Overally, I’d call it a compromise: it’s just barely good enough for full screen, but not any better than that. This said, the quality probably improves with the speed of your connection. Still, it’s beautiful to switch to this after all those low quality videos I’ve been seeing on the internet for years. A revolution? Maybe. I can’t stop watching it, that’s for sure.

One thing I cannot judge well at this point is the amount or variety of content the service will ultimately have. Currently, there’s enough content to watch, however there’s not nearly enough content to do a search and actually get meaningful results. The amount of content will grow when Joost goes out of beta invite-only mode, and some big fishes might jump in (currently you can, for example, watch content from MTV, or the famous auto show Fifth Gear) but what I’d actually like to see on it is cheap, independent productions. I hope they introduce a model for people to get their own content up there, because it would bridge the gap between old school TV and YouTube, but I don’t know if this will ever happen.

Plugins

One of the most important features of Joost is the support for plugins. If you’re looking at Joost as a competitor to YouTube, all that was said so far makes it clear that it definitely has some advantages (and many differences). However, if you look at it as a competitor to television - be it television from a TV tuner, cable TV or IPTV, then plugins are what’s going to make the difference. Joost’s plugins are simply widgets you can load in your Joost screen, and currently these include clock, feed reader, instant messaging (Jabber and Google talk are currently supported), rating plugin which enables you to rate the current clip with grades from 1 to 5, notice board, and channel chat. This is not bad at all, but the developers are promising many more to come. The widgets are somewhat basic but fully functional, however it’s not really important, as the possibilities are huge. Imagine watching television and chatting about it on the TV screen itself. Or watching a concert and reading new posts from your favorite sites. In one word, it’s great.

What’s not to like?

Ads. I’ve seen commercials break the program in half without a warning, which is annoying and I hope it’s just a glitch and not a ‘feature’. Other than that, ads are what Joost is funded upon and we can definitely expect them - I just hope they don’t get overly intrusive. I also expect more content and a better way to organize your own content, opposed to the current simple My Channels list. I could add other minor points, but I expect that a lot of things that are missing that I could name will probably happen in the way of a plugin.

Conclusion

Well, it’s free TV. It can’t be bad. The application works great, looks ok, and if you got a decent internet connection, you’ll have no problems using it. Its success will depend on the amount and quality of content, and of course, ultimately, the success of Joost’s ad-based business model. Everything else seems to be in place, so if the content is there, I’m sure people will love it.

*the test platform was Windows XP SP2, Opteron 144, 1 GB DDR RAM, DFI UT NF4 SLI-D Nforce4 motherboard, and a 100 KB/s download on an ADSL connection. The tested version of Joost was 0.7.3.1

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There’s a good article over at ArsTechnica which analyses the admission of an unnamed studio executive that the DRM iTunes uses is too lax for them, meaning they need even more control.

I’d like to add to this, but I’ve basically already did that in my last article on DRM, so I’ll just reiterate two key points:

- DRM is not about fighting piracy, it’s about greed. It is an action to raise income of the copyright owners, and to earn money from areas where it was previously not possible to do so. This corresponds well with ArsTechnica’s claim that “DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.”
I’ll just add that it’s not only about selling your rights back to you, it’s about selling every little piece of information that can be derived from the original information, be it a movie, a song, or a piece of software.

- In an attempt to sell the world the concept of DRM, the industry is trying to convince us that normal behaviour is legal. ArsTechnica says: “Who hasn’t lent a DVD to a friend or colleague? This is perfectly legal behavior, but you can see that Hollywood hopes to stop this kind of thing via DRM.” Here, I always like to reinforce this with a hyperbole: if they could, they would charge us to remember a movie, talk about a book, or whistle a tune.

With the recent news about Yahoo acquiring MyBlogLog, I’ve realized that it’s getting increasingly hard for me to remember which companies Yahoo and Google bought throughout their history. All the info is out there on the net, but it’s never complete - there were always some pieces missing. So I’ve decided to create one big chronological list with all Google and Yahoo corporate acquisitions that are publicly known, with dates, acquisition values and current status of the acquired companies.

In my research on this topic I’ve browsed through many sources, with the most important being Wikipedia, Kuro5hin and SEO by the Sea, so big credit to them.



This list is a work in progress and it will be updated as soon as I get new info. Feel free to contact me if you can contribute.



*Note: if you’re receiving this via RSS, the huge table probably won’t work as intended. I’m sorry, I guess this time you’ll have to visit the website.

I was just forced to use IE6 for a short while. I didn’t do this for quite a long time, and I was surprised how frustrated I was with the experience. Part of it was because I didn’t have my bookmarks. However, it also made me think about all the little things I’ve gotten used to in Firefox, which didn’t seem like a big deal when I’ve started using them, and now I can’t live without them.

So, I’ve conducted a little experiment. I’ve tried to do what I usually do online for one day, but using only IE6, to see which features I’ll miss the most (except, of course, the obvious ones, like tabs).

This is what I came up with. None of these are really groundbreaking, but they might be viewed as little tips. Check them out: if you’re not using them, you might be missing out a lot.

1. Multi-page home page. When I’ve first discovered that I can add several pages to open when I start Firefox, colleagues at work said it was useless and it would just make Firefox boot slower. However, besides the obvious convenience of not having to open all the pages I go to everyday, there are other perks of this approach. I set up some pretty specific pages to open with Firefox, like several different Google Analytics pages. After an hour or more of surfing, I usually mess everything up and have 30 tabs open. It’s much faster to simply kill this instance of Firefox and open a new one, than opening all these pages by hand.

But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a handy command line argument for Firefox which enables you to open multiple home pages . Make a Firefox shortcut, right click on it and choose properties. Then change this argument: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” to this: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -new-window franticindustries.com|www.digg.com . This will open a new Firefox window and load these two pages. The way I use this, is by having several different Firefox shortcuts - “Firefox social” opens Digg, Reddit , Netscape, and other social content sites, “Firefox Google” opens up all my Google services, while regular Firefox opens a multitude of sites I usually use. Very handy.

2. Selection source. Like most webmasters, the first thing I look into when I find a page I like is its source. However, sometimes it’s tedious to go through the entire source if you’re interested only in a small part of the code. Well, in Firefox, you can select any part of a webpage, right click and choose View selection source. You’ll get the source only for the part you’ve selected. It’s not perfectly precise, but it’s good enough for me and it saves me a lot of time.

3. Undo closed tabs. Maybe it’s just the way I browse the web, but I often kill a tab only to realize I actually need it five minutes later. In IE6, if you happen to close a window, it’s gone. With Firefox version 2.0, I can now just bring back the last tab I’ve closed with Ctrl+Shift+T. I haven’t found a way to increase the history cache, though - if anyone has an idea, please let me know.

4. The test profile. Most users never use more than one Firefox profile. However if you do lots of testing, like me, it’s good not to touch your standard settings. So, I’ve created a test Firefox profile, like this: firefox.exe -CreateProfile test, which I use when I’m testing new extensions and themes. When I want to switch between profiles, I just start Firefox with firefox.exe -ProfileManager. You know what made me remember this? Because I got the IE6 .bmp images bug and it took me half an hour to remember how to fix it.

5. Search tricks. One of Firefox’s strongest features is the built-in search box. I use it so much I’m completely lost without it. Of course, I’ve added a lot of new engines, like Wikipedia, IMDB, and Webster. You can find a lot of new search engines for this box here. Also, I don’t use a lot of extensions, but Searchload Options is really lightweight and it will give you a couple of advanced options for the search box. But in IE6, all this is gone. I’m telling you, having to open a new Google window every few minutes is hell. Bless you, Firefox.
The feature I also use a lot is the “Find in this page” option, which you access with Ctrl+F. It enables me to find keywords in any webpage quickly, and most of the time it even works inside forms. Highlight All will highlight all the results with yellow color, which can also be handy. But most importantly, this search feature works in every Firefox page, even in the source viewer. The built-in source code viewer in Firefox is decent in itself, and with highlighting it becomes even more powerful.

6. Quick tabbing and session saving. This is something I do a lot. When I find a list of links which I have no time going through, I simply middle click them all. They open in the background, in new tabs. I can check if they’re worth anything later, and if I find anything worth saving, I just go Ctrl+Shift+D and voila - they’re all saved in a bookmark folder.

7. Spell checking. I instantly got hooked on this one. If you’re a blogger, it’s an absolute must. My posts would have many more grammatical errors if it weren’t for this little option (and some of yesterday’s posts probably do because I did them in IE6). Even if you don’t write in English, you can choose other dictionaries - right click in a field, and go to Languages - Add dictionaries.

This list is definitely much longer than this, but I’ve included only those features which are maybe less known or less used. I’m back to my trusty Firefox now and I’ll do my best to try to put this horrible experience behind me.