Mark Mischke's Weblog

On P2P, the MPAA and the RIAA

I just heard about the PIRATE Act that's percolating through congress. It wraps p2p file sharing in terrorist-style lingo and has the potential to impose severe punishment on those who illegally share copyrighted material, while lowering the burden of proof for law enforcement folks.

Sharing copyrighted music, movies, software is illegal already, isn't it? We don't need additional legal red tape to fight it. What we need to do is to better understand the reason _why_ copyrighted material is shared illegally.

The MPAA and RIAA are all about greed, not entertainment. They peddle junk and demand a high price. It's all too common to drop $17 on a CD, only to find one or two good songs on it. Maybe that's why iTunes is doing so well. It appears that people are more than happy to pay a buck for a song they like. I'd much rather spend a buck on a song, knowing that I don't have to deal with the varying bit rates, unpredictable volume shifts and imperfect dubbing that run rampant in the world of MP3 sharing.

The software industry isn't much better. Products are rushed to market well ahead of being ready. There are usually no refunds available if a customer discovers that the realities of a product don't live up to the distorted claims of the glossy brochure or Web site.

I love it when rappers like Dr. Dre whine about people 'stealing' their music. Oh, you poor kop-killin', crack-smokin' gangsta (or so one might gather from listening to his music). Did some pimple-faced teen-ager steal your songs??

Why does the MPAA care about people sharing movies? They're all low-res computer-playable formats, and very few people are willing to stare at a tiny computer screen for two hours to watch a pirated movie. Think of it as an extended trailer that prompts people to go out and see the movie, rent it or buy the DVD. Seriously. Who enjoys watching a movie alone, sitting at their workstation?

Does Adobe _really_ lose money each time somebody pirates a copy of Photoshop for home use? I think it's quite the contrary. If a person couldn't get it for free, they simply wouldn't have it. The average person isn't gonna pony up $600 for an image editor. They'd use Paint Shop Pro, or something else priced for general consumption. What Adobe is missing is that this band of evil home Photoshop pirates are becoming skilled in a valuable industry tool, and are securing Photoshop's footing in a wider segment of corporate America (which _does_ pay for all its software).

P2P-ers aren't the problem. Yes, sharing copyrighted material is illegal, but I believe that the motivation behind file sharing is revenge for getting rooked by industry greed for so long. It's also sending a message that there's an emerging market, which is being ignored, rather that embraced. If the RIAA, the MPAA and the software industry started placing more emphasis on quality, and offering products targeted in new ways, the p2p 'problem' would sort itself out.

Another death in the White Mountains

Just last week, a couple of experienced hikers set off on a day hike up Mt. Lafayette. They chose the Old Bridle Path, which is the most common and direct route to the summit. Bad weather came in, and they were stranded above treeline in extremely low temperatures for two nights. The husband barely survived and his wife died.

By all accounts, they knew what they were doing, and they were well-equipped for a winter day above treeline. They weren't prepared for a night above treeline, however, let alone two. Still, they used their heads, built a snow cave and did their best. The bad weather outlasted their endurance.

One of the downsides of winter hiking is all the extra stuff you have to carry for emergencies that almost never arise. Carrying a tent or bivvies, sleeping bags & pads, extra clothing, a shovel, extra food and a stove for melting snow adds a lot of weight to an already heavy pack. The thin margin for error in winter hiking makes this extra load a necessity. If it means that you need to hit the stairmaster with a 50 lb pack for the weeks leading up to your trip, it's worth it. If these folks had these things, they might be OK. Dry clothes, a warm, dry sleeping bag and Nalgene bottles full of hot water make a huge difference.

I did an overnight at the Liberty Springs tentsite three Aprils ago. Apparently no one tells the mountains that April is Spring. :-) We had a beautiful first day - warm and sunny. The deep snowpack was so soft that we decided to leave the crampons in the Jeep and just go with snowshoes. We summitted, set up camp, made dinner and hit the sack. I awoke in the middle of the night to hear freezing rain on the tent (Doh!). I tapped the fabric, and it was solid! I wasn't worried. We were warm, dry and had plenty of gear. I knew that we could Gore-Tex up, break camp and descend, while keeping dry. Fortunately, the rain stopped by morning, but the trail was a sheet of ice.

Crampons would have made the trek a snap, but they were three miles and three thousand feet of elevation away. My Denali snowshoes were certainly up to the task, but my partner had rented recreational shoes, which weren't so good on ice. I gave her my Denalis and wore the crappy shoes, figuring that my greater weight, combined with stomping would give me the traction I needed. I fell on my ass a few times, but it worked.

My point is that this was a minor (and common) weather glitch, and we needed every scrap of extra gear we'd brought along. I'll never again trade crampons for weight savings.

In the winter, you have to expect the worst and hope for the best. I always carry a full compliment of overnight gear. The only time I don't carry some kind of formal overnight gear is on summer (or late spring/early fall) day hikes. Even then, I carry a ground pad, fleece tops & bottoms and one of those emergency 'space blanket' bivvies.

The resignation double-standard

A couple of years ago, my buddy Tom was preparing to leave his first job. He was nervous about the whole process of giving his notice to his boss. Since he knew that I'd been in industry for ten more years than he had, and that I'd been down that road several times, he asked me what the process would be like. I thought about it for a short while, and told him that it's like breaking up with a girlfriend, only without the crying. Tom was an avid dater at the time, and I felt that analogy would resonate.

Being a consultant, I'm very fortunate to not have to entangle myself in the process of resignation anymore. It's never fun, and that's because of the double standard that exists in the employer-employee relationship. When a company needs to lay off (downsize, rightsize - pick your term) an employee, they stress that it's a business decision - not a personal one. They're 100% correct here. A company lives or dies by its bottom line. I won't digress into a discussion of _why_ companies get themselves into positions where they need to lay off staff. ;-)

When the shoe is on the other foot - when an employee resigns - they're often made to feel like they've betrayed the company. To be fair, in my personal experience, most direct managers understand the fluid nature of things, and the fact that personal needs drive change. It's HR and the folks way, way up top who most often seem to get their noses in a twist over it.

Fair is fair. All other factors that come into play just don't hold water. "How can you leave us as we're nearing a release?", "after all we've done for you", etc. Like I said, it sounds like a breakup. I've known people who were yelled at for resigning. When a company has a layoff, they don't ask each affected person whether it's a convenient time to be unemployed. Maybe they have a kid in college, which is certainly as important as a software release. :-)

My point is that the needs of both employers and employees is tied to their respective bottom lines. When the numbers aren't adding up (whether that be solely monetary, coupled with stress or satisfaction, etc.) the affected party must make a change. Business partnerships (which include employer-employee relationships) work as long as they're mutually beneficial. When they're not, it's time to dissolve them. It's not personal under any circumstance, no matter how HR chooses to look at it.

It seems to me that we'll be seeing a lot of moving around as the economy continues to improve. Resignation is very stressful for most folks. I know I never enjoyed it. Layoffs are very hard on bosses, too. Most bosses care about their teams, and they know that morale amongst the survivors will take a hit. The whole process _feels_ quite personal, no matter who initiates it, but it really is just business.

Catching up with Windows

When you boil it down, Windows, OS X and Linux all do pretty much the same things. They let you browse the Web, IM your buddies and read your e-mail. They let you play (and rip and burn) CDs. They let you compose documents, play games and develop software. The list goes on.

What Linux is teaching me is that the devil is in the details. It's the little things that add up to give Linux the impression of being a kludge (even though it isn't). I'm being unfair. Most of the world (esp. the world of software development) is unaware of the concept of software usability. Apple pretty much pioneered it, and Microsoft paid millions to psychologists to get it. It's no surprise that Linux is bringing up the rear here. To be fair, they've done an admirable job. But they're not there. They don't _understand_ usability. They're just trying to emulate what they perceive it to be.

I see the plethora of desktop environments, window managers and rendering engines holding Linux back. While I like having a choice between KDE and GNOME, how can they both possibly get it right, especially when they aren't tightly coupled with the underlying window manager and rendering engine. Christ, how many window managers are out there (and they all have their quirks)?? Integration counts. These components work together to provide the crisp look and feel that makes an OS appear tight. If you let someone include a theme with KDE that has a poor color gradient on the buttons, _KDE_ winds up looking cheesy. You don't see MS or Apple packaging imperfect themes. Sure, you can download them, but they're hastily cobbled together by users who want a Start Wars desktop and you get text showing up off-center in buttons, etc. - just like you get with Linux out of the box. ;-)

I'm very excited about SuSE 9.1, which includes the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2.1 (and it's Plastik theme!). It's supposedly light years ahead of 9.0 (kernel 2.4 and KDE 3.1.4). I think that SuSE understands the user experience (good ol' German engineering at work here...), and with Novell's $$$ behind them, I'm hoping for good things. I was ready to ditch Linux before trying SuSE. Now I'm a convert. I'm also a harsh critic, because I've watched them all grow up, and I was pretty pissed about how hard Linux was to configure and use after all these years. Say what you will about my Windows boxes, but all my hardware works on them without the need for superfluous scripts. Again, I'm hopeful that SuSE 9.1 will correct this.

One big thing that undermines Linux is the poor font rendering. I don't know if it's the limited choices that are bundled or the fact that I'm running an LCD screen, but the smoothing is light years behind what Apple and MS provide. This is one of those things that weighs heavily on a user's impression. My girlfriend, a user experience engineer, looks at my Linux box and comments on the cheesy text that KDE vomited all over the screen - and that's after installing a ton of extra fonts from my Windows box and carefully selecting one that I felt did a decent job, overall.

Here's what I think Linux needs - a commercial fork of KDE, riding atop one constant window manager and a commercial X server. Free is great, but money drives development. XFree86 supports most cards, but doesn't take advantage of most of their advanced features, like 3D. In short, Linux is just about ready to be a competitor to MS and Apple, but it can't compete if it's free. It needs the same driving force (from kernel to icons) that keep the others striving to be better, and they need the competition. In the end, we all benefit.

Fedora Core vs. SuSE vs. Windows??

I found this interesting: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/22/0914204. The author may wish to have a glass belly button installed, so that he can see where he's going with his head embedded up his ass.

In case the link dies, here's a replay of his summary:

CATEGORY	FEDORA	SUSE	WINDOWS
Easy to Install	A	D	B
Easy to configure	C	A	D
Default Security	C	C	F
Patch Management	A	B	F
User Experience/ease of learning	C	B	A

This is the problem with Linux freaks (of which I'm in danger of becoming). Sorry, but Windows IS MUCH easier to install, configure and update than ANY version of Linux. Get real! Also, I'm tired of hearing about how 'insecure' Windows is. There's nothing wrong with it. ANY popular platform will become the subject of attack by the pimple-faced script kiddies. It's just that Windows is the only player in this arena. It's the only OS that matters. The others aren't even a blip on the radar screen.

I'm having a blast with Linux, but I'm growing weary of these religious nuts touting its superiority over Windows. They're dead wrong. Windows is king for a good reason. Linux is a toy. That may change, and for the right reasons, but let's keep religion out of it. Just because something's free doesn't make it good. Even in the Linux world, anything worthwhile costs money (SuSE Pro, Linuxant's DriverLoader, StarOffice, etc.). Pay your fucking money and stop looking for a free ride. And stop whining about Microsoft. If Linux wins the OS war, it'll be on its merits, not on your whining.

Anticipating SuSE 9.1

I'm excited about the upcoming SuSE 9.1, which is due in early May. It will feature the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.21, both of which offer a plethora of features which promise to bring the platform into the modern era. 2.6 has the features expected in a modern kernel, and will have support for things like plug & play and devices being there or not at boot time (essential for notebooks). KDE 3.21 promises greatly-enhanced PIM features, including all the KMail things I was prevously whining about.

Plus, the Qt IDE, KDevelop, has had a major rev, and I'm excited about that. All in all, with these cool things on the horizon, and with the fonts I've imported from my other machines (Tahoma is the font that Linux is lacking...), things are looking great. KMail still sucks, but less so (since I've found that the solutions to my IMAP folder woes were existant, but buried). According to what's been added to the KMail component of the new Kontact suite, all my concerns have been addressed. I can't wait!

Getting better and better

Forgive my rant yesterday. I just get pissed off when I see these dweebs mouthing off to people in public forums, safely hidden by the veil of anonmity. I guess I've always felt that manners are manners, regardless of where you are, and that there's no excuse for overlooking them. :-)

OK, I'm off of my soapbox...

Linux has now become an official part of my life. I'm finding that many of the minor annoynances (weird-looking fonts, things that can't be configured, etc.) can be worked around, and even tweaked to my satisfaction. I wish that KDE and GNOME weren't so diametrically opposite (I'm using KDE now, BTW - Ximian was starting to bug me). I suppose that competition is good, but GNOME apps don't play so well in KDE, and vice-versa. I use Evolution for my e-mail, and it's kinda weird to have to adjust its fonts from the GNOME control panel (while I'm in KDE!). And then there's Mozilla, which doesn't seem to respect the font selections in either control panel. :-) But I digress. I'm actually thrilled with SuSE 9.0 and KDE. Life is good.

Today I'll test out the scripts I created for connecting to various wireless LANs. I've also got a bunch of scripts for connecting to remote Windows boxes via rdesktop. If all goes well, I'll nuke the Windows partition and start tooling up some kind of a GUI for more easily switching between wireless LANs.

Regarding fonts, I discovered that some core Microsoft TrueType fonts (Arial, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Verdana, etc.) are available for free download via SuSE update. Cool!

Why are there so many jerks in the Linux world??

I'm thoroughly enjoying getting my feet wet with Linux, and Googling my way through the various issues I'm encountering. A very unfortunate theme seems to prevail throughout many of the message threads. There are a LOT of assholes in the Linux world. It seems that condescention rules the day in many of the public forums, and if someone doesn't already know the answer to the question he's asking, he's pre-labelled as inept and unable to properly research things on his own.

To all you *NIX snobs: if you're going to talk down to someone for asking a simple question, how about not answering at all? No one is impressed by your lack of manners OR your Linux knowledge. Move out of your parent's basement. Kiss a girl. Join the human race by helping a fellow geek out.

Also, don't ask people to RTFM. TFMs for free software are an arcane collection of circularly-referential HOW-TOs and man pages that create more confusion than answers. Chances are the person posing the question already HAS tried to wade through the docs. Don't the folks who write these things know that PRACTICAL EXAMPLES go a lot farther than unreadable, but technically accurate details?

Kudos to all the patient mentors that continue to help folks out amidst the flames. They're changing the way free software is perceived. Meanwhile, I'll ignore the freaks and continue the march. Learning Linux is fun, even if the self-appointed cogniscenti think us newbies are stupid. :-)

SuSE and Ximian is the way to go

I've been extremely happy with my SuSE 9.0 Pro / Ximian Desktop 2 setup. I should have done a little more research before jumping into this, and initially gone with a packaged distro, but that's what the learning process is all about. According to what I'm reading, SuSE seems to be the one to go with if your needs range from simple user to uber-geek. The RH family seems to get a lot of flak. Given the major behavioral differences I saw betweem RH/FC and SuSE, this criticism is well-deserved. Then again, the version of SuSE I bought was their boxed Professional edition, and the RH/FC distros I tried were FTP downloads, so YMMV.

I discovered that my network interfaces were loading ahead of my PC card services, so I switched them around (just had to rename some scripts). YaST occasionally switches them back when I install updates, but it's easy to fix. Also, my notebook's internal Ethernet interface was loading before my wireless interface, and preventing a default route from being assigned. Easily fixed - I just removed the internal interface in YaST. Now my wireless card comes up without incident (thanks to the NDIS shim from Linuxant, which wraps the card's XP driver). One outstanding problem is that the ESSID and WEP key have to be preset in YaST. This is fine when I'm at home, but not so good when I'm at a client site. I can probably write some scripts to change this on the fly with iwconfig & dhcpcd. I'll test this out, and maybe write a simple GUI for simplifying the process.

My built-in trackpad is considered a PS/2 device, and SuSE doesn't like it when I hotplug (or unplug) my USB mouse. Nothing bad happens; it's just that the change isn't recognized until I go into YaST. I'm sure I'll figure that one out...

None of these things would be an issue for a desktop installation. Any OS has a serious shaking out period on notebooks. It took Microsoft quite awhile to make the NT line notebook-friendly.

After a little tweaking, I found the right combination of theme components that worked best for me. I downloaded some components from art.gnome.org, but finally settled on a combination from what came with Ximian. Fonts require careful selection. Most of them don't look as good as you'd expect. Kerning and aliasing is sometimes screwy with certain typefaces. Again, careful selection can make all the difference.

I wish Gnome / Ximian Desktop was a little more configurable. It'd be nice to see features like simpler icon alignment to the desktop grid, a shutdown option without having to log out first (like KDE has), the ability to adjust desktop icon size, etc. These are pretty minor criticisms, and I suspect that some of them are already there and that I'll find them as I continue to poke around. Plus, GNOME keeps getting better and better. I prefer it to KDE because it feels cleaner. The average user might prefer KDE, which could be why it's SuSE's default.

Ximian Evolution is the perfect IMAP client. I liked the way KDE's KMail looked, but it sucked as an IMAP client. Us IMAP folks are always second-class citizens. I suppose that's to be expected, since there are so few of us. Nonetheless, KMail was unusable, since it didn't allow me to specify which server folders should be used for Drafts and Sent. :-(

If I can solve the 'roving wireless' issue, I'll nuke the XP partition on this box, and make it a Linux-only machine. Then I'll be a truly platform-neutral dude. Who'd ever have thought that Linux, XP and Mac OS X could all live happily under one roof?

Linux - OK, now I'm pretty damn impressed

Like with most things in the computing world, I've been using the shotgun approach in my investigation of Linux. I started out with Red Hat 9 in a Virtual PC session, progressed to RH on a 'real' machine, evolved to Fedora Core and have now settled on SuSE 9.0 Professional on my notebook.

SuSE has pretty much blown my socks off, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's experienced frustration with the whole Linux thang. Everything about SuSE screams usability, from the installer through the way they configure the desktop environment. They coach you through things, while keeping expert settings lightly buried. The installation process was a dream - not _quite_ as easy as XP or OS X, but a lot easier than NT and probably on par with Win2k. IMHO, the average user could get SuSE up and running with no problems.

I like how SuSE starts PCMCIA services before starting the network services. RH/FC seems to have overlooked the fact that some people use PCMCIA NICs. Of course, my WPC54G wasn't recognized, but I'd already purchased linuxant.org's DriverLoader product, and I got it up and running pretty quickly. Regrettably, each time I boot or reseat the card, I have to remind the wlan0 interface about my SSID and WEP key, but I'll find a way to automate that. I seem to be having a lot fewer problems with this card on SuSE than many other people running different distros. Wireless NIC support is still a little weak in Linux, but it was also weak in Win2k. It'll get there, especially with vendors like SuSE apparently paying attention to the problem.

Another thing I like about SuSE. It doesn't keep my notebook's fan on all the time like FC did, and it runs as cool as XP does.

Now I have three OSs to play with. I've always loved working with NT/2k/XP, and OS X won me over in late 2002. Now I have a version of Linux that I can spend more time working with than debugging. If I can get Remote Desktop running smoothly, I'll remove the XP partition and give SuSE the whole notebook.