Areas of our digital life that should be left open or kept closed
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Microsoft really knows marketing. But its latest (unintentional) attempt to promote the new search engine Bing may have gone over the line. According to reports, a glitch in Internet Explorer 6 forced Bing onto users as the default search engine. Even when users manually altered their preferences, Bing emerged once again.
Read the whole article at PCWorld.com.
I started using Apple Inc.’s iTunes back in Italy. The software has many locks-in: it doesn’t play Microsoft’s proprietary WMA or the open OGG Vorbis audio format. When instructed to consolidate the music library, iTunes does it with a logic of its own, separating the audio files and the images in completely remote registries; and the library manager also operates on its own will: it always switches back to the default music library location even though I specified my preferred one.
Pentafoil tangle by Carlo H. Séquin
Despite all its drawbacks, iTunes remains the only solution for a European citizen considering digital music purchase over the Internet. The songs are a child’s play to locate, samples can be played, and it only takes a couple of clicks to get the files on the local disc. Moving them from there is another problem… The biggest drawback I could see was the unability to buy music from other European countries. An abberation considering the many laws safeguarding the free movement of goods across the EEC.
Why cant Apple Inc. sell music licenses across internal European borders? I thought it should be easy. Well it turns out that for the time being it is actually impossible. Andrew Orlowski explains on The Register why the European intellectual propriety laws, or lack thereof, makes it very hard for entrepreneurs to launch a pan-european digital music store.
It is highly arguable that at the time of this famous statement, Andy Warhol could have foreseen that a US government agency created in 1958 to secure technological edge over the Soviets would combine with post-1975 personal computers after to enable common mortals to experience fame from the anonymity of their basement.
Since 1989, the World Wide Web has enabled skilled users to publish content on the Internet, and the ever-decreasing technicality of the process now allows laymen to publish 140 characters-long messages. The Web 1.0 era was characterized at best by free static web hosting, while the Web 2.0 saw the successive rise of free content management software, free blogging, MySpace, Facebook and eventually Twitter. On april 16th 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher won his bet against CNN, reaching 1,000,000 followers on his Twitter account before the news channel.
Twitter is based on proprietary software, just like the social networking portal Facebook. Both networks boast a multi-million broad user base, but have yet failed 1 2 to capitalize on their popularity. Apple’s iconic iPhone received dedicated Facebook and Twitter applications and Facebook features a micro-blogging feature that can be synced with Twitter.
Users somehow consider the free service they get as something democratic, but truth be told, both networks are funded by capital venture; so at some point the investors will want to get their money’s worth.
On several occasions, Facebook did stir strong protest from regarding policy. The network is prone to phishing and is criticised namely for holding onto information even after an account has been closed and for reselling data to third parties. Similar concerns about Twitter brought some developers to create Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter clone that handles all the user information according to the Creative Commons license.
As this blogs bears testimony, I have been a hardcore GNU/Linux user since 2000. When I migrated from Windows to GNU/Linux, I was well aware that it meant sacrificing certain commodities due to poor (if not non-existing) driver support. The good part is that I became very proficient with open-source graphics and desktop publishing tools like the photo-editing GIMP, the vector drawing Inkscape or the desktop publishing Scribus; to the point where I now use them at work on a Windows® workstation. I seem to have found the distribution that does it for me (Linux Mint) and from surfing the Internet to managing my music library, everything works flawlessy. I can save and encrypt all my files in open formats, knowing that there will always be software that allows to access the information in a remote future.
In the meantime, the drivers issue has greatly improved: GNU/Linux now handles most digicams and it is often possible to run a scanner or a printer. Video cards keep getting better support, but sound cards are somehow left out. I am a music composing hobbyist, and the migration from Windows to GNU/Linux left me resourceless. I am aware of all the music editing software available on GNU/Linux, but I haven’t even been able to get it to work because of ALSA problems. I can’t even get Audacity to work properly on my Ubuntu Dell for crying out loud! Edit: Ubuntu Studio now comes preloaded with drivers and applications for audio and video editing. I managed to install it, but there was a bug with the WiFi configuration application.
Apple Garageband on OSX
Which brings me to the point: I would certainly not consider going back to Microsoft Windows, but Apple Inc. seems to offer pretty good proprietary solutions when it comes to music editing, and I am so eager to go back to composing music that I would consider buying a Mac Mini to add to my home setting of 2 GNU/Linux computers. Apple hand-picks the hardware to make sure it works, the BSD Unix-based operating system is pretty stable and the applications are user-friendly. If my main concern about Microsoft is its strong endorsement of closed standards and closed formats, then Apple Inc. is even further down the spectrum. Just think of the amount of effort they put into fighting jailbreak, making sure nobody sells or explains how to install OSX on generic hardware, or rejecting iphone applications based on abstruse criterions.
is Apple good or evil?
So, To Mac or not to Mac, that is the question. Norbert Cartagena is as much mitigated as I am when switching from GNU/Linux to Mac. Eric Fleming wrote a long article explaining why he’ll never switch back from Linux to Mac, while Greg Detre describes some of the differences he observed when switching from Mac to Linux.
Commenting on the BusinessWeek article announcing that HP Is Studying Android for PC Use, an anonymous reader made the rather pertinent observation that Smartphones appear to be leading the computer industry into the future, where you essentially get a “thin” OS (e.g. Android, iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry, WinMo, WebOS, etc.) and you “build” the functionality you want on the device from an app store. If/when HTML5, PhoneGap, BONDI, etc. become mainstream, essentially all the same apps will run on all of the “thin” OSes, so it will simply be a matter of picking the device you like with the user interface you are comfortable with.
