Exaggerated estimate

From Apple’s Quick­time Pro webpage:

Pro­fes­sional stu­dios around the world spend mil­lions of dol­lars and man-hours pro­duc­ing com­mer­cial enter­tain­ment. Please don’t steal their work or in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the the­ater [sic]. But, you can find lots of mate­r­ial on the Web that’s legal to cut, copy and remix. Look for the Cre­ative Com­mons license and add to the world’s culture.

(2) Exag­ger­ated estimate.

What. The.

It’s hard to tell whether they’re mock­ing the MPAA’s of the world or being seri­ous. In which case, it’s great to see they’re being hon­est, but, again… what the?

Oh, and I still haven’t bought Quick­time Pro. I went there via their trail­ers site and saw this line in the footer: “Bro­ken Movie icons? Quick­Time 7 is now required to view Trail­ers– and it’s free.”

Clearly, Quick­time 7 isn’t free if you paid for 6. And, so far as I know, there’s no way to run mul­ti­ple ver­sions of Quick­time in tan­dem. So if you want to be able to view new gen­er­a­tion con­tent being cre­ated, you’re basi­cally locked into a con­tin­ual upgrade cycle. Which is a load of crap.

Also a load of crap is their Aus­tralian pric­ing for Quick­time Pro, which is $AU44 ver­sus $US29 (about $AU38 at time of writ­ing). The bits are iden­ti­cal. Don’t charge me more. I have for­eign exchange trans­ac­tion fees added to my card if I pur­chase some­thing in a dif­fer­ent cur­rency, but it’s not any­thing near six dol­lars (try twenty cents or some­thing ridicu­lously small). And it doesn’t cost you six dol­lars more to send an email to Aus­tralia instead of to your US customers.

I’m in this bizarre pseudo-closed-source land at the minute and I’m really fear­ful for the longevity of con­tent sit­ting where I am now. In terms of rel­a­tive open­ness, Apple aren’t look­ing too crash hot right at the minute…

# by Josh on November 12th, 2006 Tags: , ,
| 2 Comments »

There are some things money can’t buy

(in Aus­tralia). For every­thing else, there’s eBay and Amazon.

My money doesn’t go any­where near as far on text­books here as it would if we were for­tu­nate enough to have books at the same price they are in the US. I’m try­ing to track down some Vygot­sky works (and Fisher’s col­lec­tion is cat­e­gorised by empti­ness, haven’t checked out UNSW yet but imag­ine it wouldn’t be much/any bet­ter) and don’t want to spend the earth to pur­sue what is, essen­tially, an entirely periph­eral inter­est. So I can spend, you know, $190 on a decent text in Aus­tralia, or I can get that bun­dled with one other (also appar­ently excel­lent resource) for US$50 plus ship­ping from Ama­zon. It’s absolutely nuts.

One day some­one will try to explain the eco­nom­ics behind this to me. And that day my head will implode with frustration.

# by Josh on October 26th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 6 Comments »

Two Weeks From Twenty

So far as the album Lights and Sounds goes, this song is pretty different.

Jimmy wasn’t really pop­u­lar
He had a cou­ple of friends back home
And sooner or later they’re all get­ting out so he had to join up alone
He was dream­ing of the Ivy League since he was only three feet tall
And get the hell out of jer­sey and then he would never look back at all

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
They’re gonna miss him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy never had a rea­son to stay
Cos all the fac­to­ries shut down
All he had was a line for his name
So he could sign away his right to be proud
He tried to kiss her on the way out the door,
She just put her lit­tle hand on his face
I don’t under­stand why you’re leav­ing, she said
But I hope your gonna ask me to wait

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His lady missed him, he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy’s mother went to Capi­tol Hill
So she could fill her heart up with joy
Maybe shake a few hands while she’s there and tell them thank you sir for tak­ing my boy.

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His momma missed him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame
No there’s still no shame
And we’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame

Maybe the lyrics of every track are this politi­cized, and it’s just that the elo­cu­tion in this track makes the mes­sage more acces­si­ble, but I’d haz­ard not. I don’t nor­mally lis­ten to song lyrics, mostly because music is rarely an object-of-attention for me (that is, any­thing more than appeal­ing noise in the back­ground to aid other tasks), but for some rea­son this stood out.

I’ve heard Yel­low­card dis­missed as emo crap… is there such thing as polit­i­cal emo crap? I sup­pose that’d aptly char­ac­terise the appar­ent incli­na­tion of most polit­i­cally active (i.e. not apathetic/indifferent) uni stu­dents: per­pet­u­ally frus­trated and look­ing to hurt some­one (quoth the ban­ner, “The next cut: Howard’s neck”). Well, that seems to be the case at Syd­ney, anyway. ;-)

Any­way… enough of that. I liked the song even if it’s a bit US-parochial (i.e. one guy two weeks from twenty is more valu­able than [blank] for­eign­ers) … and yeah, I know this artis­tic sen­ti­ment isn’t iso­lated to recent con­flict or even just the US, and yeah, I know it’s a valid objec­tion. If you haven’t heard it yet it’s worth lis­ten­ing to at some point.

# by Josh on May 27th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 3 Comments »

“Growth”

Appar­ently, the world is screwed if China and India keep grow­ing at their cur­rent rate, by pro­jec­tions that dare to com­pare their stan­dard of living/consumption to that of the US.

News, appar­ently, but all it really means is that we’re (a safe enough con­trac­tion, in light of the fact that if you’re read­ing this, you’re part of the fifth of the world’s pop­u­la­tion that has access to a computer/the Inter­net) over­con­sum­ing. And they’re not. And if they do, too — that is, leave the ranks of the sustainers/impoverished pop­u­la­tions of the world — then there won’t be enough resources left.

Wow, clever. I’m pretty sure I agree with the researcher’s idea(s) entirely, but the way the arti­cle is writ­ten it’s like… damn those emerg­ing nations for com­ing out of poverty, etc. It reads as ridicu­lously parochial (in a global “West­ern” parochial kind of way. Maybe stretch­ing the def­i­n­i­tion some­what.), but maybe that’s just me being cyn­i­cal. Yes, I see IT/sustainable resource usage as not being mutu­ally exclu­sive. I’m not being com­pletely hypocric­ti­cal on this one… though I have to admit, air con­di­tion­ing was amaz­ingly wel­come on New Years’ day, irre­spec­tive of power usage (Aus­tralians, inci­den­tally, use the sec­ond high­est vol­ume of elec­tric­ity per-capita in the world, com­ing in only after the US).

Ulti­mately cli­mate change doesn’t mean that much. As in, it’ll all level out when it gets too hot for us to con­tinue pro­duc­ing goods using carbon-based prod­ucts. Sure, lots of peo­ple will die, but it’ll all be sta­ble even­tu­ally. Cue eye-rolling. We know it does mean lots, cer­tainly for our gen­er­a­tion and the next sev­eral. Cur­rent efforts (in which a 3% reduc­tion in emis­sions is seen as mind-boggling) strike me as being way too lit­tle, too late.

The solu­tion? No idea. Ideas such as an vehi­cle emis­sions tax could work, along with sub­stan­tial­ish mar­ket­ing bud­gets (hey, this is Gov­ern­ment we’re talk­ing about here… if they put in sub­stan­tial money to start with, at least some­thing should trickle out the other end) to try and change atti­tudes… but the biggest prob­lems are indus­try and power gen­er­a­tion. And 3% sounds sus­pi­ciously close to nothing.

# by Josh on January 7th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| No Comments »

acidrip

A screenshot of acidrip

This is a seri­ously cool pro­gram. Sure, it’s just a fron­tend to mplayer/mencoder, but it’s so easy! Hav­ing said that, I’m still not game to touch more than half the options, but what­ever :P I now no longer need to pull out my Cold­play Live 2003 DVD to watch tracks on it :D

(I’d ripped it before, but couldn’t fig­ure out how to do indi­vid­ual Chap­ters as sep­a­rate files, so the result­ing file was the whole DVD)

And yes, this pro­gram is prob­a­bly ille­gal in Aus­tralia, as in the US. But then so are iPods prior to iTMS.

# by Josh on November 1st, 2005 Tags: ,
| 15 Comments »

Record companies suck

In today’s news, iTMS Aus­tralia launches with­out Sony, pre­sum­ably because they’re greedy, uncom­pro­mis­ing bas­tards. I’d like to be sued for defama­tion on that com­ment (because, you know, they’d get awarded such mas­sive dam­ages for a blog this size), because then at least the real rea­son would come out, either way. I’m inclined to think they’re far more evil than Apple, but per­haps that’s just PR spin. Hav­ing said that, here’s evi­dence to the con­trary from an AppleTalk Aus­tralia inter­view with CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers:

Keep in mind : Apple is not screw­ing musi­cians. Labels are screw­ing musi­cians. Apple pays 70 cents per 99-cent down­load. If the artist has signed their music over to a label, they don’t own their music any­more. The label does. So Apple pays the label 70 cents per song, and the label pays the artist… what… a penny? Two? Noth­ing at all? But when an artist is NOT signed to a label, when they’re going through CD Baby for exam­ple, we only keep a 9% cut and pay 91% of all income directly to the artists every week. Our account­ing is wide open so they can see every dol­lar every day, and it all goes to the artist every week, with­out fail, for over 7 years now.

Also, I’ve just dis­cov­ered that iTunes users, even on Win­dows, can rip CDs with sup­posed “Copy Con­trol” tech­nol­ogy with­out even hav­ing to resort to the typ­i­cal Shift key “hack” (heh, and, in the US, press­ing Shift at that point in time is entirely ille­gal. Remove those copy­right cir­cum­ven­tion devices from your key­boards, Amer­ica!!) to pre­vent the load­ing of sup­posed restrict­ing tech­nolo­gies. I guess this means iTunes is now ille­gal under the DMCA, too?

For the record, the CD in ques­tion was Placebo’s 2003 “Sleep­ing with Ghosts” album, pub­lished by Vir­gin. At least they didn’t have the audac­ity to use the stan­dard CD logo on it (because these copy-control things are out­side of Red Book spec).

# by Josh on October 25th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 4 Comments »

Sony’s DSC-P93 sucks

UPDATE: Maybe I was wrong. See the bot­tom of this arti­cle for more.

The sen­sor on this must be an absolute piece of trash. It hasn’t even got the excuse of a slowly dying sen­sor due to a man­u­fac­tur­ing defect/humidity… it’s just really poor quality.

One image highlighting its posterization-type effects

The above image has just been scaled, and care­fully com­pressed so as not to exac­er­bate the prob­lem (in actual fact, JPEG com­pres­sion arti­facts reduce the sever­ity of it). It looks as though it’s had a pos­ter­ize fil­ter applied to it (reduc­ing the num­ber of colours in the palette, sim­i­lar to what indexed GIF pho­tos look like), but it hasn’t. That’s straight out of the cam­era… so far as I can tell, no other soft­ware has touched it.

Maybe it just looks worse to me than it is because I’ve got three sets of images here, the other two of which come from a Canon EOS-300D — or Dig­i­tal Rebel in US-speak — (or maybe a pair of them, judg­ing from time delay between shots, but last I heard they were junky con­sumer ver­sions of the EOS-10D with plas­tic cas­ing, and “spe­cial” lens options, so why any­one would buy two of them is beyond me). I don’t know, I was just pretty appalled this was com­ing straight of a cam­era — ANY cam­era, regard­less as to the brand. It’s not over­ex­posed, or blurred, or grainy (well, it is, but you can’t see it par­tic­u­larly well in the scaled ver­sion and that’s not what I’m com­plain­ing about — I under­stand low-light does that to pho­tos), it’s just really bad colour. Inci­den­tally, it was shot as a JPEG. So, it’s not like I or any­one else has screwed up RAW pro­cess­ing — the cam­era has done that for us.

Oh, and inci­den­tally, what’s with 3:2 ratios? I think it’s nicer than 4:3, but it bugged me to look shots from the Canon before I fig­ured out what was going on!

Update: Per­haps they have been processed a lit­tle. One or two of the Rebel’s pho­tos are exhibit­ing sim­i­lar qual­i­ties, so that leads me to believe some­one was being a tool with sat­u­ra­tion in Pho­to­shop or the like. And unhelp­fully left the EXIF data intact so I thought it was unchanged. :-( I guess I’m often guilty of much the same thing with the GIMP, but oh well. Doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while!

Another image effects, this time from Rebel

# by Josh on October 20th, 2005 Tags: , , ,
| 2 Comments »
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