Science Fiction Writers and the Butterfly Effect

As a science fiction writer, I’m in the business of making predictions about the far future. This can be a very tricky enterprise. If you’re wrong, you’ll inevitably look foolish and backwards and stuffed full with 21st century prejudices. If you’re right, you’ll be long dead anyway, and you’ll probably still look foolish to your contemporaries. I think part of the lack of respect that the science fiction genre receives from the mainstream has to … Read more

Bad Economic Models for Entertainment

I bought Bruce Springsteen’s roots/folk/New Orleans jazz album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions a couple of weeks ago. I unwrapped it in the car, popped it into the CD player, and enjoyed it full blast all the way up to Baltimore and back.

Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger SessionsA couple days later, the CD made its way to my computer, where all my music ends up. But Sony chose to release We Shall Overcome as a DualDisc (one side CD, one side DVD), and because the DualDisc doesn’t conform to the industry’s CD specifications, the damn thing won’t play on my PC. I can’t rip it to the hard drive either.

For me, the ability to listen to music on my PC isn’t optional. I don’t even own a stereo, and probably 80% of my music consumption takes place through Windows Media Player on my desktop PC. (The other 20% being in the car.) After several hours of frustrated Google searches for “crack DualDisc DRM” and “rip Seeger Sessions CD,” I finally just fired up BitTorrent and found a bootleg copy of the music. Problem solved.

This, of course, is illegal. Even though I own a copy of We Shall Overcome and am just looking for a way to play it on my computer, there’s no reason I couldn’t have downloaded some other album that I don’t own. According to the RIAA, I should be punished with a stiff fine.

But as anyone knows who’s been following this whole debate, the music industry brought this on itself. Industry pundits have been charting the rise of broadband Internet access and cheap computer hardware for years now. Any forward-looking industry would have tried to take advantage of this flourishing tide of consumer technology before it crashed on top of them. But the recording industry squandered its chance to build a digital jukebox system.

Instead the RIAA concentrated its efforts on meritless lawsuits against ordinary (and often innocent) consumers
in a vain attempt to scare people away from their Napster or Gnutella clients. These efforts, of course, are failing miserably. Now, because of the recording industry’s bad gamble, their profits are plummeting and the bastard children of Napster have put large-scale music piracy in the hands of any 8-year-old with a PC. Steve Jobs has the recording industry over a barrel with his iTunes store, and there’s nothing the recording industry can do about it.

Why have the RIAA’s efforts failed? Are we, the public, simply a group of amoral, opportunistic thieves?

No, of course not. The problem is this: the traditional economic model for distributing music is a historical aberration that’s unsustainable in the long term.

We all know how things worked in the music industry since the middle of last century. You walked into your local Tower Records and shelled out $15-$25 for a CD. Once it left your hands, that $15-$25 got carved up by retailers, wholesalers, payment processors, distributors, record company executives, promoters, agents, managers, etc. The artist ended up with maybe $1 to $2 of this in the end, if they were lucky. (Then the government took its 30%.)

Far be it from me to knock the work that these middlemen do. In the twentieth century, these people were necessary for artists to get exposure and sell their work. But does all their effort improve the quality of the artist’s work? No. (Although one could argue that many a meandering batch of songs has been sharpened and focused into a classic album by a good producer.)

This is the thing that has the RIAA quaking in its (stormtrooper’s steel-toed) boots. What if all the record companies went under tomorrow? What if there was nobody around to pay music artists large gobs of cash and foot the bill for their ultrasmooth high-tech studio production wizardry? What if there was no record company pushing artists’ work into the stores and in the consumers’ hands? Would the music industry dry up? Would people stop making quality music?

No.

Read more

Book-Geekity Fun with LibraryThing

I love snooping at other people’s libraries. Whenever I’m at someone’s house, you’ll usually find me with my head tilted to one side reading book jacket spines within the first ten minutes of walking in the door. I’ve been known to walk through IKEA paying much more attention to the books on the shelves than to the shelves themselves. So imagine my excitement when I discovered LibraryThing. LibraryThing is basically a connected online database of … Read more

Web Hosting Companies That Suck

Web hosting companies have a reputation for service that ranks right up there with the cable and phone companies. In other words, execrable.

This is one case where the reputation is in line with reality. Web hosting companies, on the whole, suck.

One can feel some sympathy for the people running a web hosting business; it’s not an easy thing to do. You’ve got to keep web servers up and running over 99% of the time, even during a storm or a power fluctuation. You’ve got to have adequate security to keep out denial-of-service attacks and data thieves. And you’ve got to have the patience to deal with customers who simply don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Granted that it’s not an easy business, but one must still expect a minimum level of competence. Nobody forced these people to get into web hosting. You don’t pop the key into the ignition of your Toyota and, when the damn thing doesn’t start, tell yourself that it’s okay because building a good car is hard.

I’m not sure what the margins are like on web hosting. But I can’t imagine they’re all that impressive — who can make money running a technical service on $5.99 a month? Big corporations like Dell and Yahoo! just throw up their hands at the whole thing, or they change their business strategy every two months, presumably because the service still blows.

So here I am, with twelve years of web design and programming experience under my belt, and I still can’t find a reliable web host.

This post was spurred by a bad experience I had recently with GoDaddy, which is more well-known as a domain registrar. I spent close to two hours on the phone (long distance) with GoDaddy technical support trying to figure out why the server wouldn’t create a ColdFusion search collection on one of my clients’ websites. (This isn’t a particularly arduous task; it’s literally one line of code.) GoDaddy’s first conclusion: your one line of basic code must be wrong. Their second conclusion: we can’t answer this question until you pay an upfront fee of $300 for our “advanced” technical support. Their final conclusion: sorry, GoDaddy doesn’t support basic ColdFusion searching.

Read more

The Joy of Strict XHTML

I’ve recently discovered something else the Mozilla Firefox browser can do that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can’t: Firefox can accept documents using the “application/xhtml+xml” header.

Who gives a shit? you might be thinking to yourself. Wait, I’ll explain. This might actually change your life someday.

For years, people have been writing web pages using the dated and somewhat arbitrary HTML 4 specification. If you don’t know what HTML looks like, take a look at the source code on any web page (by going to the “View” menu and selecting “Page Source” in Firefox or “View Source” in IE).

The problem is that during the web browser wars of the ’90s, Microsoft and Netscape both decided that they wanted their browsers to be as inclusive as possible. You could be a sloppy or an amateur coder, make all kinds of errors in your HTML, and the browser would silently compensate for you. For instance, the proper way to create a bulleted list is by using this code:

<ul>
<li>apples</li>
<li>oranges</li>
<li>bananas</li>
</ul>

But you could just as easily get away with typing this instead:

<UL>
<Li>apples
<li>oranges<lI>
<li>bananas
</ul></Ul>

Read more

Miscellaneous Web Design Sins

Chances are, if you’ve put together a website, you’ve committed some (or all) of these venal sins. Or your clients have made you commit them. Hyperlinking the words “click here.” People generally don’t read websites in the way they read a book or a magazine; they skim. And when you hyperlink contentless words like click here, the user gets lost in a sea of “click here”s. You can’t tell where the link goes without reading … Read more

Progress Bars and Technological Progress

There’s a dialog box that appears in certain Microsoft products which caught my attention recently. It’s a progress indicator, one of those long horizontal bars that fills up as the computer gets closer to completing a task. The label underneath this particular bar comes straight out of Monty Python: This may take up to 1 minute or longer. So, it could take any length of time then, as long as it’s not exactly one minute. … Read more

The Importance of Web Conventions

I’m looking forward to seeing the galleys for my novel sometime in the next few months. Pyr has decided to implement a lot of special features in the book design. Page numbers won’t be in the top or bottom margin as you might expect, but right in the middle of the text. And since readers get bored constantly reading text from left to right, my editor decided to make the text direction vary on each … Read more