Apple punishes honest users, encourages piracy and DMCA violations
In 2007, Steve Jobs took a bold stance against DRM. Of the big music companies he said:
Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
Now, reality shows Apple's actual choices are quite different. According to this Wired story, the new MacBooks won't play videos purchased on iTunes on displays that have no DRM. This is the kind of stuff we were railing against Microsoft about, when all of these "protection schemes" were still theoretical. Now it's coming for us, and one can safely assume this is just the beginning of the lock-down. Of course, actual pirates will be just fine. And if you're default DVD usage pattern includes re-coding your purchased movies to a free and archivable format, you'll also be fine but then you're in violation of the abomination that is the DMCA (or your local equivalent). The only ones who'll have problems with this are the people who purchase and use videos in accordance with the law. Way to go, Apple, you're sure starting to screw up very badly here.
Dynamic Worlds Getting Mainstream Attention: Procedural Content Generation
After alienating the rest of my audience (yes, all two of them) with politics, it's back-to-technology time!
BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow reports how the FarCry people are utilizing automated content generation to alleviate the load on content designers. Finally, this idea is getting some traction!
Take World of Warcraft, for example. There is a whole army of people who do nothing but design quests, buildings, plots, creatures, zones and everything else. The bigger the game gets, the more it costs to produce new content, because it's all interlinked and has to balanced out. The last expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, introduced literally thousands of new "get me three rat tails"-style quests. Apart from economics, a huge part of what makes MMORPGs like WoW less like actual worlds and more like treadmill social games is that this content has to be re-used over and over. Millions of people play the same storylines, and even when looking at individuals, there is a lot of repetition. You kill the same named mob over and over again until it finally drops something worthwhile. You keep clearing the same dungeon again and again with your raiding party. In a way, it's even worse than pre-canned single player RPGs, because there you can at least keep the illusion that a story is taking place for you only. And the good ones don't respawn unique mobs, too. But in a MMORPG, they have to, because of the way the whole experience is designed. The only way to simulate uniqueness and quench the creeping sense of repetition is to introduce even more carefully-designed static content, so players can at least have the illusion of meaningful choice.
Pit against this static concept a dynamic world, where the mobs are actually living entities with their own agendas, where the environment actually responds to actions of players and mobs alike. A world where creatures have their own dynamic ecosystem, where NPCs build their own societies, settlements, cities and dungeons. Every single one of them has a unique history. When they're killed, they stay dead - with all the consequences. If an important mob is killed, what will happen to its followers and minions? What really happens when war sweeps over the land? How does a landscape slowly change as an evil necromancer is setting up shop in the dungeon below? It's pretty hard and unrewarding to explicitly design these highly dynamic scenarios, to speak nothing of fiscal impossibility. Those questions can only be answered by a real simulation.
I postulate that the simulation, while undeniably complex, does not have to be especially pedantic and overwrought in order to deliver some pretty cool results. The simpler the rules of the game are, the more dynamic and surprising the interplay of all the entities can become. While it doesn't necessarily mean that balancing factors and design decisions will not be necessary, I suspect that a self-balancing world is achievable and fun to play in. At least, it would be for me, because WoW is definitely not the way to spend my time...
BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow reports how the FarCry people are utilizing automated content generation to alleviate the load on content designers. Finally, this idea is getting some traction!
Take World of Warcraft, for example. There is a whole army of people who do nothing but design quests, buildings, plots, creatures, zones and everything else. The bigger the game gets, the more it costs to produce new content, because it's all interlinked and has to balanced out. The last expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, introduced literally thousands of new "get me three rat tails"-style quests. Apart from economics, a huge part of what makes MMORPGs like WoW less like actual worlds and more like treadmill social games is that this content has to be re-used over and over. Millions of people play the same storylines, and even when looking at individuals, there is a lot of repetition. You kill the same named mob over and over again until it finally drops something worthwhile. You keep clearing the same dungeon again and again with your raiding party. In a way, it's even worse than pre-canned single player RPGs, because there you can at least keep the illusion that a story is taking place for you only. And the good ones don't respawn unique mobs, too. But in a MMORPG, they have to, because of the way the whole experience is designed. The only way to simulate uniqueness and quench the creeping sense of repetition is to introduce even more carefully-designed static content, so players can at least have the illusion of meaningful choice.
Pit against this static concept a dynamic world, where the mobs are actually living entities with their own agendas, where the environment actually responds to actions of players and mobs alike. A world where creatures have their own dynamic ecosystem, where NPCs build their own societies, settlements, cities and dungeons. Every single one of them has a unique history. When they're killed, they stay dead - with all the consequences. If an important mob is killed, what will happen to its followers and minions? What really happens when war sweeps over the land? How does a landscape slowly change as an evil necromancer is setting up shop in the dungeon below? It's pretty hard and unrewarding to explicitly design these highly dynamic scenarios, to speak nothing of fiscal impossibility. Those questions can only be answered by a real simulation.
I postulate that the simulation, while undeniably complex, does not have to be especially pedantic and overwrought in order to deliver some pretty cool results. The simpler the rules of the game are, the more dynamic and surprising the interplay of all the entities can become. While it doesn't necessarily mean that balancing factors and design decisions will not be necessary, I suspect that a self-balancing world is achievable and fun to play in. At least, it would be for me, because WoW is definitely not the way to spend my time...
A pragmatic idealist's approach to politics - my German perspective on the presidential election
Disclaimer: I know, this blog has to stop descending into matters that aren't really tech-related, but on the other hand it seems I have given up on delivering a focused message a long time ago. Anyway, Obama won, stuff happened and I need to vent a few things before finally moving on.
I believe in the promise of true democracy. Being a self-governing people does not mean the biggest and loudest group gets to push their ideas on everyone else, instead we have to struggle against selfishness to make the best choices for all of society and that includes every person living in it. Sometimes it is easy to forget that every single voice matters - but it does. Democracy is an idea that remains fundamentally unfulfilled and it requires, it mandates us all to never stop trying to improve ourselves and the world we live in.
I believe in freedom. For a society to be free, all of its people have to be free as well. Freedom includes a number of concepts that allow each and everyone of us to choose the life we want for ourselves, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of others. But freedom is not just a cumulative list of bullet points, it also implies a host of things that we need to be free of, such as inequality, oppression, violence and persecution.
As a scientist and humanist, I also believe that everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves, that includes the right to have an abortion - but more importantly it also requires access to contraceptives, starting with science-based comprehensive sex education. I believe that, in order to progress as a society, we need to make science our top priority. I believe religion has no place in science, and it should not play a role in the spending of public funds, or any other government activity for that matter. In order to be free to exercise freedom of belief (or non-belief as it may be), we need to be free from any form of state religion.
I believe privacy is a natural right. I believe in the separation of church and state. I believe every child has a right to a science-based education. I believe you should have the whole array of medical services available to you, regardless of your financial status. And yes, I believe that free access to information is just as much a self-evident right as the ability to exchange knowledge and opinion online.
As such, it should come as no surprise which candidate I supported in the US presidential election. I happen to think McCain is a decent guy even though the style of his campaign has been anything but exemplary. But the truth is, it doesn't really matter how nice (or heroic) John McCain is, or even how incompetent Palin might be or how horrible a job George Bush might have done. In the end, the Republican party platform itself remains the complete antithesis to every conviction I have outlined above.
America now has elected someone for president who I hope not only stands for those values, but will start to reverse the trend of the last years that marked a clear departure from the ideals of a free people. In a sense, America has the luxury to go back and forth between extremes, one election can steer the country either back to the dark ages or towards radical progress. Here in Germany, there is no party that clearly represents my democratic values, just as there is no party to represent the values of Sarah Palin. There is only endless bickering, we are stuck in meaningless exchanges and at the end of day, nothing is accomplished besides perfecting our new rightless surveilance state. We live with a political landscape that does little else besides keeping us busy, so we don't notice that our democracy is dying before our eyes. For German politicians, status quo is a way of life, and this is reflected in the media as well. But, like many countries, we just subscribe to changes coming from Washington DC. If America makes a swing towards democratic values, so will Germany. In time.
I believe in the promise of true democracy. Being a self-governing people does not mean the biggest and loudest group gets to push their ideas on everyone else, instead we have to struggle against selfishness to make the best choices for all of society and that includes every person living in it. Sometimes it is easy to forget that every single voice matters - but it does. Democracy is an idea that remains fundamentally unfulfilled and it requires, it mandates us all to never stop trying to improve ourselves and the world we live in.
I believe in freedom. For a society to be free, all of its people have to be free as well. Freedom includes a number of concepts that allow each and everyone of us to choose the life we want for ourselves, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of others. But freedom is not just a cumulative list of bullet points, it also implies a host of things that we need to be free of, such as inequality, oppression, violence and persecution.
As a scientist and humanist, I also believe that everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves, that includes the right to have an abortion - but more importantly it also requires access to contraceptives, starting with science-based comprehensive sex education. I believe that, in order to progress as a society, we need to make science our top priority. I believe religion has no place in science, and it should not play a role in the spending of public funds, or any other government activity for that matter. In order to be free to exercise freedom of belief (or non-belief as it may be), we need to be free from any form of state religion.
I believe privacy is a natural right. I believe in the separation of church and state. I believe every child has a right to a science-based education. I believe you should have the whole array of medical services available to you, regardless of your financial status. And yes, I believe that free access to information is just as much a self-evident right as the ability to exchange knowledge and opinion online.
As such, it should come as no surprise which candidate I supported in the US presidential election. I happen to think McCain is a decent guy even though the style of his campaign has been anything but exemplary. But the truth is, it doesn't really matter how nice (or heroic) John McCain is, or even how incompetent Palin might be or how horrible a job George Bush might have done. In the end, the Republican party platform itself remains the complete antithesis to every conviction I have outlined above.
America now has elected someone for president who I hope not only stands for those values, but will start to reverse the trend of the last years that marked a clear departure from the ideals of a free people. In a sense, America has the luxury to go back and forth between extremes, one election can steer the country either back to the dark ages or towards radical progress. Here in Germany, there is no party that clearly represents my democratic values, just as there is no party to represent the values of Sarah Palin. There is only endless bickering, we are stuck in meaningless exchanges and at the end of day, nothing is accomplished besides perfecting our new rightless surveilance state. We live with a political landscape that does little else besides keeping us busy, so we don't notice that our democracy is dying before our eyes. For German politicians, status quo is a way of life, and this is reflected in the media as well. But, like many countries, we just subscribe to changes coming from Washington DC. If America makes a swing towards democratic values, so will Germany. In time.
Why not just cast your vote on the web?
Yes, it's Election Night on Udo's Techblog - and like everybody else I'm already hooked on CNN even though they apparently have gotten rid of the exit polls and as of right now are just reporting meaningless filler on a 30-minute endless loop until this sucker is finally called in a few hours.
Anyway, the one thing they actually do report is what seems to be wide-spread election tampering across the board. Voting machines not recording votes, machines marking your vote as McCain regardless of what box you checked, and registered voters have apparently been removed from the list so they can't vote at all, and it looks like a load of people didn't get their absentee ballots. Couldn't this whole thing be handled over the net?
It seems fitting to me that CNN asked the same question just now, and the person they invited for this was some guy from Citrix - a company that made ridiculous sums of money by selling their VNC clone to companies on a large scale disguised as a groundbreaking innovation, condemning millions of users to slow, crappy and interrupted computing experiences. So tell us, Mr Citrix Guy, when can we expect to be able to cast our vote online? Well, the answer comes back as a stream of barely intelligible generalisms, and I'm paraphrasing this out of my ass into a language that makes more sense: not before the public sector spends a few billions on pilot studies conducted by my company, and even then there will be huge technical issues blah blah blah.
It astonishes me that we only get to hear from these people, instead of, say, guys and girls who actually implement the web as we use it everyday. Where is Google, Microsoft, Facebook? Anyone? Bueller..?
There is no question we'll get web voting some day in the future. And I can see now how it will work, based on the country you're in:
In the US: Votes will be cast using a Windows-only plugin. Only IP adresses from the continental US will be usable, screwing a lot of absentee voters, and you won't be able to vote from a Cogent line. 60% of all votes will automatically be recorded for the Republican candidate and there will be no way to tell whether your vote was counted at all. There will be three highly ambiguous checkboxes to cast your vote for either of two candidates.
In Germany: Voting will be done via a Java 1.2 client that has a download size of 780 megabytes and will only run on either a Windows version that won't come out until two years after the election or some ancient Debian release from the dawn of time. Months before you can even log in, you'll need to complete a registration process that requires you to provide 5 different types of legal identification and the filling-out of 12 paper forms at 3 different governmental offices spaced equally all over town. You will also have to buy a biometric scanner from Siemens for 250 Euros that can only be connected to your computer by a Telex line.
What will electronic voting be like in your country?
Anyway, the one thing they actually do report is what seems to be wide-spread election tampering across the board. Voting machines not recording votes, machines marking your vote as McCain regardless of what box you checked, and registered voters have apparently been removed from the list so they can't vote at all, and it looks like a load of people didn't get their absentee ballots. Couldn't this whole thing be handled over the net?
It seems fitting to me that CNN asked the same question just now, and the person they invited for this was some guy from Citrix - a company that made ridiculous sums of money by selling their VNC clone to companies on a large scale disguised as a groundbreaking innovation, condemning millions of users to slow, crappy and interrupted computing experiences. So tell us, Mr Citrix Guy, when can we expect to be able to cast our vote online? Well, the answer comes back as a stream of barely intelligible generalisms, and I'm paraphrasing this out of my ass into a language that makes more sense: not before the public sector spends a few billions on pilot studies conducted by my company, and even then there will be huge technical issues blah blah blah.
It astonishes me that we only get to hear from these people, instead of, say, guys and girls who actually implement the web as we use it everyday. Where is Google, Microsoft, Facebook? Anyone? Bueller..?
There is no question we'll get web voting some day in the future. And I can see now how it will work, based on the country you're in:
In the US: Votes will be cast using a Windows-only plugin. Only IP adresses from the continental US will be usable, screwing a lot of absentee voters, and you won't be able to vote from a Cogent line. 60% of all votes will automatically be recorded for the Republican candidate and there will be no way to tell whether your vote was counted at all. There will be three highly ambiguous checkboxes to cast your vote for either of two candidates.
In Germany: Voting will be done via a Java 1.2 client that has a download size of 780 megabytes and will only run on either a Windows version that won't come out until two years after the election or some ancient Debian release from the dawn of time. Months before you can even log in, you'll need to complete a registration process that requires you to provide 5 different types of legal identification and the filling-out of 12 paper forms at 3 different governmental offices spaced equally all over town. You will also have to buy a biometric scanner from Siemens for 250 Euros that can only be connected to your computer by a Telex line.
What will electronic voting be like in your country?
Rest in Peace, Oscar Grimm
I can't believe I missed this for so long, but I just learned that Brian Oscar Grimm, who together with Tanja Andrews created freshtopia.net, passed away this month due to brain cancer. I only met Oscar and Tanja once, at Scobleizer's mom's home in Montana, but was deeply impressed with their warmth, creativity and good humor. They were so very very nice, people that make you feel comfortable instantly even if you just met. I am so sorry. When someone so young and creative leaves this early, the sense of loss is overwhelming. You and your work won't be forgotten, Oscar. Goodbye.
Mac Neophyte Tips: why you can't put your data onto your new USB disk
This is very basic, but when I wrote this entry about being unable to reformat a new USB drive, it reminded me of an episode that happened as I was waiting at the Saturn Electro service desk because my printer had crapped out on me. As the unfriendly support guy was busy in the back with my printer (making up excuses why I couldn't return it), a woman came to the counter with her MacBook and a USB drive she just bought. We were bored, so we started chatting about her problem. Turns out, she couldn't copy folders from her laptop's drive to the USB disk - can you guess why?
Some USB drives are factory-formatted with NTFS, the Windows NT filesystem. By default, a Mac can read the disk just fine, but it can't write any data to it. A little pen icon with a strike through it indicates this read-only state on the Finder window's footer bar.
What you need to do is re-formatting the USB disk with a Mac-compatible filesystem. Don't be scared, open Disk Utility, click on the USB disk > select the Erase tab > select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" > click "Apply" to format (at which point any data currently on the disk will of course be erased).
All done!
Oh, and if it doesn't work, look at this here.
Some USB drives are factory-formatted with NTFS, the Windows NT filesystem. By default, a Mac can read the disk just fine, but it can't write any data to it. A little pen icon with a strike through it indicates this read-only state on the Finder window's footer bar.
What you need to do is re-formatting the USB disk with a Mac-compatible filesystem. Don't be scared, open Disk Utility, click on the USB disk > select the Erase tab > select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" > click "Apply" to format (at which point any data currently on the disk will of course be erased).
All done!
Oh, and if it doesn't work, look at this here.
Mac Neophyte Tips: "Volume Erase Failed" on new USB drives?
When you get a new USB drive, it's usually formatted with FAT (the Windows compatibility filesystem). As long as it's not NTFS (the Windows journaled filesystem), you can usually read from and write to the drive without problems when you hook it up to a Mac. However, if you don't need Windows compatibility, it's a good idea to format the drive using the native OS X filesystem. It offers more features, better Mac compatibility and journaling to make your data safer.
Normally, you can easily re-format any drive on the Mac by opening Disk Utility, selecting the disk in question and choose erase with the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" option. Sometimes, this returns a "Volume Erase Failed: The underlying task reported failure on exit" message. This is a horrible unixism, because Disk Utility obviously called a command-line tool that exited with some cryptic error message so it doesn't know what to do.
First of all, there is most likely nothing wrong with your new USB disk, don't listen to the support forums. This is the thing: when your USB drive was factory-formatted, they partitioned it to be as compatible with Windows PCs as possible, so they gave it a partition setup called "Master Boot Record". And for some disk sizes, you can't put a Mac OS partition on top of that. So all you gotta do is change the partition scheme of the drive.
Anyway, here is what you can do to fix it, even though Disk Utility should know how to tell you all by itself. Go open Disk Utility, select the USB drive. Make sure not to click on the underlying partition, but on the actual disk drive entry above it. You can find it easily, because it's not only labeled with the whole disk size, but also identifies the manufacturer of the device and it's model name. After clicking on the device, select the "Partition" tab > click on the "Volume Scheme" dropdown menu > select "1 Partition" > click on the "Options" button.
Then, a dialog window appears where you can select the partition scheme. It's probably marked "Master Boot Record". Go ahead and select the "GUID Partition Table" (or "Apple Partition Map" if you want to boot off the disk with a legacy PowerPC-based Mac). Click "OK" to close the dialog and then click the "Apply" button to re-format the drive. Should work like a charm!
Normally, you can easily re-format any drive on the Mac by opening Disk Utility, selecting the disk in question and choose erase with the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" option. Sometimes, this returns a "Volume Erase Failed: The underlying task reported failure on exit" message. This is a horrible unixism, because Disk Utility obviously called a command-line tool that exited with some cryptic error message so it doesn't know what to do.
First of all, there is most likely nothing wrong with your new USB disk, don't listen to the support forums. This is the thing: when your USB drive was factory-formatted, they partitioned it to be as compatible with Windows PCs as possible, so they gave it a partition setup called "Master Boot Record". And for some disk sizes, you can't put a Mac OS partition on top of that. So all you gotta do is change the partition scheme of the drive.
Anyway, here is what you can do to fix it, even though Disk Utility should know how to tell you all by itself. Go open Disk Utility, select the USB drive. Make sure not to click on the underlying partition, but on the actual disk drive entry above it. You can find it easily, because it's not only labeled with the whole disk size, but also identifies the manufacturer of the device and it's model name. After clicking on the device, select the "Partition" tab > click on the "Volume Scheme" dropdown menu > select "1 Partition" > click on the "Options" button.
Then, a dialog window appears where you can select the partition scheme. It's probably marked "Master Boot Record". Go ahead and select the "GUID Partition Table" (or "Apple Partition Map" if you want to boot off the disk with a legacy PowerPC-based Mac). Click "OK" to close the dialog and then click the "Apply" button to re-format the drive. Should work like a charm!
Bartlett's advice to Obama
It just thought I'd leave this here for you, it's delicious. From TFA:
BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that's what they are. Sarah Palin didn't say "thanks but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said "Thanks." You were raised by a single mother on food stamps - where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I'd ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you're at it, I want the word "patriot" back.
McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn't know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can't do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie - the truth isn't their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they've earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It's not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It's not bad enough she's forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It's not enough that a woman shouldn't have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist's baby too? I don't know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she's got the qualifications of one. And you're worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
Mac Neophyte Tips: Reclaiming space on disk images
When you decide to use FileVault to protect your personal stuff on a Mac (and you should), you are effectively using an encrypted disk image as storage for your home folder. Now, when you delete something in there, the space for it on the hard drive isn't restored immediately. Instead, when you sign off later, OS X compacts and reclaims the space.
Many people use disk images not only implicitly with FileVault, but create them to protect content on other drives, such as USB disks or Flash memory sticks. The problem here is, disk space never seems to come back after you delete something on there, no matter what you do. This is because OS X designers really screwed up usability when it comes to actually working with disk images: cleanup doesn't happen when you unmount the image, nor is there a menu option to reclaim lost space.
This means, you have to use the command line to compact disk images manually. Open a terminal window and type something like this, where "SomeUSBDrive" is the name of the disk or directory where your space-wasting image is located and "NameOfTheImage.sparsebundle" is, well, the image itself:
If the image is encrypted, you'll be prompted to enter the password for it. Compacting images is really fast if you're using sparse bundles, but if you're not: this might take a while.
Many people use disk images not only implicitly with FileVault, but create them to protect content on other drives, such as USB disks or Flash memory sticks. The problem here is, disk space never seems to come back after you delete something on there, no matter what you do. This is because OS X designers really screwed up usability when it comes to actually working with disk images: cleanup doesn't happen when you unmount the image, nor is there a menu option to reclaim lost space.
This means, you have to use the command line to compact disk images manually. Open a terminal window and type something like this, where "SomeUSBDrive" is the name of the disk or directory where your space-wasting image is located and "NameOfTheImage.sparsebundle" is, well, the image itself:
cd /Volumes/SomeUSBDrive
hdiutil compact NameOfTheImage.sparsebundle
If the image is encrypted, you'll be prompted to enter the password for it. Compacting images is really fast if you're using sparse bundles, but if you're not: this might take a while.
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