Justin Carmony’s Professional & Personal Blog

According to Slashdot:

Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. … As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.

What the heck? 250GB a month? Yes, for a typical, non-technological household, then the 250GB seems okay. What about my house? I have 3 PCs, 2 Laptops, 2 iPhones, and one xBox 360. I work full-time from my home and I am a software engineer. I manage dozens of large web servers and many of them make backups to my “backup server” weekly. Anywhere from 10-20 GBs will be sent to my pc every week. Thats 80-100GB a month. I also stream movies, music, tv, and many other things daily. I download games on Steam and my xBox, and download legal things via BitTorrents.

I can see myself easily going over the 250GB a month limit, several months in a row! I’ve already felt internet throttling when ever I download legal content via BitTorrent from Comcast. The last few weeks I’ve had days where my Internet just seems to stop. But my biggest gripe I’ve ever had with Comcast is this….

When I request business class internet, Comcast tells me I can’t, because I live at a residential address. Thats right, I can’t get higher speeds, or static IP addresses, or a better service level agreement because I work from home. When I asked why, I was told that if I really was a big business, I should get an office. Oh yeah? I want to spend $1000 dollars more a month to have an “okay” office, have to spend money driving to work, only so I can have a “business” internet connect? Oh yeah Comcast, I love the idea! You are so in touch with the home office.

Ugh, I’m tired of Comcast, but my only other internet option is DSL, which in my old neighborhood can only get speeds of 256K…. which is slightly faster than my phone.

Since my wife and I got our new iPhones, I’ve been playing around with a way unify our calendars. When we first got married we started to use Google Calendar. We have three calendars: mine, hers, and ours. Its great for staying organized, especially when we’re trying to organize two lives. It worked well for several weeks, except one thing…

We had to be on-line and on the browser to view our Google Calendars. Lot of the time when we needed to see our calendar we were with family or friends without computer access. Also, when I work I have twenty or so browser windows open, and it can be difficult to find my calendar in the mix. I also am biased towards desktop client applications when I’m using them every hour of the day. So I set out on my quest to find a way to sync across all the different mediums I use. Now that I think I’ve found my solution, I thought I would share my findings with the rest of the world.

When I tried to decide how to sync my calendars, I started with several goals:

1. Google as my “main” hub for hosting the calendars.
2. No “hosting” services on my end - I didn’t want to have to have a server or something on one of my PCs required to be on all the time for this system to work.
3. Over the air syncing for the iPhone - I don’t want to have to plug in my phone to my PC to “update” my calendar.
4. No hassle, “it just works” mentality.

Here is a diagram of how I’m syncing:

Here is how I set it up:

1) Google is the “center” for my calendar - I’m using google as the main hub for my calendars. It is a great source for hosting my calendars because I know they are always up to date, they have great apis for developers to use to implement with, and you can access them anywhere.

2) Calgoo on Windows - Since I don’t use Outlook for numerous reasons (mainly because it is a slow pig), I was flexible for my window client. I settled on using Calgoo because it was free, the interface is great, and it just works.

3) iCal and BusySync on Mac - I like the iCal interface for using a calendar, and BusySync allows for bi-directional syncing. It happens automatically without any manual intervention.

4) NuevaSync to iPhone - This is the best syncing system for the iPhone and Google (that I’ve found). It doesn’t require any third party software on your iPhone, it uses an exchange account to sync between Google and your iPhone. Best of all, it is over the air, so it work greats. I’ve set my iphone’s fetch to ever 15 for email and calendar.

How do I like it?

I love it. It gives me easy access on my phone, my work PC, my laptop mac, and anywhere with a browser. Depending on your sync frequency, it can take as little as 15 mins for a new entry to get sent across to my other devices. My wife can add something to our calendar and it will show up on my phone.

Let me know if anyone has any questions on how I set this up, but each of the websites explain pretty well how to do it.

Well, it looks like there is case of a large organization trying to cover up some bad press. Featured on slashdot: “YouTube Yanks Free Tibet Video After IOC (International Olympic Committee”:

The International Olympic Committee filed a copyright infringement claim yesterday against YouTube for hosting video of a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan Thursday night. The video depicts demonstrators conducting a candlelight vigil and projecting a protest video onto the consulate building; the projection features recent footage of Tibetan monks being arrested and riffs on the Olympic logo of the five interlocking rings, turning them into handcuffs. YouTube dutifully yanked the video, but it can still be seen on Vimeo. (Be advised; there is some brief footage of bloody, injured monks

What should companies do when they are getting bad PR on the internet? Especially something that is as high profile as the Olympics, I honestly think it is just best to take the bad PR and move forward. Here is our scenario:

People are protesting the issue between China and Tibet. I don’t know a whole lot about it as I should (put it on my list of things to read up about). The Olympics are being hosted in China. This is a perfect place and time for people who are protesting the China-Tibet issue to get some attention. I mean the whole world is watching. So the pro-tibet people make a video and post it on the net. They include some images of the Olympic rings. I watched the video, and I walked away thinking it was 95% about China’s actions. I really didn’t think about it being anti-olympics.

So what happens? The IOC gets worried people might think people the Olympics are evil or something. I’m pretty sure some people think the IOC is evil, but this video wouldn’t make one person think that who didn’t already. But the IOC panic and have YouTube remove the video due to “copyright” issues. All of a sudden the IOC changes their stance and enter into “censorship.” It doesn’t matter what is legal or not, people all of a sudden think the IOC agrees with China. Is it true? That doesn’t matter. Its PR.

Then you have something that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago. The news story goes viral. It starts to be featured all over the internet, and soon more people will see it under a worse context than had the video not been removed. Ten times more people could see. hundreds, maybe even thousands will see it now. All for what? Copyright issues.

The bottom-line is this: trying to coverup bad PR can blow up in your face in an instant. Especially when it is so controversial. You have names like YouTube, Olympics, and China, of course it can get a lot of coverage.

I’ve been very happy with WordPress. I’ve experimented with textpattern, drupal, joomla, and dozens others. Each time I circle back to WordPress for it’s easy of use and great community. I just upgraded this blog from 2.3.2 to 2.6 without a single problem. 2.6’s new features are great, and all I can say is “wow.” I have to give Matt, Barry, and the rest of the team a huge round of applause. It is fantastic!

I am testing my new iPhone app for wordpress. While I wouldn’t want to write an essay from this, it is pretty cool. What they really need is for a way to respond to comments on here. I’m sure it is currently in the works.

I haven’t written in a few days, and I’ve been swamped with work, but I thought it’d make a quick post about Ctrl-Alt-Del’s ’silly’ comic:

While you have failed entrepenuers saying how the obviously successful iPhone will fail, there is one truth to the iPhone: it can be very slippery without a case!

Until Apple change’s their attitude and policies, they will never be a Microsoft, Sun, or other monolithic technology company. Why? Their NDA on the new iPhone SDK 2.1 hinders developers seriously. They are so tight lipped about everything and are such control freaks that they will never replace Microsoft. If someone asked me today if I could magically snap my fingers and have Apple replace Microsoft, I would say “hell no.” Using their Laptops and Phones is one thing. Developing blindly with nothing but half-baked documentation and a NDA shoved down my throat is another beast.

I don’t have time to describe every little detail as to why Apple is absolutely retarded about prohibiting developers from collaborating with each other. We endured it while the iPhone 2.0 wasn’t out, but if Apple can’t trust anyone, they are in the wrong business. Maybe one day I’ll rant some more, but until I want to waste some time on complaining about Apple, I think I’ll just let everyone else do it to. I just wanted to throw in my two cents that I’m frustrated with Apple.

The other day I posted on my thoughts of Rhapsody and Yahoo Music. It seems like there has been a lot of talk about how Yahoo Music users are going to lose their music they purchased through Yahoo. I want clarify a few things:

First, Yahoo Music users can transfer their account to Rhapsody. I believe this also transfers their purchased music. Now, if your account has lapsed, I don’t know exactly how it works. I still think there are lots of Yahoo Music users will get the short end of the deal, and some lose all their purchased music. I know there are worse things in the world, but here are my thought on DRM.They

Digital Rights Management - Good Intentions, Horrible Execution

DRM at heart really has good intentions. It just wants to make sure that people listen to music that they are have bought or subscribed to. In a perfect world, DRM could help the user. If I bought a song, and that song could follow me across all computers, all devices, and I would never lose it. If my computer blew up, I could buy a new one and “hey! There is my song!” My mp3 player, my phone, my laptop, my computer, and anything else all that could play the song. I could burn it to a CD when ever I wanted, and I could use it all this way 100% legally.

But whose rights are being managed? They are not the user’s rights. The scenario above is when the user’s rights are being managed. DRM in its current state doesn’t manage the user’s rights, but the publishers rights. This isn’t a bad thing in theory if both publishers and users rights are managed. But whose rights are being managed? The publisher’s right solely.

DRM in its current state has this philosophy: If there is any possible way that any user could might share a song with someone else who doesn’t own the rights to listen. Unfortunately, this philosophy leads to buying music with DRM into an extremely restricted environment. What would it take to make DRM work?

1) One Universal DRM System - For my music to work everywhere, there only has to be one. I doubt this will ever happen. If there are more than one system, they have to work together seamlessly. This in my opinion is an impossible dream. Why can there only be one? For all Computers, Devices, etc. to work with DRM music, there should only be one system. When there is more, it undoubtably will happen that one device will only support one and not two. Our classic example now is Apple’s technology vs. Windows Based (WMA’s) systems. iPods and iPhone can play apple’s music. Zunes, Sansas, etc can play protected WMAs. There is no way to switch the two. It just doesn’t work.

2) Easier for the User - The reason why all DRM systems have been so locked down is the mentality of “don’t trust the user!” Isn’t that the whole reason why we have DRM? I believe DRM would work a great deal better if it made life easier for a user. I’ll give an example where this indeed has happened with DRM later in this blog post.

3) Don’t Punish the User - Currently, if you slightly fall out of a DRM’s system or model, you lose your music. It is frustrating for users and my biggest fear of buying DRM music is I’ll somehow lose the license, crash my computer, etc. and I will have to re-buy the song. Once 6-7 years ago a hotel maid threw away my plane ticket on accident. It was with Southwest and when I got to the airport I had my driver’s license to prove it was me. I told them my last name of “Carmony” and she asked me if I was Justin and I said yes. They then told me without the ticket I had to buy another one. I was infuriated! They knew it was me. They knew I had bought a ticket. But because of some maid I had to re-buy my ticket. I get the same feeling with DRM. Why can’t I re-download music I purchased? You know I bought it. You know I signed in just fine. So force me to re-buy what I already should own? Just because my computer blew up, or was stolen, or any other number of reasons I would imagine DRM would protect me in this case, not hurt me.

When Digital Rights Management is Good

I think the current DRM model is mostly good for one scenario: music subscriptions. I loved my Yahoo Music account and now my Rhapsody. I love the fact that I can pay a subscription to listen to millions of songs. The key in understanding why I pay money to subscribe is one simple reason: it is more convenient than other illegal alternatives. I used to download music illegally when I was younger. The good old Napster days when it took 30 minutes to download one song over dial-up. Now a person can download an entire discography of a band in under 30 minutes.

DRM makes sense for subscription services. It makes good sense to protect “borrowed” music. People would be able to steal music insanely easy without protecting that music. Besides, they are renting it, not purchasing it. DRM has enabled a new business model that couldn’t exist without it. The only issue is that I can’t use subscription music on any device. Once again, the problem of not having a universal system.

When Digital Rights Management is Bad

Purchasing Music. That sums it up right there. While subscribing to music works well because you can re-download it when needed, buying music with DRM is a huge hassle. It makes it such a big hassle that it is a lot easier to download music illegally than buy it legally. Any current DRM system ties users to specific computers, devices, and rules. If those rules are broken, the music won’t work, and even lost forever. However, instead of coming up with more lenient DRM systems, companies have been doing the sane thing: throwing it out the window.

Amazon, Rhapsody, and many others are allowing people to buy MP3s on their site. This allows people to legally buy their music and do whatever they want with it. It is the same as buying a CD. No worries about what devices it will work on, or if you can burn it to a CD. If you lose it, its your own fault and you can’t blame anyone but yourself.

Once again, if DRM made my life better, I would love to have DRM. However, when DRM is such a restrictive technology, it only hurts honest paying customers and doesn’t stop illegal users. It would be different if acquiring illegal is was hard. But many times it is so much easier to get it illegally on the internet than legally. Once again, I can never say this enough times, if DRM made the consumer’s life better, it would be welcomed with open arms. But since it is such a pain in the butt, we all hate it.

I look forward to the day where either the DRM towel is thrown in and it is only used for subscription based technologies. Or I’ll even look forward to the day when DRM helps my life by just working exactly how I would have want to work. But until then, I will never buy music if I’m bound down by it.

I’ve been a subscriber to Yahoo Music, first with their Radio, and then their Unlimited service since 2005. I’ve loved the ability to listen to a huge collection of music at my fingertips. Since 90% of my music listening takes place on my computer while working, I never really had to worry about taking my music on the road on being portable. I also love being able to listen to music legally without having to feel guilty about downloading music off the internet. I’m a very big supporter of keeping music legit.

My father and brother have been Rhapsody fans for awhile. They’ve been showing me all sorts of different cool things about Rhapsody. I even went and tried a trial demo. But I was just so used to the YME (Yahoo Music Engine) interface, and I liked a lot of features in YME that Rhapsody lacked, so I suck with YME.

Well, it looks like after a few years Yahoo threw in the towel and their users transfered to Rhapsody. I was rather disappointed it, but I started to think why YME lost out to Rhapsody. I think Yahoo could have kept it going for awhile, but I think they probably figured it would be better to just make a deal with Rhapsody. Is Rhapsody really that much better?

Head-to-Head - It seems like the experts really liked YME more than Rhapsody. Comparing content, download speed, quality, player, and cost it looks like many prefer Yahoo Music Engine. In fact, almost any review I looked up, YME won. So why is Rhapsody ahead with more users?

1 - Rhapsody Marketed Everywhere

I’ve seen Rhapsody marketing online, radio, TV, and anywhere else possible. I’ve seen different campaigns and strategies. In fact, when explaining what my Yahoo Music account was, I basically had to explain is a “Yahoo’s version of Rhapsody.”

What about YME? They only advertised on Yahoo, and mostly only on their music aspect of their website. Sure, it was an efficient and low cost way to do it, but they didn’t really try to break out other ways. I really think this hurt YME. They might have gotten more users for less money, but at the end of the day people know Rhapsody’s name vs. Yahoo Music Engine. Besides, Yahoo Music Engine and Yahoo Music Unlimited? Rhapsody’s name is just better.

2 - Rhapsody Has More Ways To Access It

Yahoo Music Unlimited can be accessed via their client. Um, yeah, thats it. While their client is really good, better then Rhapsody I think, they only have it. Thats it, and it can be slightly bloated. What about Rhapsody?

Rhapsody can be accessed via the website, their windows client, Sonos, TiVo, and many other devices. I mean, Rhapsody overcomes the limitation that really didn’t bother me: listening not at your own computer. This leads to my last point:

3 - Rhapsody Made Partners

Yahoo has always been really good at keeping to themselves. When trying to take on Apple’s iTunes, the leader of the pack, you can’t afford to just work on your own stuff. I mean, I’m sure the Yahoo people working on Music Engine did take a “live or die” approach. Yahoo does hundreds of things. Music is just a little part of their grand scheme.

Rhapsody? It was their whole focus. If they failed, they are out of a job. With competitors like Yahoo, and the infamous name of Napster, Rhapsody couldn’t take their competition lightly. I don’t know all the details of their business, but their deals with companies like TiVo really helped expand their brand and brought in new users.

Conclusion

I’ll be sad that Yahoo Music Engine will be shutting down, but Rhapsody is still really good. What can be learned? Stay ahead of the game. Make sure your company is the innovator. While Yahoo may have had all the resources, I really think they didn’t take their program seriously. Support was iffy, updates were far and few, and new ground breaking innovation was just lacking.

Hopefully I’ll be writing how I love Rhapsody… and perhaps I won’t we’ll see how I like it.

Edit: This article was intended to specifically address certain types of of open source advocates, as stated in the title. This article is not intended to label all open source advocates as hypocrites. See comments by the author below.

Today, and almost every day, I’ll read an article about a proprietary computer company (Microsoft, Apple, etc) and “open source” technologies and communities. Every time I read them I see a large percentage of “user participants” in comments, responses, etc. that make me cringe.

Today’s example was ZDNet’s article “Open source should support Apple over Psystar“. I thought it was a great, simple article:

I have been wracking my brain all day for an angle on this Apple-Psystar story (great work by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) and I can’t come up with one.

Save this. Open source should be supporting Apple here.

The writer goes on to basically say that the Open Source world relies on users respecting the licenses and agreements made by the people who download their software. Apple has a EULA and Psystar is basically breaking that agreement. She admits that Apple’s EULA is nasty and removes any rights for a user, but that user by choice bought an Apple product.

However, what kind of comments show up?

If you accept Apple EULA you give your soul to the devil (and all your possession must be Apple approved, you cannot use the software to its full potential: like on a REAL computer, you surrender all freedom and you are sucked down into the whorst artificial monopoly ever witness by mankind)

However their kernel choice is an open source kernel, and if this is the part that is being modified then the issue is moot.

Apple doesn’t support Open Source. Where’s my version of iTunes for Linux? Glad to see they were able to take KHTML and make Safari out of it. Where’s the love in return?

There isn’t any. Recompiling iTunes for another *nix kernel would be trivial. It’s missing because they don’t think the open source community matters to them.

I say let ‘em swing in the wind.

hell no open source should not support apple over psystar. i have download the os 10.5 patch myself along with a copy of os 10.5. why would i pay apple 2400 dollars for a computer that is not as fast as the one i am using, that i built for less than 1500 dollars(including xp). as far as the eula is concerned it means nothing to me. i signature is not their. as i have stated before once i buy a piece of software i will do whatever i want with it.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: Proprietary Companies (Microsoft, IBM, etc) have legally fought Open Source to snuff out competition. Open Source people fought back for their rights and defend them. They declared that open source “is about choice!” Its allowing people to choose different software than the typical proprietary solutions. These open source projects have adopted licenses to prevent people abusing their Intellectual Property. While Open Source people might scream at me for saying that, in essence that is what all of these open source projects are: intellectual property that is owned by the public, instead of by a person or corporation.

So open source advocates scream and yell when people violate the intellectual property of the public. However, when it is the intellectual property of a company, especially someone like Microsoft or Apple, that it doesn’t matter because they are “evil.” Regardless of the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of dollars they have invested into their IP, its okay to disregard that due to the fact their “business principles don’t line up with mine.”

It is a double standard that thousands and thousands of Open Source users are taking. It is a total crime for a business to abuse open source licenses, however its okay to for users to abuse business’s licenses. When companies mess with open source, open source users run to the law for protection. Yet when the roles are reversed, open source users say “screw the law” and go with their own ‘moral compass’.

My question to these people are: what about my choice?

I’m willing to pay for my copy of windows. I support Microsoft in their endeavor to make better products. I enjoy programming in .NET because it saves me time. That is my choice. I love my MacBook Pro. I like the quickness and responsiveness I get from it. It is my choice to buy from a company whose value is in their Quality Control.

But hypocritical open source advocates tell me I’m wrong and evil because I’m making the “wrong” choice. I’ve seen a serious trend with open source users that instead of arguing for choice, are arguing what I should choose. Yes! By all means you can choose whatever you want to do. If you want to run only on open source technologies, more power to you. But don’t call me “evil” for being willing to pay for software that makes my life easier.

I support open source. I love what it is doing to the technology industry. However, there are many open source users that I cannot stand. Stand up for choice, but stop being hypocrites when telling me that my choices are wrong, because thats not choice at all.