daverea.com

Anyone who has ever gotten into a discussion with me about Wal-Mart knows how I feel about what I call “Wal-Mart economics”. As much as I love free enterprise (if you want to call our system “free”) and the capitalism that (in large part) makes our great nation work, Wal-Mart economics tends to make my shoulders sag and my outlook on Liberterianism droop…

Wal-Mart economics has very little to do with Wal-Mart’s business practices, or whether or not they’re good for America. It has everything to do with the “sell-out mentality” that you almost inevitably must assume when you walk through the doors. It’s this mentality that says: “I could spend $50 on a blender that will last me a decade, but I’d rather spend $20 on a blender. It may only last me a year, but at least I saved a few clams.” What I’m talking about here is the fact that so many Americans are so willing to sell out to rock-bottom prices, they’ll buy inferior products.

Now, thanks to some bright people at Universal Entertainment and some content company called Spiralfrog, Universal will be opening their entire library for free download. All you have to do is watch some advertising while their swill swirls onto your hard drive. Or is that all?

Oh yeah – they didn’t mention that you have to be running the Windows OS to use their download software or listen to their files. And they didn’t mention that those files will be encrypted with digital rights management (or DRM) that restricts how you use them – including limiting which players can play them, preventing them from being burned to CD, and forcing them to be used on only one computer. Oh – we’re sorry – you can’t download this song to your iPod. And you’re not allowed to burn it to CD to listen to in your car. And – oh – we’re real sorry for any inconvenience here, but if you wanted to stick that music on your laptop for your next business trip…well, that’s a no-go. Just doesn’t work for us.

Let’s take a look at some other ad-supported mediums. Television is a great example: it’s ad-supported. You watch your show, and since you’re not paying to watch that show, you watch some advertisements too. If you choose to tape that show (with or without those advertisements), you can do lots of things with the tape. You can transfer it to your digital media player, watch it on your PC, store it away for a long as you want, or even (gasp!) bring it to a friend’s house and watch it on their VCR. As long as you don’t give away copies to anyone else, or sell them for that matter, you’re pretty much A-OK.

How about music, then? If you go to the record store and buy a CD, you skip the advertising. But you now have lots of things you can do with that CD. You can make an archival copy of it, and store it away in case the original gets damaged. You can rip it to your iPod, plop it on your laptop for a rainy day, burn tracks from it onto a mix-CD, or loan it to a friend for the weekend. Furthermore (and this is key here, people), you can sell that CD you bought to someone else for its fair market value.

Universal, Apple and their record-industry ilk are claiming that they’re “revolutionizing” the music industry with “the next big thing” – when they’re really coming up with new and exciting ways to restrict your freedom to use what you rightfully own. It started with iTunes, and the other pay music services: you pay us, we’ll let you download some music, but we’re going to restrict what you can do with it. No more of this “fair use” stuff – you know, making good use of what you’ve purchased fair-and-square.

Now, they’ve come up with a new way to apply Wal-Mart economics to the music industry: You watch some ads, and in exchange you’re allowed to download our music. But, unlike that television show that you “bought” by watching that advertising, you can’t do much with what they spoon-feed you. The music-industry corrolary to the general principle of Wal-Mart economics I spelled out above: Americans are willing to sell out to cheap music they can access without leaving the comforting glow of their computer monitor, or getting out their wallets, but they don’t seem to realize that the music they’re downloading is tainted with restrictions and conditions.

Maybe it goes back to the time-worn-and-proven adage that “you get what you pay for”. And I’m happy to pay for CDs, thanks – if I’m going to fork over my hard-earned money to you, I don’t want you slapping restrictions on what I can do with what I buy.

Kelly’s little-known-fact of the day: You really can go through an entire head of lettuce making two grilled-chicken salads!

Dave’s don’t-try-this-at-home moment of the week: Combining 1% milk and Mr. & Mrs. T’s Straberry Daquiri/Margarita mix does not produce strawberry milk!

Since I wrote a few weeks ago about updating the OS on my home PC, I figured a follow-up is in order.

Sometime around the middle of August, I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS on “liberty”, one of my twin Dell 4550s. Since this was my first experience with Ubuntu, I opted to stick with most of the defaults for the install, altering only the hard drive settings (to preserve the contents of my existing Gentoo drive).

So far, the experience has been fantastic. Just about everything “Just Worked” right out of the box. Anything that didn’t was quickly solved by installing the right packages – and the package repositories are nearly as extensive as Gentoo’s. Any speed hit that I might have taken by using pre-compiled binaries is easily offset by the fact that I can sync my Palm Pilot again, and any guilt I felt over considering abandoning one of the most “purist” Linux distros was quickly overcome when Pandora (my very favorite online music service) worked from Firefox without any moaning or gnashing of configuration files!

Now, in the spirit of geeky experimentation and computational out-on-a-limbedness that seems to have gripped me, I’ve installed Ion, which is a piece of Linux software called a window manager. On whatever OS you’re using, the window manager (or WM for short) is the code that arranges your windows on your screen, sets up your menus and more or less defines the “look and feel” of your PC. If the WM for Microsoft Windows is a lumbering but cool-looking limo-bus, and the WM for Mac OS-X is a sexy-looing future-car, then Ion is all the simplicity of a commuter train crammed into a package about the size of a Yugo.

There are no menus, no start button, no task bar, no system tray – pretty much no anything except for a svelt gray stripe across the top of the screen. On it are arranged the titles of all the programs you have running. Every program runs full-screen, so there are no overlapping windows and you never play the minimize/maximize/re-arrange game trying to bring what you’re interested in to the front of the screen. Meanwhile, anything you would normally use menus to access (such as launching a program or getting information about your system) is handled with keystrokes in Ion.

While I’m not sure about welcoming Ion into our home quite yet, I know Ubuntu is here to stay. Sorry, Gentoo: compiling and configuring my OS from scratch was fun for a while, but there are more important things in life now than watching gcc messages float by as I contemplate my 133tness…

A good friend forwarded me a link to http://www.letssaythanks.com/, a web site created by Xerox that allows you to customize a “Thank you” greeting card that is mailed free-of-charge to an American servicemember on duty abroad.

There are lots of opinions about the war in Iraq, and about America’s presence in Afghanistan and other places, and y’all are entitled to whatever opinion you happen to hold. But regardless of how you feel about the way our leaders have chosen to deploy our troops, the men and women on those deployments deserve our thanks. They are the ones who are away from their families, in harm’s way, looking out for each other and us – the people of the nation they’re sworn to protect.

So whether you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Go-USA patriot, or an anti-war anti-guns anti-violence anti-carnivorism liberal, or (like most folks) you fall somewhere in-between, please head over to http://www.letssaythanks.com/ and send a thank-you card. Because the recipient of that card is one of tens of thousands of people whose job, and whose honor, it is to keep this nation free for you to hold and express whatever your beliefs may be.

I’m not exactly all that “loose” when it comes to the operating systems on my computer. While there are those Linux enthusiasts out there who seem to want to try a different distribution every week, and while there are those Windows users out there who seem to enjoy re-loading that joyous piece of software a couple times a month, I like to stay a little more conservative. I ran Red Hat Linux from 1999 until 2003. And Gentoo Linux from then until now, re-loading my machine only once.

(For the record, that re-load was because I suspected my hard drive was going south, and I wanted to switch to a new baselayout anway.)

So it’s taken a bit of effort for me to decide to switch my main Linux desktop to Ubuntu Linux. I’m not sure when the switch will take place yet, but it’ll probably be this weekend (if I get a spare couple of hours to make the switch). Of course, it’s Linux, so you get to download it for free… So I dutifully downloaded the CD images for Ubuntu Dapper Drake workstation and server 6.06 earlier this week.

Wouldn’t ya know it – three days after I did my little download-and-burn session, they up and release a new version.

Oh well – CD media is cheap, and Bittorrent is my friend…

(…which I hadn’t, since I’m a RSS dork face who doesn’t actually visit people’s web sites all that often)

Andy has a new layout!

Rock on, G-Andy.

Made up a batch of these tonight. They. Look. So. Damn. Good!

I figured if I eat one tonight, there’ll be enough sugar coarsing through my veins that I won’t get a wink of sleep tonight… So I’ll have to wait to beta-test them until tomorrow’s breakfast. Hey, it’s only 6 hours away…