Monthly Archives: December 2005

Apple DRM: Lose your music, buy it again. And again.

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There’s been a recent flap about iTunes and iPods losing all their content and the ugliness of it all. The ugly underside of Digital Restriction Management is epitomized by this Apple support web page:

Otherwise, if your hard disk becomes damaged or you lose any of the music you’ve purchased, you’ll have to buy any purchased music again to rebuild your library.

So, let’s make this clear: the oxymoron Intellectual Property means their property, not yours, their rights to sell you the same thing multiple times, not your freedom to do what you wish with your purchases. Unacceptable terms for me. Digital Restriction Management that prevents a legitimate, innocent user from time-, space- or device-shifting content they have purchased must not be allowed to succeed. Pirates won’t respect them. If Congress and the industry try to ban Fair Use, only criminals will enjoy the new digital freedoms. This is insane.

Do LUGs matter? Yes!

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Slashdot asks Do LUGs Still Matter?, pointing to an article by Joe Barr, writing for NewsForge. The answer for all UGs hasn’t changed: User Groups matter if they matter to you. If there’s something you want out of a LUG and you’re willing to put some effort into a LUG, amazing things can happen. Everyone knows of a LUG that’s faded: there’s a natural rhythm to LUGs like all organizations. A leader with fire in his/her belly drives the group to new heights, burns out or gets distracted, and the group declines. A new leader may emerge or the group may fade away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but an empty web page or two.

The Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group is on another power climb, not its first, nor hopefully its last. Active volunteers are running chapters in Nashua, Peterborough, Hanover, Concord and Durham. A Python Special Interest Group shares many of its members and the groups resources and gives us a presence in Manchester as well.

In the past year, member of the group were present at Linuxworld Boston, the Software Association of New Hampshire InfoeXchange annual conference, the Hosstraders ham radio swapfest, the McAuliffe annual teacher’s conference, and Software Freedom Day.

LUGs can matter as much as you want them to.

What is the Internet?

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Joho the Blog posts “Three models of the Internet. Grant McCracken blogs about three ways of taking the depth and seriousness of the Net’s effect on culture. Here’s a distillation, but you should read the whole thing: 1. Disintermediation – “The Internet is an efficiency machine. It removes the friction…” 2. Long Tail – “The Internet is a profusion machine. It allows small cultural producers to find small cultural consumers, and as a result, all hell is breaking lose…” 3. Reformation – “It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them. This reformation model says, in other words, that the coming changes will deeply cultural…and not merely…”

End of the year is a good time for some heavy thinking. The Internet has been through several phases. Like the blind men studying the elephant, each of us may have different perceptions of what it is and where it is. Tim O’Reilly loves to quote that “the future is here, just not evenly distributed.” I think this is how it has always been.