2 Robots

I’ll admit it. When I was younger I used to pirate music, movies, games, and software. I was a poor high school and later college student. I had no money. I couldn’t afford to buy those things. If I didn’t find a way to get it for free, I just couldn’t get it, period. It wasn’t a question of wanting to pay or what the market thought was fair. I just didn’t have any.

That was a while ago. Now I have a job. And I don’t pirate any more. Partially, this is because I’ve been a software developer, and I see things more “from the other side.” But mostly, its because I can. I have $50 to my name so that I can go out and buy that game I wanted, or the box set dvd’s, or whatever (not to say I don’t think they are overpriced).

That’s why I’ve always thought that the piracy numbers given out by the movie (MPAA), music (RIAA), and software (BSA) industry groups have been complete garbage. I mean, Billions of dollars? Common, that’s rediculous. Just because someone has pirated your software/song/movie doesn’t mean they are willing to pay for it. That’s always been my assertion, but of course I could never prove it.

Luckily, Russel Carrol, Director of Marketing at Reflexive (a PC game company) has done it for me. In an article posted at Gamasutra, he lays out a very data-driven and scientific analysis of the company’s piracy rates both before and after taking steps which reduced piracy. Read the article. Really.

His conclusion: Only 1 in 1,000 pirates are actually willing to purchase the product.

Does it still seem worth suing college kids, guys?

For the past few years, I’ve been using a Mac Mini as my main HTPC. This has worked out really great, as the Mini is a small, quiet piece of hardware, and generally Apple’s iTunes/Frontrow is simple, intuitive, and impressive as a content management system. As my collection of media grew, I started to run [...]

I think its a shame that email encryption and signing isn’t more prevalent on the Internet. As a technology that has been mature for over 10 years, there is little or no built-in OS support for it in either Windows or OS X. The latest version of Ubuntu Linux, however, happen to have built-in support for Gnu Privacy Guard, the GPL free implementation of PGP encryption and identity verification.

This software is capable of both making sure that only the recipient can access the email you send them (pretty good when using a public mail server, like Google or Yahoo, for example), and also to guarantee that the person in the “from” field is actually the person who sent the email.

In fact, if GPG became a part of the SMTP standard protocol (or even became used commonly), it would serve to thin out the majority of spam mail, as well as phishing email attempts.

So, in an attempt to get GPG used a little more often, you should read the book Cryptonomicon. Aside from providing excellent information on what GPG is and why you should use it, it is an excellent adventure story.

Then, take a look at the following guide to add GPG support to OS X Leopard.

Click on for my public GPG key …

I upgraded my blog software to WordPress 2.5. I’ve been using WordPress since the 1.x days, and more specifically, I’ve been using the current theme (originally based off Neuron, but long since modified) since then, so I haven’t been using a lot of Worpresses newest features. This morning I “widgified” my the right column, so [...]

Hard drive technology is fundamentally broken. The main problem with hard drives are that they haven’t been able to keep up with Moore’s Law. While computers have gotten faster and faster, hard drives seem to have topped out some time ago. At the same time, the total storage capacity of drives has continued to increase. [...]

Apple seems to be getting a lot of negative press on its recent SDK announcement. Much of the criticism seems to focus around two issues: That not all functionality of the phone is accessable via the SDK, and that Apple controls the distribution method to the phone. I’ll adress the second point first. Some perspective on the history of apps on cell phones will do a lot to put this in perspective, and see why these decisions were made as tradeoffs, and actually strengthen the position of the iPhone as a leader in custom applications.