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Recording Industry Lobbyists Says Politicians Worried About User Rights Are ‘Disgusting’?

Well, well. Last week there was a “town hall” meeting in Toronto about new copyright laws in Canada, and we’ll have a more detailed post on that later. But there is one story that popped up from all of this that deserved a separate discussion. Apparently two Parliament Members, Olivia Chow and Charlie Angus, who have been big supporters of consumers’ rights on copyright issues, have been called out by music industry lobbyists for distributing a ‘disgusting’ flyer. Why? Because that flyer contained an interview with Angus (a former musician in a popular punk band), where he talks about the importance of consumer rights and not following through with a DMCA-style law in Canada. It’s hard to read anything in that interview that is “disgusting” — unless you don’t believe consumers have any rights. But that apparently was the position taken by Alan Willaert, the Canadian representative of the American Federation of Musicians, who not only called it disgusting, but also demanded a retraction and an apology.

It doesn’t sound like he’s going to get it. Charlie Angus is defending himself ably:


I was elected to participate in discussions about public policy. I have never heard of a lobbyist group demand an apology for speaking out about a totally botched piece of legislation like Bill C-61. If they spent less time running e-mail attacks and more time speaking with the various players they might realize that the NDP position has been balanced and consistent from the beginning.

As for a public recanting to satisfy the C-61 lobby ? Sorry, dude….it ain’t happening.

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It’s Not The ‘Good Enough’ Revolution; It’s Recognizing What The Consumer Really Wants

It’s hardly a new idea, but BullJustin points us to an article in Wired about what the author, Robert Capps, refers to as The Good Enough Revolution, in which he talks about various offerings that have succeeded in the marketplace, despite not having the “quality” of the leading products. So, he talks about the Flip Digital video cameras, compared to higher end camcorders, mp3s vs. CDs, and things like Zoho Writer vs. Microsoft Word. His explanation is that these “lower quality” products are “good enough,” and tend to offer certain features, such as easier accessibility, lower price and better ease of use.

I’d argue that the concept of “good enough” misses the point — and the real issue is that the actual quality is in those other characteristics that he discusses. The real problem is that some start to focus on the “quality” of some aspect of the product, rather than the quality of meeting what the consumer wants. It’s the same thing we’ve discussed over and over again, with a company (or industry) not really understanding its market. The first automobiles were a lot crappier than the fancy horse carriages you could buy — but they did the important thing better: getting you somewhere faster and cheaper.

The issue is that the focus on “quality” is on the wrong attribute. It’s also why many people falsely claim that the VHS beat Betamax, despite “lower quality.” Yes, it may have had lower quality of the recorded video, but that wasn’t the attribute people cared about. They wanted to be able to record longer videos, which the Betamax was not set up to do, but VHS was. In almost every one of these stories, you find that it really was an issue of quality — but the real question was what attribute the market cared about when it came to quality.

With the MP3 and the Flip Camera and Zoho Writer (and many others), it appears convenience is a driving attribute. So while all may seem to have less in terms of the type of “quality” that some like to focus on, they ignore what the market actually wants, which appears to be convenience.

This, too, is one of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to get so focused on the product when you don’t know what the market actually wants. The people who create the initial products almost always assume that the most important attributes are the product itself, rather than the convenience it provides users. There will always be snobs who want to focus on the “highest quality” possible, but they’re part of a small market, rather than a mass market. And if that’s “good enough” for them, that’s fine — but it misses the real marketing opportunity.

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Being Unique Is Not The Same As Exclusive (Or Scarce)

Taylor Davidson alerts us to an odd blog post with suggestions on how photographers need to adapt to the changing market place. As Davidson properly notes, there’s some good points mixed in there with some really odd conclusions. The writer does a decent job explaining how the market has shifted — with the ease of digital production and distribution, the old exclusivities have gone away. But, from there, gets confused about what to do with it, focusing on trying to build up artificial scarcities or suggesting that photographers try to ignore basic economics. That’s not going to work.

The key point is that the writer seems to think that the key scarcity is uniqueness, as if there’s some exclusivity to it. Uniqueness is a good thing, but it’s not the same thing as exclusivity (again, a point Davidson makes). Uniqueness is what gets you noticed (promotion) and what makes your real scarcities (time, access, experience, etc.) worth more. But the writer of the post seems to think that uniqueness can only be developed by shunning others, learning from no one, and trying to hide all of your ideas. Some examples:


Hide your best work. Only your clients should see it. no one else.

I can’t think of an idea any worse than this. Earlier, the writer suggests focusing on commissioned work. You don’t get commissioned if you’re hiding your best work. Your best work is the calling card for you to get commissioned work.


Do not share or post your techniques. You will only be popular with the ones that have no imaginations. Like leeches, they feed on others knowledge.

Yes, because all brilliant photographers are simply born brilliant, and never learned a thing from others. The statement above does not mesh with any creative process I know. Sure, there will always be some copycats and “leeches,” but if you are an innovator, that’s only good for you. It boosts your own reputation as being a trendsetter. Furthermore, most truly creative people use the ideas of others as a part of their own, and build on them — taking pieces of what they find from others, but still building on them and creating something new and unique. Hiding your techniques doesn’t make you exclusive or your work more valuable. It likely just means you’re cut off from what is state of the art.


Never, ever ask for the opinion of another photographer. If its good, they will copy you, if it’s bad, they won’t tell you.

Someone’s sounding a bit paranoid here. Collaboration and feedback are good things. They’re what help people grow. The problem is that the writer seems to think that this market is a zero sum game, of sorts. If one photographer has a good idea, it’s one less good idea for the rest of the world. That also explains the following:


Do not copy. If you have an idea, look to see if it has been done. If it has, drop it. Move on. be creative.

Of course, an awful lot of creativity is done by unique individuals looking to redo the work of others, but adding their own style and flare to it.

All in all, I recognize that it’s tough for content creators in disrupted markets to come to terms with the market challenges they’re facing, but locking everything up isn’t the answer. Cutting yourself off from the world, and hiding your best work, is not the answer. That seems only guaranteed to make your own market dwindle. No one will recommend you. People searching for you won’t find you. Your work may be unique, but you’ll have missed out on valuable ideas and feedback from others. It’s hard to see how that’s a winning strategy at all.

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Poll Results: Taking a Job You Think is a Stupid Business Idea

Yes, I’d take it. – 68%  
No, I’d turn it down. – 32%  

The people who say they would take the job outnumber the people who would not by two to one.

There was a large and interesting conversation about this when the poll went up. Here are some excerpts of points I found interesting:
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Why would a Googler use Solr for search?

Google is arguably the world’s largest open-source company, not only releasing a minimum of 14 million lines of open-source code but also hosting over 250,000 open-source projects on Google Code, in addition to its open-source advocacy work like Summer of Code.

Despite these open-source bona fides, it’s still surprising to see someone at Google adopting Solr, an open-source search server based on Apache Lucene, for its All for Good site.

Google is the world’s search market leader by a very long stretch. Why not use its own search technology? Why use Solr?

Google’s Public Sector team suggested an answer last week:

One of the top concerns we’ve been hearing from nonprofit organizations who list volunteer opportunities on All for Good is that their opportunities aren’t updated on the site as frequently as they need. This happens because…we crawl feeds from partners like VolunteerMatch and Idealist just like Google web search crawls web pages. Crawlers don’t immediately update, they take time to find new information.

Today, we’re rolling out improvements to All for Good that will help solve this problem and improve search quality for users. The biggest change, which you won’t see directly, is that our search engine is now powered by SOLR, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities. Nonprofits should start seeing their opportunities indexed faster, and users should see more relevant and complete results.

I don’t think this means that Google thinks Solr provides better results than its own code. Rather, I suspect this was simply a case of a Googler using her 20 percent “free” time to get a job done. It was likely easier to roll a service using Solr than to get official approval from Google to use its search technology for an important but nonprofit purpose. (My request for comment by Google had not been answered at the time of this post’s publication.)

To me, this says much about the power of Google’s culture: Googlers appear to be unfettered to use the best tool to get a job done, which may not always be the best technology, per se, but simply the most easily available technology for a given project at a given time.

The decision also says a tremendous amount about the value of open source, and of Solr in particular. If it’s good enough for Google, as David Fishman notes, it’s probably going to be just fine for you, too.

Update, 11:41 a.m. PDT: I heard back from Chris DiBona, open source and public sector program manager at Google, who offered this reasoning behind the move, in response to the suggestion that Google uses Solr:

I think you meant “Googler chooses Solr.” You see, Allforgood.org is run by Our Good Works, a non-profit that works with technology companies and the whitehouse on that site. I’m on the Board of OGW, but it is run by Jonathan Greenblatt.

That said, we chose Solr because it made sense for the project we had. We want other companies/countries to be able to use the code we’ve written for Allforgood.org and to have it depend too heavily on Google Base precluded that, but specifically, technically speaking Solr fit the problem better than Google Base did.

So, it’s not accurate to say that “Google chose Solr,” but it is accurate to suggest that All for Good was founded by Googlers in their “20-percent time” and continues to be hosted by Google, as TechCrunch has reported, and that those Googlers, along with the rest of the board, opted for Solr over Google.

As DiBona mentions, and as I blogged above, this is a reflection of fit-for-purpose, and not any problem with Google’s code. All for Good is completely open source, so it makes sense that it would opt for open-source Solr over Google Base.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Originally posted at The Open Road

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Find Information about your Network Cards using C# or VB.NET

Here’s a small snippet of code of how to find out which network cards are enabled and able to transmit data on your machine. Here’s the code.

Add a reference to System.Net.NetworkInformation

C#

var nics = NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces()
.Where(o => o.OperationalStatus == OperationalStatus.Up);

foreach (var item in nics)
{
Response.Write(item.Description + "<br />");
Response.Write(item.Name + "<br />");
Response.Write(item.Speed + "<br />");
Response.Write(item.NetworkInterfaceType + "<br /><br />");
}

VB.NET

Dim nics = NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces()_
.Where(Function(o) o.OperationalStatus = OperationalStatus.Up)

For Each item In nics
Response.Write(item.Description & "<br />")
Response.Write(item.Name & "<br />")
Response.Write(item.Speed & "<br />")
Response.Write(item.NetworkInterfaceType & "<br /><br />")
Next item

The output is below:

clip_image002

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Good To See: Wikipedia Moves Forward With Color Coding Less Trustworthy Text

More than two years ago, we talked about a great idea to deal with the (somewhat misleading) question of the trustworthiness of Wikipedia: color code new edits from untrustworthy editors. Not only would this alert people to at least double-check that particular info, it would remind people that Wikipedia is a constantly changing site. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed that I hadn’t heard much about this idea since that summer of 2007. However, apparently, it’s been gaining in popularity, and now Wikipedia is set to start using it across the site. Here’s how it works:


Based on an person’s past contributions, WikiTrust computes a reputation score between zero and nine. When someone makes an edit, the background behind the new text gets shaded orange depending on their reputation: the brighter the orange, the less “trust” the text has. Then when another author edits the page, they essentially vote on the new text. If they like the edit, they’ll keep it, and if not, they’ll revert it. Text that persists will become less orange over time, as more editors give their votes of approval.

While there are some concerns about how well this will work (and how much processing power it will take), it seems like a worthwhile experiment.

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Proof Of Concept Skype Wiretapping Malware Released

One of the benefits of Skype was that, due to the way it works (P2P, encrypted communications), it made it much more difficult to do any sort of wiretap. This has upset various governments who are used to having the ability to wiretap any voice communications. However, it’s never impossible. The most obvious way is to simply create some sort of trojan that gets installed on one user’s computer that has audio recording abilities — and Symantec is going around hyping up the fact that source code for just such a trojan has been released. Of course, even Symantec admits that there’s no evidence of the code actually being used in the wild — it seems more like a proof-of-concept. On top of that, it’s hardly a new idea. Nearly a year ago, we talked about how German authorities were accused of using something that sounded quite similar. Still, it is a good reminder that even if you’re using an encrypted Skype call, at either end of that call, the audio is decrypted, and a well-placed recording system can capture it.

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Handle Server and Client Side Validation using the ASP.NET Custom Validator control

I have seen a lot of users asking how to use the CustomValidator Control to perform both client side validation as well as server side validations. Let us explore how with a practical example. In this example, we will keep a Checkbox inside a Form. The user has to keep the CheckBox in a checked state before the form is submitted. Here’s how to achieve this requirement:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<
head runat="server">
<
title>Validate if CheckBox is not Checked</title>
<
script type="text/javascript">
function
chkBoxClientVal(sender, e) {
var ctrl = document.getElementById('<%= CheckBox1.ClientID %>');
e.IsValid = ctrl.checked;
}
</script>
</
head>
<
body>
<
form id="form1" runat="server">
<
div>
<
asp:CheckBox ID="CheckBox1" runat="server" />
<
asp:CustomValidator runat="server" ID="CustomChkBox"
EnableClientScript="true"
ClientValidationFunction="chkBoxClientVal"
OnServerValidate="chkBoxServerVal"
SetFocusOnError="true">
Check Box To Be Checked</asp:CustomValidator>
<
asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" />
</
div>
</
form>
</
body>
</
html>

C#

protected void chkBoxServerVal(object sender, ServerValidateEventArgs e)
{
e.IsValid = CheckBox1.Checked;
}

VB.NET

Protected Sub chkBoxServerVal(ByVal sender As Object, _
ByVal e As ServerValidateEventArgs)
e.IsValid = CheckBox1.Checked
End Sub

Observe the following:

– EnableClientScript is set to true

– EnableClientScript has not effect if a JavaScript function does not exists

– The ClientValidationFunction must consists a JavaScript function of the form

Function SomeFunction(source, args)

Note: As a best practice, always remember to validate ServerSide in addition to Client Side Validation. This helps maintain validation rules when JavaScript is turned off.

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Disable NTP sync during USplash in Ubuntu Linux

NTP sometimes greatly slows down your Ubuntu’s boot time. To disable it just do a simple
sudo apt-get remove ntpdate

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