Joseph Brower

If you are in my area (southeast idaho), contact me and ask me about the Lan Party on the 6th. My birthday is on the 7th, so my wife is letting me do this. We’ll be playing the following games:

Battle for Wesnoth
Tremulous
Nexuiz
Warzone 2100 (latest stable release, not the beta)

Those are all excellent FOSS games that I’m sure we’ll all enjoy.

F-Spot is included by default in Ubuntu as a photo management tool. I’ve done quite a bit of photography and felt like my images in their separate directories were starting to get out of hand. I figured that if Ubuntu includes it by default, it’s gotta be good, stable, and at least worth using. So let’s just get the point.

The Good: You can tag photos, manage revisions, view a nice timeline, export to various sites, without much trouble at all. You spend 30 minutes with the interface and you’ve got it down pretty well.

The Bad: What is this F-Spot View thing and why would I want to use it? Opening up an image with F-spot skips the importing (which I’ll get to later) bug doesn’t provide really any usable tools.

The Ugly: Speed is a major issue, especially when importing, and even moreso when importing raw imagery. I would love to talk about how well it handles raw, but honestly, it’s still slowly importing. Apparently it runs dcraw over the file (for some unknown reason) and that takes a while when you have thousands and thousands of raw files. It isn’t multithreaded either, so my fancy multicore machine doesn’t help with the speed at all.

Overall though, F-Spot is a much needed project. Hopefully these rough edges can be smoothed out. For people with smaller, or nonraw driven photo collection, I can see this being very useful for maintaining galleries. I’m still deciding what I think. I guess I’ll know once this import finishes. Oh, and if you know a way to speed it up, please let us all know in the comments.

So you all have read my previous posting about my dealings with Dish.  Well, here’s the ending.  They finally refunded the money.  They also credited my account for the amount that they caused in additional fees to me.  I wish they would have done more.  Honestly, I probably won’t stay with them any longer than I have to.  The retailers all seem afraid to stand up to them, which is a shame, because the retailers are the only ones that could help get any sort of change happening.   I’m going to continue working with the retailers to try to encourage them to band together.  Either way, the person I talked with at Dish was quite nice and they deserver a few point.  Dish is now rated at 7/10.  They are barely passing, but I wont be actively quitting.  I’ll probably just let my contract run it’s course and then be done with them.

I was discussing this topic with a friend of mine, and came to the realization that not only is DRM dangerous to the rights of consumers, but it is dangerous to the economy as well as overall literacy.  I’m not referring to the DRM that seems to get the most attention, that is, DRM for games, music, or movies.  My focus will be on e-books that are DRM enabled.

Economic Dangers

Real money used to be exchanged for real goods.  Sadly, that landscape is changing.  Money has turned into credit and real goods have turned into imaginary property.  Essentially, I see people purchasing imaginary property with imaginary money.  I could go into how credit based purchasing is crippling the economy, but I believe we all understand that.  Purchasing imaginary goods is just as crippling.  When someone “purchases” an e-book, the price is usually comparable to getting a physical copy.  It is definitely more expensive than going to a library and “renting” the book.  The problem is, the e-book is never purchased, it is just rented for an unspecified amount of time. Let’s look at what an e-book owner is losing by having purchased the e-book:

1) The expense is purely an expense.  It isn’t an asset.  This means that the book can’t be resold or even given to someone after purchase.  All value is lost after purchase.  How many people would buy a car if it’s resale value was immediately zero.  People see the problem with large purchases, but sadly, small purchases aren’t scrutinized nearly as much.

2) The purchase is volatile. E-book readers will fail, computers will fail.  That’s why people make backups.  However, you can’t readily backup and restore your e-books because of the DRM.  If your e-book reader is damaged, or replaced, or even upgraded, there is a good chance that all of your purchased e-books will disappear.

3) The purchase isn’t final.  We recently saw a case where a book was sold and the publisher changed their mind.  The book was then automatically removed from people’s machines.  This is the equivalent of someone selling you something, and then coming to your house and taking it back.  Sure, the money was returned, but obviously the buyers saw the book as more valuable than the money they had spent for it.

4) Censorship can run rampant.  I understand that censorship is a touchy topic.  Everyone always would like to see certain things removed, generally for their children.  I understand and can respect that.  I’ve also seen governments want to censor certain things.  If a government can simply remove all of the books from people’s homes, then there is a problem.  Memories can be changed and manipulated to support the current leadership, and honestly, that terrifies me.

Those are the direct problems for the buyer of DRM.  But lets look at a larger scale.  What happens if everyone goes to DRM enabled e-books?  How would that impact a global economy?  When real money goes into imaginary property, the production of goods decrease.  The overall value of a culture declines, wealth becomes more focused to the upper class, and people don’t really progress.  In other words, the economy as a whole will suffer, which leads to another set of problems.  If people are only owners of something until the seller determines otherwise, then we all become slaves to the sellers.  If we depend on that book (for example, if it is reference material for my work) then we will be willing to keep paying the ransom to keep the book.  Something is wrong with that picture.

Danger to Literacy

We see the problem or literacy that faces us today.  DRM is a catalyst for this problem and aids in its growth.  If I can’t share my book with someone, or lend it to them, then they simply don’t have the option of reading it.  I’ve lent many books to friends which they enjoyed.  If I was using a DRM protected e-book, then I couldn’t have done that.  As books are phased out in favor of e-books, we must be sure we don’t lose the ability to share.  Even small children understand the importance of this.  Why do we, as adults, accept the inability to share?

What Can be Done

We need to ensure that when we purchase something, we are purchasing real property.  In the case of e-books, we must ensure that our e-book device will reject DRM.  We need to ensure that books we purchase don’t contain DRM.  E-books are wonderful and very beneficial, but let’s make sure they don’t contain the pitfalls of DRM.  As consumers, we have rights that we must defend, or we will lose them.