RasterWeb!

I’ve been thinking about ALLOFMP3, which seems to be able to exist because Russian copyright law is different from US copyright law. Of course you can access ALLOFMP3 from the US and even sign up with the site and download files, and this may or may not be breaking US copyright law. I think it does, but I don’t know because I am not a lawyer. (See Terms of Use.)

Let’s say it is legal in the US. the first question is, should you use it? Well, use it for what? If you just want to get a ton of new music you don’t have for cheap (pennies per song it seems) then that’s one thing, it’s probably not right. Are the artists losing money? Possibly, it all depends on the label I would think. My guess is for big labels you’re hurting them a lot more than the artists. I’d stay away from new independent artists (if there are any) as most of them seem to have some system in place to support them more directly. (Magnatune perhaps?) What if you just want digital copies of stuff you already own? I spent too much time last summer digitizing some old vinyl I’ve got, which involved connecting a turntable to my Mac, playing and recording the album (which hopefully did not skip and didn’t have any bad hisses or pops) and then splitting the album into tracks, and adding meta data, and… It’s a pain as you can see. So while I’ve got 5 or 6 Clash albums it would take me probably 20 or more hours to get MP3’s of them all.

Ok, so we’ve really got a legal and moral thing going on. I mean, if I were to sign up and download all the Clash material I already own on vinyl and cassette, does this violate US copyright law? Does it violate any US laws? Do I violate any laws when I digitize my vinyl collection? I don’t think it does, isn’t that part of the home recording act or something? My friend had his house burn down, and lost all the music he legally paid for. Was it ok that his friends made tapes of much of it for him? What if out old pal Cam goes back to Russia, downloads a few gigs of songs over there and tries to return home with them? Will he get hassled at the border? Does anyone know the answers? So let’s fast-forward, I’ve got all the Clash songs I want, which I’ve paid for once already, does the Clash lose any money from this? Does the label that put out the recordings? I wouldn’t have bought them on CD or as MP3’s because I’m the kind of person who actually would spend that 20 hours digitizing vinyl if I had to.

What do others think of ALLOFMP3? All sort of things apparently. It makes me sad to see people flock to it and think INCREDIBLE DEAL without considering any other implications…

So the final question, for all the money… Do I sign up and get digital copies of all those dang Clash songs I’ve been rambling on about? What say you?

Two interesting things came together this weekend. I heard about a keyboard that is built in the tradition of the Apple keyboards of old, and I read a Consumer Reports magazine that discussed the quality of PC‘s.

If you’ve been using Apple hardware for more than 10 years, you might remember that the quality of things produced by Apple was a bit better. Back then it was quite easy for the Mac-crowd to not only feel as if they had a superior operating system, but that they had superior hardware as well. Apple’s stuff was solid, and well manufactured, not flimsy and breakable, like so much of the hardware used to run Windows back then. Apple has always had the problem of costing a little bit (or a lot) more, but I’ve always felt you get quality for the price you pay. (Believe me, I won’t buy another Dodge!)

Today Apple still makes better hardware, and the Consumer Reports I read put Apple ahead of Dell and the others for reliability, least amount of problems, etc. This is of no surprise to people who use Apple hardware – it’s very nice – but years ago it was even better. I think things started to change when the first Macs without auto-inject floppy drives came out, the Mac started to lose some of it’s elegance that day, and it continued on as IDE drives started to replace SCSI hard drives…

Still, Apple had to make changes to become price competitive with the lower-quality products, because to the average consumer it’s still to some degree a matter of megahertz, or disk space, or screen size, or miles-per-gallon, or whatever… I think that more and more people are starting to see the value of the user experience, but to many it’s still just a game of numbers. When it comes to IT departments determining what tools a person needs to do their job, I sometimes think people should be forced to use Mac OS X for a minimum of one month before deciding that Windows is the best operating system for every desktop.

Apple had to lower itself to fit into the category of “good enough” while other companies seem to strive with all their might just to raise themselves up to such a label.

Wasn’t it just days ago I had a fresh Mandrake install? Yes it was…

Well, it lasted a day or so, until I tried to change the resolution on the monitor. A simple change to XF86Config right? Well, along the way things went very bad. Ok, everything went bad, really, really bad. I probably hosed something in mtab along the way, but the system was dead. So I thought I’d try a re-install. That didn’t seem to work either. Well, the first few times, but finally I got a complete install done, and it just woundn’t boot into Linux from BootX.

Thus ends my experience with Mandrake. For now anyway… If I get ambitions I might actually check to see if the CD‘s are good, I have a feeling disc 2 was the problem with the install. Don’t take this as a poo-poo on Mandrake, just my experience.

I hear Fedora Core 2 runs on PPC, but it still seems a little bleeding-edgy. I might try Gentoo now (since I found the CD) or perhaps go back to Yellow Dog, you’ll find out next week!

I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who don’t quite understand how validation works. I don’t claim to be an expert, but as I understand it, you have a set of rules, and if you present something that breaks those rules, then what you have done is not valid.

People constantly posts messages to the www-validator list with the belief that their invalid HTML is somehow correct, and the validator must be wrong. (Some go so far as to suggest the validator be fixed to report their invalid markup as valid!) I can’t complain too much, because these people are most often not well versed in writing valid markup, or understanding what the DOCTYPE they chose actually allows, and they get big credit for attemping to validate their work. (May 2004 seems to have more messages than any previous month so far.)

Still, it often feels like someone keeps telling you 2 + 2 = 5, and every time you explain that it’s a simple matter that 2 + 2 = 4, another person comes along to tell you 2 + 2 = 5.

While it’s true that the W3C MarkUp Validator has it’s limitations (as most validators probably do) chances are it knows HTML better than most people do…

(And please, for the love of all that is good, tell everyone you know how to encode & into & within HTML!)