ExpanDrive

We all hate EULAs. We don’t read them, even when the little checkbox that indicates we’ve read and agreed to them won’t go away until we’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom of the 5,000 words of legalese. When some enterprising soul does read one, usually in anticipation of new version of Windows or Mac OS, he’s always shocked at what he finds, and blogs about it to the world. The world blogs back, and blogging deathmatches ensue until the terms of the agreement are lessened. Of course, this has always been a mostly meaningless exercise, since there is already a law in place that governs how we can use software we’ve purchased. 17 USC Section 117(a)(1) tells us that you are free to make a copy to RAM of any software you own (regardless of what the EULA says) provided:

(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner

Seems pretty cut and dry. Even though you don’t own the copyright, if you buy software, you can use it. The copying of it to RAM would seem to technically violate the copyright, but this law explicitly says that it doesn’t. Until yesterday.

In a summary judgement for Blizzard, the Ninth Circuit held in MDY v Blizzard that this section of law does not apply to anybody. Purchasing a copy of software does not make one the “owner” of that copy under section 117. The section of law that applies to this class of people (”licensees”) is section 106, which makes it illegal to make a copy of any work to which you do not hold the copyright. The use of software is only legal if you are given the right by the copyright owner, in this case through the EULA, and therefore if you violate the EULA, you are in fact infringing on the copyright. Unless I am mistaken, the only way to be the “owner” of a copy of software is to be the owner of the copyright itself, making Section 117 redundant. I can’t imagine the law was intended to be interpreted this way.

This ruling also sets a bad precedent for the status of other legally purchased digital property. If this judgement is correct, Fair Use does not exist. While it hasn’t been tested in court, it is generally assumed that one has the right to copy CDs for archival purposes and transfer to a different medium (Section 117(a)(2) seems to say this, as well), but all it would take would be some text printed on the inside of a CD case to explicitly make that use illegal. No contract needs to be signed; the owner of the copyright simply has to make reasonably sure that “licensees” read the agreement. Of course, this amounts to agreeing to a contract you haven’t seen, since no stores will allow to open software boxes or CD cases before purchase, and most won’t allow you to return opened software or CDs should you not agree to the terms. Since breaking the terms of this agreement now makes one a criminal, that is a bigger deal than ever before.

Slate talks about Wall-E today, and they’ve made me angry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

This is a very bad representation of the movie’s themes. In Wall-E, the environment didn’t collapse because people were fat and lazy. In fact, the movie makes pretty clear that people didn’t get fat until they’d been living in space for hundreds of years. This progression is shown several times (think of the successive captains’ portraits). It’s well-established science that you will get fat and lose bone mass floating around in space. The movie explicitly states that the Axiom’s denizens have grown obese under the effects of micro-gravity (it’s unclear why this would be, since the Axiom appears to have artificial gravity, but it is stated in the dialogue, so we’ll have to take their word for it) and more dramatically, technology. It may be true that some people are genetically predisposed to being obese, but if nobody has to walk anywhere anymore, everybody is going to get fat.

And everybody does get fat, but that’s a symptom, not a cause. The movie’s link between “obesity and environmental collapse” is much more circumspect and thoughtful than the Slate author insists it is when he says “Wall-E tells us that if we don’t change the way we live, we’ll all get really fat and destroy the world”. That chain of events actually happens in the opposite order, so finding the idea that “we gain weight and the Earth suffers” in the movie is bordering on fabrication. The same bad habits caused the environmental catastrophe and the bloating of humanity, but to suggest that the blame is laid at the feet of the genetically obese is a deliberate misreading.

Earth becomes uninhabitable because humans are wasteful, negligent, and encouraged into over-consumption by the giant corporation that also serves as their government, not because they’re fat; we’re even shown that they’re not fat when they leave Earth. No amount of FUD is going to change that very obvious (maybe too obvious) thematic statement from the creators. You can argue with it, but don’t don’t raise straw men and invent themes that just aren’t there in order to more enhance your offense. If you see the movie and come out with the idea that Pixar is decrying compulsive consumerism exclusively because it will make us all fat, then I will suggest you are missing the point entirely. If you come out thinking that Pixar believes obese people are destroying the Earth, I will begin to judge negatively your comprehension skills.

So Greenpeace dropped their annual list of environmentally unfriendly tech firms yesterday, and once again, through calculated data manipulation complete coincidence, a successful, fashionable and approachably-branded company is bringing up the rear. Nice work, Greenpeace. Way to contribute to the credibility of environmentalists.

Anyway, all this talk of eco-friendly technology got me thinking that, as far as greeness goes, Magnetk must be up there with the best in the world. After all, there are only three employees at the office, and not one of them drives to work.

Jeff usually bikes or takes the commuter rail, even though we all know from his Twitter feed that the stations frequently smell like pee. And Jon cycle-commutes with such intensity that cars are often forced from the road because of it.

While the office may not be LEED Platinum certified, it’s still in a converted Victorian; with all the impacts and emissions associated with demolition and construction, modifying an old structure is usually less harmful than building a new one.

Also, having windows that actually open means that on all but the hottest days, climate control can be achieved without switching on the small window AC unit (or “entropy pump”, as Jon likes to call it).

Furthermore, the company is bootstrapped—the guys that own it built it with their own cash. That means no unpleasant uber-capitalists are cranking carbon-besotted dollars into your seamless SFTP integration. And because there’s no physical product, packaging, or shipping, the environmental costs of production are all but nonexistant.

Even the office location screams Earth-friendly: it’s in one of the most bikeable cities in America, and everything from the train to the subway to locally-brewed beer to sushi to the best burritos in town is well within a five-minute walk.

If the employees were feeling unusually lazy one day, it’s still not a crisis; any number of local establishments deliver by bike. There’s no need even to step out for a cup of coffee, thanks to an office bottomless cup card from the coffee shop downstairs.

So are there greener companies out there? Probably—people are way into that sort of thing these days. But they tend both to work way too hard at it, and to shove it in your face once they’ve achieved results.

Magnetk’s greeness is elegant and serendipitous, and if I hadn’t written this blog post, no one at the company ever would have bothered to tell you about it.

Maybe you heard earlier this week about Apple taking out a patent on some solar cells, so soon we can all have solar powered MacBooks and iPhones and blah blah blah.

Look: that might do it for my cousin Irene with the gold pigtails and a frilly pink dress, but that sure as hell doesn’t do it for me. I demand MORE POWER. And like John McCain, who’s so tough he wouldn’t even use a solar-powered sundial, I know exactly where to get it.

That’s right, I’m talking about a nuclear computer. I’m sick of being behind the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys in generating what is obviously the manliest form of power on earth. And don’t bother whining about “feasibility”. If we’d let weenies like you take over during the 60s, there’d be a Russian flag on the moon and the national pastime would be badminton.

A Mac Pro weighs almost 50 pounds, and enough fissionable material for an a-bomb weighs only 11—still sound impossible to you? Sure, you’d need turbines and a cooling system and crap like that, but Apple’s always bragging about how awesome its designers are. Now it’s time to put up or shut up.

On top of just being frickin’ awesome, nuclear computing would all but solve the national energy crisis. When you were running some pansy application like Mail or iWank or whatever, you could use the power supply in your PC to run the rest of your home, and even sell power back to the grid.

Look, I love the environment as much as the next guy—wind turbines, recycling, bottle deposits, hybrid SUVs; the whole nine yards. But solar’s simply not a viable solution for power users; I mean, what are you gonna do when the sun’s not shining?

Let’s say you’re playing Quake IV in your bedroom at 4am, and somehow fighting back the entire Korean Peninsula with a single measly railgun—do you want to get gauntleted because a “low power warning” pops up and ruins your FPS? Or do want your power supply to get so hot from rendering ultra-high-res blood spatter that you have to huck it in the bathtub to prevent a meltdown?

The choice is yours, people. Don’t let Steve Jobs talk you into buying an inferior product.

Image: MacNuke, created by author. From original work by Gmn wnr. Free use under cc-by-sa-2.5.

Remember when Dell didn’t totally suck?

All highly successful large projects battle bloat and complexity. Sooner or later, lighting a controlled burn can really help out. Microsoft has done a great job with this in their Office line. Office 2003 did a lot to reduce code size and speed launch times. Office 2007 does away with more than a decade of familiarity in favor of a new and more thoughtful user interface.

Phoenix was born out of the need to cast off the horrific bloat and instability that characterized the Netscape/Mozilla suite in 2001. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted a lean and mean browser that would load and run faster and provide a simple and extensible way of defining the user interface. They did a great job.

Renamed Firefox, the project just hit the 400 million download mark. Despite all this success, I can’t help but think that somebody needs to start a controlled burn on Firefox. Each month that passes I find myself progressively more dissatisfied with Firefox. Launch times are ever increasing despite my progressively newer hardware. It is wildly unstable on OS X - crashing daily. On Windows it is better, but not much. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t make me run IE.

Somebody get moving - build me me a better browser

I’m a proud owner of Parallels Desktop for OS X. It has served me admirably, but it’s time to move on.

A while back, when Parallels announced they could finally boot my BootCamp partition directly, I was in love. I had visions of Visual Studio and XCode existing side by side. Working on the SftpDrive Windows and OS X clients at the same time. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Then I tried it out, and was distinctly less enamored. It was SLOW. It worked, but I didn’t just buy a brand new MacBook Pro so I could have a slow, often painful, primary work environment that lacked any graphics acceleration. I’d love for it to have worked, but I switched back to plain old BootCamp. What can I say, I need my speed.

SWSoft is adding features to Parallels at a rapid pace, which I appreciate. However, their “core” virtualization experience really isn’t that good. Especially compared to VMWare Workstation, which I spend a huge amount of time using. I hate to do this, but let’s go over some of the major offenses:

1. 20% CPU usage while the VM is completely idle, on a fresh install. No need to explain this further, not acceptable. For references - VMWare gives me about 2-4% usage.

2. It only supports one processor. That sucks.

3. Disk usage: Parallels Virtual Disk access is WAAAY slower, especially in BootCamp. I get around a 75% performance hit using the disk in BootCamp mode. That’s a made up number, but it feels SLOW. Copying around a 1GB file, painful. With VMWare I experience no such grief.

4. Memory usage: Man, nothing makes my system, with 2GB RAM, go turbo like trying to run a VM in Parallels with over 512 megs of RAM then switch to another memory-heavy applications, like XCode.

Thanks, Parallels - you really lit a fire under VMWare’s ass. It has taken a while to get here, but VMWare Fusion is at RC1. It’s time you gave it a shot. They are using the same x86 virtualization technologies that they’ve fined tuned in other products for nearly 10 years. It’s really good - you’ll notice the difference. It’s still free, so why not? VMWare is quickly approaching feature parity with Parallels, and it blows down the doors with the performance.

Here is my least favorite Windows XP dialog:

Let’s say I have a long WEP key - maybe a random 26 digit hexadecimal string [quite common]. Not only do you have to type it in without the option of seeing the characters you type, you must type them TWICE.

This is dumb.

It is only critical that a user confirm a typed password during the process of creating a new password, just so they don’t accidentally get locked because they unwittingly made a typo while entering in the new password.

Here, OS X gets it exactly right:

Type the password once, hit ok. If I mistyped the password authentication will fail and I can try again. Brilliant. In the spirit of complaining, I do have one major gripe with the OS X wireless stack that Windows XP does a much better job with.

Head up the the Airport dropdown on your menu bar and you’ll see the list of access points that have a strong enough signal to connect to. If you’re in a public place you might see 25-30 access points. OS X gives you no indication of which of those are open or closed, and certainly no idea what their signal strengths are. Want to find one that has a good signal and is also unencrypted out of that list of 30? Good Luck.

Found via daringfireball.net: this apple ad really gets the gist of why UAC pisses me off.

Watch, feel my burning frustration.

Joe-end-user, running his pre-installed copy of Vista on the $600 dell laptop, is in no position to make a good decision about security. Stop asking him.

This is just like the whole ActiveX fiasco with IE. Walking through the basic scenario:

1. Navigate to some site you want to view - www.manyfreesexypics.com
2. Site wants to install some ActiveX plugin, which adds all sorts of great functionality [for their ad network provider]
3. IE Prompt: “Do you want to install this activeX plugin? Translated by User: “Click yes to see this site”
4. User: Hmm — I clearly want to see it, thats why I came here. Of course I hit yes.

People always hit yes.

Vista UAC pushes this culture of always saying yes right into the operating system. Basic tasks like renewing/repairing your IP require elevation. When users are forced to “allow” with such frequency, what is going to get them to slow down and think? How can they be expected to know the difference in risk between renewing their IP address or running a program they downloaded?

After about 3 weeks of using Vista RTM as my primary windows development environment, I’m officially downgrading to XP.

The reasons for this are many:

1. Driver issues; Mouse, firewire controller, power management, to name a few.

2. Nothing works without about 10 extra installation steps. VMWare Workstation and Visual Studio are the two key components of my development environment. Visual Studio needs a custom patch, needs to be run as administrator, yet still doesn’t fully work right with some plugins I rely on. VMWare Workstation doesn’t run or install correctly without modifying Vista security settings. I’d love to run the 6.0 beta [which has amazing Visual Studio integration] on Vista - but Visual Studio wouldn’t start because it could not “acces the log file”. That’s awesome.

3. Vista has been out in beta in one form or another for quite a long time now, but the level of changes made during the final 6 months created all sorts of issues that are similar to this. SftpDrive has had Vista support throughout this process, only to have various aspects of it broken and require various fixes for release. The latest 1.6 beta now works with RTM.

4. UAC is really annoying. The first thing you need to do is turn it off. You would hope some basic sanity would have resolved a few of the issues, such as using control panel. You can’t do anything in the control panels without re-authorizing priveledges on practically every click.

5. Everything covered in here: The 5 sins of Vista. #1 and #5 really bother me. #1 is truly asinine.

Overall - I’m left trying to figure out why Vista is better and why it took 5 years to make it happen. The start menu is new, I guess. The windows have translucent borders if you spent over $1500 on your machine. Give me a break.

The lesson I’m taking away is that developers can only sell upgrades and “new” revisions based on features. It’s truly poor form to roll 5 years of bug fixes into a $350 package with more regressions than new features.

I’m going back to XP.