The Bangus Ultimatum

In the future, media studies and media history academics will probably look at this event as a watershed event for the transition of media from synchronous/passive/firm-generated, to asynchronous/active/user-generated.

The latest incarnation of Microsoft’s Halo franchise, earned $170 million in 24 hours, the largest opening day in the history of the entertainment industry. The Xbox 360 title beat previous records set by blockbuster theatrical releases like “Spider-man 3” and novels such as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Hail to the Master Chief!

It’s no secret that CD sales have been plummeting as people are opting for digital music downloads. And it’s not just a “piracy” issue. Legitimate online music stores are also on the rise. So what does the recording industry do to fight back?

True to its form, it comes up with a physical product - the Ringle. Basically, it’s a cd with one hit single plus a ringtone version, plus two extra songs (presumably too weak to merit their own Ringle). - all for $6.98. (Note that the iTunes usually sells songs/ringtunes for under $2).

It’s an idea so monumentally stupid, and symptomatic of the recording industry’s refusal to move on from a dead-end format (the cd, which at least justifies their price structure).

But then again, if this doesn’t work, they can always resort to suing the fans. Things might be a bit difficult for them, though. A federal appeals court ruled that RIAA’s “insta-lawsuit” strategy - churning out thousands of unspecific, boilerplate “John Doe “complaints, is illegal. Now isn’t it sweet that they’d have to make a specific case just for you?

Back in the year 2000, Yahoo was sued (and lost) in a French court. The judgment ordered Yahoo! to pull out Nazi memorabilia, prohibited by French law, from its auction site. Yahoo! was up in arms over the decision, saying that:

“Yahoo.com is not doing anything unlawful. It is completely complying with the law of the country in which it operates and where its target audience is,” he said.

“Yahoo auctions in the U.S. are ruled by the legal, moral and cultural principles of that country.”

Fast forward to today. Yahoo! is now being sued in the U.S. court for selling out one of its subscribers to be arrested and tortured by the Chinese government. Yahoo! is now singing a different tune, playing the citizen of the world and moving for a dismissal of the U.S. case and urging a shift of venue - to China.

It’s not true that the Internet is this inherently un-regulate-able utopia. Government power and corporate interests can converge to produce what in fact could be the most regulated space in history. We can’t sit back and trust the network’s architecture alone to protect our rights. Just as in the real world, our rights online is something we have to stay vigilant about.

David Lynch (great director I admire, and who doesn’t) said in a recent interview with MTV that he’s quit using film (you know, those celluloid strips used by ancient cameras) and is going digital from now on:

MTV: You shot “Inland Empire” using digital technology. Will you ever go back to film?

Lynch: Never. Digital is so friendly for me and so important for the scenes, a way of working without so much downtime. It’s impossible to go back. Film is a beautiful medium, but the world has moved on. The amount of manipulation we can do, anybody can do, is so much the future. Film is so big and heavy and slow, you just die. It’s just ridiculous.

Anti-”piracy” rhetoric carry some moral currency when you consider how bloated and expensive film and its related technologies are. Traditional film outfits invest a lot of money, and as a matter of policy, the law should protect their expectation of a reasonable return. But digital technology (lighter, cheaper, more accessible) changes the calculus. When it costs so much less to produce movies, does it still make sense legally protecting old business models?

The lack of blog posts was due to enrollment madness in UP. It’s almost over now.
One of the new things this semester: the bulk of my workflow will be done around Emacs (or specifically, XEmacs). I finally have an office computer that can run it. Here’s how it looks like:

If you’re someone whose computer experience is limited to the candy-colored confines of Windows or MacOS, it looks like a retarded text editor. What’s so cool about that?

Except that Emacs really doesn’t give a fuck about cool. It’s currently version 21.x, and the code and concepts behind it have been around since the 1970’s. You don’t get to be that old and grizzly by thinking about cool. You get to reach that number of iterations by being neurotic about function. It’s a text editor, indeed - but this text editor can surf the web, read and write email, do math and databases, handle your calendar, remotely control computers in the network, among many many many many things. It’s not a killer app - it’s a pissed homicidal maniac, but chances are, you’ll never find out.

Right now it’s keeping my to-do list, and churning out beautiful pdf’s of legal pleadings (via LaTex and ghostscript). Yes, these things make me happy.

A big chunk of the certiorari nights were spent tap tap tapping away at Nayna’s Powerbook G4. The output was beautiful, thanks to the OS X’s Postscript-based rendering system, and damn it felt good to be using a Mac again.

As we were winding down, the discussion veered towards operating systems, the old PCs v. Macs debate, and we very nearly talked H to buying a Macbook Pro. That decision would have to wait for next year, but at least we made him painfully aware of the constraints of his condition.

It made me miss my neglected jurassic macs. You see, after quitting ABS-CBN Interactive years ago, I blew my savings on a) photography stuff and b) a couple of old but refurbished macs. I had a 9500 (with scanner and printer and jaz drive), a color classic, and a 5300 Powerbook. All ridiculously underpowered compared to the big iron servers I used to handle at work, but I’d like to think that after crash-and-burning with programming, I was ready to be more sensible with technology. I bought into the Apple ads that said that it’s not how powerful your computer is, it’s how powerful your computer makes you. At any rate, the plan was to use the macs to write stuff that would make the world a better place (or at least a less bad one). You don’t need overwhelming processing power to run a word processor, I figured. I thought it would just be so damned romantic (and outright Hemingway, dude), typing manifestos, maybe dropping in a scanned photograph of deforestation (or whatever) - on a machine that ran under
200Mhz.

Then, law school. I never had the time to transport the macs to my dorm, and the dear old cranks just gave out. I couldn’t even boot them the last time I dared turn one on. And I’m working on a dual core pentium system to write code (In fairness, I use only Linux/Apache/PHP/Ruby/MySQL). So yeah. What the hell happened?

Tell you what’s going to happen, though. I’m going to bring one of these babies to Manila this Sunday, have it checked. I am going to make amends and do whatever it takes to get it running again. I have hope embedded in the ghosts of these machines, and I’m not about to give up on them.

Spare time has been terribly sparse as of late. Summer classes have begun and I’m absorbed by the subject.

I’m trying to hit two birds with one stone. I’m learning Ruby on Rails (RoR) by using it to prototype future features of the UP Barops website. To the non-techies in the audience, Ruby is a great computer language. Rails is a framework built on Ruby that enables one to build dynamic, data-driven web sites with ease and joy.

I’m an old timer when it comes to web developement. I’ve seen the state of the craft move from plain html, to customized scripts, to overhyped web application frameworks. I still feel the pain of having to work with Broadvision, the joy of finding PHP. But this must be thus far the most fun I’ve had working on web backends. Part of me is tempted to quit this law thing and just go back to coding full time. It’s that good.

Throughout my RoR sessions, I kept getting a sense of deja vu. Looking at the views provided by the scaffolding mechanism, it finally hit me. The rapid prototyping, the default views, the request system: very much like working with Lotus Domino, an underrated app server, in my opinion. The architecture isn’t as neat as RoR, but the thought was there: NSF’s in the model layer, Agents as controllers, and views as, well, views.

My only problem is that although I can happily build away with a local rails install (thanks to Instantrails), I haven’t encountered a local hosting provider that supports it. Ploghost probably might, but only once they know it enough to meet the support requirements (smart). I hope they can pull it off. Sooner than later, so we can host the UP Barops Site there. Ploghost, by the way, are the folks who host the iBlog website - for free for almost a year now. Part of my job is to maintain this site, and Ploghost has been durn great to work with. The most fun I’ve had working with a host (and I’ve been through the UUNET days). It’ll be way greater, of course, if they roll out Rails