O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.consilient.com/pressrelease/11/

Consilient today released the Consilient Sitelet Technology Platform. Sitelets are “portable interactive process containers” which allow complex business processes to be broken down into components. Look for Andy Oram’s upcoming profile of Consilient on openP2P.com.

Wired is calling it the Million Geek March. But that doesn’t seem quite right. Perhaps the Million Pirate March, or just the Million MP3 March (would MMP3M take off as a new acronym?). Napster’s call for a march to attend a hearing on Capitol Hill suggests a trivialization of the great marches for civil rights and U.S withdrawal from Vietnam. (The first 1,000 marchers get a free Napster T-shirt!)

Marching on Washington isn’t about sitting calmly in a Senate hearing room. It’s about great rhetoric (and levitating the Pentagon). Shawn Fanning is likely no Martin Luther King or or Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, but if he were Savio, he might say: “There is a time when the operation of the centralized server becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the disk drives and upon the RAM banks and upon the routers, upon the motherboard, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who administer it, to the people who own it, that unless music is free, the server will be prevented from working at all!”

Late last year I reviewed the release of Netscape 6, in which I decided however pretty it was, it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. It’s been five months since then and I’m regretting ever installing it on my machine.

This may be an well-worn thread, but aren’t newer versions supposed to work better than their predecessors? Forgive my ranting, but god help the web designer who has visitors using Netscape 6. I use Netscape 4.7 more often than N6 these days, simply for the fact that often times the Mozilla-using Netscape 6 doesn’t display web pages the way the designer intended. This has most recently come to my attention because this is happening on two of the O’Reilly Network sites that I produce. They look great in IE and Netscape 4.7, but the layouts go to hell in a handbasket under N6 and the latest build of Mozilla. Because a large enough percentage of our audience is using a Mozilla based browser, this becomes a potentially major problem that needs fixing, only tracking down the problem isn’t as easy as finding a missing closing tag within the HTML. It seems that there isn’t a consistent way that the displays get fudged with the Mozilla rendering engine.

But that’s not my only complaint. My bookmarks have mysteriously vanished from “My Sidebar” at times. Trying to do production edits through N6 is a frustrating experience. And then of course are the crashes, which happen more often than when I was a 16 year old with a 65 Mustang. That Mustang is now sitting in my uncles yard, long gutted for parts. Just like that Mustang, Netscape 6 will be sitting in my Recycle Bin once I figure out how to fix the bugs of displaying pages with it.

Related link: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-5195914.html?tag=tp_pr

While Macintosh looks to OS X to be a turning point with both developers and everyday consumers, one must wonder why their marketing team focused on multimedia aspects that won’t be there from the get-go.

Lucas Gonze, formerly of WorldOS, sends in these meanderings on XMLP and SOAP. Lucas wonders why it shouldn’t be built on SOAP, and why Microsoft supports SOAP, while Sun is against it.

A question I have been thinking about is why should the XML protocol (XMLP), ne XP, exist? Why should this be a new thing entirely, instead of something built on top of SOAP? Why is Sun against SOAP? Why is Microsoft promoting SOAP, which would seem to be good citizenship on a level that would normally cause an allergic reaction?

Some datums:

1. As we saw in the Halloween documents, until recently MS considered commodity protocols a threat.
2. Sun generally sees commodity protocols as being in their interest, since network-oriented products need big iron on the back end.
3. MS owns the client.
4. MS has saturated the client-side market, so in order to grow needs to move into the server market.
5. MS has been unable to break the Unix cabal’s hold on the server market.
6. Sun holds the lion’s share of the Unix market.
7. SOAP is a commodity protocol for remote services.
   
   1. XMLP is a commodity protocol for remote services.
   2. EbXML is a commodity protocol for remote services.
   3. XML-RPC is a commodity protocol for remote services.
8. Multiple standards are no standard at all.

Corollary of 1 and 2 should be that Sun is pro-SOAP and MS is anti-SOAP. Why are their roles reversed?

Corollary of 4 and 6 is that MS growth into the server market has to be at Sun’s expense.

Corollary of 7, 8 and 9 is that XMLP threatens SOAP. Even if XMLP is not a serious threat, because it is too far away from shipping for uptake to be a good bet, it muddies the competitive waters. In short XMLP is fear, uncertainty and doubt. [1]

Putting it together: MS is giving ground on 1 (commodity protocols) in order to gain ground on 4 (server market share). Sun is spreading FUD to block SOAP adoption, hence to keep MS fenced in in the portion of the market they already own - the relatively small number of projects using MS operating systems on their servers.

Why is MS betting on a new standard, rather than embracing an existing one like EbXML? EbXML is architected for server to server transactions, and gives no room for MS to leverage their client-side dominance. My best guess on XML-RPC, which is probably not right, is that MS could easily have chosen it over SOAP, but preferred SOAP for technical reasons [2].

In short, this is a replay of the COM/CORBA story, but written in XML, and with Microsoft giving ground to an open standard in order to see if it makes a difference.

¹: No slam intended on the XMLP WG, whose work quality I much admire.

²: XML-RPC is beautifully lightweight; however it is too closely tied to HTTP to be used for the kind of high-throughput, low-latency transactions that COM and CORBA excel in.

Related link: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/03/20/audiomill/index.html

AudioMill says it can search internet radio stations for song titles you are interested in, and then download that song to your computer. Interesting idea, but the quality of streaming audio only lies between 40 and 128kps, and the fact that you can’t turn their format into MP3’s or burn them to a CD may turn off a good number of their target audience.

Related link: http://www.dci.com/brochure/p2psf/schedule.asp

DCI’s Summit on Peer-to-Peer, subtitled “Expanding and Enabling Enterprise Computing,” is a quiet affair concluding today in San Francisco. With roughly 50 attendees at the sessions, and about a dozen exhibitors, one gets the strong sense that it’s too early — perhaps *way* too early — for a pure business P2P conference. The current economic climate certainly doesn’t help matters, but for now P2P is the still the province of programmers, techies, and wild-eyed visionaries.

The deadline has passed, and Napster has (according to News.com) filtered more than half of the downloads
. Being the curious fellow that I am, I decided to find out if there is a noticable difference yet. You’ll have to point me to which filenames are being blocked, because it’s just as easy as before.

Metallica, Madonna, Dr. Dre, heck, the whole family is still there for the taking. Of course this is only the first phase of the filtering, and they say that it will get harder and harder to get around the filters as time goes on (especially since Napster just hired Gracenote to help track down alternative names.

I might’ve already found a way around the filters though. The injunction states that record labels must give Napster the artist name, song name and filename of the song they want removed from Napster’s network. When one does searches on Napster you usually put in either the artist or the song name, how often do you look for a file by it’s filename?
So here’s the solution. Say you have Primus’s “Tommy the Cat” on your hard drive and would like to share it with the rest of the world. Create a folder named Prymus (notice the purposeful misspelling), then create a folder named Tommy the Cat. Inside that folder is where you store the actual MP3, naming it index.mp3. Since the RIAA can’t prove that they own the copyright to every index.mp3 out there, Napster users are free to go about their usual business as usual provided they use this naming/directory structure.

Will Napster users really want to go through creating new directories for each artist/song? Maybe, maybe not. Heck, I’m not sure how the filters are set up, but based on my searches today, it looks like Napster can block files based on artist names, but not variations on that name (since I could find songs under Madona, but not Madonna). It would be a heck of a lot easier to freeload than it would be to contribute to the greater community. Either way, it’s a work around the filters that seems to simple to be true.

Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42259,00.html

Weeks after the movie industry shutdown 2600 magazine for publishing the DeCSS code, a couple of MIT students have found a way to descramble DVD’s using only 7 lines of Perl.

Judge Patel’s March 5th ruling may look to favor the RIAA, but Napster can claim victory on the sole basis that they didn’t get shut down. What was interesting is seeing how the press reacted. Some, like the Washington Post sees the ruling as a win for the RIAA, while others like News.com see it as a Napster win.

Napster wins hands down here, not only because they get to stay alive, but because the burden of policing the network has been put upon the RIAA. That means the RIAA will have to track down every single filename that can be altered an infinite amount of ways (like changing Metallica.mp3 to Met2allica.mp3) and prove that they own the copyright to said material.
Napster users are hooked, I recently recieved a desperate email from a Napster user pleading me to point him to a Napster alternative because he is “on there 24/7″. This email gave the office quite a chuckle, put showed how extreme the mentality of some Napster users is. Now that they are addicts, they will find a way around the policing. Suddenly our bright-eyed college students have turned into digital drug dealers, always finding a way around the RIAA’s badge.

The fact that they don’t have to shut down is also huge for their plans to launch a subscription service this summer. If they were to get shut down it would have been much harder this summer to not only get people to get back in the habit of using Napster, but have them pay for access. This ruling will also help keep Napster users from jumping ship to other file-sharing clones like Gnutella, iMesh and AIMster.

Quotes from the RIAA after the ruling seem to show that they are content with the verdict, but you can’t believe that they are happy with it. The RIAA has wanted Napster shut down from day one, and it doesn’t appear that this is going to happen. Napster users will have to work a bit harder for their MP3’s now, but this ruling didn’t do much damage to users or Napster in general. Score one for Napster and P2P technology.