You don’t get a CD, a case or the cover art but you shell out almost the same. You have to pay for the hard disk space to store it on. And the music industry trusts you the customer so little that you can either pay extra to cover lost revenue if you do choose to pirate music from your favourite artist or you can resign yourself to playing your downloaded music where and how the record label says you can. Steve Jobs can suddenly discover that DRM is a bad idea because it makes it harder for him to sell devices but did you notice that if you buy song by song you’re paying more than you would to buy the CD and rip the tracks? Oddly, the price for a whole album is the same with or without DRM, possibly because putting it up past the price in the shops would put people off; I find it even odder because most pirated music is entire albums. I think pay-for downloaded music is too little, too late and too expensive.
I suspect Peter Gabriel thinks the same because he’s done the smart thing with his new music download service We7. People don’t want to pay for things online - not just because of the cost but because it hinder the immediacy, the expectation that when you click a link online you get the object, not the page to buy it. We don’t mind sitting through the ads to get free content either and the river of ad money is flowing into online services faster than ever.  With We7 you get free music without any DRM, just an add tucked at the beginning - and after a while you can get it without the ad. Pass it on to a friend - it doesn’t matter because they get the ad and the artist gets the royalties from the ad.
I’m expecting www.we7.com to do well when it gets out of beta in June, not just because it’s a good idea. Peter Gabriel isn’t a novice online; the Real World site gives fans a community, his OD2 music service did well enough to get bought by Loudeye and then Nokia - and he spotted online music piracy as an issue long before the ostriches at the RIAA. OD2 launched in 1999; while it was still in development the team came to AOL UK where I was running the Technology and Internet channels looking for a partnership. We can sell music online at a fair price they said, or people will pirate it. AOL didn’t pick up the service; in those days an MP3 player with a hard drive looked like a hardback book and said Hango Personal JukeBox on the front - hardly mass market, and a dial up service was never going to be ideal for downloading MP3s. Plus AOL in Europe was a joint partnership with Bertelsmann - parent company of ‘we’ve just noticed DRM might not a good idea’ EMI. 
Could more backing for music downloads at a fair price have headed off online music piracy? I think so - but then I’ve always said home taping is skill in music.
-Mary

I’ve been reading a fascinating paper by Danyel Fisher, of Microsoft Research. He’s one of the folk behind the SNARF email triage tool, and is currently looking at how people use online maps.

“How we watch the City” is surprisingly beautiful (in the way many computer-mediated visualisations are). To show how people and searches gravitate to specific places he’s created an application that draws a heat map over Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, letting him zoom into the “hottest” searches, bright clusters that illuminate the virtual space of the search engine. With access to the services search logs, he can show just how searches relate to geography.

He comes to an interesting conclusion:

“We have seen several apparent motivating factors for the use of maps. Collectively, users seem to look at particularly unusual imagery, at roads, borders, and edges; and at homes and neighborhoods (presumably their own). The vast majority of hits are focused on a fairly small area, following population, suggesting that largely, users currently find use of the tools for looking at natural scenery less compelling then they do city imagery. Last, the tools here suggest that visualizing the use of online spaces can provide valuable insight into the space.”

Here’s one of the images from his paper, showing the search temperature of the US.

There’s a distinct relationship between search density and population centres when he looks at the USA as a whole. Bright clusters of searches obviously map to specific places. California and the eastern seaboard are especially busy.

But Fisher’s application lets him zoom in even further.

Las Vegas is a bright island of search in the middle of a very real desert. The city’s searches cluster around the obvious, the tourist destinations of the Strip, with a bright off strip cluster that can only be the city’s busy conference center.

This is yet another way of showing, and working with, attention data.

Fisher’s paper made me realise something else…

Heat maps are a powerful way of overlaying information on maps. They’re a technique that’s commonly used when working with demographic information. However, Web 2.0 mapping technologies like Virtual Earth and Google Maps mean it’s now easy to create your own visualisations and layer them over a map. One London estate agent is using a mashup heatmap to plot sales hotspots in the city, looking to maximise returns and speed up sales. It’s easy to imagine a taxi company doing something similar to work out where to deploy cabs for fast pickups…

Visualisation is a powerful tool. Why not make it work for you?

–Simon

You know the feeling. You’ve just installed a piece of software, and you’re ready to get on with your work when you discover something like this:

It’s the dialogue that won’t go away - with the radio button that doesn’t do anything.

Actually that’s not entirely true. You can make it go away, but that means clicking the finish button and rebooting your PC or (worse still) your server.

Yes, it might be necessary to reboot your machine if you’ve updated a core operating system function, or you’re installing a fix for a particularly nasty security exploit, but in most cases it’s completely pointless. The application you’ve installed will run quite happily, and you’re left with a dialogue box that just sits there. You can kill it from Task Manager, but that’s not the same as letting an installer finish cleanly.

It’s not just Windows that’s guilty here - I’ve seen the same on OS X, where the Apple Updater seems to believe that Quicktime requires a complete restart everytime an incremental update comes out. Sadly the Windows version of their updater does the same. iTunes is an application, not a core piece of the OS.

I know it’s possible to install significant updates without restarting. Microsoft has made working with Exchange a lot easier over the last few years, and now just stops the service, makes the update, and restarts it. Mozilla installs updates in the background and then justs asks me if I want to restart my copy of Firefox now or later.

Perhaps it’s time for the rest of the industry to catch up - or at least give me the option of restarting my PC when I want.

So, what’s getting you peeved today?

–Simon

With all the back and forth over what the PR company said to Wired and what Wired said to Microsoft about the Channel 9 coverage the other week, it was easy to miss an interesting number in the actual story: 4,500 people blogging at Microsoft. That’s a lot of people saying a lot of interesting things, long before the information gets into MSDN or the knowledgebase, even with the new wiki areas on MSDN.

Need to get Offline Files working with Vista and a NAS running Samba? The nitty gritty is on a Microsoft blog). The blogs are the best Microsoft tech resource at the moment, but unless you spend your day doing nothing but read them (and you need to save some time for the IT Pro blogs), how do you know what’s there? Microsoft’s blog search tool searches everything on the MSDN blog site, but there are blogs on the TechNet site and indeed blogs on other services entirely. You can search all the blogs - and Microsoft newsgroups - by choosing Communities to filter a search on Microsoft.com but you can’t choose that as an option on the main search tool on the front page. There’s also a custom Google search you can use. It doesn’t search every single blog but it’s still useful.

But if I just bookmark either of those tools as a way to search, odds are I’ll forget it. Instead I wanted to add them as a search providers in IE 7 - but neither Google nor Microsoft has put the code on the page to make that automatic. Handily, when you choose Find more providers from the drop-down search menu in IE 7, Microsoft has a page where you can paste in the URL you get when you run a search on any search engine and get that provider added to your list (run a search for TEST on the search site, copy the URL and then pick Find more providers to save going back and forth between pages).

-Mary

Everything comes to an end. Hard drives, relationships with business partners and suppliers, employment contracts, the usefulness of data and your customers themselves.  How easy do you think your systems make it for someone dealing with a dead hard drive, a terminated contract or a death in the family to sort things out? Having dealt with the first and the last in the list this week, we’ve been compiling a scorecard. Barring the ‘temporary problem’ on Windows Live ID that stopped us getting into MSDN to get a key for installing Office 2007, replacing a hard drive in a Vista notebook is simple and straightforward. 
Dealing with just the bureaucracy of death is much less so. There are a lot of forms to obtain and fill out; some of these are available on line, some aren’t. The procedure is different for every organisation and again some put the details of what you need to do online and some don’t. The US Social Security Site puts the link right on the front page; the National Savings Site has it in a drop-down of useful information; the Inland Revenue and Department of Work and Pensions sites conceal everything apart from the information about inheritance tax and probate.
You have to make a lot of phone calls (or pay a lawyer to do them for you). Building societies, insurance companies and banks haven’t put entries in their voice recognition systems for ‘I need to tell you someone is dead’. When you phone the US Social Security enquiries line you can’t even speak to someone without giving your social security number, but if you don’t have one reeling off a random string of numbers seems to work well enough. And only one person in three interrupts their script-for-recording-details long enough to say anything friendly; the rest plough straight into name-address-date of birth as if it was a dead hard drive you were reporting.
The systems you design and run might not have to deal with death - customer, data or otherwise - every day. But every customer you have is going to die, as is every hard drive. You might as well have a system that recognises that and make things as easy as possible at a difficult time.

In a recent blog posting security researcher Richard Clayton used data from Demon’s spam traps to suggest that there may be as few as five groups of large-scale spammers at work.

The picture is also hiding a deeper truth. There’s no “law of large numbers” operating here. That is to say, the incoming spam is not composed of lots of individual spam gangs, each doing their own thing and thereby generating a fairly steady amount of spam from day to day. Instead, it is clear that very significant volumes of spam is being sent by a very small number of gangs, so that as they switch their destinations around: today it’s .uk, tomorrow it’s aol.com and on Tuesday it will be .de

It’s an interesting thesis, and one that goes some way against current thinking. The vast volumes of spam that we worry about do exist, but they’re not spread out over time - they spike as new spam schemes come online. Clayton’s numbers cover the rise of a particular nasty bout of pump-and-dump spam, targetting mainly German users.These spikes mean that it could be possible to track down the groups that initiate the spam. Yes, they use botnets to transmit the data, but it’s got to come from somewhere. By knowing that a few groups control the nets and marshal the spam, ISPs and law enforcement agencies could track down and neutralise the gangs that fill our inboxes with trash and burn our processor cycles running anti-spam tools.

However that’s not to assume that getting rid of the gangs will miraculously clean up the Internet. There will always be mom-and-pop spammers and young guns trying to make a quick buck. But with the gangs out of action, the funds that pay for the development of spamming tools could go away, making it harder to pull tools off the darknets…

And with the volume spammers out the way, we could finally start making inroads on that constant background noise of spammer and 419 scammers. Perhaps we really could see the end of spam in our time.

We just need to get our statistical models in order first…

– Simon

If you work in IT, there’s no escape; you’re 24-7 tech support for the rest of your family and any friends who think you owe them a favour. Now that almost every home in the UK has a wireless access point and more than one PC, that means network support - my favourite!
There’s nothing more infuriating than a network that doesn’t. One problem I’ve seen on a lot of home networks and in quite a few small offices is one PC that can see another machine but isn’t visible in return. When you can only copy files from one system, a message saying you do not have access to MSHOME and need to contact the administrator of your system does nothing for the blood pressure of the user who has an admin account (or yours if they corner you after Sunday lunch).
You can sometimes blame a Mac that’s decided it wants to be the browser master on the network even though it’s not going to give out the list of workgroup members if you ask it at gunpoint. You could blame the whole idea of browse masters and peer-to-peer networking and just switch to a domain, but if you don’t want a server or you do want to keep Fast User Switching on your PCs - or you know you’ll end up supporting the domain over the phone, here’s how to make the notwork network.
Start with the basics; check that both PCs are in the same workgroup and the correct services and protocols are enabled. Remember that you won’t see the other PC in My Network Places or be able to connect to it unless there is a shared folder on it. Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties > Computer Name; if both PCs are not in the same workgroup, click Change and type in the same Workgroup name for both. In Network Connections, right-click on the Local Area Connection and choose Properties; make sure both Client for Microsoft Networks, and File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks are ticked in the list. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties > General > Advanced > WINS and select either Default or Enable NetBIOS Over TCP/IP (if Default was already selected for both change it to Enable).
If grandma is happily sucking on that egg, the most likely culprit is a firewall. Start by checking the Windows Firewall; make sure you’ve checked File & Printer Sharing on the Exceptions tab. Also make sure that you’re not running more than one firewall on each PC; has someone decided to upgrade to Zone Alarm without turning off the Windows Firewall first?. You can temporarily disable the firewall to see if the networking starts working. 
Next check the network services (Start > Run > SERVICES.MSC). Check that the Computer Browser and the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper services are both listed as Started and set to start Automatically. Use the Browstat utility from http://rescomp.stanford.edu/staff/manual/rcc/tools/browstat.zip - originally from the Windows Resource Kit but hard to get from Microsoft now - to check how the browser status of the network is set up. One computer will act as the browser master for the workgroup and store the list of all the PCs in the workgroup – if that’s not happening you won’t see what PCs are in the workgroup and you won’t get access.
Download the utility, unzip it into a folder and run it from the command line as BROWSTAT STATUS. This will tell you what workgroup the PC is in and which PC is acting as the browser master; do this on both PCs. Often the problem is that you have PCs in different workgroups and the PC in MSHOME isn’t running the browser service, so there’s no browse master to list it as being in MSHOME. Putting both PCs in the same workgroup will fix that.
If there is no browser master showing up but both PCs are already in the same workgroup, disable the browser service on one PC but leave it running on the other PC. Power down both computers and turn on the one with the browser service running first; this will force that PC to become the browser master and list the computers for the rest of the network. Use Services.msc to set the Computer Browser service startup to disabled.
Also make sure the Guest account is enabled if you’re not forcing everyone to use a password. On Windows XP Home Edition (and on Windows XP Professional Edition if you’re using Simple File Sharing; check in the Folder Options control panel under View > Advanced Settings) open a command prompt and type
NET USER GUEST /ACTIVE:YES
On Windows XP Professional open the Local Security Policy console (in the Administrative Tools control panel); look at Local Policies > Security Options> ’Network access: Sharing and security model for local users’ and set it to ‘Classic - local users authenticate as themselves’. Look in the User Rights Assignment folder in Local Security Policy; ‘Access this computer from the network’ should have Everyone on the list and ‘Deny access to this computer from the network’ should not have Guest in the list.
And if there’s any justice in the world, you’ll now get first choice of the easter eggs.

There’s something not quite right about EMI’s announcement, and I’m struggling to put a finger on it. Maybe I just don’t trust the big record companies - they’ve been offered so many chances to get things right around DRM, that a damascene conversion just doesn’t ring true…

…especially when many smaller record companies have been trying to get Apple to remove the DRM from their music for as long as there’s been an iTunes store.

I want to be wrong about this, but the paranoid and cynical part of me has spent too much time talking to copyright activists and the like, and too much time looking at the ways that organisations like the RIAA manipulate the industry and regulatory bodies - and the law.

There’s a scenario rattling around my head, it’s Machaievallian and cynical, and straight out of Sun Tzu and I want to believe otherwise. It goes like this:

When offered ostensibly the same item at two different prices from the same store, people buy the cheaper of the two. It’s why people buy paperbacks rather than hardbacks: they take up less space, and they’re quite a bit cheaper. The new DRM-free tracks are like hardback books, they’re larger, they last longer (or at least in more places), but they’re more expensive than the convenient, cheaper paperback - and will only be bought by collectors and people who want that specific edition.

At twice the bandwidth, these new tracks will be a lot bigger than their DRM-encumbered equivalents, and at 20p more they’ll look more expensive. Most people will just buy the smaller and cheaper tracks - as only an audiophile would hear the difference (especially through the headphones that Apple bundles with its iPods).

So, the conspiracy theory goes, when the sales figures come back in six months or a year, EMI (and the rest of the record industry cartel) will be able to point to much more DRM-encumbered music selling than non-DRM music, and then say “See - DRM-free music isn’t a selling point. People don’t mind the DRM, they keep buying it, even through a music store where the CEO has made a point of asking for the industry to remove DRM…”

Apple has built a brand on the concept of value. That’s all very well when it comes to computers and software, where £400 or £1000 is a sum that demands value for money. Selling a track for 79p and 99p, well, those are sums where the determining factor is price. That’s something that EMI and the rest of the cartel know very well, having sold in to that market for years. Rememebr the CD single wars of the early 90s?

Yes, the digital album-level price doesn’t change, but one statistic from the sales of online music that keeps coming back is how few people actually buy albums online. Most sales are single track sales, either current singles, or consumers looking for that one track they remember from an album they used to own many years ago…

I just hope that this isn’t a Trojan Horse that Apple has let in through its gates. I’d hate to see the future of DRM-free music lost just because the world buys things on price, not on value.

I hope I’m wrong.

I’m scared I’m not.

– Simon

When you phone your credit card company they ask you to punch in your credit card number, date of birth and various other long digits on the keypad to get an automated balance; if you’ve got a question about that balance, the information that was enough to give away confidential information suddenly isn’t enough to get your records up on screen and you have to give all the same details again. With a really inefficient system, the information you give to try and sort out a problem never gets written down or passed on to anyone else and you have to go through it from scratch every time.

Think that’s bad? Try going into hospital.

A member of my family was admitted into hospital this week and the data collection was beyond a joke. First there were two pages of written information about their condition and medications to hand to the paramedics. They asked some questions, did some tests and wrote the answers down on their gloves. That got transcribed while we waited in a corridor: we’re now up to four sheets of paper. The admitting nurse at A&E repeated a number of the tests, added a few more tests and asked some questions: some of them new, many of them the same - and wrote the answers down on a brand new 6-page form. The admitting doctor asked similar questions, but stuck to the same form: 10 sheets so far. And up in the ward, a nurse took out a blank 8-page form, repeated some tests, added some more - and asked a long list of questions, writing down answers for the tests on their hands and for the questions on the form; for the commonest questions those same answers were recorded for the third or fourth time. And guess what the nurses taking over for the next shift asked?

Few if any of these were questions that were going to get a different answer. Maybe it helps the person asking to hear the answer from the patient rather than to read the notes. You’d certainly rather they asked the same question than copied information incorrectly from another form. But not once did anyone refer back to a previous form and ask ‘is X true’ instead of asking ‘what about X’?. Leaving aside the question of whether something like a tablet PC could speed up getting this information into the system, duplicate enquiries like this have to waste the time of some of the busiest people in the hospital. Not only are three people asking the same question, there are four places to look to check vital details. Single patient records for the whole NHS? We don’t even have single patient records for the same hospital.

How much of your business information is collected in multiple passes and stored in multiple systems? You may have a CRM system, but are you irritating your customers and wasting staff time by asking the same question again and again depending on how they contacted you today?