micromux

Unreasonable Search and Seizure

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Our government has been busy listening to personal telephone communications. While the President claims we are targeting international phone calls, there is really nothing to prevent the government from arbitrarily tapping conversations of citizens domestically.
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Nero Licensing Nightmares

There are a lot of versions of Nero for Windows. This is suppose to be an application to burn both CD-RW and DVD+R/-R discs, so using Nero it is possible to create everything from an audio disc to a DVD movie. Unfortunately, there are some stringent licensing requirements that you may be unaware of. Allow me to describe a typical scenario and the kinds of results you can expect.

Imagine if you purchase a CD-RW burner that includes Nero Express 5. After adding the new hardware to your computer, you reboot and install the Nero software. When this is complete, you test the CD burner and everything works fine.

A few years later you decide to upgrade the Sony CD burner to a AOpen DVD burner. With this new device, it should be possible to continue to author CD’s in addition to the DVD discs the new burner is capable of creating. Your DVD/+R/-R includes Nero 6 software to author DVD discs, so you simply install the new Nero and start using this software to author DVD discs. Fortunately, everything seems to work fine until you return to your Nero Express that you were using with the Sony CD/RW and try to make a CD data disc.

This does not work. In fact, you are unable to burn any kind of CD media with either your Nero Express 5 software or your new Nero 6 package. You then attempt to uninstall all of your Nero applications and start over; however, the Nero Express 5 refuses to uninstall because it claims to require an MSI installer that was not bundled on your original installation media.

What happened? Why is it now easier to boot Knoppix to burn my CD and DVD discs?

As it turns out, Nero distributions are licensed to the hardware they ship with. When your new AOpen burner includes Nero 6 this is really a version of Nero that will only work with burners of that exact make and model. Thus, after adding the new DVD burner to our system the Nero Express 5 will prevent us from burning CD discs since our CD hardware is no longer in this computer.

Do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes on the Nero website. In the Support section there are “Clean Tools” to remove old versions of Nero from your computer once the hardware has been upgraded. This is the only way your will be able to uninstall a Nero package once the hardware has been removed. Maybe this is something Nero can fix in a future release, it would be nice not to have this same problem after installing my new dual-layer dual-sided blu-ray DVD burner.

The Price of Education

Our educational system is in dire need of repair. Over the past thirty years we have more than doubled our per-pupil expenditures, and we now spend an average of $8,996 per child compared to to 1971 when we were spending an average of $4,479 (Stupider in America). Unfortunately, we are graduating fewer students today than we did thirty years ago so money has not improved our ability to teach.

The fundamental problem is a lack of competition. While there are some excellent public schools, these are only available if you live in the corresponding school district or if you have managed to obtain a coveted school voucher. Thus our public school system is a virtual monopoly, with the only real competition coming from private schools that very few people can afford.

Perhaps the system should provide more selection. What if students could pick the school they want and the $8,996 per-pupil was attached to the student? This is what they do in Belgium and they have some of the best educated kids in the world. Allowing students to select their school would eliminate the public school monopoly, any school that could not attract students would be forced to downsize or go out of business altogether.

There is another facet to this dilemma, the teachers union protects the salaries we pay our educators and prevents schools from eliminating inept employees. The problem with this is that teachers in public schools are working for the taxpayers, so the union is ensuring the public school monopoly can be maintained for as long as these kinds of schools are chartered in the US. There is no reason for a union to protect the jobs of civil servants, the taxpayers have already agreed these jobs are for the public good and will guarantee cost of living increases.

As a result of all of this, our children are at the losing end of an educational bureaucracy. We should continue to experiment with charter schools and in the near future take some of our large urban school districts uniformly to a voucher system where students can pick the schools they want. If we can foster a competitive atmosphere where only the good schools survive then our children will be better educated.

Windows Product Activation

It appears that quite a few Windows XP installations have been activated using FCKGW. These are the first few letters of a popular Windows Product Key that was suppose to be used by a major PC maker for volume licensing and was instead leaked to the public domain.

This may not sound like a major problem, but many unsuspecting users have illegal installs of XP that have been activated using this key. Microsoft has banned this particular product key from downloading updates at the Microsoft website, which will make it impossible for a user to maintain their system. One option is to buy a legitimate copy of XP and follow the instructions from Microsoft but it is quite likely that even this will not work. After you have exhausted this avenue, you can either spend $200 to get the full retail version of XP or visit Dell and pickup a new Dimension for $299.

Of course, it may be that you already have a legitimate copy of Windows, but that your OEM install has been polluted by one of these rogue licenses. Hopefully you still have your original Windows media, or the partition on your hard drive with the media has not been lost yet.

While it is understandable that Microsoft wants to protect itself from piracy, the wide assortment of XP key generators seems to make this implausible. These kinds of restrictions only make it difficult for unsuspecting users that are victims of these pirates. Not only do the victims get robbed when they buy their system, but they are then forced to spend another $200 on a legitimate copy of XP when they discover the version they have won’t work.

Of course, there is nothing in the registration mechanism to prevent Microsoft from restricting more product keys in the future. How safe does that make you feel? There is no need to take this out on the consumer, the focus should be on distributors and resellers to enforce these stringent licensing requirements.

Annual 2006 Predictions

Another year is upon us, and it’s time for the deluge of annual predictions. Rather than prolong this any further, here is my outlook for technology in the new year.

1. I Want My Dual Core. The emergence of a few key technologies (64 bit computing, dual core, SATA, Bluetooth, 802.11 and USB 2.0) makes older computer hardware virtually obsolete. Perhaps even more significantly, many of these technologies are required to take advantage of next generation platforms like Windows Vista, VMWare and PVR tools like MediaCenter and MythTV. Many computer users will find themselves upgrading this year, and the new systems will be much more powerful with significant amounts of RAM and very large hard drives.
2. Dual Layer DVD+R. Until now the DVD market has been predominantly single-layer DVD+R/DVD-R media. Manufacturing has started to focus on the dual layer derivatives of these formats, so as the year progresses it will become cheaper and easier to get your hands on 8.5 GB of storage in DVD+R/DL media. Higher density optical storage is still a few years out, although starting this year vendors of some high-end systems will start to include higher resolution DVD playback devices in some systems.
3. Goodbye Broadcast TV. Television technology is experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift as a result of a disruptive technology combined with unrealistic government madates for DTV broadcasts. Now that you can watch many of your favorite shows on the video iPod, this will begin the conversion of television viewing to video-on-demand using a PVR-style device. Many users will simply rely on a video iPod to provide this capability initially, but as they realize the enhanced features of Windows Media Center, TiVo and MythTV they will begin to flock to these platforms. Be prepared to watch A Christmas Story next December using your TiVo and downloading the content from an on-demand service like NetFlix.
4. USB Thumb Drive Connectivity for Entertainment. As USB portable storage devices continue to gather momentum, this type of device will begin to reach ubiquity with your entertainment hardware Everything from your surround sound receiver to your HDTV and even your car stereo will sport a handy USB plug. Many people can use this with existing USB thumb drive devices, but other portable media systems like the Apple iPod and can be easily adapted to support this kind of connectivity.

Generally the trend seems to be on convergence with specific focus on digitial media storage. While there is work being done with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray devices will start to appear in stores, the consumer has already figured out that they don’t need to store media on a disc in order to enjoy it. As such, they are perfectly content loading multimedia content onto a thumb drive or downloading directly to their PVR. While it can be difficult to protect copyright holders, there are a few companies already demonstrating viable business models so it is only a matter of time before the consumer catches up.

Clearly, higher quality video and audio formats are on the horizon but consumers are willing to accept convergence devices to circumvent planned obsolence. The mass migration to hi-def DVD will be unnecessary as it becomes increasingly possible to access content directly on your PVR or Windows Media Center PC.