The Substantially Similar Weblog

David Robinson, guest-blogging on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog, makes an interesting observation about Microsoft’s offer to relicense and retrieve mp3s already purchased on iTunes for free. The market actually works:

Will copyright holders be getting the same amount from Microsoft, when their songs are re-purchased on behalf of migrating iTunes users, as they will get when a user makes a normal purchase of the same track in the Zune system? The copyright holders have a substantial incentive to offer Microsoft a discount on this kind of “buy out” mass purchasing. As Ed pointed out to me, it is unlikely that users would otherwise choose to re-purchase all of their music, at full price, out of their own pockets simply in order to be able to move from iTunes to Zune. By discounting their tracks to enable migration to a new service, the copyright holders would be helping create a second viable mass platform for online music sales — a move that would, in the long run, probably increase their sales.

[…]

Bottom line: Markets are often surprisingly good at sorting out this kind of thing. Technology policy watchers underestimate the power of competition at our peril. It’s easy to see Microsoft or Apple as established firms coasting on their vertically integrated dominance, but the Zune buyout is a powerful reminder that that’s not what it feels like to be in this or most any other business. These firms, even the biggest, best and most dominant, are constantly working hard to outdo one another. Consumers often do very well as a result — even in a world of DRM.

What’s neat about this move is that it shows that there are more degrees of flexibility that most of us had thought. Critics viewed iTunes/iTunes Music Store as a monolithic lock-in system, but here a clever market participant figured out a combination of contractual and technological measures to work around it and create competition.

I am one of the unfortunate hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers who eagerly ran out to buy the Motorola v710 Bluetooth phone when it first came out a couple of years ago. (For a short period of time, I could really turn heads with my wireless earpiece—now you look like an antiquarian if you don’t have a Bluetooth headset). It turns out that Verizon disabled all of the most useful Bluetooth features on the phone, and a class action lawsuit ensued, which predictably settled on terms quite beneficial to counsel, but less so to the affected class. The settlement provided several options for Verizon subscribers who had purchased the v710, only one of which had a substantial monetary value—namely, a $200 credit toward a new phone (or whatever the actual price we paid for the phone, assuming we still have receipts).

The settlement period expires at the end of the month, so tonight I finally got around to cashing in on the victory.

I was quickly reminded of how much I hate shopping for cell phone technology. Verizon provides more than a dozen options for cell phones, each of them mediocre in its own different way. (I should also mention that the Verizon Wireless website is, itself, mediocre in many different ways.) Cell phones have been around for long enough that it ought to be fairly mature technology; instead, you have to figure out which annoying shortcoming bothers you the least. The most expensive of the non-Pocket PC models, the Samsung SCH-a630, despite having a 2 megapixel built-in camera, has a lower image quality than the cheaper “LG the V” (better known as the LG VX9800), as well as crippled Bluetooth like the v710.

I ended up settling on “LG the V,” despite its silly name and hefty form factor, because it seems to be the one model that Verizon decided not to cripple Bluetooth on. Apparently, it has complete OBEX support, and works quite well with Linux.

It gets worse shopping for Bluetooth headsets. None of the top headsets recommended by cnet are even offered by Verizon. So instead you’re stuck perusing endless message board postings for threads with names like Which Bluetooth Headset is best for VX9800? trying to figure out which, in fact, is the best Bluetooth Headset for the VX9800. While some aspects of a Bluetooth headset are obviously personal preferences based on, for example, the shape of your earlobe, how often you drive in a convertible with the top down while talking on your cell, and whether you like to wear your headset to bed, I would really appreciate some objective metrics and brand uniformity. There’s no way to predict, for example, whether a particular model of Motorola, Jabra, or Logitech headset will be any good—some seem to be well received, while others have glaring design flaws.

As a trademark lawyer, I’m disappointed by this state of affairs. I’d like to be able to identify a brand that I can trust and just go with it. This is especially true where it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of an item on first inspection (or over the Internet) and it’s an item you’ll keep for at least a while (two or three years for cell equipment). As things stand, there seem to be few real winners, and the search costs are inordinately high. Hopefully the invisible hand will eventually fix this situation, but I’m not going to bet on it.

Dear LazyWeb: What’s the best ogg- and linux-compatible hard drive based portable music player? Unlike the old days, there now seem to be a large number of portable ogg players, but most of the mainstream computer press sites give short shrift to linux compatibility issues. So what does someone “in the know” buy? I’m interested not just in compatibility, but also a player with a thoughtful physical design, user interface, and that doesn’t have little plastic-y bits that will break over time.

(By the way, the ‘official’ LazyWeb site seems to be completely overrun with spam trackbacks.)

1. IDE ribbon cables
2. IDE jumpers
3. Slave/master issues
4. BIOSes that can’t boot to large partitions (I would be happy not to see this in the afterlife, either)
5. Long, uninterruptible POST
6. dma_timer_expiry
7. Cilantro

Actually, I don’t really dislike cilantro, I just wouldn’t miss it if I never saw it for the rest of my life. The other stuff, though, is definitely getting in the way of me dying happily.

This is not a list that would resonate with most people, but I expect most of my readers are not representative of the general population.

Below is a sampling of devices present at a small family gathering on Martha’s Vineyard. Not shown is the digital camera used to take this photo, as well as a number of chargers, USB cables, and devices including an iPod, a GPS mapping device, a Nintendo 64, more cell phones, and binoculars. (Well, okay, I don’t know if “binoculars” count as a device).

Are we going to look back on these days of endless device proliferation and laugh at our erstwhile profligacy, or are we going to sink further into the unholy morass? So far “all-in-one-devices” (cell phone/PDA/camera/MP3 player) have been kind of sucky, so I fear we are heading more toward the latter option.

I’ve just spent several days (on and off) trying to get an old PIII box up and running as a file server. Now that 250G drives are down to about $80, there’s no reason anyone should be concerned about disk space anymore. Anyway, the computer kept locking (hard) whenever I tried to mkfs the disk, regardless of the filesystem.

I tried several different drives; different controllers; moving the drives around to different positions (master/slave); different kernels; different BIOS settings; and some other things—but every time the machine just locked on “Writing inode table…”

So, as a final straw, I decided to drop down to 128M RAM from 384M. Then it worked fine. Up to 256M—still fine. 384M—hard crash.

Problem solved.

I hate this kind of thing, though. It’s painful manipulating the insides of these old boxes, and there’s precious little feedback about what’s going wrong. Maybe a more wizened hacker than I would have thought to check the memory first, but everything else appeared to be working fine which isn’t usually the case when you’ve got bad memory.

An old friend of mine called this kind of experience “tuition.” It costs a lot, but in the end you learn your lesson.

I just got my first cell phone text message spam. I’m glad to have finally arrived.

I’m sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Prudential Tower in Boston, working on my laptop. In front of me are a bunch of computer components, including a CPU and two large monitors (I’m waiting for a car to cart all this away). I suppose I look a little like a homeless computer nut.

There are eleven open hotspots from where I’m sitting. As I’ve been working, I’ve gotten the following comments:

• “Now that’s a blackberry!”
• (patting the CPU) – “Buddy, it doesn’t work anymore, it’s okay.”
• “He’s got Internet!”
• (weird combination moan and groan—like a toned-down Howard Dean scream)

You know you’re a geek when… a comparison of mail readers makes you laugh out loud.

Ahem.

Maybe I’m the last one to know, but I just discovered the origin of the name “Bluetooth.” According to CNet’s Quick Guide to Bluetooth Headsets:

What’s in a name?
In case you were wondering, Bluetooth gets its name from a 10th-century Danish king, Harald Blatand (or Bluetooth) who unified Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. According to legend, he had an affinity for teeth-staining blueberries. Oh, and the logo combines the runic alphabetic characters for H and B.

I thought that was pretty cool. I had always assumed it was just a fanciful made-up name.

(By the way, this entry obviously follows from the last few—with a newborn baby, the more hands-free and cordless appliances you have, the better!)