Hummingbird Mentality

After re-listening to many of the excellent podcasts from 2005’s Accelerating Change conference, available from IT conversations; I got a hankering to read Charlie Stross’s highly recommended, and Hugo award nominated, post singularity novel Accelerando. The book is available to download under a Creative Commons license. Or rather, the book was available for download. Accellerando.org is down, and although the site itself can be accessed for now via Google’s cache, the PDF of Stross’s novel is unavailable. So too is the site which originally seeded the novels torrent, and the torrent itself. Cue whaling and gnashing of teeth re: the unsustainability of torrents.

Bittorrent, a protocol which provides an excellent method of ‘appropriating’ the latest episode of Lost, sans advertisements direct from the USA, is rather unsuited to maintaining the availability of media on the long tail. A naive, non programmer’s explanation of why this is the case follows… For a file to be available to download via Bittorrent, at least one seeder must maintain availability of a complete copy, dynamically providing portions of the file to a potential downloading ’swarm’. Additionally, for a file to be practically quick to download, pieces of it must be available from a wide range of sources (so that individual clients can trade them directly, greatly accelerating the process), and must additionally be listed on a Bittorrent tracker server, which brokers communications between clients, and between clients and seeder.

Dispersed hosting is a weakness and a strength of Bittorrent as a distribution medium. Say what you will about the printing press, it takes far longer for paper based novels to disappear completely than for their digital equivalents to become network isolated, or become unreadable due to the march of incompatibility.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about building Bittorrent (or torrent like) functionality into consumer devices, set top boxes and the like; and little awareness of the bandwidth costs that such distribution transfers to the end user.

There have been a variety of attempts to establish an open directory of Creative Commons works, but as of right now no exhaustive list exists, and existing search methodologies are ineffectual. This is not a criticism of CC per say, which I find both useful and commendable, both as a creator (almost without exception, everything on this site is made available under a creative commons license), and an ethical (sic) user, but rather of the assumption that the internet automagically provides publishing methodologies equivalent or superior to those of traditional media.

Right now, as far as I can tell, it is essentially impossible to find a (PDF) copy of Accelerando online, as far the the internet is concerned, the novel no longer exists. Similarly, the archive of episodes of Technolotics will effectively disappear forever in the ether, if I ever fail to pay a hosting bill (already rather overdue I’m afraid).

Update: After some further searching, I did manage to find a lone floating copy - download here - of Accelerando, which neatly solved my immediate problem. Astute readers will note that this doesn’t invalidate my original point. To ensure the novels continuing availability (I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume Accelerando.org’s servers have been consumed by some sort of singularity), I’m hosting the file myself. Download link, and copyright notice, after the break.

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I don’t buy the argument the the iPod - iTunes packages own the digital market due to the wonderful convenience of the iTunes store. Yes iTunes is one of the major reasons for the iPod’s success. The same is not necessarily true of the iTunes store, at least not in Europe, where the store didn’t even open for a full year after the US version, long after iPod units began flying off the shelves in 2002.

Frankly, I don’t know anyone who buys music from the iTunes store, even now - perhaps because it’s far less common for Irish students to have credit cards, than their American contemporaries. Using the iTunes store has never made sense from a behavioral economics perspective; as purchasing a CD through Amazon or Cd Wow is just as easy, cheaper, and provides access to the original media to rip, mix, burn as much as desired. More importantly for students, CD’s (and Mp3’s) are much easier to share and borrow. 200 million songs sold in two years might seem like a lot, but it’s still a drop in the ocean next to the tracks purchased on CD and traded on file sharing networks.

The iTunes software is on the other hand, ubiquitously used to rip and burn CD’s, manage Mp3 / M4a collections, and most importantly to sync iPods. It’s this - the convenience and usability of the iTunes - iPod combination, that has given Apple such a lead. Hell, the store is a loss leader. Would this integration be so difficult to mimic?

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Interesting! It appears Microsoft’s new Zune player is nothing more than a repackaged Toshiba Gigabeat. This from Wikipedia, by way of Gadgetell.

[Toshiba] “1089″ and The Zune

Microsoft’s Zune is a branded version of the new “1089″ model of the Gigabeat. Due to a very tight release schedule, Microsoft worked with Toshiba to modify the Gigabeat firmware, outer-casing and user interface…The Zune is identical to Toshiba’s 1089 model’s specifications… After the initial launch, Microsoft will take-over production and manufacturing of the Zune from Toshiba.

Hilarious. Despite reading about the Zune’s many glaring limitations [1][2][3][4], I’d managed to miss this. Microsoft didn’t even make the damn thing! This explains so much. Why Zune doesn’t integrate with Windows Media Player, doesn’t work with Windows Vista, and why it’s apparently so well designed (the crippling un-features are afterthoughts). Hardy har har, Microsoft can’t even build it’s own Mp3 player!

It does make you wonder why the hardware companies who produce these wonder machines don’t just go their own way and get them into the market. It’s an open secret that Apple didn’t design the original iPod, but instead adapted the design from a prospective product from a tiny company called Portal Player.

Another interesting line from the Wiki..

The Gigabeat line was chosen because of its tight integration with Windows Media Player and its support for the PlayForSure DRM standard.

Makes you wonder why the finished device doesn’t support PlaysForSure.