3 Reasons Why Legal Music Downloads Suck

Here we go, 3 reasons why you shouldn’t buy music from digital music stores such as iTunes.

1. Digital Downloads are worth nothing.

On iTunes a single is worth £0.79.

However, the value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. Music purchased from iTunes cannot be sold, cannot be transferred. It immediately becomes valueless. Thus second hand digital music is worth £0.00. Hardly a great investment.

I know some people who would never buy a new car – And I quote.. “It becomes worth 10% less than I paid for it as soon as I drive it out of the showroom.” – Yet they are happy to spend hundreds of pounds a year on iTunes. Music which loses 100% of its value as soon as it hits their computer. Seems a bit silly really.

2. CD’s are better value for money!

A CD retains it’s value. You can physically touch it, you can sell it on if you get bored of it.

Lets look at a real world example. Coheed and Cambria ::  ‘Year of the Black Rainbow’

iTunes: £7.99.(digital)
Play.com: £7.99. (CD) – http://bit.ly/a8Dyv9

They cost the same! Despite the extra costs to get the raw materials, create the CD, package it, post it etc. Furthermore you get more with the CD. You get a ‘Making Of’ DVD and the lyric sheet along with the same tracks found on iTunes.

If you look closely at Steve Jobs when he is using iTunes I am sure you can see ‘$$$’ appear in his eyes.

3. There are better alternatives

For older music, more often than not, a CD is usually cheaper than the digital copy. For listening purposes, if you are staying at home you might as well use a free service such as Spotify. Even paying £10 a month for Spotify presents better value for money than iTunes. It has the same drawbacks, you cannot sell / transfer music and yet it has the advantage of opening up a library of (probably) millions of tracks.

Over to you

What do you make of legal digital downloads? A big swindle or the future of the music industry?

Posted in General, Observations | 1 Comment »

Sorting out Facebook privacy

It is difficult to talk about online privacy without sounding paranoid. Here is how I see it.

1) I do not want strangers to know my precise location at any given point. This is mainly down to security and trying to limit the already obscure risk of burglary when I am out. Perhaps also to limit the even more obscure risk of being abducted on my daily stroll. (Do you see what I mean about sounding paranoid?)

2) I do not want people to be able to see pictures of me. Well, not exactly. The problem is that images often do not carry a context, furthermore you often have very little control over what images other people post. For example. I would like to try restrict the publication of the odd drunken picture. Such pictures spread around friends are fun, such pictures spread around strangers is just plain creepy.

3) I would like to keep most of my private life private.

The problem with Facebook is that the default settings are a bit iffy. The main two which raise an eyebrow are.

a) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> What your friends can share about you.

By default this was set as pretty much everything. Ok so I have been ignoring the prompt to make my account more private for about 6 months but still… most of this information doesn’t matter however being able to share photos / videos / status updates and family information… that potentially might not bode well. Considering how I only talk to maybe a fifth of my Facebook ‘friends’ I unticked everything. I just see no reason why friends need to share any information about me.

b) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> Instant Personalization Pilot Program

This horrible invention allows ‘partner’ websites to detect facebook users and personalise their websites based on the information they receive about you. Sorry… but no thanks. I think this is really horrible and is the complete opposite of point 3 above. While this is only a pilot program at the moment, it seems that the idea is to expand it. As a programmer it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to harvest the facebook details of visitors..

Friends of Friends

The only other thing I did was make most of my data invisible to friends of friends. As I said above, the majority of ‘Friends’ on Facebook are not actual friends. Thus… 95% of ‘friends of friends’ are strangers. I came to the conclusion that if I do not want strangers to view something I probably do not want friends of friends viewing it either.

Concluding

Facebook for networking is awesome. People who spend hours playing Farmville or doing one of the millions of pointless questionnaires may want to reassess some of their life choices.. however, each to their own. It is just important to remember that to make use of 95% of Facebook’s features you really do not need to share tonnes of information about yourself. I would advise everyone to spend 5 minutes running through their privacy settings to ensure they are happy with what is being shared about them.

Posted in General, Observations | No Comments »

Punting for Lib Dem

This is just a quick post explaining why I am voting Lib Dem this year. I have never voted Lib Dem. In the 6 years I have been eligible to vote I have consistently opted for Labour.

Labour

Labour have had 13 years in power. I actually think Brown is alright. I do not mind ‘the bigoted woman’ remark. He was obviously frustrated and said something in the heat of the moment. It’s nice to see he is human.

However I can’t help but feel that the Labour party has had their time. Looking at their manifesto I see very little that is new and a lot of ‘more of the same.’ I think it is too late for this. Labour have made commitments like counting immigrants out of the country… why didn’t they do this 12/11/10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1 years ago. Labour has done a lot of good things while in power. However, they just seem to have run out of ideas. This is why I will not be voting for Labour.

Tories

The one thing I like about the Tories is their promise for a new budget when they get into power. This is a great idea especially considering how the Government hasn’t done a spending review recently and the last budget was more about a political speech than about numbers.

However, I am genuinely worried about the Tories being in power. Look at their actions in the past 5 years.  They promised to match Labours spending commitments year on year. When things went wrong they attacked Labour for not saving… it would have been no different if the Tories were in power. You then have banks, when they started going under, at every turn the Tories made the wrong choice. If the Tories had been in power we would have been buggered. After all it was Brown and his ideas which was the model that the rest of the world adopted.

I then have my local MP. I e-mailed all of the ‘big 3′ candidates. Grant Shapps was the only one who didn’t respond. If he cannot take the time to listen to me now, what hope is there that he will in future? Grant has got back to me with some nice responses. Only candidate not to bash the other parties. Thats a +1 for him.

Finally who the hell are the Tories. Apart from Cameron who are you voting in? I can name 4 Tories. Cameron, Hague, Clarke and Osborne. I can name more Liberals and they are the Lib Dems! No one knows who the Lib Dems are!

Lib Dems

A new politics! A bright future! Well no, lets not get carried away. Nick Clegg has been the biggest winner this year but he also has a number of marks against his name. He continues to attack the ‘Ashcroft funded’ Tories despite having a number of dodgy party sponsors himself. He talks about fairness, yet when queried on iffy campaign tactics by one of his candidates he sidesteps the question and tows the party line. For the past week he has said nothing new which has been a little boring.

However, you need to compare him to the other 2. The Lib Dems are actually thinking outside the box. Raising the possibility of scrapping a £100B weapon we can never use… it’s a good thing! The fact that Labour + Tories won’t even raise it for discussion is very worrying. Having a policy which actually deal’s with immigration.. sure, it might need fine tuning but it is a new idea! A workable policy! Redistributing wealth to remove the tax burden on the poorly paid… reforming the voting system… it’s all good stuff.

Perhaps most importantly is the cuts. The Lib Dems by far have the most costed review on spending.  They talk about the cuts they are going to make and the tax raises they want to do. They come up short on what is required but far less short than the Conservatives and Labour.

Closing

Lib Dems need an act of God to get an outright majority. However a vote for the liberals isn’t a wasted vote. It is the only way to inject some fresh ideas into politics. The Tories say a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Brown. Perhaps they are right… However Labour would only get in with Liberal support and the Liberals would only give that support if Labour seriously adopted a number of Liberal policies.

The country needs new policies and a new direction. Only a vote for Liberals will bring this.

Posted in General, Observations | No Comments »

A Prolonged Break

For the past week I have been in Portugal. When I went I decided to have a complete break from technology. Apart from my phone (which I kept off) and an iPod which I played when I travelled I had nothing but scenery and books to entertain me.

Now, this obviously led to some frustrations. The Internet is both wonderful and crap. The crap I did not miss. The wonderful-ness… or Google as many know it..  I did miss. On the first day I had a problem. What should I do in Portugal? If I had my laptop I would have done a search ‘<my location> tourism/attractions/days out/etc’. This would have taken a moment. I could have looked at scale maps, got reviews, planned travel and got opening hours instantly.

The second use was for medical reasons, my brother, despite warnings got hideously burnt on the first day. I would have loved to Google it and see what it threw up. There has got to me more than ‘apply after sun.’

What I had at my disposal instead of the internet a holiday rep, a barmaid at the local bar and a freemap. This ‘freemap’ was a non-scale map with various locations dotted on it. I do not have a car so what looks like 5 minutes on a non-scale map could be a 2 hour walk. While this was initially slow, I did find a novelty in it. It made my holiday a far more personalised experience. Take travel for example, our local bar had a travel service when we purchased food. We would show up. Ask for the usual, then get a ride to where ever we wanted. If I had a laptop I would have found the cheapest taxi and had a very annoymous travelling experience. Instead we were chatting to English drivers and had a great holiday.

The same can be said about many other things. Local shops, which I would have avoided if I knew where the local supermarket was, were filled with friendly and talkative people.

If I had the Internet I would have gone straight to the biggest beach, my local map didn’t cover the large beaches and instead I had a great opportunity to discover what can only be discribed as micro beaches. Each one had a single restaurant which some how survived off of the tiny flow of visitors. I would have usually overlooked these and instead found the first sun lounger in the nearest large town.

For all the wonder’s of technology, I can’t help but feel that it can rob you of memories. You become programmed to look for the most efficient way to get around. To try to pack your holiday with everything that you can do. However, often it is just far better to land and talk to those around you. Find out what is worth doing and just stumble onto things. I will definately be going travelling without technology on my next holiday and holidays to come.

Posted in General, Observations | 1 Comment »