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I was thinking about this on the way back from work today: what’s the end-user cost of (worthless) DRM? And I realized, well, it’s whatever it takes to get around it. So I decided to illustrate this with an example, using our monopoly cable provider and its BS DRM as the inspiration, since I’ve been trying to work this out. Let’s use a simple example. Cox, one of the worst companies on earth, is required by law to carry all local broadcast channels unencrypted over its cable network. They don’t, of course, and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a lot of FCC regulations and at least a couple of laws, but that’s a story for another day. So I want to take a copy of an HD program (House, for example) with me on my iPhone to watch on the train to work. Top Gear is also on at the same time, so I want to record both shows and take them both with me when I go. And for the examples, I’m assuming you’re doing this for a year. Okay. Here’s how it would work in an ideal world.

I plug my iPhone into my DVR, and get a copy of the show automagically transferred over in a beautiful, iPhone-compatible H.264 format. Cost: cable ($50/month) + DVR ($25/month) + BS Cox Charges ($25/month) = $100/month = $1,200 for the year. Of course, that’s not reality. For one thing, Apple locks down transfers to the iPhone more securely than the Treasury does its gold (and I do have a bone to pick with Apple for that). For another, this solution comes free of charge with eternal life, unicorns and world peace. So, the reality is, you’re going to need something to talk to both the DVR and the iPhone. Enter a computer.

Okay, not that much more complicated, because by law, Cox is supposed to provide an unencrypted stream of local broadcast channels out of the DVR to any device that wants it over IEEE1394 (aka “FireWire”). Except, of course, they don’t. They encrypt everything, except the SD versions of Fox, NBC, ABC, PBS and CBS (and possibly Univision). So even though the cost of this is about $1,200 (for the cable + DVR) and $600 (for the computer) = $1,800 for the year, you can’t actually do this.

In fact, to do that simple scenario of recording Top Gear and House at the same time, here’s what I need to do:

I need to get two set top boxes (one per channel), two Hauppauge HD-PVRs (one per channel) to record the unencrypted component data, a beefy encoding machine, a network and my iTunes machine. Total cost? Cable: $1,600. HD-PVRs: $500. Encoding machine: $500. Network: (let’s assume I have this, otherwise) $100. Mac: $600. That tots up to a staggering $3,200, or $3,300 if I don’t have a network for one year. This is beyond my willingness to pay, and beyond most people’s technical skills. Can you imagine if your parents or aunts and uncles asked for a copy of the latest Top Gear and you told them this is what you had to do?

So what do most people do? Well, for a cost of $(amount spent on computer), they do this, because it’s simpler, easier and it just works, thus only causing DRM to harm those legitimate consumers:

And that, in a nutshell, is why DRM sucks.

Wired has a good article up about why the future of digital music is still the crusty old MP3 format from the late 1980s. Probably the most important reason, though Wired mentions it only in passing is compatibility. Everything – and I really, truly mean everything – supports MP3. Looking around the house, I’ve yet to find a device or gadget that plays music in a format other than MP3. Sure the iPhone supports AAC, and the N800 supports Vorbis, but both devices support MP3 and that’s why I think MP3 will be around a long, long, long time yet. And judging by popular reaction, I’m not alone in this frame of mind.

In fact, the best way to understand MP3′s wide compatibility is to look at a market where there is not a standard like MP3. For example, I would very much like to backup a number of my Indian movies, which are already suffering from disc rot. However, there is no one single file format that I can save my movies too. If I save it in DivX, the most widely used video file format, I cannot play them back on the television, since none of the devices connected fully support the playback of DivX. Neither can I watch them on my iPhone, since DivX is an alien concept to Apple. On the other hand, saving the file as a H.264 file ensures I can play back on the Xbox, but the file will stutter on the iPhone. If I choose to setup a file that doesn’t stutter on the iPhone, I artifacts that make the file unwatchable on the Xbox. And heaven forbid I should try to watch this on my N800, or on the computer. I find myself in the unenviable task of having to making five different versions in order to ensure universal playback, a situation that should never arise in the first place, if there was a standard that just worked, like MP3 does for audio.

So, if anyone has a good solution to my problem, I’d love to hear it – what’s the video version of MP3?

I really wanted to like Vernor Vinge’s Hugo-winning 2006 novel, Rainbows End.

And sadly, I knew from about the first 50 pages that I would be beginning my review of the novel with those words.

Rainbows End came out about the time I was busy graduating from college, so there wasn’t much time to any of the reading then. I was intrigued by it, because I had just read Vinge’s work on the coming technological singularity, and had been reading Charlie Stross‘ Accelerando on and off as it came out in parts. Anyway, some two years after I put it on my must read list, I finally got around to it. Kind of shows you how long this list is, eh?

After reading and loving Alastair Reynolds‘ Revelation Space universe, I felt that I was ready for another “serious scientist” turned author. Never having read A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky, I was unable to compare the writing style. I’m told however that Rainbows End is probably the most readable of Vinge’s novel, which is slightly scary, since I found it a pretty difficult novel to read, and I didn’t particularly end up liking it.

What I mean by difficult is perhaps slightly different from what is normally meant by that word. For me, difficult speaks to the ease with which I could get into the story line. I found Dan Simmons‘ Hyperion similarly difficult to get into because of the vocabulary. But unlike Simmons, who was pretty much done explaining terms by the end of the first chapter, Vinge struggles to push out ever more esoteric terms nearly to the very end. So instead of focusing on the story as I should have by about 300 pages in, I spent most of my time trying to play guess the word. Compared even to a peer like Reynolds, who is willing to stop the jargon spew by the first third of the novel, Vinge seems determined to make it nigh impossible to concentrate on the story by introducing words right up to the end.

What I will say is this: Vinge is a visionary. Wikipedia says that an initial version of what became Rainbows End was published all the way back in 2002; in 2002, I would have scarcely believed that what he refers to as the “Secure Hardware Environment” was possible – or likely. However, given the recent maneuverings around ACTA, the broad authority courts in across the world have given executive branches to breach into the sanctum of a computer, as well as continued action on the part of the assholes promoting DRM, I’m beginning to suspect that it will be only a matter of time before we do see something like SHE implemented as a combination of national security, fear of terrorism and Internet security. I expect that before the next decade is out, it will be damn near impossible to buy hardware that is not bugged at the hardware level, either purposely in order to comply with government directives, or by governments where chip assembly takes place.

Second, his ideas for overlaying the real world with augmented bits and pieces is an idea as old as sci-fi itself, but his version is more believable than most. The implementation is pretty much unique in my experience – via contacts or electronic paper, rather than the usual neural implants that dominate other novel story lines. Indeed, we’re beginning to see this sort of augmented reality come into being in the last two years or so – but currently, the ability to do so is in the realm of heavy, powerful, dedicated machines like the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Ultimately, Moore’s Law will prevail, and we will indeed see chips as powerful as the tri-core PowerPC in the Xbox or the Cell in the PS3 in tiny, watch-phone sized devices. (From what I’ve been able to tell, the novel takes place in 2025, which is approximately speaking nine Moore Cycles away, meaning that the 221 sq. mm Cell chip should be doable in about 0.5 sq mm, so not a bad guess on Vinge’s part for a watch-sized augmented reality chip.) I can’t say I pretend to understand how the contacts would work power-wise, but I suppose that’s why I’m an economist and not an engineer.

But for all of this really well-thought out future, Vinge falls short when it comes to the actual implementation of the world. I struggled to understand “belief circles” and “arXiv references”, not because I was unfamiliar with the terms themselves, but because I think he used the terms incorrectly. This is easier to illustrate with an example. The formal name for the on-screen arrow controlled by the mouse is a “cursor“, or “mouse pointer”. If the pointer is not appearing on screen, technical people might say “the pointer is not showing up on screen”. People unfamiliar with the formal terms, however, would likely say “I can’t see the mouse” or something pretty similar to that. I, like most technical people, would likely be baffled initially by this statement – particularly if we’re in the same room and can see the mouse sitting beside the keyboard. Some amount of parsing later, I’d likely conclude that what the person is saying is that the pointer is not on screen, and work from there. As far as Rainbows End goes, it’s probably worse because Vinge is using a term that has a specific meaning today, and I’m attempting to understand a sentence in the context of the current meaning. It would probably – in fact, definitely – be easier if he just invented a new term and vocabulary. Instead, I’m left with this hybrid where I have to think “wait – is this a future meaning of the term ‘foo’ or is he using ‘foo’ in the same context as we are today?” And if anyone could tell me what a Scooch-a-mout or Dangerous Knowledge is, I’d be eternally grateful.

That’s not to say it’s not an entertaining story. It’s the coming of age story of a very, very old man – a man who has lost his marbles once, and been given them back. So there’s definitely a healthy and energetic plot underlying the story. There’s also a remarkable clarity of vision (even though, as I’ve mentioned, it is a pretty dystopian future) and enough unsolved mysteries and questions at the end of the novel that you’ll beg for a sequel to find out what happened; fortunately, he’s writing one.

I just kept jarring back into reality from the story. That made the story difficult to understand, and difficult to read. More than once, I considered giving up and coming back when I was more “ready” for it. I’m glad I persevered, but it took a lot longer and was a lot more exhausting than I had hoped for.

Verdict: borrow. Required reading to get half the tech jokes on the Internet, but you’re not going to read it more than once, unless it’s reading for comprehension’s sake.

One of the more interesting arguments I have back and forth with people is about Windows Vista. I’m most assuredly not a fan of Windows Vista, but I do have a slightly more fair perspective of Windows Vista than most.

For example, a friend of mine and I often have conversations that go something like this:

Friend: “Varun, Vista sucks.”
Me: “Now why?”
Friend: “Because it runs so slow. When I ran XP on it, it was so fast. But Vista is slow!”
Me: “So you’re telling me that an OS designed three Moore Cycles ago is slower than a contemporary OS? Why is this a surprise?”
Friend: “Because it’s so slow. I can’t stand this. I’m going back to XP.”

Fair enough. I have enough gripes and frustrations with Windows Vista that I’m considering buying a new laptop that comes with XP out of the box, instead of Vista. But I’m also realistic about it. When Microsoft was designing Windows Vista, the facts were: there was no EeePC on the horizon, little notice that Intel was switching away from the megahertz race to the performance per watt metric, and vast numbers of tiny, eco-friendly cores were distant gleams in chip designers’ eyes.

Anyway, this is a long way to get around to the point. My flatmate bought a new computer this weekend for less than $400. It’s one of those HP Slimline machines, kind of what I was considering, except it’s got a AMD Athlon 4400+ instead of an Intel Core 2 Duo. The only change she made was she doubled the RAM in the computer from 1GB to 2GB. It has Windows Vista Home Premium on it.

It is FAST. Even with the crapware that came with the computer (including – shudder – Norton Internet InSecurity) and no SP1, the computer ran surprisingly quickly. In fact, the new machine was significantly more responsive than XP on the predecessor machine. By way of comparison, this computer scores about 175% of the PCMarks that the old one did, so it’s not as if the new computer is several orders of magnitude faster than the old one.

Which just goes to show: Vista may require more resources than XP. And I, for one, do feel a lot of that wasted resource usage is useless crap – mainly of the DRM variety. But, when you give Vista a machine that was designed for Vista from the ground up, including a DirectX 9.0c card, enough RAM, a decent (not blazing processor) and a depressingly standard hard disk drive, it can scream and feel as responsive as XP.

I discovered a place that sells Blu-ray movies for just about the same as regular DVDs here, so I picked up Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (henceforth, “HP5“, because my hand tires of typing the whole spiel again and again) on Blu-ray for the extra $1.10. And since there’s no way I can write a review of HP5 longer than five or six sentences, I am just going to do some combine-the-posts.

For those of you comfortably watching from the sidelines of the Blu-ray versus HD-DVD battle, the technology involved in the two is functionally identical, down to the frequency of the blue laser used at 405nm. Where the difference lies is how deep individual layers of the disc are located from the surface, which is enough to make the two otherwise identical formats the same. There are some other differences too – HD-DVD can store a maximum of 17GB per layer, Blu-ray stores 25GB per layer, and there are some negligible differences in the software side of things. On the manufacturing side of things, apparently HD-DVDs can be built on the same lines as regular DVDs, making them theoretically easier – read: cheaper – to manufacture than Blu-ray discs; I have not yet seen any price differential that suggests this. Mainly, however, the biggest feature they share in common is irritation.

The primary cause of this irritation, of course, is because some studios have chosen HD-DVD, others Blu-ray. Effectively, there seems to be little to no difference in the quality of these discs, with some movies looking better on one format, and others on the other format. I strongly suspect the reason for this is that as yet there have not been any movies that: (a) require anywhere near the disc space of either format; and, (b) there haven’t been any movies that have yet been optimized for either format. So given that it’s hit or miss, the audio and visual quality differences between the two is basically a wash. So much for Blu-ray versus HD-DVD in the pre-recorded media field.

Where I have thought Blu-ray has had an advantage thus far is in the ease of making Blu-ray discs. While I have seen Blu-ray writers available for some considerable time (at least a year), I have yet to see a single HD-DVD writer. Indeed, I find it ironic that one can buy blank HD-DVD Recordable media, but not a drive to use the media in. Neither do either of the formats allow you to make a copy. While theoretically there is a managed copy mechanism present in the HD-DVD specification to allow copies for either device-shifted uses and backups, I have not seen this ever implemented. Both formats have had their respective encryptions broken within a few weeks of their releases, forcing multiple firmware updates, thus illustrating the basic principle yet again: DRM is a hindrance only for legal users and no defence against those determined to break the security of the discs.

The real joy of HD-DVD and Blu-ray is in watching it instead of a regular DVD. More than the video quality – which I feel is only slightly better than that of a regular DVD because of the aforementioned lack of optimization – the “wow” is in the audio. And what a surprise it is. Like video games, for the first time I have a decent sense of audio movement and positioning. It’s hard to describe, but easy to illustrate. For example, in the battle scene inside the Ministry of Magic in HP5, there is a moment when Lord Voldermort sends shards of glass flying towards Dumbledore and Harry. At the last moment this is converted into sand by Dumbledore. With the regular DVD there is no sense that the glass has a different sound from the sand. With the Blu-ray disc, though, you can tell there are two different materials, because the left side is making a whistling noise while the right side is making a shushing sound. That was the truly “wow!” moment for me.

Ultimately, though, I don’t see the need for the discs. I have long been a proponent of getting rid of the discs and moving to an all digital format. Indeed, given a way to store video with all the options offered by DVDs (subtitles, multiple angles, etc.), I would not today have a single DVD around. I seriously doubt that either format will take off in a major way, serving as a niche market for audiophiles and videophiles. Most people are happy with the quality of DVDs and those who want more are usually well connected to the internet and have legal ways to download better quality videos than DVD offers. In countries where broadband connections are not as prevalent, there is also a preference for the cheaper option – which DVD remains compared to the next-generation discs.

I suspect by the time this format war is settled, everyone who wants better than DVD quality video and audio will have access to it through a broadband connection, and those who don’t have such a connection will continue to be satisfied with DVD quality audio and video. In essence, this war will be an expensive footnote on the road of optical media development.

Go read this. Then come back. I’ll wait, don’t worry.

Now let’s see how this survey most likely happened.

Option 1: Microsoft offers rental downloads at $5 a pop per movie with time and more DRM restrictions.
Option 2: Microsoft offers to-keep downloads at $15 a pop per movie with more DRM restrictions.

Which would you go for? Most likely you’d go for option 1 above, thus leading to the stupidity best illustrated by Robin Burrows comment above. The reason is because the survey is missing option 3, to which survey takers are implicitly considering:

Option 3: Buy the full movie from my local shop without any additional DRM restrictions for $15 with the media.

Compared to option 3, option 2 sucks – it’s not competitive at all. Thus most consumers choose option 1, because option 3 isn’t available. And thus you get the idiocy of people like Robin Burrows. To be fair, he’s only playing the game, because really the people who ought to be first against the wall are the surveyors who wrote the question that way.

If I had the option to get my media in digital format, without intrusive and fair-use violating DRM, that allowed me to share my media the way I would share my physical media, allowed me to play my media the way I want when I want where I want, at the same price as the physical disc or less, guess how many discs I would have?

If you guessed zero, you’d be right.

I’ve been reading the rather confusing thread on Slashdot about Nokia refusing to support the open source Ogg Theora video codec because of DRM concerns. While I share the sentiments of the vast majority of the readers of Slashdot that DRM sucks, speaking as an economist, I find myself accepting Nokia’s argument that most content providers, particularly in the US, will not licence their content without onerous DRM that hurts legitimate consumers and presents no problems to pirates.

I’ve been considering some of the comments, most especially the suggestions that people switch to using Ogg Vorbis or FLAC for their audio storage needs, and I find that despite my desire to do so, it’s hard to find good quality, relatively inexpensive players for it. This is particularly true with portable audio players, but try to stream Ogg or FLAC over your own network, and the problems become quickly inherent – no device support chiefly amongst them. Thus, I, like most people, stick with using MP3, not because I like the standard or think it has better technical merits, but because as the defacto standard, it has massive, massive network effects and almost any device I can think of supports it. AAC is getting there (certainly through the iPod-iTunes ecosystem), but the number of AAC-supporting devices is still dwarfed by the number of MP3-supporting devices.

But what do you use to store music? First poll below!

[poll=2]

A few years ago, I had a debate with Stakface about the relative speed of operating systems. While my laptop is in the shop, I’m using my Mac as a main computer for the first time in… years? Certainly, A Very Long Time. And my first impression of multi-tasking in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is that it’s slow and unresponsive. To be sure, this computer is aging (what isn’t?), but even then it’s not quite three years old and acting much, much older. To compare my Toshiba laptop from 2002 running Vista to this Mac Mini from 2005 running Leopard would probably result the Toshiba winning the responsiveness award, even with half the memory that this machine has (512MB of RAM there versus 1GB here).

I find that while Windows has an unhappy habit of running very responsively 99% of the time, every half hour or so, Windows will find some background task that will suck away every single available computing resource and the interface will crawl to a halt. Surprisingly, no data really gets lost in the process, though. Vista in particular has a nasty habit of doing this more often, which I attribute to a combination of its resource hungry indexing engine and its pointless and ultimately futile DRM algorithms.

By contrast, Mac OS X feels slow all the time, but there are never really any surprising changes in speed. Whether it’s the Adium list in the background where animations are supposed to take five seconds and take between ten and 12, or whether it’s the time before switching applications, the interface as a whole feels sluggish. What is even more annoying though about this process is that occasionally when you switch applications – even though the menu bar has drawn itself and I’m waiting for the window to appear – data gets misdirected, adding to the frustrations. So my typing a space causes iTunes to stop playing, even though iTunes is no longer the foremost application.

Much like the screen wipes in Windows 98, where it would literally take several seconds for a minimized window to disappear and be replaced with the desktop, the Mac OS doesn’t feel like a multi-tasking OS. This perception is reinforced by things which happen in the background in Windows whereas they are modal in the Mac interface. For example: printing from the Mac usually brings up an application modal “Printing…” box, forcing me to stop working on the document instead of the Windows scenario where after you hit “Print” or “OK” in the Print dialog box, you can continue working, letting some background process handle the printing. It’s frustrating and irritating to have that happen, particularly if, like me, you’re trying to edit your new resume and make sure the alignment is okay on a piece of paper, which requires multiple little edits and reprints.

If you grow up with the Mac interface, I think most people find it responsive enough. Coming from Windows, however, the entire interface responsiveness philosophy feels wrong. Which brings me back to the debate I had with Stakface all those many months ago: small, occasional disruptions are excusable and even expected in Windows; consistent slowdowns are not. He believed it was more disruptive to have a sudden slowdown in performance rather than to just have a slow, consistent interface.

Different philosophies indeed.

Particularly if you’re hawking a product like the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle.

I don’t know what the selling model seems to be for a device like this – particularly in the case of the Kindle which sells for $400, and books cost $10 a piece. Let’s look at the competition for a device like this: dead trees in the shape of a cuboid, selling for approximately $Free to $6.99. Perhaps $30 for a hot new hardcover from a small-town bookseller. And there are no upfront costs to the buyer. The model I’m presuming that they are trying to emulate is the music selling business, where tracks can be bought and stored on a digital audio player (DAP). Two major problems:

1. The pricing is completely off – you usually pay less for a digital download than the associated physical plastic disc like a CD. In this case, not only are you paying a higher rate for the same content (wrapped in unsharable DRM, of course), you’re also paying the very high barrier to entry. To be sure, you pay a higher upfront cost to get a computer and a DAP, but given that most people who are likely to use a DAP already have a computer, this cost is amortized over many different activities, leaving the cost of the player, which can range from $20 to $500, against the $300 of the Sony Reader or the $400 of the Kindle.
2. The success of online music stores and services has been driven in no small part because of the ability to download songs ala carte. So instead of buying the $15 bundle of ten crappy songs and two good songs, you can spend $2 to purchase the two good songs and forgo the $10 loss of the bad songs. Books aren’t like that – you’re not going to buy chapters 1-12, skip chapters 13-18 and buy chapters 19-25 at $0.25 a chapter. Books are bound together because it’s hard to follow the story if the chapters were served ala carte. By contrast, magazines are salable by article, and were the Kindle or the Sony Reader offering the ability to purchase articles ala carte, this would likely be a very successful device, particularly for people in the sciences or for college students with slightly larger budgets.

So, in short, it’s hard to see this having much success outside a very, very small niche. The sad thing, of course, is that publishers and technology developers will take note of the failure of such a device and conclude that there is no market for a relatively inexpensive e-ink based book reader and shut down further development. Instead, consider what the problems truly are for a device such as this and work to fix them:

• DRM – making digital books, unlike real books unsharable. Options: don’t implement DRM (really the only viable solution in the long-term), enable DRM that allows books to be “passed on” and read by one person at a time, just like a real book.
• Pricing – given that we’re not paying for physical resources, and given that most books are in digital form as it is to be typeset, there is no reason for digital books to cost more than their physical counterparts. $2 is a fine price for digital books, $3 is tolerable. Anything above that is a fleecing
• More uses of the device’s strengths, less of its weaknesses – given what the device does (books), there is no reason to cram in a music player. Most people who are likely to buy this device will have at least two music playing devices with them anyway – DAP and cell phone. There’s no reason, in this instance, to deploy a music player; if and when devices such as a book reader become ubiquitous and cheap (say, less than $50), it makes sense to use a book reader as a music player. On the other hand, the devices (particularly the Kindle) is capable of much more:
  • The aforementioned ala carte journal or magazine subscriptions.
  • The ability to read long documents in Word, PDF and other formats in an open fashion.
• More bookish. The Sony Reader excels at being a tiny size, and by looking like a very thin hardcover. The Kindle looks positively clunky by comparison. Neither, however, is designed to be as portable as a book. To succeed, it needs to be roughly the size and shape of a paper back – something that can be tossed in a bag or carried in a pocket without bulging or poking out. The N800 is such a form factor – and it may be worth designing a device which uses a form factor. I, for one, have always thought that an electronic book reader should be the size of a mass market paperback (4.1″ x 6.8″) and thinner, with buttons on the reverse (think about how you hold a book). It should be as simple as possible, like a book: maybe a toggle switch for on-off at the top, buttons to go next and back on the reverse on both sides and a select button. That’s it – nothing more complicated or sophisticated.

A few days ago I had a major scare with my phone, and I was convinced it was the end of the line for my scratched up, but otherwise good shape Nokia N80ie. I started my emergency research for a new phone, making sure to avoid Nokia after my unbelievably bad experience with them. That, coupled with my recent desire to be standards compliant such that I could switch platforms or applications at any time, made me look at almost every major mobile platform – BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, iPhone and, of course, Linux.

As luck would have it, I got the problem fixed after recalibrating a few things. However, the scare made me reevaluate my dependence on certain platforms. For example, I have used Series 60 as my primary mobile platform for almost four years now. Similarly, I have depended on Windows as my primary OS for nearly as long as I have been using computers. My first Windows was the Windows 2.0 derivative known as Windows/386, in fact. Having been on Microsoft platforms for as long as I have, it makes it difficult to switch not because I’m scared of Linux, but because it gets in the way of my productivity.

Should something go wrong in Windows, I know where to find out what the problem is, I know where to go to fix the problem and experience has taught me what is most likely to go wrong. These ties are Microsoft’s true network effects and the reason they can put out a service pack every five years and expect everyone to pay up. By contrast, I can get Linux working without any troubles and I can fix small problems and determine incompatibilities, but I don’t have the faintest clue what to do if something goes seriously awry. A reasonable person would expect that knowing one OS inside out should be sufficient.

It is not. You see, there’s something very important about desktop Linux and Linux platforms like Android.

They are insurance.

They are my insurance that should Microsoft do or be forced to do something that is absolutely reprehensible, then I want to be able to pick up and leave. Suppose a government agency decides that a backdoor should be left to allow unfettered government access to my personal files – then I want to be able to switch to an OS which has the benefit of the “many eyes” approach to security. Or suppose Microsoft decides to switch to a subscription OS service – so that you pay, say $100 for the OS media, and then $120 a year to use the OS. Quite aside from the unacceptably transient nature of this relationship (c.f.: MLB switches its DRM provider), I want to be able to switch to an OS that cannot extort money to provide me with access to my computer.

That’s why I started this year by making a pledge to use more FOSS programs in my every day life. Back when it was called Phoenix in 2002, I started using Mozilla Firefox. This year I started using Thunderbird and Pidgin. And I switched to more open, better defined standards. At the beginning of this year, I used Outlook to store calendar information in its proprietary Outlook store, stored messages in its proprietary PST format and so on. Today I use Thunderbird to keep my data in the universal and open mbox format, and use the Lightning extension to keep my calendar in the universal and open iCalendar format. I used to use Trillian to send instant messages and mainly in MSN. Now I use Pidgin and mainly message using XMPP. My music used to be in a variety of formats, including DRM’ed WMA and AAC; now everything is MP3. I don’t use Ogg because I’ve yet to come across a Ogg-playing client for half the devices I use, but should Ogg support come out for my devices, I’ll convert my music as soon as possible. Next year I plan on using OpenOffice more extensively. And replace my reliance on Stata by using R.

These changes also make it possible to switch operating systems more easily moving forward. These applications insure against vendor-lock when it comes to my data. And FOSS applications are insurance against vendor-lock on applications.

If you’re willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on insurance of your physical property, it makes common sense to insure against vendor-lock for free, or for the price of a few hours of your work-week.