Idea I didn't bother patenting #42

I distinctly remember discussing the idea of advertising messages on car wheels after putting together rotating wheel rims and under-car lighting. With a wireless link to a computer actually on the wheel the message could even be made dynamic. This was about two or three years ago - but I eventually decided that such illuminations would fall foul of restrictions on putting illuminations on cars. After all if such things were legal why don't people put a dynamic LED ticker in their rear window to communicate with that tailgater, hot chick or hunky trucker behind them? Or even to send a "Sorry! My bad!" after cutting someone off.

But according to Gizmodo it looks like some company called Illumination Design Works has created a product called Hokey Spokes to put colored designs and messages on bike wheels. Its only a matter of time before its the latest bling, bling fad for the well appointed pimpmobile.

Here comes the chopper to open your lock!

Well don't say I didn't warn you, because I did... news just in from Malaysia will surely make fingerprint scanner based locks about as popular "as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip". Believe me, news about a car owner getting his finger hacked off with a machette will be all over the place in no time at all. All we need now to finally finish off biometrics is a re-run of the clip from "Demolition Man" where the prison guard gets his eyeball gouged out.

ROTFLMAO - Ariel Atom 2 review

It's not often, okay never, that a car review has made me laugh out loud. However the BBC Top Gear programme ended its latest season with a test drive and review of the Ariel Atom 2. Even if you're not into cars and going fast its worth watching the video to see what an open top 300 horsepower car that weighs only 1100 pounds will do to your face when you put the pedal to the metal. Its basically the worlds fastest go-cart except its street legal, and the second fastest street legal car they have ever tested - second only to the Ferarri F60 Enzo which happens to cost more than ten times as much.

Someone has been reading my email

Well, I swear it seems like that sometimes. Just a few months ago I did a brain dump of product ideas and stashed them away in my "Ideas" mail folder. Software to allow you to control Windows Media Center by voice was among them, dated December 16th 2004.

Now look what someone went and did.

Plays for sure - maybe

Well despite my best efforts to use Napster to stop buying CDs there's just one problem - my girlfriend loves some of the newly acquired songs so much she wants them on her MP3 player. Unfortunately that's the one thing Napster can't do unless you actually purchase the tracks vs. just "renting" them. So, off she goes and buys the CD. Sigh. Kind of defeats the purpose but I can understand it. She could at least buy the tracks from Napster I guess at $0.99 each it will be cheaper and more instantaneous than buying the CD and ripping.

So the real solution is to subscribe to "Napster To Go" for the extra $5 a month (they just knew I would) and then we can take that music wherever (up to three different MP3 players are allowed). Even at $14.99 a month I still think its a great deal - that's just about one CD purchase a month. The big problem is Napster lists precious few MP3 players that support their To Go service, basically the Creative Zen Micro and the iRiver H10.

While investigating which to get I started to get confused - the Napster site mentions the Microsoft "Plays for Sure" logo and I start wondering why it is that they don't list all "Plays for Sure" players as being compatible. After all the Microsoft site lists dozens of players supporting "Plays for sure" including several Creative players. And they say that Plays for Sure means the player supports Windows Media Player 10 and their digital rights management stuff for playing protected content, so what gives?

Eventually I figured it out - I noticed that as well as the pesky little "Plays for sure" logo they have a secondary one that lists "Download" and "Subscription". It turns out that subscription content requires some extra chops that most plays for sure players don't have at the moment. Only the Zen Micro and a few others have the "Subscription" box ticked.

So, it seems that "Plays for Sure" is really only "Maybe Plays for Sure" which kind of defeats the point. How many consumers are going to bother checking the back of the box or be smart enough to figure out the difference better subscription and download content especially when Napster does let you "download" as it were. I guess that is why Napster decided it needed its very own "Works with Napster To Go" compatibility logo.

The man who mistook his pop-under for spyware

Last week I spent an entire afternoon trying to track down what I thought was a spyware infection on my laptop. Since I do some part time work purging other peoples computer of spyware I thought I was somewhat embarrassed to have succumbed to it in the first place, but it was far worse that after hours of scanning, poking around, and Googling to the ends of the earth I still couldn't figure it out.

For the record I use Microsoft's Anti-spyware Beta product to keep stuff off my machine because its the best free product there is. They may eventually charge for it but not yet. It also has the best realtime defense against spyware monitoring a whole raft of system settings that others don't. However for removal of spyware I generally resort to Webroot's SpySweeper that detects stuff other programs don't find. What I usually do is download the free trial, run it and then uninstall it. For whatever reason they don't seem to mind this usage pattern and I have recommended the pay version to lots of customers.

Anyway a couple of weeks ago I closed a Mozilla Firefox window only to see, horror of horrors, a pop-under window right there in front of me. Pop-unders and there pop-up brethren used to be the scourge of my and most peoples web browsing existence, but since I switched to Mozilla a few years back I haven't seen any. So the pop-under leering at me now was a shock. I knew the only explanation could be spyware lurking on my machine and surreptitiously commanding Firefox to open windows without my permission.

But after the aforementioned afternoon of looking for spyware I found nothing. The URL from whence the popup came, or claimed to come, z1.adserver.com, produced plenty of hits on Google but all of them seemed to be related to spyware I didn't have. I was eventually beginning to believe I had been infected by some completely new strain of spyware that had managed to get around Microsoft's realtime protection and was undetectable by the latest and greatest scanner. Harrumph.

Then I started to wonder if I could catch the spyware in action telling Firefox to create the popup window - that would allow me look at all the running processes and figure out what it was and remove it. So I looked around for information on configuring Firefox's popup-blocker and then Eureka!. Searching for pop-under and Firefox lead me to a page that described a recent scourge that even afflicts Firefox: the Flash activated pop-under and pop-up. Apparently people have started putting Flash and other plugin content on pages that can create a secondary window and that is not normally blocked by Firefox.

However it turns out there is a hidden option privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins that can be set to make Firefox stop popups originating from plugins. Yay! I enabled that and now for the last week I haven't seen a single pop-under. Apparently this hidden option may soon be put into the may Firefox configuration UI but why on earth isn't it there now and more importantly the default action?

Still it's a relief to find I didn't have spyware on my machine after all (it makes me extremely nervous to think about it) but frustrating that it took so long to figure out what was going on. At least next time I see this problem on someone else's machine I'll know much quicker that reality isn't really on the blink and the fix is simple.

Sometimes its the little things

So I sit here pontificating about grand technological schemes that make sense and I just plain miss the obvious stuff - like putting a stero jack into cars. Its so easy that its just mind boggling no one has done this before. We go out buying lame tape adapters, FM transmitters and all sorts but why did no one ever kick up a stink about this before?

Truth be told I have thought about it before - I always thought it was a vast global conspiracy to force us to buy those epensive CD player options instead of plugging in our own. Or collusion between car companies and all those adapter companies to keep us coughing up $20, $30 or more just to get around the absence of a 10 cent part and a whole in the front of the player.

Well I'm sure those who have separate amps and CD players in their car could have rigged an external switch and input for the amp, and it strikes me as odd that the car audio companies never thought of doing this before for the aftermarket. But really, there's not much to say than "Duh! About time to!"

Please post comments with any other obvious but strangely absent technological advances society is missing.

Illegal music downloads - my 2 cents worth

Just suppose for a minute that this year everyone of the 111 million households in the US downloaded 9 albums worth of music tracks. That's about 1 billion albums, or around 10 billion tracks of music (at 11 tracks per album). Now lets suppose the music industry made $0.79 per track then that would be $8 billion in revenue for the music biz give or take per year.

But lets make a huge assumption - that no one paid for anyone of those tracks, yes that every single household got 9 albums of music, and didn't pay an penny for them. Sure, some households probably download hundreds of albums worth of music each year (thanks kids!), but then some, in fact I'll hazard a guess - most - download zero. I'll reckon that on average 9 or 10 albums per household per year is quite conservative, and with legitimate and relatively cheap (compared to store bought music) download technologies now available the number of illegal downloads is probably rapidly dwindling.

So, even with some pretty aggressive estimates of unpaid for music downloading the music biz is only loosing $8 billion a year and that's totally ignoring the effect of unpaid for downloads spawning actual music purchases and increasing revenue in other areas of the biz - like live concert attendance. In fact according to the IFPI Digital Music Report 2005 only 36% of downloaders buy less music because of it, and 10% actually buy more. In fact the IFPI report quotes Informa Media group as saying losses due to illegal downloads could be "as much as $2.1 billion" in 2004, far less than my estimate. Even globally they can only rack up a $6 billion decline in the music industry in the last five years.

Sure $2.1 billion, by the industry's own estimation, is a lot of money. But its not and obscene amount of money compared to say, the size of the economy. By all accounts you'd think that the world was going to end because of illegal downloads. Per person in the US it represents less than 2 cents per day of losses. Yes folks, if we all dug into our pockets and found just an extra 2 cents per day the music industry would have nothing to complain about. That's a mere 60 cents per month, less than the cost of the cheapest and nastiest cup of Joe per month.

In fact it turns out a whole lot of things in life have more or way more significant impact on society than that of illegal music downloads. How about credit card fraud? Also currently estimated at over $2 billion per year in the USA alone. Or what about all those mega-billion dollar corporate frauds? Or the tens of billions that offshore tax havens are costing the US tax payer or even the worlds poor and starving. Remember if corporations aren't paying their taxes then peoples taxes have to go up to compensate. In the 1940s corporations and people paid about equal amounts of the US annual taxes, now corporations pay about 13% and you, Joe and Jane Doe pay the rest.

Or getting away from corporations, how about losses to the US due to the economic effects of accidental deaths? There were over 97,000 in the US for 1998 with an estimated economic impact of over $200 billion per year. Holy smokes that's one hundred times the cost of music theft, how about we just reduce that rate by 1%? I mean automobiles kill over 40,000 people per year, if we could just reduce that figure by 2% we'd have more impact than stopping every single unpaid for music download. Think about it, if your 2 cents per day could save the lives of a thousand people next year, or let unpaid for music downloading continue as it is, which would you choose? I'm not saying the latter is good, just relative to the rest of the general suffering, nastiness and unpleasantness in society its certainly not public enemy number one. So the next time some industry pundit, or government stooge is saying "blah, blah, blah, its hurting the economy" please, just have some sense of proportion.