Pay Per View PCs?

CNet has been reporting on a recent patent by Microsoft. This patent relates to a metered, pay-as-you-go computing experience.

According to Microsoft this would be "a computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected."

So, you would (presumably on a monthly basis), for example, pay less to use your PC as a browser, and a premium to run Office applications, games or whatever. You could also pay extra to make your PC run at a higher speed for your applications.

"When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and, when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user," says Microsoft. "The user only pays for the performance level of the moment, the user may see no reason to not acquire a device with a high degree of functionality, in terms of both hardware and software, and experiment with a usage level that suits different performance requirements."

The upside is that the PC would be available for little or no cost because "the metering agents and specific elements of the security module...allow an underwriter in the supply chain to confidently supply a computer at little or no upfront cost to a user or business, aware that their investment is protected and that the scalable performance capabilities generate revenue commensurate with actual performance level settings and usage."

Downsides? Well, how about this. You would be totally tied to a single company at the point that you acquired one of these PCs. You wouldn't own your computer or software any more, you'd merely rent it. Linux (or BSD, Solaris or any other alternative) would be out of the question. Open Source software could effectively be unable to run on such a device, depending on how closed the system is.

According to the document, the actual cost to the consumer over the lifetime of the device would much likely be higher than the current model.

So, let me get this straight. I get to rent a deliberately crippled PC, pay more to make it run at it's higher speeds, am likely to be tied to a single company (ie. Microsoft) and I never get to actually own anything at the end of it. Oh yes, and it costs me more.

Welcome to Microsoft's vision of the future. Please empty your wallet on the way out.

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RiscOS 4.02 "Virtually Free" edition

RiscOS is one of those things that has a quite complicated history. Currently the two companies who are releasing versions of RiscOS are Ionix and RiscOS Ltd. The legal battles between the two have been ongoing for a while, but (hopefully) things are calming down a bit, which brings us on to the news.

RiscOS Ltd have announced a "Virtually Free" edition of RiscOS 4.02. What they mean by "Virtually Free" is a low cost release, along the lines of the Amiga Forever packs. And just like with Amiga Forever, there is a cheap (£5) download version, and a more expensive (£10) CD release. Both versions come with instructions on how to get it running in an emulator.

RISCOS Ltd Managing Director Paul Middleton explained that: "We have been looking at ways of making a low cost, or 'Virtually Free' version of RISC OS available for some time. With RISCOS Ltd having now confirmed it's ownership of all versions of RISC OS produced since February 1999 we are now in a position to offer a low cost product that acts as an introduction to RISC OS."

Sadly you may have a little bit of a wait before you can get your hands on it. Although the sales were supposed to have been available from today (Monday, December 8, 2008) at the moment the sales page contains a message to the effect that "We are sorry but due to technical issues the RISCOS Ltd sales website cannot currently process orders online."

You can, however, order via telephone on 0772 044 6921 or by email at sales@riscos.com.

Hopefully this won't dampen the interest in a genuinely unique operating system.

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Death of an Acorn

RiscOS has been on life support for a couple of years now. For those of you who haven't happened across it, RiscOS was an innovative operating system developed for the Acorn Archimedes / RiscPC range of computers.

The Archimedes was the successor to the BBC Micro range of computers, using the RISC based ARM (Archimedes RISC Machine) CPU. They were commonly found in UK schools in the late 1980s / early 1990s.

Often seen as a competitor to the Amiga and Atari ST (although arguably less successful in the home market), the Archimedes morphed into the RiscPC and, in common with the Amiga, has been owned by a number of companies, had arguments over the ownership of the OS and is often seen as yesterdays news.

Currently work is underway to open the source to RiscOS, and the announcement by the current owners Iyonix apparently doesn't change this.

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Novell's Linux Adverts

We've had a look (and made fun of) the new Microsoft adverts. Microsoft have now dropped the Sienfeld and Gates double act, and are hopefully going to be producing adverts that actually say something.

Of course, it is all too easy to judge, especially when the competition already has a well known series of adverts ("I'm a Mac"). What about Linux? Well, let's look at what Novell came up with in 2007.

(As a side note, those of you that read to the end of the post might get to see something nice)







So there you go, adverts for Linux! Whoo hoo! Shame that they had to copy someone stuff. Hmm, maybe they were being ironic?

Not the best spoof of the Apple ads though. The prize for that goes to this.



I know which one I'd rather play with. . .

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Chromium for Linux and Mac! (Well, sort of. . .)

I think I've made my opinion of the release of the Windows only Chrome beta pretty clear - but just in case you've not been paying attention - I'm less than impressed.

I did, however, point out that with the source being available someone might be able to put something together for those of us not stuck on Windows.



Codeweavers have done just that.

In eleven days they've used their Wine based porting tools to put together a version of the browser for Linux (and MacOS too!) based around the Developer Build 21 release of Chrome.

A couple of things to note however are that there is no automatic updater for this unofficial package. Another is that as this is almost a beta of a beta you shouldn't use it as your main browser, just think of it as a tech preview.

Packages are available for most major Linux distro's here.

I've not installed it yet, but once I've done so then I'll let you how it compares to the native Windows version.

So how well does it work? It is certainly a lot slower to use than a native browser such as FireFox on my trusty old Athlon XP 2200, but was certainly up to day to day browsing, in fact I'm updating this post using Chromium. I'm not sure if the lack of speed is down to Chromium itself, or due to the porting process.

More importantly - you can watch YouTube videos, at last once you've installed the Windows version of the Flash plugin (which you can do via the browser, just remember to quit and restart the browser afterwards).

It probably isn't worth using this as your main browser, but is certainly nice as a "fill in" until the proper native version of Chromium comes out.

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DRM Sucks

Warning: This post contains foul language, adult references, and satire. Anal insertion of recordable / pre-recorded media is not condoned by the publisher under any circumstances. No matter how extreme the provocation. Thank you.


DRM Sucks. That isn't just an opinion, that is a solid gold fact.

Let me explain. If you are a publisher then please take note of this: DRM does not stop piracy. It does not significantly reduce copying. If mainly serves to punish the people who have actually bought your products. You know, your customers.

Let's give some examples. If I buy a DVD (and I've bought a fair few over the years) I don't want to have to watch a presentation on why piracy is bad. Look, I've already bought the fucking DVD, what more do you want from me? Let's make it worse and have it play every time we put the DVD in the drive shall we? No, let's go further and make it so you can't skip past it. Oh, wait, you already have.

Look, put it on rental copies by all means, in fact it makes sense to do so. But what gives you the right to waste five minutes of my time on each and every fucking disk of a boxed set that I have already paid for?

If someone can let me know whose bright idea that was then I'd appreciate it, because I've got more than two hundred legally bought DVDs that I'd like to shove one-by-one up that fuckwit's arse. Without the aid of lubricant.

You know what's really ironic about it? How about the fact that pirated versions of the dvds won't have that message on it. You're pissing off the honest people who have bought it from you not the pirates!

How about music? A short look at recent history shows that when you "buy" DRM protected music you can end up loosing out big time, especially if the company that you've "bought" the tracks from goes out of business, or decides to stop publishing music. Your music collection that you've paid for can quickly become worthless.

Does the DRM stop people pirating the music? No. You can install the pirated MP3s anywhere you like, on any device that supports MP3s. How about your DRM protected music? Think it's going to work on your £15 mp3 player? You never know, you might be lucky. Then again, you probably won't.

Games are even worse. Unique registration keys? Fine. Using the CD as a key is annoying, but I can live with that. Phoning home via the internet is mildly irritating, but not the end of the world. Restricting the number of times that I can reinstall the game though? Not a good idea, not unless I'm getting the game at a serious discount. Want me to pay full price and only be able to re-install the game three times? How about you fuck off and come back when you're serious about wanting my money and not about wasting my time.

So what can we do about this? I'm not sure that boycotting products would work, as the publishers would blame the low sales on piracy, making them more determined than ever to make life difficult for us honest folk.

So how about this, let them know that it isn't good enough. If we buy something then the agreement should be that it is ours to keep and use as we see fit without unnecessary restrictions. Track down pirates by all means, sue them into oblivion, string them up by the nuts if it makes you happy. Just don't punish the honest customers.

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Ubuntu to fund a better Linux?

Mark Shuttleworth, boss of Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu), famous as the guy who did what a lot of people said couldn't be done by making a fortune from Open Source is taking steps to improve Open Source by helping to fund development of some of the projects.

In his blog (which you can read here) he gives the reasons behind this, but it boils down to this:

Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.

Although Open Source has in recent years reached the point where it is suitable for everyday use, a little extra polish really doesn't hurt. It is nice to see a company that not only uses Open Source, but continues to invest money and resources back into it.

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