Although many users see a qualitative difference between the sale of a digital album and the sale of a physical CD, the legal framework surrounding royalties and payments is not different – a digital album is still considered a ‘product’ accompanied by license for personal use as opposed to a ‘license to a product’.  As you might not be aware, that means that every distributed download of a song (note: download, not purchase) is considered equivalent to the creation of a physical CD and so accompanied by a mandatory mechanical license fee of 9.1 cents per song, an amount set by the US Copyright Royalty Board.  (To be more specific, I believe the rate is technically 9.1 cents or 1.75 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is greater.)

Within this legal framework, your purchase is for one copy of the album in question and a situation such as a hard disk crash is seen by record labels and publishers as roughly equivalent to breaking a compact disc; just as you would have to repurchase the CD in such a situation, you would also have to repurchase the MP3 if you haven’t backed it up elsewhere.  We will continue to offer DRM-free MP3s to all of our users, however, and provide no hindrance to making backups of your content as you desire.

I understand that you might not see it this way but as a business we must respect the laws of the country in which we operate; although we would prefer to continue with our existing manner of handling downloads, this is a policy change about which we have absolutely no choice.

Once again, I appreciate your understanding with regards to this situation, and please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Sigh. I am just going to let the bold parts of the letter speak for themselves. I wish AmieStreet and all other digital media vendors the best of luck in this market. They are doing their best to provide an excellent service in the face of true adversity.

Although most people only download their music one time, we’ve noticed that you have done so more than once on occasion. We realize that the ability to re-download files has been important to you, so it’s understandable that you might be disappointed to see this no longer available. Unfortunately a number of factors beyond our control, including legal and royalty concerns, have made this impossible going forward.

We’re very happy to say, however, that you can continue to stream all of the music you’ve purchased on Amie Street. That means wherever you have access to the internet, you also have immediate and unrestricted access to stream the entirety of your Amie Street music collection from your library.

To make sure that downloading music continues to be as easy as possible, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the user experience and making updates to the site as needed. The primary voice that directs any such changes will be yours, so if you have suggestions based on your experiences using the site, we’d love to hear from you at feedback@amiestreet.com. Tell us exactly what you like and don’t like, and we can make Amie Street even better!

The truth is, that I have only re-downloaded music on a couple of occasions, most likely because I purchased the music while at work, forgot to take it home with me and then re-downloaded it when I got home.  The other re-downloads have been due to technical issues involving pop-up blockers and an old design of the AmieStreet website, that was fixed long ago. In other words, this is not a service that I use a great deal. Once I have downloaded my music, I know where it is and I do not (generally) need to download it again.

However, I can’t help but feel a little irritated by this move.  It’s not that I want or even need to download my music multiple times – it’s that it feels like a step backwards.  The days of purchasing a physical medium are drawing to an end and more and more services are provided as digital downloads. I haven’t purchased a physical CD for months, probably years, and yet I bought two digital albums from Amazon a copule of weeks ago.

I have dozens of old CD’s that are scratched and no longer play without skipping. To obtain new copies of these albums requires that I buy them again, either digitally or as physical items. This is a constraint of the media, and one that I was perfectly happy with when there was no other alternative. If you break something, you have to buy a new one – it works the same way with all physical property.

On the other hand, AmieStreet (and all other digital media vendors) already know that I purchased the music. Or at least, they know that I purchased a license to listen to the music, which is something entirely different and yet completely meaningless to most people. If my computer bursts into flames or something, why can I not re-download music that I have already paid for? It isn’t going to cost any more to throw a few megabytes acrosss the internet to my new computer, as it would cost to create a new product then package and ship it to me.

Perhaps the idea is that I bought a license to listen to only the version that I downloaded, and no other digital copy of the same song? So by copying it to my iPod or another computer, I’m breaking the license agreement? I would like to think that this line of reasoning is nonsense, but by allowing customers to download a song only once, this is the model that is being applied. AmieStreet (or more likely, a team of lawyers barking at their heels) is trying to apply a physical model to a virtual world which is not constrained by the laws of physics.

Whatever the reasoning behind this move, it is an utterly pointless restriction and ultimately self-destructive. People that actually pay for their music are once again being hampered for doing the right thing.  Why add artificial barriers for people that actually want to give you their money? When there are unlimited free downloads of almost everything you can imagine, why make the paid version worse?

Those people that do not want to pay for their music will continue to recieve high-quality, DRM-free, re-downloadable media whenever they want it. Those of us who choose to do the right thing and buy their music, will end up with an inferior service and in many cases DRM-encumbered music that treats the customer like a thief .

It doesn’t matter who you are, or how powerful you think you are – like King Canute, you cannot stop the digital tide.

So, now that he’s back up and running (with very limited access), a handful of his games don’t quite work properly and still require administrator access. The “RunAs” command in Windows is practically useless because you still need to enter the administrator password – and then the game launches with the administrator profile, including the registry and documents and settings, and not the profile of the logged on user.

What’s really needed is an equivalent to the Linux sudo command, so that the game can be run with admin priveleges, but with the correct user profile. Enter the greatest utility that I’ve found so far this year – surun.

Surun implements privelege elevation in a safe, secure, and trivially easy way. It makes the “RunAs” command look as useless as it really is. And best of all, my sons games all work flawlessly and he can only elevate those applications that, as the system administrator, I specifically add to a list of known programs. This means that he can’t start an elevated command prompt or anything like that and wreak havoc on the system again.

If you need to run programs that require administrator access on a limited user account, do yourself a favor and get this program. It is completely free and it makes Windows security work in a sensible and painless way. Get It!

I had cut and pasted a URL into the block of code I was currently working on, so I could refer to it more easily. However, I accidentally left it there when I compiled the program, and to my dismay it compiled without complaint! Take the following contrived code block for example: 

public int Add( int x, int y )
{
    int result = x + y;
    http://windowscheerleader.com/
    return result;
}

The URL just dumped into the middle of a block of code should certainly have caused some kind of compiler error, right? Or should it…?

In C# (and C++), everything after the “//” is treated as a comment and is therefore ignored. So the compiler will never see ”windowscheerleader.com/”. But that still leaves us with “http:” in the middle of the code.

However, it turns out that the compiler thinks the “http:” is a label – the destination for a goto command! In other words, we could write another silly function like the one below, and the compiler would be perfectly happy with it!

public int GetSmallerValue( int x, int y )
{
    if ( x < y )
        goto http;
    return y;
    http://windowscheerleader.com/
    return x;
}

As far as the compiler is concerned, we have a label followed by a comment, which is perfectly valid. As I said earlier, this isn’t terribly useful (unless you want to embed uncommented URL’s into your code for some reason), but I did find it interesting. One word of warning though – since the “http:” is a label, you can only use this “technique” once in each scoped block or the complier will get upset with you!

StreamRipper has a very nice feature where it creates a “relay stream” that you can listen to. Instead of creating two separate streams (one for Winamp for you to listen to, and another for StreamRipper to record from), you can have StreamRipper create a “relay Stream”, which his cuts down on the required bandwidth and allows you to listen to the same stream that you are recording.

I’ve always had a problem getting StreamRipper to create the relay stream properly on Vista, and like everyone else, I was all too keen to blame Vista for Winamp’s inability to connect to the relay stream. However, it turns out that everything is working exactly as it should, and there is a very easy way to get a working relay stream in Vista…

Instead of connecting Winamp to http://localhost:8000, which is the default host and port for the relay, you have to use the local loopback IP address of your local machine instead. In other words, connect Winamp to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and it will work perfectly!

The reason for this, is that localhost under Vista resolves to an IPv6 address and not IPv4 address that previous versions of Windows used. StreamRipper only understands IPv4, and Winamp is apparently trying to connect to it using IPv6. By specifiying the local loopback IP address of your machine explicity, rather than referring to it by name, you are forcing the use of IPv4, which means everything works as it should.

Happy ripping!

Apart from the fact that the responses don’t actually make any sense with regard to the question, I wasn’t even using Internet Explorer to copy the files! I had IE open, but the zip file was being extracted from Windows Explorer…

Anyway, the archive was extracted just fine and everything seems to be working normally again, so I guess there’s nothing really to see here. I just thought it was curious.

Anyway, enough people have written about this, including bombing the Amazon reviews for the game, that I don’t really have much to add. Other than the fact that I won’t be pirating it either. Downloading and playing a cracked version will only enforce EA’s view that the game didn’t sell due to piracy – and not becaue of the ridiculous restrictions placed upon it.

So I bought my son Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for his birthday instead. It’s not a very deep or challenging game, but until you’ve seen a seven year old jumping up and down on the couch while cutting down clone troopers with a Wii remote, using his force powers to blow everything up – well, you just haven’t lived!

Well, I’m not going to talk about it here, since plenty of other people already have it covered. I really just wanted to get a post up, since I haven’t written anything for 3 months. I’ve been too busy playing Hellgate:London…

Anyway, I’ve been keeping my eye out for some good party games that the whole family can enjoy together, when I came across this list of the best ever Wii games, on Gamespot. As you can see, Warioware Smooth Moves scores 9.1 out of 10 and is even credited with editors choice. Reading through the review, it sounds like the perfect party game – fun, innovative, hilarious, easy to play etc.

However, to play the multiplayer game (for which this game comes so highly recommended) you must first complete the single payer game! In what universe does this actually make sense?

I came home from work yesterday, showed the game to my kids and of course they immediately wanted to play it. I fiddled around with it for a bit, but couldn’t get the multiplayer game to activate. I finally went to the internet and discovered the amazing truth – that you must complete the single player game to unlock the multiplayer game!! So there we all are, crowded round the TV and looking forward to a night of hilarity and the game is useless. Well, unless everyone wants to watch someone else play through it first.

The really daft part of this is that whoever completes the single-player game will have an innate advantage over everyone else who has never played it! I’m really finding it hard to understand why Nintendo decided to cripple what is essentially a party game, by forcing you to play it alone first.

I’m seriously thinking about taking it back to the store for a refund.

So I decided to do a little research and discover exactly why I wasn’t being offered the upgrade. Of course, I could have just downloaded it and installed it myself, but I was curious as to why my Windows Update didn’t appear to be working.

Well, it turns out that there are a number of reasons why I wasn’t seeing SP1 as an available upgrade. After reading the support article, poking through the version numbers for a bunch of drivers I discovered that I had a “problematic” driver – “SigmaTel Stwrt.sys – version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier for x86 computers” to be exact.

So the first thing I do is head over to Sony‘s web site and look for an updated driver, but of course it doesn’t exist. The most recent driver on offer is over a year old and is the one I already have that is preventing SP1 from installing.

Second stop is SigmaTel‘s website, and a Vista Support Update link – now we’re getting somewhere! But hang on – this just tells me to go to my PC vendor and get an updated driver from them! It appears that SigmaTel has been bought out by IDT and they are no longer supporting the audio chipset in my laptop.

It would seem that I cannot install Vista SP1 on my laptop, due to a single “problematic” driver that is no longer supported by the device manufacturer (SigmaTel/IDT) or the OEM (Sony). What exactly does “problematic” mean? Will my computer fail to boot, go Bluescreen of Death on me or worse? Or is it something I really couldn’t care less about, like the sound card won’t reinitialize correctly after resuming from hibernation? Will it work? Do I dare install it, only to find out that I’ve just turned my laptop into a useless brick?

Unfortunately, it’s rather difficult to pin the blame on a single entity. Is it Microsoft‘s fault for failing to write a proper service pack? Perhaps they had a very good reason, such as a security issue and the driver no longer works after the issue was fixed? Is it SigmaTel‘s fault for selling the chipset to another company? Is it IDT‘s fault for not writing an up to date driver? Or is Sony to blame, since they are using the technology in their computers and should provide an OEM driver?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who is at fault – the customers are getting the short end of the stick. And this doesn’t just affect Sony customers, but also Dell, HP and any other vendor that used these very popular audio chipsets.

But the worst part is not that this problem exists, but that Windows Update does not even show SP1 as an option. Hundreds of users are not even going to know that there is a service pack available, let alone to try to update their drivers first! There is no indication whatsoever that a service pack is available, leaving many people completely in the dark.

It’s really quite difficult to Cheerlead things like this. I just hope it gets sorted out soon, but I’m not going to hold my breath…

And in the meantime, there are hundreds of customers – including myself  – that cannot install Vista SP1.