Mind Architecture Happenings

Have you seen the new Microsoft Zune? It is a competitor to Apple’s iPod.

There are quite a few things that people don’t like about the Zune, not the least of which is the DRM. On the Zune, even free content becomes copy protected. You can share it but the other person can only use it for 3 times or 3 days.

The issue that I dislike about the Zune is the deal Microsoft has with at least 1 record company. This deal pays the record company for every Zune sold. Presumably this is because they assume that if you buy an mp3 player you are stealing music and the record company isn’t getting paid for that stolen music. So, now they are getting some money for what they wouldn’t normally have gotten. Now, this is assuming everyone steals music and they are stealing this companies music (Universal I think it was).

My big issue with this is that I would bet that the record company doesn’t pass any of that money on to it’s artists, they are going to keep it all. Doesn’t sound quite right to me. The musicians have historically gotten screwed by the record companies and it looks like this is doing the same thing again.

Since most people are starting to download music and more music is being purchased online, I think more artists will go independent and start selling their music online without any record company. I think this would be a good thing as it’s a great scenario of our capitalist society at work. You like an artist and music, you go buy it from them. They get paid for what they do and you get music you like. If you are buying it online, they can offer it for a great price and still make more for every song sold than they would through the record company. Of course, they have all the responsibility of marketing and sales too.

I see more musicians starting to sell online. I also see the end of albums. Think about it. Right now you can buy individual songs online. If an album only has 1 or 2 good songs, you’ll only buy those and forget the rest. Artists will have to make every song they release something that people will buy and pay for individually. This will kill the album concept. We wouldn’t have 1 hit wonders but we would also have room for more artists as we could spend $20 but get 20 or more songs from a variety of artists that we like. Instead of spending $20 to get an album of 1 artist with only a couple good songs.

We’ll see, but I think the Zune may be the beginning of big changes because the individuals have enough power that the companies won’t be able to stop it.

p.s. - There was a recent lawsuit brought on by Tom Petty and others. This suit was trying to win back money from the record company. Why? The artists were still being charged about 15% breakage fee. This is for when a shipment of LP’s has some broken records, the artists pays for it. Ah, but, you wisely say, we haven’t had lp’s for many a year. Correct.

Forrester Research recently released the results of a survey of web site users who listed the following as necessary requirements to make their user experience a good one:

72% want direct paths to the content they’re seeking
70% want ads that don’t interfere (i.e. no popups)
67% want good search functionality
60% want an uncluttered home page and a clear privacy policy
58% want easy registration
and only 40% said unique content is a necessity.

Research also indicated that personalization wasn’t all that important with only 44% of North American online consumers reporting having personalized a portal site, 18% personalized a weather site, and less than 10% personalized a news, entertainment, travel, or retail site. Also, only 17% of online consumers report they come back to personalized pages - even if they find the site helpful.

What I think is interesting about this research is it confirms a basic truth about web site design. You only have a few seconds to get a visitor’s interest and convince them to give your web site a chance and the features we believe are most compelling often pale in comparison to simple usability issues for most web surfers.

If a visitor can’t find the content that brought them to your site, can’t search your site easily or navigate your menu, or can’t find your privacy policy, no amount of unique content, personalization, or other “gee whiz” features will keep them from clicking that ‘back’ button…

There seem to be quite a few buzzwords that techie geeks like to throw around. Enough to make your head spin. For many, this all seems like a different language. Not to fear.

Network World magazine has a special issue on buzz and defines what some of the associated technolgies are. For those of you looking to keep up a bit, look for the 2006 Buzz issue of Network World.

When I’m doing tech work, many of the computers brought in have problems because of the user not knowing what they are doing or need to do. This leads to viruses and misconfigurations etc. If you don’t count those, over half of the remaining actual hardare problems are hard drive related. Usually this means a hard drive that has gone bad. When that happens, time for a new hard drive and hope you can recover all your data.

With all the hardware in a computer, having the hard drive go out is the worst that can happen. This is the only item that if it goes out you can also lose your data. Isn’t the data what is really important? Word docs, pdf’s, photos, movies, emails, etc. How valuable is that stuff to you?

The funny thing is, most people don’t prepare for a hard drive failure in any way. Let me put it to you, your hard drive will fail it’s just a question of what day. Pick the most inconvenient day, that will be the day.

Over the past couple years, the only problems I’ve really had with my computer have been a hard drive going bad. You can usually tell a hard drive is going bad. With one computer it was the black smoke and the grinding noise coming out of the machine. Luckily that is the exception. Most of the time you can clue in that the hard drive is going bad by these things:

• The computer is slower or seems to take forever to boot
• You are getting lockups regularly that require a reboot.
• Rebooting wants you to run disk check

If you are experiencing these, chances are your hard drive is starting to go bad. But wait, I hear you saying, my hard drive is only a couple years old. Guess what? Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen 3 month old hard drive die. I’ve seen hard drives last for 8 years. Depends on a lot of factors. Unfortunately, not all hard drive models from a single manufacturer are equivalent in reliability so you can’t depend on only getting from 1 manufacturer.

The best thing is to backup. Now, this mostly means your data. Problem is, sometimes data can be in places we don’t think about. What about your Outlook file that has all your email? Or your Quickbooks file of your account for the last 7 years? These can be in many places. The problem is getting it all and backing up in a way that allows you to easily put it back in case of a crash. With drives getting to 300 GB and 400 GB, how do you back it all up? Not to mention, that larger drives seem more unreliable and more prone to crashing.

The other thing is actually reinstalling all of the apps and getting all the updates. This can be a nightmare.

So what to do? Well, I try to keep everything in My Documents that I can. That includes regular backups of the Outlook file and Quickbooks file. Plus any known config and ini files I can ( like my ftp program). Then I have a program that automatically backs up that folder. I also have it set to backup my web server folder with all my projects in it and the mysql folder with all the databases in it. Then if I crash unexpectedly, I can reinstall and get all my data back.

The other thing I do is have a second drive that I ghost to once or twice a week. What is Ghost? It is a commercial program that allows me to completely copy my hard drive to a second hard drive. Then if the first dies I can turn off the machine and boot from the backup as if nothing happened. Maybe then I have to get my updated data off my backup from the night before. This has saved me several times in the past. There are also other programs out there that do the same as ghost.

Why am I writing this? I’ve had some issues lately and then today my system locked up and when I rebooted it couldn’t detect the hard drive. Uh oh. So it is right now cloning over to the second drive. When done I’ll reboot from that second drive and continue on.

Another item that may help some people are the large external hard drive backup units they have now. You set these up and connect through USB. Then with the press of 1 button you are backing up. I haven’t tried one, but they look cool.

Just had a friend (Steve at Bark at the Moon) get a new iMac 24 inch. Sweet is definitely the word. I have to say, if nothing else, it is the best flat panel I’ve seen. I’ve looked at many flat panels and not really cared for any of them. Always thought they didn’t improve on the picture quality of my CRT enough if at all. Some looked worse. Not this Mac. Absolutely gorgeous looking.

I have never really played with OS 10. Seen it and can find a browser which is all i’ve needed. Some of the new things he was showing were cool. And of course they looked really slick, regardless of usability.

Now, would I get one? It could be a possibility. I wouldn’t mind having a mac to test browser compatibility. Would I ever leave behind all my PC stuff. Doubtful. I ‘m a PC guy and like futzing sometimes. I also like playing with tons of different software and being able to buy anything I hear about. From what I hear, I could easily run Windows in a VM and all the business and working apps would work wonderfully. But I would still want my high end machine at home for games.

Anyway, definitely draws you to it and is way cool looking.

On a related note - my iPod is dead. Don’t know what happened. It was playing along and appeard to lock up. Seeing as how that happens once in awhile, I just went to reset it. I got an unhappy face and a weblink on the screen - http://www.apple.com/support/ipod. Now, nothing. So I’ve got to send it in. This is the second time in 2 years. Another time it gave me a problem I reformatted and it was fine. Gotta figure though, these little hard drives get banged around alot. Not surprised if there are bad sectors. But this is just annoying to have to send it in for the second time because there is nothing I can do to get it back up. Maybe a Zune?