How EMI prevented me from being their customer

The copy controlled logoI was buying some music the other day, as I had got a gift certificate for quite a bit to spend in the music store. I had heard the latest Coldplay album should be great, so I decided I should listen to it to see what it was. The headphones fit snugly around my ears as the sales woman put the CD in the player and gave me the cover.

I noticed quickly by the cover that it wasn’t a CD after all, but a Copy Controlled disc – but I wanted to listen to it anyway. The music was nice, so I did listen for a while, but the experience was marred by repetitive clicks and small skips in regular intervals, as if the disc was badly scratched. When I told this, the reply was that this wasn’t too unusual – they just tried another disc if that was the case, and this could be without the clicks and that stuff – and they were easily ripped anyway. “Would I try another one?” But no, buying such a disc is totally out of the question for me. I would rather find another one, a CD that works as it should.

As I looked through the CDs, I noticed there were some tempting ones that I normally would try, even buy, but despite their placement among the innocent CDs, they couldn’t hide the ugly fact: The Copy Controlled logo told its story – not a CD, don’t buy.

So, the result? The record company (EMI and subsidiaries) lost sales of at least one CD, because they try to sell faulty discs. Sorry Coldplay, not this time – but if you decide you’ve had enough and want to release your music on CDs later, I may have a look again.

For thise who are curious, I ended up with “Leaves’ Eyes: Vinland Saga” – also an enhaced CD, but the enhancement in this case consists of some extra video tracks, not any copy protection stuff. Nice.

Opera advertising on TV

Hot on the heels of the news about Opera Mini being released today, I just now saw an ad on TV that I enjoyed: Opera Mini is being promoted, together with the easy downloading instructions (Send an SMS with “Opera” to 1984 – Norway only, remember.)

The ad is straightforward enough: Have access to the web wherever you are. A couple of guys sit down on a motorbike, switch to a mobile phone which shows how easy it is to use Opera Mini, and how good looking it is(!). Switch back to the two guys, where the passenger starts singing opera. 😉

Looks like the best browser is set to get well known. 🙂

Opera conquers WAP

How Opera Mini works
So far, Opera has spread out on the desktop, on various platforms, and on advanced mobile phones. Users with only access to the net via WAP could only look at the rest with envy – up until now. Opera is introducing Opera Miniâ„¢ for WAP phones that can run java. With this, you’re no longer restricted to WAP pages, but you can surf the web as normal. Installing is as easy as downloading a ringtone; click a link, or send an SMS. (Currently available for users in Norway.)

Another first for Opera. Now – where’s my phone…

AOL gets it – DRM free music

According to BetaNews, AOL will start offering DRM free music from popular artists from their AOLMusic.com service. Finally someone who gets it – when it’s possible to play music on the equipment you want, then it’s interesting to buy the music, too.

While there are other online stores that provides DRM free music, this is the first (to my knowledge) that will provide popular artists for download. Let’s hope this is a growing trend.

If ignorance is bliss…

…then there must be many who are blissful in the media. How many times have there been articles in the news, where the author seems blissfully unaware of Opera, even if it should be the most natural thing to at least mention considering the theme being discussed? It’s many.

This time, it’s Yahoo’s turn, talking about the Minimo project from Mozilla. That Mozilla now is releasing a preview version of Minimo is well worth mentioning, even writing an article about. The only thing is something written in the article:

In general, Mimimo looks to address the problems with current mobile-phone browsers, which are difficult to use and don’t display web pages very well. Only 9 percent of cellular-phone subscribers in the United States use browsers to access news and information, according to JupiterResearch.

“The lack of usability on the cellular phone or mobile device is a big hurdle to overcome before we can see faster growth of browsers,” Hofmann said.

Wouldn’t it be natural to mention Opera here, as one mobile-phone browser that doesn’t have these problems? There’s no need to have much of the article talking about the Opera alternative, but it would be nice to know that there already is an alternative browser out there, which already do what Minimo is setting out to solve…

Maybe if people were informed about the choices they already have, with a browser that provides very much usability today, the market would grow faster?

IE7 Beta 1 and the Acid 2 test

Well – the IE7 beta is out – sort of, it’s not for everyone. But, some have tried it, and in the IE Blog there is a link in the comments to a screenshot of IE7 running the Acid 2 test.

Seems there’s still some way to go for MS to compete with modern browsers 😉

Still, the comments about this beta goes to both extremes, from praising it to slagging it off. It will be interesting to see what we get, when it’s ready for public download.

Bittorrent in Opera – it’s a glimpse into the future

Not too long ago, a Technical Preview of Opera (Opera 8.02TP) was released with support for bittorrent, a move that was welcomed by many. So, when can we expect to see a final version of Opera with this support? I don’t know.

It has been clarified though, that a technical preview is not a beta release, just a glimpse into what the Opera guys are working with, and that bittorrent will not be included in version 8.02 Final. But in Opera 8.1, maybe?

I guess we’ll just have to hope Opera 8.1 is released quickly, then. 😉

Microsoft patenting emoticons!

Eh? What? I have a hard time believing what I just read myself, but Microsoft has patented emoticons (or well, filed for patent, patent no. 20050156873). More specifically, they’ve patented the method of making a character sequence, such as a colon and a right paranthesis, being “converted” into a graphic, which is recreated at the receiving end. That is, : ) becomes 🙂

On the one hand, I can’t believe that this is something people can have the idea of patenting – but I guess this is what happens if you can patent programming methods/algorithms.

It’s a crazy world. Or a stupid one.

What do you want from CSS3?

Web design doesn’t stand still, and designers find themselves tweaking the options they’ve got and clamour for more. It’s nice then, that we now have the option to tell The CSS Working Group what we’d like to be included in CSS3 – so if you are a web designer, what are you waiting for?

It’s a smart move to get designers, not just technical people, to say what they want to be able to do with CSS. Let’s hope the result will be very useful – and that browser implementation don’t lag too far behind, of course. 😉

Testing Opera bittorrent

I’ve tested bittorrent in Opera – found myself a nice, big file and started downloading. It worked. How was the experience?

Well – Opera delivered what was needed, and not much more. The information I got was the download and upload speed, how much was downloaded and uploaded, estimated time left to finish download and how many I was connected to. This is basically the information needed, even if a bit more could be nice to know.

As I didn’t leave my PC to itself but continued working on it, including accessing the web, there were some features I missed from dedicated torrent clients; a way to limit the bandwith use a bit. I won’t claim anything after just one test, but noticing that Opera maxed out the available upload bandwith, other things felt slower – at times much slower than usual. However, this can very well be other things, including but not limited to my own imagination running wild.

Now, editing ini-files seems to be a nice way to tweak Opera to do like you want, and as I learned today (no time to read all the info at once, before testing ;)) it is possible to tweak bittorrent settings, too. Can’t try it out for a while yet, but I still wish these settings will get an easy to use interface to make changes.

For the time being though, the changes you can make to the opera6.ini file are these:

[BitTorrent] – add this section header and use the following:

Setting Description Default
Enable Enables BitTorrent support in Opera 1
Warning Dialog Displays warning dialog before initiating BitTorrent download 1
Listen Port Port for incoming connections (make sure your port is available). 18768
Bandwidth Restriction Mode 1 = automatic upload restriction, unlimited download, 2 = fixed rate restrictions for upload and download 1
Max Upload Rate Maximum upload rate in kB/s. Used only if bandwidth restriction mode is set to 2 0
Max Download Rate Maximum download rate in kB/s. Used only if bandwidth restriction mode is set to 2 0