Month: March 2008

dnrTV: .Net 2.0 stuff

I just watched dnrTV 18, on new language features in .Net 2.0. I was already familiar with partial classes, but they also went over some more esoteric stuff, including covariance and contravariance, nullable classes, and anonymous methods. Geez. There’s a lot of odd stuff in .Net that I just don’t know much about. Well, I guess that’s the point of watching screencasts and reading books and whatnot, huh?

Peerflix is dead

I got an e-mail today indicating that Peerflix will be (mostly) shut down on April 23. They’re basically shutting down DVD trading, but leaving the web site up. I guess they think they can turn it into some kind of news portal, or a competitor to IMDB, or something like that. I got a fair number of DVDs through Peerflix, and traded away a fair number too. Not a lot, maybe a couple of dozen discs total. I always found the service to be a bit of a kludge, but it worked out fine for the most part.

LaLa, which is a similar site for CD trading, still seems to be somewhat active. I haven’t had any of my CDs requested in a while, so *I’m* not doing much on it, but it looks like other people are still getting something out of it.

I guess you could go with the assumption that on-demand movie downloads from places like Amazon and iTunes killed Peerflix, but I don’t know if that would be quite right. That’s probably part of it though. There’s really no way to make a lot of money just off the service fees on a DVD-trading site. If it’s really well-managed, you could probably make a small profit, but it’s not going to make anybody rich. Whoever was investing in Peerflix probably just figured that out.

This all plays into the general trend away from physical products and towards just pushing bits, whether it’s music, movies, software, or books. I still think physical products, in certain areas, are going to be important for some time to come. I think people are still going to buy books and DVDs, but I think we’re moving away from renting movies in physical form, and I think we’re eventually going to move away from “renting” hard copy books. We’ll eventually get some system set up where we can “borrow” e-books from our libraries, and check them out onto a Kindle or something similar. And I think Amazon will eventually allow for paid book rental on the Kindle — maybe it’ll cost $10 to buy a book, or $4 to rent it for a month. (Feel free to come back and read this post again in five years, and laugh at how wrong I am!)

more Kindle DRM discussion

Right after the Kindle was released, there was a lot of talk about the DRM/licensing model it used. The subject seems to have come up again this weekend, starting with a post on Gizmodo that got referenced on Slashdot and Boing Boing. If you look through the comments on all three of these sites, you’ll see some well though out opinions, plus of course some less (perhaps) cogent ones.

I’ve loaded my Kindle up with a fair number of free (and legal) non-DRM’d ebooks from various sources. I do intend on buying some stuff from the Amazon store at some point, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Yes, I do know that I won’t really be *buying* these books, but rather just buying a license to read them on a particular device under specific conditions. I’m OK with that. I usually only read a given book once or twice, and I don’t feel the need to keep a copy of every book I’ve ever read, so I really won’t mind it if my Kindle ebook “library” disappears if I ever decide to just get rid of my Kindle. If I buy an ebook that’s really great, and I really want to keep a copy around, I’ll probably go out and buy a hard copy too.

One of the arguments that I see come up frequently is the idea that if DRM’d ebooks *completely* replace hard copy books, then various really good things about the current book economy will go away — lending books to friends, buying cheap used books, borrowing books from the library and so on. I really don’t think we need to worry about this happening any time in the near future. I think the ebook reader market is going to remain a niche market for quite a while. Even if the price comes down, it’s just not a model that’s going to appeal to most people. There are a lot of people who just don’t read enough to warrant buying any kind of dedicated device for reading. Just picking up an occasional paperback at Border’s, or the library, or the airport bookstore, is more than enough for them.

And I don’t think that the iPhone, or smartphones in general, and going to be used as ebook readers by too many people. That’s also an opinion I’ve seen tossed around a bit. I think the iPhone (or iPod Touch in my case) is great for browsing through the NY Times site and checking out a few articles, but I wouldn’t want to try and read a novel on it.

So I guess that’s my (more than) two cents on the Kindle DRM thing. I don’t know if anyone will find this post particularly useful or interesting, but I just had to get all that off my chest.

yet more dnrTV

Not that anyone but me is going to be interested in this, but I watched dnrTV show #13 today, the second part of the CSLA.NET 2.0 overview. I’ve only scratched the surface on CSLA.NET so far, but I think I have a little more of an understanding of what’s going on and how it works.
I also caught up a bit on the .Net Rocks podcast on the trip down to my parents’ house and back today for Easter. I’m still about 40 episodes behind. I was (mostly) keeping up for a while, but I started falling behind when they went to twice-weekly. Then, my commute got shorter, which means less time for podcasts in the car. So, the end result is a huge backlog of DNR episodes.

dnrTV – Generics

I keep meaning to watch dnrTV, but I never seem to get around to it. I need to find about an hour where I can sit still in front of the computer, and give it my full attention, and that isn’t easy lately. I did just watch show #9, with Venkat Subramaniam talking about generics in C#. This is one of a handful of topics that I’ve got on my mental to-do list to learn more about. I see that show 105, the most recent show, is also about generics, so maybe I’ll try and watch that one tomorrow.

There are a number of shows on CSLA.NET, which is another topic I really need to learn about. I really need to talk myself into watching this stuff more often, and maybe watching a little less Frisky Dingo!

Dave Stevens

I was saddened to read today that Dave Stevens has passed away. The Comics Reporter has a thorough obituary. I loved his work on The Rocketeer back in the eighties. I remember seeing him at the San Diego con a few times over the last several years, but I never got around to actually stopping by his booth, saying hello to him, and letting him know how much I liked his work.

Kindle

I got a Kindle today. I ordered it back in early February, so it took about a month for Amazon to get it out the door. It’s pretty much what I expected. The screen is very readable, in any (reasonable) light. As many others have pointed out, the button layout makes it a little awkward to figure out a good way to hold the thing without pressing either the next page or previous page button. I think I’ll get used to it though.

The built-in web browser is interesting, and might be somewhat useful. Gmail seems to be usable on it. Lotus Notes webmail is out of the question, though. Mobile-friendly sites like http://nytimesriver.com/ ought to be useable.

I haven’t bought any books for it yet. For now, I’ve just got some free books on it that I downloaded from ManyBooks and Tor.

For the most part, I’m liking it. I have so many hard copy books sitting around that I won’t be using it for most of my reading any time soon, but I’ll start reading something on it soon, just to start using it. I’ll likely blog more about it after I’ve played around with it some more.