Category Archives: Technology

The Music Industry Finally Gets The Memo

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I was amused to see this story — Music Industry Embraces an Online Future — talk about how the music industry is getting healthier with online music sales. The story is pretty much a fluff piece about how people are starting to buy music online, but the funniest quote in the article has to be this one:

“The subscription model will be incredibly popular once people understand it and get their heads around it. The difficulty is that it’s so radically different to what people have seen in the past. It’s not like an electronic version of a record store,” said Barney Wragg, vice president of Universal Music International’s new media division, Elabs.

The only people who don’t understand the subscription model are the music executives. All you can drink is a way of life in the US, from cell phones to long distance to Golden Corral. I commented almost two years ago when iTunes started up that they needed to move to a subscription model. Everyone assumed that original Napster service would charge between $5 and $20 per month. Boys and girls, XM offers subscription music service via satellite. Hello? Anyone home in the music industry?

The fact is that the music industry is doing everything it can to avoid the future. Ultimately we’re going to have music on demand services, paid by subscription, that we can carry around on whatever the iPod evolves into. This middle step of selling songs online for 99 cents is probably necessary and thankfully there are enough people willing to pay through the nose for worse service (here’s where you should insert my rant about how $10 per album for music is a rip-off without getting the atoms to go with the bits; for $10 you can own the actual CD and rip it yourself). But everyone understands the subscription model. If the music industry moved quickly, it would have avoided Kazaa and all of the other Gnutella spin-offs. But instead, they continue to move at a glacial pace, sticking a toe at a time in the water while everyone else continues to download music, eroding the possibilities of success in the future.

Symantec Norton Anti-Virus Purchase Difficulties

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I recently failed to acquire a 3-seat license for NAV using their DigitalRiver download system because of what appears to be a coding problem. When you download the setup program after purchase, you are actually getting a Download Manager, which then retrieves the product from the server. Well, the setup program wouldn’t connect on any of my machines. I even tried both home and office networks, in case there were significant differences in the firewalls.

To see what was going on, I set up an HTTP proxy server and ran the setup program in proxy mode. After checking the logs, I realized that the URL it was trying to download was

http://localhost/Nxxxxxx.exe

Obviously, the request to “localhost” was going to fail. After over an hour with their tech support people, I finally gave up and got a refund.

IMAP for GMail

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As I sit and rethink my e-mail setup, it occurred to me that IMAP for GMail is a no brainer. I’ve been playing around with a couple of accounts on GMail and the POP3 isn’t really sufficient, especially since GMail expects that you would keep all of your e-mail on their servers forever. For that scenario, IMAP makes perfect sense.

So here’s my request to Google — add IMAP.

Symantec’s Norton Privacy Control and Mac OS X “Panther”

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I spent a frustrating couple of weeks with my Mac recently. I noticed that when I pointed my web browser (either Safari or Firefox) to certain websites, my computer when into a tailspin, sending the kernel_task process through the roof (massive CPU utilization) and dumping my ability to connect to a network (“network unavailable” errors). After digging around my computer for a while, I stumbled on the problem — Norton Privacy Control.

Now Symantec claims that the current version of NPC works with OS X 10.3.5, but I can tell you it doesn’t. When visiting www.news.com, Safari chokes and I discovered that the NPC daemon crashes. That essentially kills your network connectivity and nothing short of a restart seems to work. I searched the web and Symantec’s website, but found nothing but a note from Symantec to run LiveUpdate to fix the problem. I had already done that and confirmed that I was running the latest code.

So the fix for this problem (if you have it also) is to remove Norton Privacy Control from your StartupItems. I did that by going into /Library/StartupItems and just moving the “NortonPrivacyControl” folder elsewhere, followed by a reboot. That has cleared up the problem and I’m back to normal.

Now here’s my real beef. After spending the time debugging their product, I went to the Symantec website to let them know about the problem so that they could fix it. Unfortunately, it appears that there’s no mechanism to submit bugs to them — no product support forum or anything. I finally went to the feedback page and submitted something under “product suggestions”, but I suspect that’s going to go right into the little trash can that we all have on our computers these days. Seems like they ought to have some sort of bug alert system when there’s a problem like this. You know, everyone and their mother has a user forum for product stuff that the staff reviews from time to time. Wouldn’t that be a great idea for Symantec?

Hopefully there will be enough keywords in this entry that anyone else who has this problem will find this posting. Google, do your stuff.