I've been using spotify for a little while now, and I thought I'd put down some of my observations.
First of all, here's one of the playlists I've made - Upbeat, the encouraging songs that I like.
I'm paying $11.99 per month for access to a huge array of music, in addition to the large collection I have locally. Let's start with some of the things I think could be better:
I find songs that I want to listen to that Spotify doesn't have more often that I'd like.
They still don't seem to support the video and audio elements. Which means all sorts of cool apps - visualisations, generated music, equalisers, games - can't be made or used.
There are some issues in navigation - some clicks start tracks playing, some go to info pages.
On occasion an app will just not work for a few days. This has happened with the lastfm, triple j and tunewiki apps.
Please, please, please, when I click on the close button, just close! Get rid of this silly 'close means minimise to the task bar/tray' stuff!
Are there really exactly 50 apps available? I would have thought there'd be many more than that.
And now for the good:
It is well past time that great desktop programs were simply wrappers around a browser. This is the way almost all desktop programs should be made.
Having said I find tracks Spotify doesn't have, there are so many excellent tracks available, it's usually not a problem.
The monthly $12 really does seem worth it to access pretty much any song I think of, when I think of it.
I like that queued tracks and other state is shared between computers. It doesn't always work, but it seems like it does. If I'm imagining this, then I guess my tastes are just that consistent.
Being able to see what other people are playing has been a great source of new tracks, bands and genres.
So all in all, there are still some gaps, but worth the $12/month, and I've certainly enjoyed the access to existing favourites, and new favourites.
I really get annoyed when I read this in a news article, or quote or show of some sort. There's rarely reasonable discussion about it, and almost never pressure against it. Identity fraud is usually the only push-back, and that's usually responded to with "oh, it's not likely to happen to you".
"if somebody's not going out to cause trouble they shouldn't have any problems having their ID scanned" - ID scanner company director Joel Sheehan quoted in ID scans raise privacy fears on The Age
The guy obviously has a vested interest. Some good discussion on why this is never a reasonable point of view. E.g. "Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance." - Bruce Schneier
I thought I might branch out a bit on this blog. I've been hesitant to write about anything other than tech talk and related issues. I'm still a little worried, but I figure if I want to write about something, I should write about it. So here we go...
I've been reading and learning a lot about gender and sexuality over the last few years. It's still a bit of a new world, and I'm certainly not qualified to talk about it outside of my own experiences. I do want to share some things I read, so this is the start.
Emotional toughness can also cause men pain; if you can’t open up emotionally to another person, it makes it more difficult to have friends. The social support gap is large and growing—men tend to report having fewer close friends and being less connected to their communities than women. For far too many men, romantic relationships are the only acceptable venue for them to express their feelings (and even there, the idea that men hate emotional intimacy limits them). In fact, men tend to report more distress due to a strained romantic relationship, possibly because women are far more likely to have a group of friends to help with the social support. The nervously joking societal construct of "bromance" arises from the notion that having a close male friend is something weird enough that it needs its own name.
This hits close to home. I really wish I was more comfortable discussing relationships with my male friends. It does seem like a topic about as far away from acceptable as a topic can be. I don't know why, it just feels that way. I really do think that I, and perhaps many other men I know, are so used to not talking about relationships. This is almost always a bad thing, since it often ends with emotions being shut in, no way to discuss feelings... Overcoming my unease at writing about this is hard enough, let alone the thought of my male friends reading this. But it's important, and here's my first step.
This piece on the 'typical' Australian wage is very helpful in understanding some common misconceptions, and helped me to break down some of the areas I've been confused. I was particularly enlightened by the part about "equivalised household disposable income". I think looking at the amount necessary for a person to live (this should be similar to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), shouldn't it?) is a good way to go about it.
We need a way to compare the living standards of people across different household types, to get a measure of how much income a person would need to maintain the living standard of the typical (median) Australian. This is known as equivalised household disposable income. [...] A single person, living alone, would need around $36 000 in disposable income to sustain the typical Australian’s standard of living.
Well, that's a little more than I expected, but that's probably because it's across a range of types of work, cities, and lifestyles. The final point that the families in the newspaper stories earn much more than the average needed to live in Australia, seems to mix two ideas. $36 000 might be the average needed to live, but the median income (based on ATO stats) is just under $45 000. This doesn't change the fact that income per year of $100 000 and above is certainly not typical.
I recently read this article about Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More). There's some interesting trivia about how GitHub was formed and has developed, particularly regarding the use of socialising and social coding to differentiate it from existing repositories like Sourceforge. I particularly liked this comment about the possible wider and future impacts of GitHub:
A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. "When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law," [Ryan Blair] says. "I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request."
It's interesting that GitHub is moving closer to crowd sourcing - where volunteers fix other users' code, just because they can. It may or may not benefit the volunteer personally, but the collective improvement of easily-accessible code should improve things for everyone.
Does any one else get annoyed when an install, update, software prompt or any consumer tech of any sort - such as ATMs - says something like "Installing your updates"? Or "Installing your software"? Or even "Contacting your bank"? I'm not sure I can express it very well, but for some reason this annoys me.
By emeidi on flickr
Perhaps it's the knowledge that in fact, no, it is not "my" software, or "my" update, or "my" bank. It is only licensed to me. Perhaps this is "personalisation" gone too far. What's wrong with "Installing updates", "Installing software" or "Contacting bank"? I'm sure there's some research on this around somewhere, but unfortunately I don't seem to be able to find it. Perhaps it needs special keywords.
I'm probably being a bit over-sensitive about this. It's just a word, after all. However, it does frame - in quite a significant way - how the user feels about the software. I suppose it is positioning it as being controlled or operated by the user. I'd argue that is never the case. Most, if not all software, does things that not even the programmers understand, in part due to how big the software is. No one can understand and keep detailed knowledge of the entire application in their head.
Whatever it is, I'd much prefer the messages just tell me what I need to know, rather than attempting to connect with me. I use the software to connect with people... I'm not exactly aiming to connect with the software.
Apparently Malaysia is proposing a Computing Professionals Bill.
Here's a draft of it.
An Act to provide for the establishment of the Board of Computing
Professionals Malaysia and for the registration of computing
practitioners, computing professionals, sole proprietorships,
partnerships and bodies corporate providing Computing Services
and for purposes connected therewith.
Seems like it might be ok, but will most likely result in stifling innovation, even more government censorship (via a very sneaky means), and perhaps even reduce the number of "IT professionals".
From the MetaFilter discussion:
Sometimes I have to wonder if technology isn't really just making people stupider.
No, they've always been this stupid. Technology just makes it easier to see it happening worldwide. - Celsius1414
Time for a new maxim? "Technology isn't making people stupider, it's just making the stupid more obvious."
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently ignorant politician in a society with advanced technology is indistinguishable from a witch-hunt participant. - Inspector.Gadget
From the Act:
Computing
is a goal-oriented activity to plan, architect, design, create, develop, implement, use and manage
information technology or information technology systems.
Computing Graduate
means a person who has completed a
computer science or equivalent degree programme of study.
Computing Practitioner
means a person who has a job
function in computing or qualification in computing.
That essentially covers sitting at a computer and typing. Which I would venture a guess that pretty much anyone might do.
Do they all need to be registered?
Another MetaFilter quote:
A lot of times these professional certification things are about protecting incumbents from new competition. [...]
Basically incumbents will setup licensing systems to create an artificial scarcity of them so that they can keep prices high. - delmoi
A scary piece of legislation. Also, is it odd that it's in English?
