It looks like some larger companies are starting to see the light and realizing that DRM is more of a burden than it has benefit to both consumers and content providers. In a symbolic move, Yahoo are now offering a DRM-free personalized MP3 download – you may think about the artist and the song what you want, but at least it’s a step in the right direction and the reasons that Yahoo gives for this initiative show that they are in fact serious about this.
“The only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.” – that’s a strong statement, especially coming from a technology company that could easily jump on the DRM bandwagon and do the exact same thing. But it looks like Yahoo have realized that DRM comes at a cost that is much higher than the potential benefit and so this recent move is a warning shot in the direction of the record labels that still seem to think of DRM as the best thing since sliced bread. Instead, Yahoo suggests that offering better features, personalization etc. and the option to play the music on whatever platform they want to their customers is what they would like to do to add value to music downloads. I couldn’t agree more. As Yahoo put it so nicely, “Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer”.
Of course the success of Indie-music sites like Emusic, which have been selling un-DRM’d MP3s with increasing success, is also starting to threaten a DRM based business model, so it only makes sense for Yahoo to put some pressure on the labels to be allowed to start doing the same thing. But regardless of their motives, the move for more DRM-free downloads is a step in the right direction and should ultimately provide consumers with more freedom of choice. And maybe our cultural heritage will in the end be a bit less threatened than it seems to be at the moment. And that’s good news indeed.
Technorati : DRM, MP3, Yahoo, freedom, record labels
July 21st, 2006
Alive again and relatively well rested after two crazy nights spent on the road to and from Berlin, I’m finally ready to report on this weekend’s event of the year in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. No, not the football finals, that was last week. I’m talking about “Calling all Nations“, a worship gathering initiated by Noel Richards that, after years of planning, finally took place last Saturday, a mere 6 days after the idols of sports had been worshipped in the same place.
Where should I begin? It’s so difficult after an event like this. There are a lot of superlatives that lend themselsves to being used, but I’ll try to restrain myself. There are also a whole lot of negative things that could be said and again, I will try to restrain myself, although a few things need to be said. But let’s start with an overview of what this day was.
We arrived way too early at around 6am, when gates opened at 9, so some of our group went off into Berlin to see some of the sights, while others (like me) spent some time sleeping (or trying to) on the bus. Anyway, at 9 we were let into the stadium, which I must say is an impressive sight, although it looks different without any grass in it. We had seats in the east curve, which is about as far away from the main stage as it gets, but then there were no seats that were really close to the main stage anyway. A smaller second stage was right in front of us, though and throughout the day performaces would alternate between those two stages. A little earlier than scheduled, the “Psalm Drummers” started the program at about 10.45 and from then on there was a steady rotation of worship leaders with some of them playing just one song and others a couple of songs, up to about a maximum playing time of half an hour. There were worship leaders from around 20 different countries (and visitors from 30 countries) and although the start was a bit slow, as the stadium filled up with what must have been more than 20.000 people (no official numbers I’ve heard, sorry) there was a growing sense of unity and enjoyment of worshipping God together.
There were only two short breaks the whole day and there were a few talks by different people and times to pray together afterwards, but the main focus was pretty much on worshipping God through songs. I enjoyed most of the music and I’m sure God enjoyed all of it. Of course, everyone has his favorites, so I will name a few worship leaders that I particularly liked. First off, there was YFriday, which I hadn’t seen live before and who did a great job right at the beginning of the day. Claas P. Jambor is always a treat, he only played one song (Open Skies), but it was great. Reuben Morgan (Hillsong) was fantastic. Delirious? as always played a solid set, but never really got out of “concert mode” – so it was good that the last time slot belonged to Matt Redman, who did a good job in wrapping up the day’s events and bringing us all together in worship once more.
The large variety of worship “artists” (I’m a bit reluctant to use that word…) was also one of the problems of the whole thing. At times it got quite hectic when there was a string of musicians just leading one song (which in many cases people didn’t know and couldn’t sing along to right away) and then handing over to the next person, who would play something in a completely different style. You’d have a band getting the audience fired up and celebrating, only to be followed by another artist starting a slow, quiet song that just didn’t seem to capture the atmosphere. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the entire day that was like that, but it did happen more than once.
And then there’s the big question: what’s the point? Worshipping God together is great and something we are called to, yes. And we did that a lot. But the feeling remains that maybe (and especially with several years of planning) there should have been more. Somehow it feels to me like a tremendous chance was missed to use this event as a catalyst for… something. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m wrong and it wasn’t missed and I just didn’t get it. Right now it feels like we had a great day, certainly prayer and worship together and proclaiming the glory of God in this country will change things. But it doesn’t feel like something we’ll be telling our grandkids about one day… let’s hope that it’s just my faith that is too small.
Technorati : Berlin, Calling all Nations, Hillsong, Matt Redman, christian, event, music, worship
July 16th, 2006
I just realized that I haven’t updated my blog since I wrote about Larry Wall at the ICCM. Well, that wasn’t the only reason I was there. But I certainly enjoyed that conference – Taylor University is a great location and the organizers of the conference really put a lot of effort into this, it’s a great way to meet tech people from lots of missions and find out about things they do, success stories and failures.
Anyway, right after the ICCM, we as OMers had our very own meeting, also at Taylor. Our international IT committee (IITC) met to discuss strategy and make decisions on a number of issues. While I am not a member of the committee, I have attended at least part of the last couple of meetings (which take place every 6 months) as an “expert” on our Linux development and some other things. It really can be fun sometimes… and really boring as well. I guess we had a relatively good mix this time and some good decisions were made that will influence the way our Linux development will go in the next months and years.
We got away from the IITC meeting a day early to drive back to my colleague Matt’s home in Gettysburg, PA (we, that’s Matt, our project manager Andrea, and me). We had the grand tour of the Gettysburg battlefields on Saturday afternoon, after catching up on some sleep in the morning (let me tell you, sharing a room with a heavy snorer for a week is not ideal). There are a few pictures of that in the gallery (or will be, soon), but if you don’t get all the explanations with them, it’s probably just a bunch of fields to you. Sunday we went to Matt’s church, which was great – he was finally able to prove to his pastors that we really do exist and he didn’t just make us up 
. Afterwards we went to Hershey’s chocolate world, which was quite interesting, before going back and having a nice Chinese dinner in Gettysburg.
Monday was all work again… we had to discuss our next system administrator training, which we plan to do in a different way this time. First time I ever thought that mindmap programs really are a good choice for certain tasks. In the afternoon we also had a look at the API for our new Linux management application, which is what we are currently working on. We’ll have to make a few changes now because we are moving away from the console based approach to a web interface (a result of the IITC decision to let us do it whichever way we want it). In the evening we had the chance to see Matt’s wife in a softball game… I think I’ll never understand what Americans find so exciting about baseball and softball, but I guess they have that problem with Europeans and football… err, I mean soccer. Nice Italian food that night in a restaurant near Harrisburg.
Tuesday was more of the same and by early afternoon I was about ready to go home. Which had to wait until Wednesday, though. Matt drove me to Dulles airport and I was there for my United flight 3 hours before departure. Now, is it just me or would it make sense to open more than 1/3 of the checkin desks when there is a two hour queue waiting to check in? Instead of then telling passengers who have waited like cattle for two hours that they are rather late and “really need to hurry” to get to the flight that has almost started boarding? So I wasn’t too excited about United’s service… which I wasn’t in general, but I guess flying Emirates earlier this year has pretty much spoilt any other airline for me anyway. So Thursday morning I was back in Germany and the rest of the time until a couple hours ago is a bit of a blur to me. I guess jetlag does that… but it seems to be getting better now. Monday will be back to my normal work schedule… not a bad thing, really. It’s nice to meet in person every now and then, but it’s equally nice to be back in my little home office.
Technorati : Gettysburg, ICCM, Linux, OM, Taylor University, meetings
June 23rd, 2006
I’m in Upland, Indiana for the annual International Conference on Computing and Missions (ICCM) this year, together with a lot of OM’s IT staff. The entire Linux team actually drove all the way from Pennsylvania yesterday, which is where my colleague Matt and his wife live. We arrived just in time for introductions and it was kind of fun when a guy stood up, claiming he’d just “wandered in”… it was actually Larry Wall, this year’s keynote speaker, who I’m sure you’ve heard of if you’re a techie… maybe not if you’re a Christian just generally interested in technology.
Larry actually trained to be a linguist with Wycliffe, the Bible translators, but then couldn’t go out on the mission field for health reasons. So instead, he developed the Perl programming language. This morning he gave the first keynote speech and there are a couple more to follow… this one was great fun. In typical Larry style, he introduced the topic of his speech as “Seeking a pe(a)rl of great price”, while saying that he really didn’t want to spiritualize Perl too much. It was very interesting to hear about a programming language from a linguist’s perspective and he certainly made it a lot of fun, while at the same time making fun of a lot of other programming languages in a very intelligent way. I’m definitely looking forward to his talk tomorrow. Funny side thing – he actually ended up in prayer group #42
Right now I’m actually sitting in a Windows Vista demonstration and I’m very unimpressed with what I’ve seen so far… well, I guess I’ll never become a Windows guy at heart. Anyway, they say the conference is really all about the food and lunch is not too far away anymore, so I’d better get this posted and get ready.
Technorati Tags: ICCM, missions, technology, IT, Linux, Perl, Larry Wall
June 10th, 2006
I don’t want you to think I’ve had a sudden flash of inspiration when a lot of articles in the “Christian Living” category turn up now – I’ve been digging through my little archive of “Service on Sunday” sermons and other texts I’ve written in the past and am now slowly translating the most important ones to English, so that I can make them available to you. It would be great to get some feedback – sometimes it’s encouraging to hear that the work I put into it was actually helpful to someone 
. Anyway, today I dug out a text on loving your neighbor (please forgive me if the British spelling with “ou” slips in every now and then…) and how that’s difficult if you don’t love yourself.
Continue Reading June 5th, 2006
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