Here’s a quick list of crap to buy if you haven’t begun to Finish the Fight.

Xbox 360 Console Includes 20GB Hard Drive (with HDMI)

Halo 3

Xbox 360 Wireless Controller

Xbox 360 Live 12 Month Halo 3 Gold Card

If you’ve opened up ports in your router to get optimum speeds on Bit Torrent transfers, you can do this fairly easily.

Step 1: Get your house in order
DHCP is great, but if you’ve got multiple devices on your network, it’s to your advantage to go manually set each one up. Especially if you want to do anything more advanced than web browsing and email- you cant map ports if you don’t have an address to point to. It’s a mild hassle, but do it once and forget about it.

I use the standard 10.0.1.X convention, with my main base station being 10.0.1.1, subsequent repeating base stations counting up, and my mac is 10.0.1.24, with subsequent computers counting down. Any random DHCP devices that hop on, such as iPhones and such just grab something randomly, and thats ok as they tend to not require portforwarding. The important thing is that the computers that do stuff that requires things from the outside finding them- like torrents or file serving- have some internally assigned address you can map to.

Step 2: Establish a permanent, easy to remember address to your network
No one wants to remember IP addresses, and besides, most of us have broadband connections with dynamic IP addresses on our routers that can change. We need something that’s easy to remember, and will work even if our router grabs a new IP address address from our service provider every week, day, 4 hours, whatever.

The solution? DynDns. Free for personal use, this service allows one to create an easy to remember address, such as robrob.dyndns.org that will point back to your home network; There is a small utility available for various platform that checks your IP address at set intervals (such as every 5 minutes). While there is a mac utility available, I have a Windows PC that I use to run torrents and other tasks, so I installed my client there to keep my Mac tidy. Many main stream routers have DynDns (or similar offerings) built right into them as well. Regardless, it doenst matter where the DynDNS updater service resides on your network, as long as it’s there somewhere and telling the master server what your networks public IP address is.

Step 3: Direct Traffic
So now you’ve got a nice clean internal network with IP addresses you assigned, and an external facing domain that is synced up to your routers public facing IP address. At this point, you simply need to go into your router and define some traffic directing rules. I may want to mount my mac harddrive in the finder of a remote mac, or connect to my windows PC with MS’s nice new Remote Desktop Connection for mac beta. Or get to the torrent box through a web browser. Even though these are three different machines on my private internal network, we can tell our router to send each specific type of request to the correct machine, even though they are all asking for robrob.dyndns.org. This is thanks to a misunderstood but wonderful tool called port mapping (or forwarding).

The specifics may vary slightly from router to router, but the gist is roughly the same (i use Apple Airport gear). You type in a public port (this will vary for each service; a list of apple’s frequently used ports is here), an internal IP address, and the private port, which i tend to keep the same as the public port.

For instance, to make the Personal File Sharing feature accessible over the internet, I would open port 548 on IP address 10.0.1.24, port 548. (548 is the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) over TCP, used for AppleShare, Personal File Sharing & Apple File Service) (also, I have assumed you’ve clicked the box to turn sharing on in the sharing settings menu; if you haven’t do that as well :)

Voila. Now you’re good to go.

Step 4: Get “Back to My Mac”
This is the easy part. Grab a mac with an internet connection and hit command-k in the finder to bring up the server connection box. Simply type in your DynDns address (ie: robrob.dyndns.org) and wait a couple seconds while it does it’s magic; you should be presented with a login dialogue, and there you can enter the login info you use to get on your mac when you’re in front of it. If you log in as an administrator, you’ll mount the entire system, otherwise you’ll get your user documents directory. Sweet.

Next Steps: Route more ports.
Now that you know how this simple traffic direction works, go nuts. If you want to control your PC, simply map the MS RDC port (3389) to the PC’s IP address. If you want to print to your mac from anywhere, map the TCP printing port to the mac with the printer sharing enabled, etc… Once you grasp the basics, it’s usually as simply as googling the default port number and mapping it as we talked about.

Notes: Security
I’m not even going to attempt to present myself as any sort of authority on security. Just remember that that using a router and DHCP isolates your internal machines from external threats, and the steps we are taking to open up and map all these ports explicitly nullifies that. Don’t go nuts and open up anymore ports than you have to, don’t enable guest access to anything, and so on. Be careful, and google anything you’re not sure on.

I hope this was somewhat easy to follow. Back to my mac sounds like a great feature, but as I’ve shown, taking a few minutes to understand a couple basic concepts will let you do the same thing without ponying up $99 a year- or waiting until October.

Well, no apologies necessary- and it is happening soon. it’s happening now. it’s been happening. I don’t know if “potential” is the right word though, I think chicago is held back by it’s legacy. The city is geared around (mundane) TV spots. The agencies are lead by people that made their careers in the TV age. it’s a 30 second spot town, period.

I don’t think TV is irrelevant, or even unimportant, but in the current landscape TV is only a piece of the brand puzzle. Yet it dominates 98% of these fuckers thinking. And at this point, i really don’t think there is any changing it, people are just set in their ways and they’re probably gonna need to get fired by their holding companies, or worse yet, just lose every account until the agency has to be reborn as something else. Hell, some have even taken the baby step of firing a ton of older guys who were sucking massive compensation packages to make room for young up and comers, but at the end of the day, they didn’t fire themselves- and i’ll leave that at that.

In light of Bob Scarpelli’s quote in the Ad Week piece- particularly the “The community has to make the commitment to reinvent itself and bring in talent” part, I’m revising my statement. The Scarpellis of Chicago don’t need to be fired. The need to (metaphorically) have their hearts ripped out on Bill Bernbach’s alter and unceremoniously be cast aside (that casting aside can and should be literal).

Harsh? Maybe, but not as harsh as watching ridiculously overpaid and under performing “Executive Leadership” steer the ship into an iceberg for 15 years and then turnaround and suggest hiring some outside talent should cure what ails us. You’re what ails us, dude.

Here’s a good story the sums up “The Chicago Way”. Chatting with some other industry folks, about a big pitch. The Client is introducing an essentially web-based product to a highly online market, and it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to envision a media plan that skews a wee bit digital. What’s the big Chicago shop take to the pitch? A TV spot, and some storyboards and scripts for more TV spots. Good job guys. Gaze into your crystal ball and take a rough guess how that pitch went.

Yet without fail, we all invariably find ourselves in some random Chicago theater once a year, while our respective agency CCO bitches at us for not being creative enough. Lately the speeches include a second, tacked on portion about the importance of “Integration”- which is usually far more ironic than insightful considering:

a) The guys still just want to cherry pick TV, and
b) Why in the hell are “full service” agencies so unable to present a cohesive integrated offering, anyway?

Isn’t that one of the whole advantages of the holding companies gobbling firms up, to present a comprehensive set of offerings to global brands? Yet, this constant dysfunction is a universal element throughout Chicago. Given where the agencies currently stand now on the integration thing, I starting to think the only thing “Full Service” meant in the 90s was “we have to get our scans and large format prints done by the Studio the company owns”- usually at fprices far inflated by what the open market would demand.

The $400 foam core mounted color laser prints might sound rather small in the grand scheme of things, but they symbolize the gross inefficiencies of these lumbering mega-agencies. The Ad Week piece rightly laments the lack of “indie” shops in Chicago, and rightly so. How much better would creative be if we could take all the money wasted and spent it on creative development instead?

At the end of the day, I suppose we shouldn’t be mad at the Scarpellis of Chicago. We should be mad at ourselves.

Day in and day out we all watch decisions get made around us- decisions that ignore the realities of the marketplace and where it’s headed- and we don’t say a word. Much like the lumbering shops that are grateful for their stale clients as long as they are paying the bills, we too are apparently grateful to take their paychecks and avoid rocking the boat. We don’t have the balls to say “You know what, that’s a dumb, out of touch idea” when we hear one, and we don’t have the courage to tell Bob Scarpelli that what he said in Ad Week left a foul taste in our mouth when we see him in the elevator.

Chicago has to change- everyone can see that, from commentators in the media to agency staffers, all the way up to the Bob Scarpellis. Chicago simply has to do something radical to get relevant again. What doesn’t make sense, at least none that I can see- is how anyone expects that to happen when we have the same handful of mega-agencies being run by the same guys that got us into this mess in the first place. Massive disruptive seismic shifts don’t happen in neat little meetings- they take a fucking asteroid obliterating something.

I know a guy who has his employees digg his articles. Pretty shameless, but knowing him and his personality, it’s to be expected. He’s had his hand slapped before for spamming public message boards begging for diggs, but legally I suppose there is nothing stopping him make his employees do his bidding, ethics and integrity be damned.

What will stop him, at least from bugging me over AIM is the “block user” function. He is a nice enough guy, and we occasionally talk, but mainly I just get IMs from him with links to Digg. Ironically, he usually doesn’t reply, or digg things, when i send messages back with links to my own content.

At any rate, the point I am getting at is this- don’t be a whore begging your peers for diggs on AIM. You’re going to end up losing access to those peers, and for what- a dozen diggs? That’s nothing. A statistical fart. Having been dugg before in a big way, I can say that getting to the front page is out of your hands. The nerd herd will take to it and light it on fire, or it will sit there and sink. Your 40 buddies have dick all to do with this process, so why get a reputation for being annoying, or worse, a spammer?

My advice, if you want a good digg rate, is to worry more about just writing good stuff. It will circulate if it’s good. Don’t worry about the immediate digging from your crew- it’s worse than when Ad agencies set out to make lame “viral” campaigns. Focus on the content, and if the internet likes it, the internet likes it. Oh, wildly speculative apple rumors go over well too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go AIM everyone I know to digg this.

At any rate, the previaling logic was studio support would decide this in a timely fashion and we can carry on rebuying all the movies we just bought on DVD again and call it a day; this has not really been the case, with many studios supporting both, some flip flopping and changing their minds, and so on. Ultimately the studios are going to follow the units/money, not dictate a standard.

So who is going to nip this war in the bud? Walmart. Buzz is swirling that Walmart has ordered a couple million cheap chinese HD-DVD players. The implications of having the world’s largest retailer throwing their muscle behind one camp or the other is huge. Afterall, the PS2 was a nice boost for the original DVD, but it wasn’t until morbidly obese women were trampling senior citizens at a black friday stampede for $30 DVD players that the format really made it.

Similarly, flat panel tv’s were only in the realm of the upper crust until black friday sales drove the price to something the masses would tolerate; within weeks, those black friday prices were pretty much mainstreamed, and now HDTV penetration is climbing hard and fast.

Walmart getting cheap players is a big deal, and it would not surprise me to see additional studio support follow. It’s still not enough to make me really care, but it does seem to be getting a little more inevitable.

My prediction is you’re a retarded jackass, and you’re next game won’t sell half as many as Carmack’s.

Seriously though, console wars are bad enough, but there are still people that like fanning the PC vs console flame war? They are different experiences, good at different things. Done.

In 5 years, yes, it probably will be time for MS and Sony to “rethink” some stuff and release a new console. Hell, they will probably even use those fancy multicore chips Romero is screaming about. Christ, I feel more retarded for even thinking about this more than 2 minutes. Next.

In what many see as a jab back, Microsoft recently altered liscense terms, requiring Mac users looking to run Vista in Paralells to purchase more expensive flavors, such as business or Ultimate editions. No technical reasons for this exist; my personal opinion is MS simply wants to discourage the practice. With a virtualized copy of windows, MS’s dominant OS goes from being the magical software that makes the box work to merely a runtime environment required for some specific software applications. Not exactly the strongest foundation to build an empire upon.

In any event, look for both camps to beat their chest louder and louder once Leopard gets here. And if Microsoft somehow decides to fire a nastier shot back- which I am fairly certain they will if Leopard shoots out of the gate to glowing reviews, and the switch numbers keep growing, look for Apple to quit making witty banners for a second and fire back a gut shot of their own- iTunes for Ubuntu.

While numerous ipod solutions exist for Linux, the demand for iTunes has apparently been pretty strong over the past few years. The closed nature of the Ipod ecosystem puts it at odds with typical linux releases- i don’t see the source code making it’s way to sourceforge to be compiled in a billion flavors anytime this century- the relatively recent popularity of Ubuntu on the desktop makes me think Apple isn’t above publishing an installer package for that particular distribution.

Until Dell starts shipping home boxes with Ubuntu installed, or if you could walk into CompUSA and choose from a dozen Ubuntu boxes, the numbers won’t really mean that much. Sure, they’ll probably sell enough content through the store to recoup development dollars, but the real victory would be to see the windows version get demoted to sitting side by side with the other alternate platform version.

Reducing Vista to a mere runtime environment. One of many alternatives, not just the “other” one.

Casual copying takes many forms- maybe a student wants to learn an app, or a designer wants to work on his work projects at home when he calls in “sick”. It could be even more innocent, perhaps someone has switched platforms and doesnt want to have to reinvest thousands of dollars into digital goods he’s already purchased just because he got sick of dealing with a particular OS. Whatever the particulars, we all know there are hundreds of thousands of unliscensed applications floating around out in the wild, to the detriment of everyone- publishers can’t get paid, users can’t get support, it’s no good.

My suspicion is that many- if not most users- would jump at the opprotunity to “go legit”, but then they see the CEO of Adobe justify the $1700-$2500 price of admission to the latest creative suite by stating “Our customer is not typically price sensitive”. At which point desire to be a legit customer gets replaced with a desire to tell adobe to kiss their ass as they trek off to piratebay to grab it for free.

Is there a quick fix to this? I think so.

A couple times in my youth, perhaps every 5-7 years, my local library had Amnesty Day. The idea was pretty simple. Collect all the library books you can find- even if they are years old and you’re afraid to bring them back because the nickle a day will ad up to quite the bill- and bring them back. They’d zero out your account and let you start over with a clean slate, presumably with more resolve to not abuse the system as a return for the awesome favor their just provided you.

Seems like a logical system to me. Without it, they wouldn’t get the books back, and there was no way they could hope to collect the fines anyway (hough now I suppose they’d send it to a third party collection agency, sigh). And you get back customers and encourage the love of reading and books and all that good stuff.

No brainer.

Let’s encourage Adobe, Microsoft, and others to follow suit with a software amnesty program.

For one week, and one week only, let people buy the full retail versions of popular pirated software applications for a steeply discounted price- perhaps the student, or upgrade price.

Before the accountants start crying, look at it like this- odds are you wern’t gonna get anything from these people anyway, and they were still going to be using your crap. Now you get something. And more than that, once the big initial purchase hurdle is over, you’ve got a ton of people who now have legit liscenses and they will probably take advantage of your biannual overpriced upgrades.

From what I’ve gathered, you guys make *alot* of money off upgrades, why not inject a couple hundred thousand more customers into that pool?

Also for the bean counters, I would limit the program strictly to individuals- commercial liscense holders (or non holders!) can either pay their bulk rate or call a sales rep and try to negotiate more favorable terms.

Adobe, if you’d like to price your software more than the typical computer- hell- workstation costs nowadays, that’s your right. You can because you own the market and people don’t really have much choice. But if you’d like to earn some goodwill, consider an amnesty program. Hell, it’s not even altrusitic, you’ll make some money, with the promise of making even more money from now until forever.

Give it a shot. If it’s good enough for books, it’s good enough for the software used to lay those books out.

n

I have no interest in “pulling a corey” and spending every waking hour crying like a little girl about the dangers of DRM. Nor am I naive enough to believe that no independent creative would steal from another indie creative. But on the overall topic of font theft and disrespect, I’ll say this: No warez kid you stop from stealing your typefaces would ever pay for any of your typefaces anyway, regardless of how you deliver it. Period. Once you accept that, it makes the rest of these obvious points all the more painful to watch unfold.

Davis admits there are some “minor flaws” in the system. For instance:

1) Incompatibility with existing type managers
2) No collecting for output/archiving
3) No embedding in PDFs (or other file formats).

Are you shitting me? These are all show stoppers, but Davis rambles on and on, justifying them and offering up “solutions”. For instance, he plans on releasing his own Type Management tool to handle his crippled bastard type collection. Is each font vendor supposed to do this as well? As Ars points out in their comprehensive review of all of them, it’s VERY hard to do this chore well. Extensis has only been trying it for 15 years, but I’m sure Davis can crank a nice one out in a couple weeks- then again, once leopard ships. Aside from the obvious flaw in this line of thinking, many production environments are pretty tightly tested and locked down, and I don’t see them being very eager to rollout a slew of crappy little tools to support whiny font makers.

More infuriating than Davis’s flippant disregard for production workflows, his the constant backpatting throughout his little speech, littering it with claims like “bold and revolutionary”. I suppose it is certainly bold, but christ man, an iPhone it’s not.

Crippling your product and making your customers change their practice to suit your needs is certainly not new, let alone revolutionary. Big Media has been trying it for years, and we see how wel that’s working out. The really tragic aspect to this is that had he sat down and thought about the issue from a big picture perspective, looking at his users, he could have implemented some revolutionary changes to the industry, rather than vomitting up some rootkit like DRM-shitwrapper.

Let’s think about fonts and how they get purchased. Joe AD typically has a collection of typefaces his studio/agency owns, and that works most of the time. But for those special jobs, a special typeface may be in order, and he shops around online and whips out his Amex when he finds the indie type that fits his and his clients needs. He buys a copy,maybe more if othes are working on it right now with him, and moves on. It’s not uncommon, despite what the EULA may say, to pass this font on for output, and to archive it up on the server or optical media when the job is complete- if years pass and the agency needs that piece for a new business pitch, the assets are all right there.

Now, let’s dig deeper and put on our Bold and Revolutionary hats.

What other asset is treated similar to this? And can easily be stolen, but rarely is, mainly out of fear that your studio will get their face sued off if you violate the liscensing terms? Stock Photos.

Chuck, or smarter people like him in that line of work, might want to look to thatmodel in the future. It could simplify things as well as be more lucrative. The one man shop doing a band poster for a local band can liscense it out for $15 that use, whereas if Landor or DDB or whatever wants to make a typeface the star of a national/global campaign- and put it in 200 seats in the process (plus vendors) you can charge them hundreds of thousands. Hey, that seems cooler than $145 or whatever you’re getting now.

Yes, a model like this would mean the font houses would have to retool their sales force a bit, but so what? If it’s so obvious the industry needs changes made, shouldn’t the few type houses be the ones to be incoinvienced and have growing pains headaches, not the hundreds of thousands of creative professional and people in production enviroments?

Or, you could always have a little faith that only assholes would steal fonts from an indie fonthouse. And it’s not worth pissing off awesome customers due to a few assholes you don’t care about.

Either way, my guess is the revenus Davis seems to love so much will dry up as a result of the design community blogging and ranting about this mistake on a messageboard, and the open letter will quietly disappear – along with the ill-fated DRM installer.

When we first sat down to eat, he had a text message; he explained to me some dudes he knows made this service called Dodgeball and told me a little about thier offering. Cool.

Fast forward 3 hours later at the bar, he’s still putzing about with his phone, only now grumbling about “that damn dodgeball” and how it is usually dormant- except during SXSW, when it kicks into overdrive (for obvious reasons- thousands of nerds in one place, blah blah).

Anyhow, now that we are all back home, the internet is abuzz about those Twitter growth charts, with SXSW frequently popping up as the likely culprit for the explosive bloom. Well, I was there and it was certainly blowing up- litterally; I can’t recall how many times that first day I’d hear people grab their phones and exclaim “My twitter’s blowing up!”. No shit sherlock, that’s what it does.

By day two, the enthusiam was peaked; by the third day it sounded to me like most people were tired of the damn thing.

I see the appeal of these nerd toys at big events like SXSW, especially as packs of pasty folks drift from bar to bar and party to party. If I had to subject myself to them everyday though… i’d probably just pay Verizon my early termination fee and call it a day.

Twitter seems to take the obnoxious bits from the Social Web and reduce them down to their most asinine and annoying. Who needs a nice meaty piece of content, when a micro-entry will do the trick? Perhaps this is a nice addition to the ADD set’s toolbox, but I like solid, well written content. On my own terms- via a nice tabbed browser session, or in an RSS reader, at the place and time of my choosing.

Personally, i would rather read 15 year old’s You Tube Reviews, or Threadless T shirt design feedback, than the current Twitter offering of 30 year olds acting like they are 15 and thinking people care they are having a beer before bed.

Plenty of others have railed on Twitter for their own reasons. To be fair, Dodgeball should probbaly get a little more angst pointed in it’s direction, but I suppose that’s life in the shadow of a Social Web Wunderkid.

What the brains behind both of these operations fail to get, as they scramble to add my social network to my phone, is that my social network is already in my damn phone, in the address book. Hell, if you have a fancy phone, you’ve probably got your AIM list in there too. And I’m cool with it just as it is right now.

The scary part is this- now that Twitter is getting mentioned in the media, it will be a couple months before Ad Agency hacks start pulling their teams off of Second Life and start putting resources into hopping on the Twitter Train. Given their track record of not really enhancing things of marginal value in the digital space, I can’t wait to see what kind of awesome shit they come up when working with tech of extremleymarginal value- ON MY CELLPHONE.

The even scarier part is- assuming the players involved aren’t complete dunces- they have to have some ideas around enhancing these services when the iPhone ships. Thankfully it looks like Apple is going to run a tight ship when it comes to “real” apps, but I would certainly put money on a Twitter- or whatever replaces it when it’s bright SXSW colored star burns out- dashboard app thats gives me a 3rd, maybe 4th way to find out whether John Gruber had the chicken or the pasta on his flight home from Austin.