Streaming Delenda Est

• Streaming was a tempting promise, a holy grail. No more waiting. No more caring about how fast or slow your connection was. You can have it all, and you can have it right now.
• The first obvious compromise was quality. For the overwhelming majority when streaming was first experimentally deployed, their modems limited them to the stereotypical postage-stamp sized video clips. To add further insult to an already injurious situation, even if your computer was fast enough to handle the playback without stuttering, your connection hardly ever was.
• This appears to have had yet another (possibly intended) consequence, and one which Microsoft is no stranger to: Lowering people's expectations. Yes, don't worry, it's perfectly normal for your computer to crash, to reboot every time you change the slightest thing, and for audio and video to sound and look like sheer unadulterated crap.
• Broadband to the rescue? Guess again! A new breed of "web designers" had begun to emerge.
• Fueled primarily by hubris, their natural inclinations were allowed full rein by the rocky state of HTML at the time: Caught between its promise as a platform independent markup language which separated form from content, and the perversions thrust upon it by the desktop-publishing crowd who demanded pixel-perfect control from a medium conceived for its polar opposite.
• Most of the tools that quickly emerged to "help" people author webpages encouraged bogosity and tag salad rather than sound structural markup, which did nothing to help matters.
• This was further complicated by the inborn tendency of "corporate America" to face reality with a rather counterproductive approach which has been termed "solutions as requirements". When all you have is a hammer...
• The final nail in the coffin was the combined whammy of Netscape and Microsoft, whose creations essentially merged into one entity best referred to as "Internet Exploder". The most frightful lies have been spun by these companies, their toadies in the industry and the media at large in order to revisionize history and to placate the sheep into believing that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Bullshit is Innovation. Particularly distasteful was Netscape's attempts, like Apple, to spin their public image as downtrodden rebels sticking it to the greyface of monopoly, when in reality their ignorance and malignance was just as great, and has done just as much damage as Microsoft's own tactics.
• Microsoft is just catching up to standards that were pioneered back when HTML was a baby -- oddly enough, the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer scores far better in this regard than the native Windows version.
• Netscape, on the other hand, could no longer ignore the fact that their product was just as much of a pile of crap as IE if not more, and so they did the only sane thing they could by throwing it out and starting from scratch. I won't address any of the "open source" issues with Mozilla. Its developers have done far more in less time than the naysayers would have it, and even if the end product falls short of ideals, it has at least provided a much-needed fresh breath of diversity and accessibility.
• Arena and emacs-w3 were supporting Cascading Style Sheets in early 1995. The first official draft of the CSS specification is older than the first Netscape public beta (0.9). Don't even get me started on the OBJECT fiasco. Frames "innovative"? Pig vomit.
• Now it's interesting to note that most of the controversy over "content protection" hadn't started raging yet. CPRM, 4C entity, and Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" slowly becoming reality were still a few years away. Most people putting up high quality multimedia content weren't big movie studios yet. Nevertheless, they were concerned about Control, because they were the kind of Suit who epitomizes every nasty and negative stereotype about that mindset. Control Freaks. Like the Apple computer people who've managed to cultivate that nice reputation and image as a bunch of kindly bearded rebels sticking it to Tha Man, their sphincters could turn coal into diamonds.
• Control freaks, meet fledgling web designers. The former in chains and trying to get the rest of the world to join them; the latter, eager to please, flushed with naivete and drunk with the sensation of power. Now it's nearly impossible to find any hint that things used to be different.
• Crotchety old grandpa, that's me. "In the old days, we downloaded our files like God and RFC intended, dammit!" The real clue that things had forever changed was when old-timers started feeling like clueless newbies. Gee, I never had any problems downloading files before...and slowly, it became apparent that the problems were deliberately put there.
• I remember one day spending nearly half an hour trying to download a video clip. I even had a network of computers running different operating systems, so I was sure I could do it. I ran back and forth between the computers, trying different media formats, jumping through one goddamn hoop after another; barely getting within sight of my goal, only to have it elude me every time.
• The seconds of my mortal life are too precious to waste being buggered by technofetishists who ignore history; and yet, the harder someone tries to go against the basic underlying principles of the Web, the more motivated I usually become. A stupid reaction, but an almost universal one. What's the first thing you want to do when someone tells you not to do something? Childish, yes. That's the mindset that treats you like a child, and then gets surprised when you act accordingly (War on Some Drugs, anyone?).
• The growing trend both on the Web and with physical media is to break things in the name of "copyright protection", which does nothing whatsoever to stop commercial bootleggers, and punishes purchasers for exercising their rights. Today the DMCA makes it illegal to reverse engineer. Tomorrow, some new legislation may make it illegal to "view source" on a web page.
• I believe in the philosophy of "cypherpunks write code"; that is, that it is better to empower ourselves to live well rather than demand that the world or others conform to our desires.
• To that end, the most effective way to resist the streaming mindset is a two pronged attack. Education can only go so far; true empowerment means access to the necessary tools.
• The anti-streamer's toolkit includes programs which make it easy for the end user to properly download content. Use your favorite search engine to find copies of these and add them to your arsenal:
• StreamBox VCR (Real Video). Available for Win32 only. Yanked off the Internet by Real Networks and the State, but still downloadable if you can find it. Somewhat outdated.
• ASFRecorder (Windows Media). Available for Win32 and Unix (source code included). Still officially ignored since its author(s) remain anonymous. Somewhat outdated.
• Major MMS (Windows Media). Available for Mac OS X and various free Unixes. Open source.
• Net Transport (MMS, PNM, RTSP). Available for Win32 only. Works quite well saving most Real and Windows Video streams. Not open source.
• Some day soon, I hope that someone will come up with a program to do the same for Apple's Quicktime. This used to be a not too devious format until they started "embedding" and "Akamaizing" movies. If you view source you can still generally get the URL's, so they added another little twist wherein current versions no longer store visible copies of files in a temporary location.