Month: December 2003

which permits more creative expression: albums or singles?

Scripting News: 12/19/2003

Dave sez:

Just heard an interview on NPR with Todd Rundgren about music on the Internet, the value of a song, albums, and how the users are now in control. Todd says that iTunes is the wrong model because it commoditizes music, with every tune priced at 99 cents. He’s the guy to look to for the killer app in online music, he’s always been first. I played a Rundgren song at last week’s webcast and people groaned “Oh that’s 80s music.” What I didn’t say is that’s music from the guy who could figure out how music on the Internet works as an art. (And besides that, it was 70s not 80s music.) This week I played a Rundgren-produced song, and the kids liked it. He was one of my heroes in the 70s and 80s, and then later when personal computers took off I got to hang out with him in San Francisco.

Would it have killed him to link to the story instead of just NPR’s website?

Find the Real format audio track here

Worth a listen . . .

The whole day’s programming can be found here
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globalism as a two-edged sword

Salon.com Technology | Watch out for “Old Europe”: She can bite

So what would happen if US consumers and businesses boycotted French products and services?

Even if a patriotic consumer wanted to punish cowardly, money-grubbing “frogs,” he’d have to be a committed student of mergers and acquisitions to spot tainted Gallic products.

Liquor: Stay clear of Dom Perignon, right? But what about Seagram’s, Royal Canadian, Glenlivet, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Jacobs Creek Australian wines (all owned by France’s Pernod Picard)?

Magazines: Woman’s Day, Car and Driver (France’s Hachette Group). Soft Sheen Black Hair Products, Helena Rubinstein, Giorgio Armani (L’Oreal), the Athlete’s Foot (Group Rallye). The First Hawaiian Bank (BNP Paribas), RCA TVs and DVDs (Thompson), Motel 6 , Red Roof Inns (Accor), Nissan, which just built a giant $1.4 billion plant in Mississippi (Renault), Uniroyal Tires (Michelin), Taylor Made Golf Clubs (Adidas-Saloman).

Good old American entertainment? Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Motown Records, MP3.com, Polygram, the Sundance Channel, Universal Studios (all belonged to France’s Vivendi until the flailing company recently shucked off its U.S. entertainment interests, a move that had nothing to do with politics. Vivendi, however, still runs the water system for cities like Indianapolis).

You could always hire a consultant from Ernst & Young to guide you through the tangled skein of corporate ties, but beware: Ernst & Young is also French-owned (Cap Gemini.)
[ . . . ]
The irony, however, is that in the United States itself a key customer of French subsidiaries is the U.S. government and the Pentagon. The huge French catering firm Sodexho, for instance, is paid over a hundred million dollars a year to feed U.S. Marines, at every one of their American bases. That eight-year contract was denounced last spring by a clutch of furious congressmen. They backed down when they realized that ending it would cost American, not French, jobs. Sodexho has 130,000 employees across North America.

That’s for starters. Aerospatiale provides helicopters to the U.S. military and Coast Guard, while Dassault sells Falcon 20’s to the Coast Guard. The American subsidiaries of France’s Michelin supply the Pentagon with tires for everything from advanced fighter aircraft to tactical wheeled vehicles, not to mention sales to NASA for the Space Shuttle.

So if you live in Indianapolis, don’t drink the water, and if you’re stationed on a Marine base, eat your meals off-base . . . . .

top ten most requested files displayed

I decided I wanted to see this more easily: I wanted to know people were finding interesting, based on what Google and their own browsing turned up.

So I wrote a little script to go through the active logfile, pull out the successful page requests, tally them up, and write out hrefs and titles as links.

The actual code appears behind the [read more] link. It should work anywhere, and is reasonably configurable, based on local needs and constraints.
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new revenue stream

Well, I signed up for Google’s Adsense program last week and so far, I have netted a staggering $12.86. Hmm, not exactly going to cover much in the way of expenses around here.

It could due to the fact GoogleBot has to recrawl my site to take into account the URL change from no-ip.org . . . . at least I hope that’s what it is.

remember the one about the monkey with his fist in the coconut?

Educated Guesswork: December 2003 Archives

Eric reveals why it took Apple to create a reasonable (for now) solution to the music industry’s (and our) problem.

We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net’s gonna fail, Press Play’s gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45’s; then they bought LP’s; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD’s. They’re going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don’t want to rent your music — and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.

And, you know, at 10 bucks a month, that’s $120 a year. That’s $1,200 a decade. That’s a lot of money for me to listen to the songs I love. It’s cheaper to buy, and that’s what they’re gonna want to do.

They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing out AOL as the great model for this and saying: No, we want that — we want a subscription business. We said: It ain’t gonna work.

You remember the monkey with his hand in the coconut? He had a fistful of nuts but the hole was onloy big enough to get his hand in, not his fist out. So he had to let go of the nuts — not all, just some — to be free. Greedy or stupid, it all amounts to the same thing in the end.

in defense of PowerPoint

Hard to believe, but I try to be fair, ie, distribute punishment evenly . . . .

I had occasion to make a presentation in PowerPoint a week or so ago, and it occured to me that most, if not all, the criticism levelled at it by Edward Tufte and others (including your humble poster) are not necessarily the fault of PowerPoint.

screen grab of mock presentation

While it’s abundantly true that PowerPoint or any slideware generator makes it easy to make content-free presentations, it doesn’t force anyone to do it. If you find yourself at the receiving end of a meaningless presentation, think twice before you blame the Usual Suspect.

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we wouldn’t want shuttle mission control to be bored, now would we?

Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ”information density,” shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it’s a matter of choice. ”If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,” he adds, ”they wouldn’t want it.”

So we have 7 astronauts and a multi-million-dollar space vehicle on the line, and we’re worried about professional mission management staff being bored by the details of their job?

When PowerPoint slideware is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question . . .

If you take the time to read his books and the pamphlet referenced in the article, you would learn that Tufte isn’t in favor of overwhelming people with data, but in focusing on detail and excluding extranea, including ornaments and “chartjunk.”