Month: January 2004

is this realistic?

Cory Doctorow takes the management of TiVo to task for not being willing to die for his principles . . . .

What’s funny about this is that it’s the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn’t upset the music publishers, Marconi didn’t cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players — hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.

Where does this bizarre idea — that the dinosaur industry that’s being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it — come from?

Well, this may be driven by the fact that the TiVo guys are the dogs, erm, mammals in the fight: they run the risk of being trampled by the dinos, or more precisely, their attorneys. The system, as currently defined, may stink, but I don’t know that sacrificing a beachhead of “reasonable compromise” makes sense.

Cory’s email reply to me bears that out (an excerpt follows):

Every single successful new media tech got successful by answering a market demand, then getting the courts and the govt to change the law to legalize what they did. Appeasement never succeeds. Standing strong sometimes does. It’s the difference between a zero percent chance of success and a non-zero chance. Most companies fail, period. The risk of failure is not, in and of itself, sufficient justification for not delivering the products the markets demand.

This sounds a lot like sacrificing someone else’s business to death on the altar of principle: I don’t agree that’s anyone else’s call to make. The TiVo guys have to make the decisions they’re comfortable with. If they want to bet they can preserve their business in the face of Open Source competition and the risk of litigation from the media companies, that’s up to them.

It may work out in the end that this is a solid toehold that can be built into something else. I would rather have seen this message couched as a challenge or encouragement than as name-calling . . . .

And far as I can tell, there isn’t exactly a lot of competition in this space: there are two commercial players and one home-brew project, that I’m aware if. Given there’s no monopoly, perhaps that tells us all we need to know . . . .

a cure for Safari’s timeout intransigence

Unsanity.org: SafariNoTimeout 1.0

Well people, I got completely frustrated with Safari timing out with this stupid 60 second timeout message whenever I try to access eSellerate sales reports and other similar db-driven pages, so this was born in about an hour – Introducing SafariNoTimeout 1.0 – a haxie (that doesn’t requires APE, btw) that sets the connection timeout in Safari to 10 minutes (or different value if you feel like doing defaults write stuff in Terminal). I find it useful for own needs, so maybe some of you will find it useful too. Who knows? đŸ˜‰

If this post makes it in without any grousing from Safari, we’ll know it works đŸ˜‰

a peek at Apple’s video device strategy?

David Pogue’s Circuits email this week details an interview with Steve Jobs: one of the topics discussed was video players, of some undetermined form . . . .

But Mr. Jobs outlined three reasons he doubted video players would ever approach the success of audio players — not even counting their high price ($700 and up) and the time-consuming difficulty of loading huge video files onto them. It was clear from his answers that Mr. Jobs has done quite a bit of thinking about the topic.

First, he said, on a video player, “there’s just no equivalent of headphones.” That is, when you put on headphones and press Play on a music player, the results are spectacular &emdash; you get a very close equivalent to the concert-hall experience.

But watching video on a tiny three-inch handheld screen is almost nothing like the experience of watching a movie in a theater or even on TV. It can’t approach the same realism or emotional impact.

Second, he pointed out that Hollywood has been a much better job of providing outlets for its wares than the recording industry. If you want to see a movie, you can see it in the theater, on DVD, on pay-per-view, on HBO, in flight and so on.

On the other hand, Mr. Jobs pointed out that until recently, there was pretty much only one legal way to buy music: go to a store and bring home a CD or tape. The debut of legitimate download services like Apple’s iTunes store was a huge factor in the popularity of portable music players — but there just isn’t the same kind of pent-up demand for new movie-buying channels.

Finally, Mr. Jobs noted, people just don’t consume music and movies the same way. You might listen to a certain song dozens or hundreds of times in your lifetime. But how many times in your life do you watch a movie? Most people probably wouldn’t watch even their favorite movies 10 times in their lives, and therefore don’t buy nearly as many movies as they do songs or CD’s.

[ . . . ]

“Now, I’m not saying we’re not working on something like that,” Mr. Jobs added. “Who knows what we’ve got in our labs?”

Movies are an immersive experience: as noted above, you don’t watch a movie while you do homework or jog (at least not productively or safely). Unless some other kind of content in factored into this (something that isn’t affected by screen size like a movie would be and that doesn’t require a 90 minute investment), I’m not sure what’s a-brewing. A TiVo player you carry around, perhaps? Sync it up with your PVR and take your programming to go, along with your music . . . . .

There’s the obvious tease there, between what he says about their labs and the widely-discussed job posting for a video engineer with experience in consumer electronics . . . something’s up at Infinite Loop.

[Posted with ecto]

Dirkon – The Paper Camera

Dirkon – The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz]

During the 1970s, magazines published in Communist Czechoslovakia were controlled by the state, like the majority of other enterprises. Very few good magazines were available and were difficult to get hold of, so people would borrow and exchange them when given the opportunity. This also applied to magazines aimed at young people, which was probably one of the reasons why almost everyone from my generation, when we get on to the subject of pinhole cameras, has fond memories of the cut-out paper camera known as Dirkon*, published in 1979 in a technical magazine, translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists.

Its creators came up with a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera. It may not be the most practical of devices, but it works!

Sample images: 1 2 3 4 5

And I have a few rolls of B&W film I have been wondering what to do with . . . .

via BoingBoing

[Posted with ecto]

software subscription plans and iLife

Michael Hanscom left a comment about the iLife Up to Date program as a subscription play.

As I wrote that, I had the Mac OS X Up-to-Date program in the back of my mind, but I saw something in my browsing that mentioned a subscription model for iLife, and it made sense. And it could be a good thing . . .

It would be interesting to see what Apple comes up with if they have an obligation to innovate these products (and integration gives them some options that one-off products wouldn’t provide). As it is, some of these are in their 3rd and 4th iterations, while others are new out of the box.

The reward for Apple would be to have iLife more widely recognized as part of their strategy for empowering users: you can read that in the tagline “It’s like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life” with it’s echoes of “the rest of us.” We know about the individual apps, iTunes, most of all, but does the guy shopping for a home computer realize what a difference this makes to his “out of the box experience?”

Apple faces some risks. What if they can’t deliver sufficiently meaningful innovations to keep us writing those checks? And of course, unlike business buyers, there’s no business case, no ROI equation, we can make to justify buying another year of iLife: it has to be compelling.

That’s not to say I don’t think it can be done . . .

[Posted with ecto]

now with MySQL

If the conversion/migration goes as planned, this will be the first entry posted into a MySQL database, moving from a Berkeley DB file structure that I suspect has been stretched beyond my expectations.

Some things I have been thinking about in the process:

  • Safari doesn’t cope well with lengthy CGI processes: it gives up on them after 60 seconds and that’s not nearly enough time to extract, parse, and munge about 2000 artifacts from the Berkeley DB and insert them in MySQL. Accordingly, I had to use Mozilla FireBird to drive this.
  • It does take a long time: and the results are hard to follow, since the artifacts are exported in a non-numerically sorted order:
    MT::Category
    1
    10
    11
    12
    13
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9

    Hard to know when you’re going to be done . . .

  • And of course, most important, it would nice to know how to back out of this. I guess I would end up exporting records from MovableType (easily done) and them import them as a new empty weblog (again, easy enough).

Done copying data from Berkeley DB to your SQL database! All went well.

Well, here goes nothing . . .

why 2004 might well be like Orwell’s 1984, if you use Windows

E-029 2003 And Beyond

The footnotes (in parentheses) are extensive and should be reviewed with the full text of this article.

The successor to Windows XP (due in 2004, and rapidly slipping to 2005) is currently code named Longhorn, and it will not be compatible with your existing software, hardware or methods. Microsoft has already stated that backward compatibility will not be a design feature.

Some expect the name Windows will be dropped completely. The antitrust agreement with the Bush DoJ specifically states “Microsoft Windows” throughout. By maintaining incompatibility (already planned due to design considerations), making it look different and calling it something else, Microsoft can free itself from antitrust oversight. “It’s not Windows, it’s a different product – the agreement doesn’t apply.”

So this will be the “from the ground up” rewrite that XP was supposed to be, but not to remove bugs as we would hope.

The most important feature of Longhorn is replacement of the familiar DOS/Windows filesystem with an object database (W0). You will no longer copy files to a floppy or CD-ROM or attach them to an email, because there will be no files. Database records will be copied from one database to another, probably through a .NET server. Large organizations will have their own .NET servers, but everyone else will use one of Microsoft’s, a service for which you will pay a fee.

The Longhorn filesystem will be based on the technology of a re-thought and expanded SQL Server database (the project coded Yukon) (W8). Obviously, SQL Server being so tightly integrated with the filesystem (W19) will have a negative impact on publishers of other database engines for Windows. Not strange then that market leaders Oracle and IBM are heavily pushing the Linux platform and barely mention their products run on Windows any more.

Ponder that a moment. You won’t be able to manipulate files as files, and send them to someone or make a copy to take home. You will “own” some file handle or token that gives you access to the contents that you refer to as a “file” but that seems a little precarious.
Continue reading “why 2004 might well be like Orwell’s 1984, if you use Windows”

another subtext to these tired code words

In the ad by the GOP-leaning Club for Growth, an announcer asks a couple leaving a barber shop, “What do you think of Howard Dean’s plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year?”

The man responds: “What do I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading …,” and the woman continues, “… body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”

I saw this mentioned earlier today and for some reason, something just struck me about some of these supposedly pejorative words.

  • Latte-drinking: for some reason, liking strong coffee in the Italian style is bad. Perhaps it makes you elitist, or unAmerican (drip coffee should be good enough for anyone: never mind that coffee originated in what used to be called Arabia, for the moment). This also seems to be a criticism of how people spend their money, which is usually a core GOP value/talking point.

    This also seems to be an attack on craftsmanship, from the roaster to the barista: when I consider that the party most closely associated with those who turned craftspeople into factory cogs are using a kind of class warfare (of skilled vs unskilled labor) or inciting jealousy (claiming “those people think they’re better than you because they use Product X” when the X-philes think nothing of the kind) to garner their votes, it’s disappointing no one sees it.

    Same thing could be applied to micro-brewed beer or any boutique/artisan product: if it’s not available on every Main Street, it can’t be good.

  • Volvo-driving: well, obviously, I have to ask why just Volvos? Why not Mercedes and BMWs? Is there something wrong with choosing safety over performance or status? Volvo has gotten a rap as being the vehicle of choice for indulgent, overly-fastidious drips, while similar and often more expensive marques have escaped it. Makes no sense to me.
  • New York Times-reading is bad, but of course, it’s got “New York” right there in the title: how quaint. Of course, the fact that a lot of news that people are interested in won’t appear anywhere else, especially those who want more than their local supermarket circulars, is one of the NYTimes’ strengths.
  • Sushi-eating is bad because it’s different and not widely available: you have to go to some overpopulated Babylon (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) to find it. That can’t be good.
  • Body-piercing is not something I have any interest in or strong feelings about, but self-expression is always discouraged by some people. And in a sense, it makes it easy to judge people by their appearance from a greater distance: you’d think it would be be encouraged for that reason alone . . .

As far the whole “tax hiking” versus “government-expanding” argument, I’d like to see tax cuts reframed as “service cuts” and have candidates and “journalists” (do we still have those anywhere?) expound on what services are now superfluous. But there’s as much chance of that as there is of someone making it clear who benefits from the budget follies/tax cuts.

via SF Gate