Chuqui 3.0

NBC says bye to iTunes

NBC says bye to iTunes, hello to piracy and lost revenue | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone:

In news that comes just weeks after iTunes' loss of Universal Music Group, NBC has officially canceled its contract with iTunes, citing the need for stricter piracy controls and higher pricing that Apple was unwilling to provide.  That said, NBC will still continue to sell its programming on iTunes until its contract runs out in December.

I'm not quite sure what any of these companies are thinking.  First, Universal Music Group steps away from the third-largest music retailer in the world because it thinks iTunes is suffocating it, then NBC walks away to make more money and stop people from stealing its media.  But what both companies don't understand is that they need Apple far more than Apple needs them.

I think people aren't looking at the bigger picture here: Apple isn't just the market leader here, or the market dominator -- it is, effectively, the market. This means that it calls the shots, and the studios hate being in a position where they get dictated to.

This is really all about -- in the long-term -- trying to make Apple more responsive to the studio. To take Apple down a notch. One could argue that a little more competition for iTunes would be good for the industry and consumers, but in this case, what the studios really want is what the studios see as good for them, and one thing Apple's been very committed to is doing what they think is good for the end user.

So far, of course, nobody's really come up with anything that remotely threatens Apple, and nobody significant has walked away from iTunes, only threatened to. Apple has to walk a bit of a fine line here, maintaining that customer-centric view, but not to the degree that it finally does cause the studios to walk. The studios, obviously, won't really be happy until they're in charge and people do it their way; it's not about money or piracy, it's about who's the alpha, and right now, that's Apple, and studios always believe they deserve to be the alpha. THAT is the essential struggle here.

Update:

Michael Gartenberg's take on this:

Michael Gartenberg - NBC leaves iTunes - First Take:

Bottom line? Apple's looking good here, championing users. NBC is making a mistake, $4.99 is way too high per episode (no word on what the deal is for other venues that sell NBC stuff like Amazon Un-Box) and this is the type of move that pushes users to look for other places to get the content (like in hi-def for free over BitTorrent). Legal paid content drives consumers to do the right thing, take it away and nature will abhor the vacuum it creates.

Sometimes I think God put video content guys on the planet to make the music guys look progressive and visionary.

Boy, it's going to be a long, slow, painful journey from "hey, you'll take this and like this because you have no choice" for these guys, isn't it?

Update 2: why do I get the distinct impression that somewhere in the NBC executive offices there's a person who's yelling at the walls "what do you mean they called our bluff?" -- and finding out the hard way that Steve Jobs is a rotten person to play all-in with in business poker....

NBC made a gambit to try to push the revenue number up a huge amount (one can only wonder whether the increased price would make up for the drop in unit sales, but that's not MY problem.... and I wonder if NBC even cared about it after this turned into a "who's in charge" game?) and now, their revenue number is zero. And their chance of replacing that revenue from other online sources is, well, zero. And that means if that guy in the NBC studios has financial targets to make, his chances of making them are -- zero.

And yet they clearly thought they could pressure Apple into compromising with what was clearly a designed leak by NBC to put some public pressure on Apple. Instead, of course, Apple simple said "fine, bye". Which, when you're really the only player in the market, you can do.

I still think there's a good chance NBC will find some way to come to an agreement with Apple on this, but any chance they thought they had of getting Apple to bend on pricing's gone. This is, frankly, a stupid move by NBC for trying to force Apple into a move when they had no negotiating leverage. But what else is new when it comes to the studios?

Don't Trade Your Life for Tech

Nick Bradbury: Don't Trade Your Life for Tech:

Those of us in the technology sector see it all the time: co-workers who put in incredible hours coding away as though they have nothing else in their lives.  And quite often, they don't.

I used to be one of those people.

When I was working on HomeSite over a decade ago, I rarely left my desk.  If I wasn't coding, I was answering email or doing some other work-related task.  I hardly slept, ate far too much junk food, and traded my health for what I thought was a successful career as a software developer.

If that sounds familiar to you, do yourself a favor and stop living this way.  It's not worth it.  Eventually you'll look back and wish you would've spent more time getting out and meeting people (non-geeky people, that is), and you'll look down at your pizza-filled belly and wonder how you let yourself get so unhealthy.

Amen.

Northern Flicker, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, Montara, CA

Northern Flicker, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, Montara, CA
Originally uploaded by chuqui.

Look who just wandered by and asked for a portrait....

Earthlink Troubles Spell End Of MuniFi As Third Pipe

Earthlink Troubles Spell End Of MuniFi As Third Pipe « GigaOM:

EarthLink (ENLK), the beleaguered Atlanta-based Internet service provider that was recently forced to resort to draconian measures — including pulling back on some of its next-generation efforts — has been one of the biggest champions of “MuniFi as the third broadband pipe movement.”

I"m not surprised. I'm sorry, but our home town (Santa Clara) was one of the first to get fitted out with muni WiFi by MetroFi, and in theory, our neighborhood is unwired (and my Mac shows the network in its airport network listings); I've experimented with it at times, and even though I can go out my front door and show you the access point, I've never been able to get reliable access, and when I have, it's been slower than sludge. I've tried it a few other places in the city, and it seemed the same wherever I went.

So I long ago came to the conclusion this was a really high visibility idea who's reality was going to fall apart. And so it seems it is...

You Know You're Old When:

How to Change the World: You Know You're Old When::

Last night a cute blonde girl bought me a drink. However, she knew me because she’s my kids’ summer camp counselor. This incident got me thinking about how you know you’re old—today is my 53rd birthday. So I decided to start a list: You know you’re old when…

Happy Birthday to Guy! (happybirthdaytoyouhappybirthdaytoyoublahblahIhatethissong....)

I hate to use the term "old", although there are days when I definitely feel it fits... I prefer "middle aged", at least most days..

The first time I remember feeling, um, middle aged was when the last player in the NHL older than I was retired, so that the entire league was younger than me. That was, by the way, Sergei Makarov.

A big "middle aged" moment was when I was walking in the mall and passed a mother and her daughter walking the other way, and I realized I found the mother a lot more attractive. Another aspect of this: you redefine your idea of "girl" as you get older (I think "girl", as opposed to "woman", is a term for any female too young to consider dating, if you were in fact available to date) -- and when you hit the point that you can buy a "girl" a beer legally, you're definitely middle-aged.

And on a less fun moment, a big "you're middle-aged" reality check is when you start having peers die of things other than accidents or alcohol....

I heard Eddy Money talk about this a while back, and his "you're old" moment -- he said he was on tour, and was trying desperately to stay up late enough to keep his drummer from hitting on his daughter... no word on whether he succeeded....

What's coming September 5.

iPod rumors cause Apple stock to rise - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

We all know that Apple is gathering the tech press for a Special Event (notice the capital letters) on September 5th, and it is pretty clear it has something to do with iPods.

People are missing a key fact here about the September 5 announcement. Apple (and Steve) love to embed little hints in their invitations. Note the tag line on this event: The Beat Goes ON.

Clearly, this is an event to announce the addition of the Sonny and Cher library to itunes.

You heard it here first!

The Internet Is still Dead and Boring - Blog Maverick

The Internet Is still Dead and Boring - Blog Maverick:

Honestly, its just a bigger, more time consuming version on CompuServe Forums from back in the day (Find someone who participated in the OS/2 forums if you want to know about social networks). Only back then you didn't call People friends, they were just forum members.

I know he's taken a lot of grief, but to be honest, Mark Cuban is right here. Today's social networking is just a bigger, more time consuming form of what we used to do on CompuServe or AOL or Delphi (I was on all three, and managed forums on at least two, and possible all three -- I forget); throw in mailing lists, USENET, fidonet, modem-based BBSes -- we just keep reinventing these things.

Well, sort of. Sometimes, we actually improve them. Other times, we merely add features.

But this stuff is just like all that other, older stuff, the same way HD TV is just like the old black and white TV I had in my room growing up so I could watch Gilligan's Island. Only, well, with color, and more resolution, and four million more channels and better resolution. But those are just adding features. And sometimes improving it a bit.

But it's really just the same, only, well, different. Just like Cuban sees the internet today.

So I guess we should look at HD television as dead and boring, too, right?

chuq (this is the problem when you translate "I don't like this" into "there's nothing useful here" -- any individual opinion cannot speak for everyone, and when they try, they look stupid... I have plenty of experience with looking stupid, so I know this...)

update: another view of this, pointing out that Cuban should know better than to think his interests are the only interests that matter...

A VC: The Internet Is As Dead And Boring As You Want It To Be:

The main thing I take objection to in his post is the use of second and third person. Take this paragraph:

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that's exactly what the net
has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet
experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

If it ended with "my Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago", I'd be nodding my head in agreement. Clearly Mark's not using the Internet the way I am.

A time machine, dusty and proud...

One of the projects I've started this weekend is to clear out some clutter and clean up the "server room", the room where we used to house the servers when we ran servers here in the house and had the internet piped in to serve them (today, we "merely" have a consumer DSL line to our usage, which is a heck of a lot cheaper since we don't need the fast outbound speed or static IP addresses....)

One reason I'm doing this -- I wanted to get my writing files out and accessible again. I've picked up my first freelance gig (which is nice), and out of happenstance had a nice long talk with a friend I haven't talked to in a long time, and it might turn into another writing gig. I've been spending some time the last few days researching some ideas for that, and we'll see whether they like them.

It was fun, and a bit weird, to get my writing out of the boxes and into a file cabinet. Some of it I knew was in there, like my novel-in-stasis and my published short fiction and unsold fiction bits -- but also my old writing, the reviews in Amazing Stories (when it was a TSR publication), my writing for Macintosh Horizons, but also some of the tech writing I did when I was at Sun, including, which I'd completely forgotten, the README for NFS release 2.0.

Now, that's an answer to a trivia question nobody's going to ask...

Also, when I left Apple, I brought home about eight boxes of "stuff"; when I went to StrongMail, I only took in a couple of boxes of books and a few things, and those came back when I left, so I've had a bunch of things just sort of hanging around, and a lot of technical books inaccessible. It's time to start cleaning that up and either putting the books in shelves, or donating or tossing them, depending on how useful they are.

The "server room" is, of course, a dumping ground for everything in the "I need to deal with this someday" for both of us; Laurie still has a bunch of boxes from when she left Adobe, and all of her cookbooks are in there (15 boxes) waiting for me to finish the living room to get them back in the shelves, as well as much of my native art that has been waiting for the remodel to have a place for display again... Now that the living room is headed towards paint-ready, I'm pullling that all out again and getting it  up on the walls again. I may even be able to walk in the server room again soon.

And browse through those Sun technical support bulletins. Ah, the days of SunOS 3 -- anyone else remember when Sun ran 68000 chips?

One of those "what were they thinking?" moments...

So I've been more offline than on, working on the remodel in the front half of the house. I've got all of the door trim in (finally), and I was hoping to finish off the entryway walls today, so I could start on the baseboard.

I took off the faceplate from the lightswitch that runs the porch light, so I could put a box expander on it after adding the tongue and groove that's going up -- only to find there was no box. They simply cut a notch in the drywall, stuffed the switch in it, and then used drywall screws to hold it down, then screwed the plate to the drywall.

This is, how do we say it? Not up to code. no, frankly, it's a bloody stupid idea on any number of levels.

So now I have to go buy a box, cut open the wall, retrofit the box in, and fix this properly.

In remodelling the house over the years, pretty much every project has run into one of these "what were they thinking?" moments, where you realize the previous owner was pretty good most of the time, but then started improvising or cutting corners, and now you get to figure out how to fix it.

Things like -- realizing he used exhaust pipe to duct the forced air and air conditioning instead of using ducting. So when we replaced the air conditioner, we also got to re-duct most of the house.

Stuff like that.

my one goal -- my PRIMARY goal -- in my remodel work is that whoever buys the house off of us, whenever we decide to sell, and starts remodelling it to their needs doesn't say things about me like I say things about him...

It is amazing what a little trim does to finish off a room, though. Especially since we've been living with it half-done for two years (gah). I see the light at the end of the tunnel; next week I should have the front entry, the living room, hallway and master bath all ready for paint, and then it's making final decisions on the dining room and getting those changes in.

THAT is going to be interesting, because it involves opening up a wall into the weight room (and library), and pulling the existing door and replacing it with a larger set of bifolds (I think); and unfortunately, I don't know what I'll find when I open it up, other than, well, trouble -- because it was done by one of the tenants after the owner retired and moved out, when they started running a stereo repair shop in their garage and hacked things up to allow them to lock away that part of the house away from the living spaces (while leaving access to the bathroom -- ever see a house with, I kid you not, an airlock in it? we had one). Those were the same people who used a piece of stereo zip wire to ground an electrical outlet, so I'm not holding out much hope...

Especially since when we tore off the old base moulding to get ready for the new flooring in the front of the house, we noticed that part of the wall was built ON THE CARPETING. they just laid the base of the wall over the carper. That's how we know we have a larger door opening in that wall; we just need to figure out how best to bring it back...

Something tells me I"m going to be taking a few names in vain soon.

well, off to Lowes for more STUFF. if there's one given to remodelling, there's always a part you need that you don't have...

Pigeon dung examined in bridge collapse

Pigeon dung examined in bridge collapse - Yahoo! News:

Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons.                     

Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span's framework helped the steel beams rust faster.

(ouch). Paging Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe to the white courtesy phone... with a putty scraper....