very insightful article

Via techdirt: Reid Rosefelt writes a very good article about how the entertainment industry is both crumbling and stupid. One can hope one day they will learn, but I honestly doubt it.

From Reid's article (some great insights), I'm copying about half his article, bolds emphasis are mine.

Why do we enjoy free-with-ads sites like Hulu and Crackle? THEY HAVE FEWER ADS! And we can watch what we want whenever we want to.

What do we like about Netflix? For a fraction of the cost of cable, it gives you DVDs by mail plus the ability watch a lot of movies instantly, either on your computer or with their many compatible set-top boxes.

What do people like about Redbox. One buck! Pick it up and return it to the supermarket!

What do we like about cable?

Ummm, cable is a monopoly. You only get one store. You may only want a pair of socks and a shirt, but you are forced to buy a Yankee cap (even if you are a Mets or a Sox fan), cufflinks, perfume, towels, ladies underwear, two ties, a bedspread, low-slung hip-hop shorts, and a lamp. The kicker is that the price goes up all the time and the Calvin Klein shirt you actually came to buy costs extra. And of course LOTS AND LOTS OF ADS!

It’s not that we don’t like cable any more—we’ve always hated it! Cable is like the bully who beat you up in the hallway in high school. It’s college time now, baby!

But Comcast isn’t just experimenting with a flavor of “TV Everywhere.” They are also to merge their existing cable channels with NBC. They want to lock up all those amazing NBC Universal shows unless you subscribe.

There’s one tiny hitch though. Every single TV show and movie from NBC and Universal is available for free to anybody who has ten seconds to look for them. So what exactly is Comcast locking up? This isn’t 1995, you know. Either you just shrug your shoulders about file-sharing or you start offering some alternatives that have benefits that people are willing to pay for like Hulu, Netflix, Redbox, and iTunes. Or maybe you work a little and come up with something new? Bill Maher said recently that the Republicans looked into the future and saw… radio. These entertainment giants are looking into the future and they see… cable.

I completely agree here, which is why cable protesting us creating competition in Illinois pisses me off. From that article:

"About five dozen public and private entities, including the state, Chicago and Cook County, are vying for a slice of $7.2 billion in federal stimulus grants to promote broadband Internet service. With enough bandwidth, a government-subsidized Internet link also could provide telephone and television service, creating another threat for AT&T and Comcast, as well as smaller carriers.

"They see the plug being pulled on their customer base," says Craig Clausen, executive vice-president of New Paradigm Resources Group Inc., a telecommunications research and consulting firm in Chicago.

'These areas already have ample broadband services. There's no need to have government stimulus money coming in.'

In fighting the proposals, the carriers argue that stimulus projects shouldn't duplicate services they already provide.

"These areas already have ample broadband services," says Craig Martin, general counsel of Colorado-based Wide Open West LLC, which provides broadband service on the Far South Side under the name WOW Internet, Cable & Phone. "There's no need to have government stimulus money coming in. It doesn't serve the policy objective of Congress."

Honestly, cable services are duplicated so we shouldn't have competition? wow. Right now we're still stuck at about 50mb/s downstream as an "up to" option. Meaning the reality of 50mb is that it's 6MB/s in reality. Again something that sounds great, but it's really actually very shitty. Cableco's favorite excuse on that "oh, what can people possibly do with such a connection speed?" It's like "why should we raise the speed limits on a highway?" and just as fake of a statement.

what the fuck, alex brown?

Okay, so MS's favorite shill removed the entire entry on criticism from the MS office XML wiki link.

"whoops"?

http://boycottnovell.com/2009/10/20/ooxml-brm-convenor-wikipedia/


take a look and try not to vomit.

what happened to freedom of the press?

Wikileaks alerts us to a press stifling by the government. This is a *BIG* deal.

Basically, Trafigura is dumping toxic crap in the ivory coast. Press has been told they can't mention the name of them and the dumping at the same time. For what?

Techdirt as well has coverage.

Basically, they're trying to tell the press that the press cannot have freedom of what to cover. What the hell is up with that?

Update: new coverage on p2pnet.

quoted from p2pnet (which quoted from another site):

This country’s libel laws have been a disgrace for years and one can only hope that egregious abuses of an already abusive system persuades folk that, dash it, something must be done.

UPDATE: The Twitterverse is going mental for #trafigura and I suspect that by the time all this is over far more people will be aware of the controversy swirling around Trafigura’s African adventures than would have been the case had they kept quiet and not attempted to silence the press. Combatting this sort of bullying, however, is one thing the blogosphere is good at.

UPDATE 2: There is, at the time of writing, no mention of this story on the BBC’s website. Why on earth not? (There is now – and of course, as commenters point out, Newsnight has covered Trafigura’s African exploits before. And been sued for their troubles. So my criticism of the Corporation was somewhat unfair. Mea culpa.)

sometimes people want their own idea of justice

BPI, the international RIAA equivalent, thinks BT, an internet provider, is helping people commit illegal acts. They're not actually taking them to court over this, just threatening them and decrying how it's so bad and they have a social obligation to stop it.

From the Techdirt side (thanks again Mike):

BPI said:

"If you operate a commercial service and know it is being used to break the law, taking steps to ensure it is used legally is a cost of doing business."

Techdirt replied about how this is asinine, and now BPI comes back with (I bolded):

BT fosters a reputation as a socially responsible company. BPI has questioned whether it's appropriate for such a company to do nothing about 100,000 instances "a small sample" of the illegal behaviour that BT knows is occurring on its network. BT knows about this activity because BPI provides detailed weekly notifications enabling BT to verify each and every infringement. BPI's notifications are based upon robust copyright infringement detection techniques which have been accepted by the UK High Court in over 150 cases.

Whoops. I guess fact checking isn't important when you're a company that doesn't rely on fact or things the court even agrees with. Remember, these are the people who sued saying that a married old couple were sharing gay porn or something.


How's that for an outdated business model?

So what happens? They start complaining to the sources that identify their asinine behaviors, who reply logically. In this case, that would be techdirt. Maybe they'll learn one day.

For the Techies - Larrabee

So Intel has this Larrabee. For the non techs, the big deal is they're making a graphics card out of processors only. Intel has been all "oh, we can do this" and AMD/Nvidia (graphics cards makers) have been laughing all the way home.

Well, guess what. Today has been no different. Sharkyextreme points us to an article about the Larrabee running horribly (surprise: nobody). The idea behind it is Ray Tracing, something that will undoubtedly be significant one day but that day is far from coming.

Easy answer: computers are going to need to be between 20 and 100 times faster than they are now (which obviously could come in 4-8 years, it's not impossible) to handle real ray tracing. Mostly because there are more things that go on than that. I mean a now outdated graphics card can handle 1.5 Teraflops (and the new ones are breaking 3 teraflops). When you look at a processor, the best they can do (all processors combined) is around 70 gigaflops. This is double what the previous generation of processors could do, but processors change slower than graphics cards. In the last 2 years we've gone up 2 generations of graphics cards. In the last 2 years we've gone up 1 generation of processors. Mathematically, processors are very unlikely to catch up any time soon.

Lily Allen: stupid, ignorant, or what?

So Lily Allen is basically someone who is a music industry shill. That alone is pretty bad, but not even worth getting into. I was almost going to support her until she made a blog all about how piracy is bad, copying music is stealing, you lose business, music "has a cost to make", etc. I don't know where any of those arguments come from but there's clearly no logic behind it.

Thankfully, Techdirt has been very straightforward exposing the crap going on.

Maybe sometime this century people who are celebrities in any definition of the phrase will try not to be idiots and/or actually stand up for what they truly believe and not what they are paid (or required by contract) to believe.

Edit, it gets better: Lily's a pirate.

http://whatbecameofthelikelybroads.blogspot.com/2006/08/finally-lily-allen-mixtape-2.html

This is a link to a "mixtape" of her from 2006.

hahaha. Techdirt has more coverage..

Eh, back - so are the stupids

So lets see, what's new?

Oh right, someone's deciding that trademark means what they want it to, not actual reality. techdirt has plenty of details on that. Basically, someone is claiming trademark of the term Frugalisa, so I'd like to mention the Frugalista term is an obtuse concept. Frugalista is something absurd.

Meanwhile, I'll write when I can, but I'll just keep pointing out times that people define their own usage of existing things that are well defined.