« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
Link: NBC to End iTunes Sales of Its Shows - New York Times.
NBC Universal is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.
Better piracy controls? When it's broadcasting things free and in the clear?
Is NBC on crack?
Link: Chaos Manor Reviews Column 325, Part 4, August 28, 2007.
"From my view, if there were a good technical way to make electronic book sales much like regular book sales - if you want to give away a book, you can't do that and keep it as well - I would cheer for DRM. On the other hand, if DRM makes life difficult for paying customers, that's not good."
This is a thought experiment which I've posed a few times: if there was a DRM which which allowed consumers exactly the same "fair use" rights that they have at present, would you support it?
I've yet to get a really good answer from anyone in the anti-DRM camp. Mostly, the answers attempt to claim that such a system isn't possible, because it relies on software being capable of understanding the intent of someone when copying it (are they copying for personal use, or to pass on?). But in books, things are much clearer than in music: there is no fair use right to copy an entire book, even for academic or personal use.
I actually have a theory about this, but I'll get to that over the weekend.
Robert Scoble's theory about social media supplanting search was wrong, for a whole lot of reasons.
But that doesn't give people carte blanche to attack him. Attack the guy's ideas. Nothing else is relevant, whether it's his tone, his personal appearance, his previous posts... hell, I don't care if Robert has dubious personal hygiene.
What matters is his idea, and talking about it. What you reply to is his idea. Anything else is just an ad homine attack, and says more about the ignorance and rudeness of the person making the statement than it does about Scoble.
Sadly, there's a significant part of the internet community which values rudeness and ignorance far higher than politeness and ideas. They call it "pushing back", or "fighting back", or "sticking it to them" or "blog pile-ons" or whatever. But whatever you call it, it's just ignorance. It just means "I really don't have anything valuable to say, so I'm going to call you a bozo, so other people will think I'm cool". Or it means It's the language of the playground - even down to some people having "enemies".
Enemies? Over words on the internet? Once upon a time, having an enemy meant being at odds with another country, one which wanted to enforce their way of life upon you, or just kill you. Now it means someone whose words you don't like... although often, you're too ignorant to articulate why you don't like them beyond calling you a rude name.
So, Robert, if you read this: forget them. Carry on trying out new ideas, and don't be afraid to be wrong. Don't be afraid to be a bozo. Because if even one in a hundred of the ideas you try out is right, you'll be doing better than the people who's only contribution is to hoot and call other people names.
All the bits and pieces for replacing the hard drive in my MacBook Pro have arrived, and the drive is currently cloning over from the old 100GB to the shiny new 250GB one. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I should have around 160GB free when I've installed it - about 50GB of which will instantly get eaten up by the return of the music collection to the Mac. Then another 30GB will get eaten up by my videos (currently residing on the house server). And I'll probably go on an orgy of DVD ripping, which will eat up the rest!
Wish me luck - if you haven't heard from me for a while, it's because i'm crying over broken computers...
Move over the iPhone, there's a new phone in town... or at least there will be next year.
Meanwhile, the company also actually launched a phone, the N81, which looks rather sweet.
Only in the world of madness could making an application less powerful and capable of doing less be nodded in as a good thing. And yet that's exactly what the people golf-clapping Eric's post replying to David Pogue's critique of iMovie 08 are doing.
The arguments go like this:
"Yeah, iMovie 06 was too complicated. Better to strip out features."
Cop out. Removing features is simply a way of admitting that you have no idea how to take the product forward and improve the interface. ANYONE, even Microsoft, can simply remove features and make a product easier to use. The hard stuff - and the thing that Apple has always been good at - is adding them yet still making it easier to use.
"You get iMovie 06 free, so what's the big deal?"
The big deal is that iMovie 06 has been end-of-lifed. There will be no further updates, no bug fixes, and at some point in the future (maybe as early as Leopard) it will no long work at all. What's more, the fact that iMovie 08 doesn't import iMovie 06 projects - it just grabs the clips - means that all those archived projects will, one day, be inaccessible (while Final Cut Express imports iMovie 06 projects, titles and effects are rendered in and can't be re-edited).
This is exactly the kind of data lock-up which Mark Pilgrim made a lot of when he moved from Mac to Linux, and which many people flamed him over. This isn't just a case of Apple making you pay for an upgrade path: it's stopping you having any kind of upgrade path. Let me say that again: in a year or two, the iMovie projects you created with iMovie 06 will not be fully-usable with any application, even from Apple.
It's really amusing to see the people who've totally drunk the cool aid nodding along with Apple's claims that removing features and orphaning people's content, and tying themselves into logical knots attempting to say that less is more.
Personally, I like iMovie 08, but that's because I edit about three videos a year and all I want to do is post them on the web. If I were in Pogue's position, or had a lot of content in iMovie projects, I'd be seriously annoyed with Apple right about now.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, Mac OS X, iMovie
I completely missed the fact that Russell Beattie is back blogging (and has been for several months!)
Welcome back Russell!
The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web » Publish2 Blog:
"We couldn’t agree more (the part about the ‘human touch’ adding a lot of value). Algorithms are fast and can cover a lot more ground than individual human, but they lack a fundamental human gift — judgment."
This is true... at the moment. Of course, it's widely believed that Google is doing plenty of research into artificial intelligence, which would provide the "judgement".
"Of course, human judgment is what powers Google PageRank, via human link patterns, but the judgment is implicit, rather than explicit, as it is in the model that Digg, Del.icio.us Popular, and Reddit pioneered. When you network a large group of trusted, skilled humans — and the network effect kicks in — suddenly you can cover a lot of ground."
You're kidding me right? Digg? Trusted? Hasn't that whole "wisdom of crowds" meme been debunked enough?
Dan Roam: Back of the Napkin, The: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-gates Era
Susan Greenfield: ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century
