... then this could hurt the US tech industry in more ways than one. Groves is right when he says in the article "Suppose I use my personal computer now to create a playlist and burn music onto a CD. Suppose in three years, the only PCs on the market won't allow me to do that? What is my incentive to buy a new computer?" And what's the incentive then for companies to invest in R+D for new consumer devices, if they can't be used because of zealous copyright laws?
Someone should point out an example to Sen. Hollings: the eurobond market. In the 60s and 70s some too-stringent US regulations meant that it was difficult for foreigners to use the US capital markets to sell bonds in US dollars. So the market grew up in Europe instead, where the trade remains enormous today. Overbearing copyright legislation could do the same thing: the innovation in creative industries could easily move abroad to a more relaxed regulatory environment.
(BTW, this was a very good article - although the number of cookies the site tried to place on my machine was ridiculous - about 20, just for reading one article, sheesh. How about some legislation against that?)
A more accurate definition of the origins of the term Third World:
THIRD WORLD -- the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
It's significant that the XBox price cuts were announced just before Microsoft's first quarter sales figures yesterday, which were worse than expected, thanks to the XBox. Quote from the Financial Times: Microsoft missed earnings forecasts for the quarter to March 31 and issued lower than expected revenue and earnings predictions... The world's largest software company blamed the warning on modest prospects for information technology spending by business and disappointing sales of the Xbox console. The price were partly to keep Wall Street happy and the stock price up as much as boosting sales.
The article says MS has cuts its sales forecast for the XBox to 3.5-4 million by the end of June 30, instead of 4.5-6 million. And it might have given up on cracking the Japanese market: The company said Japan had been challenging for the Xbox. "We have not had much traction and sales have not been as large as we had hoped." The full article is here
The same article links a very interesting FT article on where exactly Microsoft makes its money, and - surprise, surprise - despite all its efforts to find profits outside the PC software market, it's still Windows and Office that produce almost all of MS's money.
Researchers have discovered that across the entire web, links are distributed according to a "power law" which leads to "rich get richer" or "winner's take all" behaviour
Ah, no that's not what it shows: Quote from the research: "In fact, pure power law scaling appears to be the exception, rather than the rule." What the research shows is that "winner takes all" varies across the web between categories.
Also, the researchers have (I suspect) a mistaken view of "competition" and competitiveness. They rate the Amazon category of book-sellers as "more competitive" - when in fact it may be less competitive in economic terms, being dominated by one or two sites/sellers. Whereas the photography caregory may be "more competitive" because of a larger number of rivals of about the same size.
What they mean, I suspect, is that the publications/Amazon category has higher barriers to entry - the amount of adertising etc being a greater sunk cost, and likely to deter any aspiring internet book retailers. In purely economic terms, that makes the category less competitive. As an illustration, ask yourself if the operating system software market is more or less competitive because it is dominated by one large brand in Microsoft?
I can't see that this is any different to putting televisions into old people's homes, it's another (albeit novel) type of entertainment - the real point is if the technology should be used as a substitute for "real" human interaction. In the article a sociologist from MIT asks: "I think we should take it as a wake-up call and really say, 'Now, why are we giving robot pets to old people?' And the answer, I think, is that we really have been struggling to figure out how to give enough people to old people."
The answer would be to allow them to have real interaction - wouldn't it be better to install some PCs in homes like this, to let them use the web, email, ICQ, BBS, whatever, and interact with real people. In cyberspace no-one knows you're old.
If you had looked at the Yahoo link or looked at the Amazon site you'd see why you're missing the point. It's not seperate, it's the subject of this discussion.
Here's an explanation. The Authors Guild is complaining that Amazon places links to Marketplace sellers offering used copies of books right where Amazon customers would be buying new copies of the same book.
From the guild press release: At the moment, when customers view information about a title on the Amazon Web site, a blue box links users to a screen where they may buy or sell used copies of that title. To encourage them to click on the blue-box link, Amazon informs them of the number of used copies of the work available for sale and of the lowest price available for those copies. With one mouse click, customers depart the new book's screen and enter the used book Marketplace.
From the Yahoo article: Amazon itself does not sell the book. Instead, customers are allowed to offer used editions through the online retailer. Amazon collects a 99 cent fee for each sale, plus 15 percent of the purchase price. Neither the author nor publisher receives royalties.
So its Marketplace that this is all about, not your mom's operation.
No that's not how it works at Amazon - you (or your mom) should have a look at its website.
Amazon doesn't order books from any second hand dealers, and it doesn't handle the postage and packing - it just facilitates the sale through its Amazon Marketplace thing...
From Amazon's explanation: The order will be sent directly to your seller, and within two days they will ship your item using standard delivery. ... Please note that since we are not directly involved in the completion of sales arranged on Amazon Marketplace, buyers will need to contact the seller directly....
I'd imagine they don't want us to go to our local used book stores either?
That's an unfair characterisation of their position. Agree with it or not, the guild isn't against second hand sales per se, just Amazon's agressive marketing of second-hand sales through an ebay-style system that sits alongside new book sales. This is great for Amazon, because it picks up a commission for every sale without taking any of the risk involved with new sales - it doesn't have to warehouse inventory or administer the sale to the same degree.
What must be galling for authors is that most people using Amazon will be searching for their books in the expectation they will be buying a new copy. With this option, potential new book buyers are lured to buy a used book, so no royalties.
Barnes and Noble offer a slightly similar option, but through used book shops, and further removed from the book buying process, but then B&N has larger warehousing than Amazon and so is probably more concerned with turnover.
Anyhow there are better ways of finding (cheaper) used books - the best being abebooks.com, a co-operative of used book shops around the world. It's great.
...there's three words that would worry me about using this as a keyboard for any length of time: Repetitive Strain Injury.
Touch-pad keyboards have pretty much been banned on office equipment since the mid-1980s because although they allowed users to type at great speed, they also caused massive incidence of RSI. Since then keyboards have all required definite "clicks" that need greater muscle movement.
Of course this would be fine for brief use (on a PDA or similar). And it does look cool.
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
Non-technical Spouse: "No, honey, the reason I had an affair with the baby-sitter was because you installed Slackware."
This was based on a survey of 1500 users... and according to the article:
More than half - 56% - of U.S. email users have at one time or another received an email from an adult Web site or that contained adult content.
56% - is that all? Presumably the remaining 44% don't actually open their email.
The laser keyboard mentioned may be vaporware, but in the meantime Logitech had on show at CeBit a very cool little wraparound fabric keyboard that doubles (when not in use) as a case for a Palm PDA. It's water-resistant, has hot keys, and folds out to be about the size of a notebook QWERTY keyboard. I think it's retailing in the UK at about £100 ($140), which seems steep, but I'll find it very useful for use in libraries as it's totally quiet. On sale in the UK next month.
The company's press release is here (has pix): http://www.logitech.com/cf/newsarticle.cfm/ 4406
Excellent news... as we know, audio alarms and tracking bugs have totally eliminated theft in the automobile industry, and I imagine these devices will do the same for laptops.
True - but I'm not so sure their goal was to "make billions off someone else's huge investment". If what Vivendi is claiming is true, the aim was (a) to undermine a rival technology (if Vivendi's smartcard was totally cracked then no other TV operaters would buy it), and (b) to cause pay-per-view rivals that used Vivendi's technology to lose money through widespread cracking - losing subscriber payments and having to spend more on counter-measures.
It must be remembered that the smoking gun could be this: NDS is 80% owned by News International. News International owns BSkyB pay-per-view sat network, which competes against Canal+ and, more directly, ITV Digital in the UK.
The Guardian's got two more pieces on this today, with more details about the collusion between NDS and "crackers", including the very seedy past of the NDS security chief Ray Adams. The guts of it are the connections of NDS with a sat-piracy website called The House of Ill Compute (THoIC), which fell apart in spectacular fashion in the middle of last year when some of the site's members confronted the spy in their midst in a pub with evidence he was recording everything and passing it to NDS, and getting paid for it. Some UK/.ers may recall it.
I wonder how many people realise just how big this story is? It was broken in the Wall Street Journal today, which said this:
"Canal officials said in the suit they were stunned when they discovered that the software code that is imbedded in its smart card was posted on the Web site DR7.com in 1999. Representatives of the site -- which appears to cater to people with interest in digital TV, computer code and other things -- couldn't be reached for comment. "Having identified the public security breach, Canal Plus Technologies engineers set about tracing it. According to people familiar with the matter, they began developing contacts in the hacker community who could help unravel the mystery. Canal's investigation took nearly three years."
What it means is that one of Europe's biggest media companies will be suing one of the world's biggest media companies, in California, over piracy. Can you *imagine* what the damages would be?
It's hard to evaluate the various claims made here based on this survey because there's no link to the original article, and it's subscribers only to see the research. All I see is an argument in search of some facts.
So we're left with a few obvious counter-points:
1) All technology takes time to filter through society. In "Rememberence of Things Past", Proust mentions how his old housekeeper was terrified of the telephone, and would shout at it when it rang. That was at the turn of the 20th century. Now people are much more comfortable with phones: familiarity breeds content.
2) Cost is as much a barrier to use as complexity. Take mobile phones (or cell phones): in the UK, where they are cheap, useage is so widespread, and happened so rapidly, that there appears to have been no technological barrier whatsoever.
3) Even if the tech industry is arrogant when it comes to support, does anyone think it's alone in that - say, compared to car manufacturers?
4) Should we be surprised if people try and fix things themselves first rather than take them back to the seller? That seems a rather natural response, and one that isn't unique to the tech sector - so it doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality of tech support.
Oh please, spare us the "customer is always right" high-horse. Basically all/. has done is set up a donations system with an added bonus that you can turn off ads if you want to. That's it. In fact it hardly merits the description "subscription". If you like the ads then don't subscribe, or if you do then use the option to keep the ads switched on. So nothing's being got rid of.
Nobody's asking you to buy shares in the company, f'chrissake, so spare us all the "cared about the bottom line" crap. I'm glad they don't. I don't care about/.'s bottom line or how much it pays for its feckin bandwidth. Hell, subscribe to wallstreetjournal.com if that's what gets you horny.
Enron and VA have got something in common: both use Arthur Andersen as their accountants. It's true - check the VA 2001 annual report.
My 2 cents: I like/. and I'd pay for it, but not this model. $5 per 1000 impressions is a bad idea I'm afraid. Look, if you can learn anything from the pr0n industry (and I'm serious here) it's this: their subscription model is tried and tested. Do they charge per 1000 anything? No. They charge for time periods, one month, three months, one year subscriptions. It's the magic 3% of readers/posters who get hit any other way.
Please, at least set up a donations file, a "Friends of/." scheme, where people like me can send in $$ just because we want to support the site. Everyone now knows that advertising ain't gonna support the site, so another model has to be found. The one you're suggesting isn't the best, although I can see the logic behind it. The sites that have gone "premium" (eg, Salon, the Wall Street Journal) have another model that you should consider.
Some British politician said that taxation is like plucking a live rooster - you've got to do it very carefully to avoid a lot of squawking. Why not try a voluntary subscription scheme (an annual $25 sub?) that gives something warm and fuzzy to donors as well, like arts companies do (ballet, orchestras), and see how that goes first. Use that as a base. Use that group as a test bed for developing a premium service. Otherwise you risk detracting from the community that makes/. what it is.
No, seriously, have a wedding registry somewhere. I got married last month, we didn't tell anyone about our wedding list and all we got was bowls... bowls, bowls, bowls. Everyone thought, en masse, "I know, I'll buy them a nice bowl." We got 20 bowls. And a sleeping bag... and a DVD player. But mostly bowls. So unless you want bowls....
(And Liz, if you're reading this: happy Valentine's day, I love you. R xx.)
Re:Wrong - this is a very good book. Read it.
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Uh, dude, I have to say that knowing there are two minor errors in the book (I spotted the Altair one but not the modem one, if that is an error rather than an over-simplification) doesn't detract from the rest of it. Yes, I know what you mean, but Cassidy's overall argument isn't harmed by either, because they are trivial points in relation and I wouldn't get too hung up about them - at least not as much as the reviewer. Shakespeare puts a clock in Julius Caesar, a huge anachronism, but it doesn't detract from the quality of the play. (Not a great example, but I hope you see the point.) I guess Cassidy's publishers will correct them (and the typos) in the second edition/paperback.
I'd be more worried if the financial stuff was wrong. As it happens, I read an interview with Jeff Bezos last Saturday, where he mentioned that Amazon's share price hit an intra-day high of $115. I was reading Dot.con at the time and the Amazon chapter mentioned a $113 high for the company. So I checked - and Bezos was wrong, it was $113.
Generally this book has been well reviewed. Anyone who wants to read a balanced review should try this thoughtful Financial Times one:
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articl e. html?id=020128001274
Wrong - this is a very good book. Read it.
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· Score: 5, Interesting
That was not so much a book review as one long sour grapes session... in truth this is a very well written book that deserves to be read by a wide audience.
John Cassidy is The New Yorkers' business writer, and I've been reading his weekly column there for some time. He's an insightful writer with a good turn of phrase and an eye for strong themes. And that's what Dot.con is about: why did the US economy get transfixed by a speculative bubble involving the internet? That's the question he's exploring, and it's a complex issue, so readers shouldn't be disappointed (unlike whoever wrote the Slashdot review) if he doesn't come up with black and white answers. It's not that simple, and only a moron would expect it to be. However, Cassidy is pretty plain who he blames for letting the whole circus get out of hand: Alan Greenspan, the media, and the investment banking community. But he has the insight to explain why each of those groups did what they felt they had to do.
It's true there a few typos (mistakes) in the book, and I have no idea who invented the modem and it doesn't matter. From what I can see the guts of the book is accurate, and any (minor) mistakes don't detract from its strength. What Cassidy has done is write an excellent narrative of the financial markets and the internet from 1995 to 2001. As a history of its type it can be compared to JK Galbraith's The Great Crash - and it's no coincidence that Galbraith has been a big fan of the book, supplying a glowing endorsement.
Nothing new in here? Well, it's a history of the very recent past, so lots of the events are very familiar to most readers, but Cassidy's ability to tie it all together makes this better than so many cut-and-paste jobs. And its aimed at the good old general public - the type of people who might have been tempted to buy some Priceline shares because their brother-in-law made big money on the IPO.
Slashdot readers can still enjoy it though, even if it is too general for them: the hubris, the schadenfreude, makes it very enjoyable. Cassidy paces the book so well, almost like a good novelist, that the book has a racy plot. And he focuses in on some key parts of the bubble as it expanded: the chapter on Amazon is particularly good. It doesn't bear any resemblence to Michael Lewis's book: that was written at the top of the "the internet's going to change everything, man" phase, which (as Cassidy points out) turned out to be hyperbole at the very least.
Don't trust whoever wrote Slashdot's review: this book actually stands a good chance of being the standard history of the dotcom boom-and-bust. It's the book that, years from now, when someone asks you, "why did everyone go so crazy about the whole dotcom thing?", you can pull out this book and say: "it's all in here...."
According to blurb: GPRS multi-slot class 10 with wireless data transfer to 53.6 kbps.
Transparent and non-transparent Circuit Switched Data over GSM networks to 14.4 kbps.
Note: this is in the UK.
On the physical sixe: it's smaller than a Palm by 2cm in length, but the screen's the same size.
Slashdot Mirror
... then this could hurt the US tech industry in more ways than one. Groves is right when he says in the article "Suppose I use my personal computer now to create a playlist and burn music onto a CD. Suppose in three years, the only PCs on the market won't allow me to do that? What is my incentive to buy a new computer?" And what's the incentive then for companies to invest in R+D for new consumer devices, if they can't be used because of zealous copyright laws?
Someone should point out an example to Sen. Hollings: the eurobond market. In the 60s and 70s some too-stringent US regulations meant that it was difficult for foreigners to use the US capital markets to sell bonds in US dollars. So the market grew up in Europe instead, where the trade remains enormous today. Overbearing copyright legislation could do the same thing: the innovation in creative industries could easily move abroad to a more relaxed regulatory environment.
(BTW, this was a very good article - although the number of cookies the site tried to place on my machine was ridiculous - about 20, just for reading one article, sheesh. How about some legislation against that?)
A more accurate definition of the origins of the term Third World:
THIRD WORLD -- the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
It's significant that the XBox price cuts were announced just before Microsoft's first quarter sales figures yesterday, which were worse than expected, thanks to the XBox. Quote from the Financial Times: Microsoft missed earnings forecasts for the quarter to March 31 and issued lower than expected revenue and earnings predictions ... The world's largest software company blamed the warning on modest prospects for information technology spending by business and disappointing sales of the Xbox console. The price were partly to keep Wall Street happy and the stock price up as much as boosting sales.
The article says MS has cuts its sales forecast for the XBox to 3.5-4 million by the end of June 30, instead of 4.5-6 million. And it might have given up on cracking the Japanese market: The company said Japan had been challenging for the Xbox. "We have not had much traction and sales have not been as large as we had hoped." The full article is here
The same article links a very interesting FT article on where exactly Microsoft makes its money, and - surprise, surprise - despite all its efforts to find profits outside the PC software market, it's still Windows and Office that produce almost all of MS's money.
Researchers have discovered that across the entire web, links are distributed according to a "power law" which leads to "rich get richer" or "winner's take all" behaviour
Ah, no that's not what it shows:
Quote from the research: "In fact, pure power law scaling appears to be the exception, rather than the rule." What the research shows is that "winner takes all" varies across the web between categories.
Also, the researchers have (I suspect) a mistaken view of "competition" and competitiveness. They rate the Amazon category of book-sellers as "more competitive" - when in fact it may be less competitive in economic terms, being dominated by one or two sites/sellers. Whereas the photography caregory may be "more competitive" because of a larger number of rivals of about the same size.
What they mean, I suspect, is that the publications/Amazon category has higher barriers to entry - the amount of adertising etc being a greater sunk cost, and likely to deter any aspiring internet book retailers. In purely economic terms, that makes the category less competitive. As an illustration, ask yourself if the operating system software market is more or less competitive because it is dominated by one large brand in Microsoft?
I can't see that this is any different to putting televisions into old people's homes, it's another (albeit novel) type of entertainment - the real point is if the technology should be used as a substitute for "real" human interaction. In the article a sociologist from MIT asks:
"I think we should take it as a wake-up call and really say, 'Now, why are we giving robot pets to old people?' And the answer, I think, is that we really have been struggling to figure out how to give enough people to old people."
The answer would be to allow them to have real interaction - wouldn't it be better to install some PCs in homes like this, to let them use the web, email, ICQ, BBS, whatever, and interact with real people. In cyberspace no-one knows you're old.
If you had looked at the Yahoo link or looked at the Amazon site you'd see why you're missing the point. It's not seperate, it's the subject of this discussion.
Here's an explanation. The Authors Guild is complaining that Amazon places links to Marketplace sellers offering used copies of books right where Amazon customers would be buying new copies of the same book.
From the guild press release:
At the moment, when customers view information about a title on the Amazon Web site, a blue box links users to a screen where they may buy or sell used copies of that title. To encourage them to click on the blue-box link, Amazon informs them of the number of used copies of the work available for sale and of the lowest price available for those copies. With one mouse click, customers depart the new book's screen and enter the used book Marketplace.
From the Yahoo article:
Amazon itself does not sell the book. Instead, customers are allowed to offer used editions through the online retailer. Amazon collects a 99 cent fee for each sale, plus 15 percent of the purchase price. Neither the author nor publisher receives royalties.
So its Marketplace that this is all about, not your mom's operation.
No that's not how it works at Amazon - you (or your mom) should have a look at its website.
Amazon doesn't order books from any second hand dealers, and it doesn't handle the postage and packing - it just facilitates the sale through its Amazon Marketplace thing...
From Amazon's explanation:
The order will be sent directly to your seller, and within two days they will ship your item using standard delivery.
...
Please note that since we are not directly involved in the completion of sales arranged on Amazon Marketplace, buyers will need to contact the seller directly....
Informative? Not very.
I'd imagine they don't want us to go to our local used book stores either?
That's an unfair characterisation of their position. Agree with it or not, the guild isn't against second hand sales per se, just Amazon's agressive marketing of second-hand sales through an ebay-style system that sits alongside new book sales. This is great for Amazon, because it picks up a commission for every sale without taking any of the risk involved with new sales - it doesn't have to warehouse inventory or administer the sale to the same degree.
What must be galling for authors is that most people using Amazon will be searching for their books in the expectation they will be buying a new copy. With this option, potential new book buyers are lured to buy a used book, so no royalties.
Barnes and Noble offer a slightly similar option, but through used book shops, and further removed from the book buying process, but then B&N has larger warehousing than Amazon and so is probably more concerned with turnover.
Anyhow there are better ways of finding (cheaper) used books - the best being abebooks.com, a co-operative of used book shops around the world. It's great.
...there's three words that would worry me about using this as a keyboard for any length of time: Repetitive Strain Injury.
Touch-pad keyboards have pretty much been banned on office equipment since the mid-1980s because although they allowed users to type at great speed, they also caused massive incidence of RSI. Since then keyboards have all required definite "clicks" that need greater muscle movement.
Of course this would be fine for brief use (on a PDA or similar). And it does look cool.
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
Non-technical Spouse: "No, honey, the reason I had an affair with the baby-sitter was because you installed Slackware."
The laser keyboard mentioned may be vaporware, but in the meantime Logitech had on show at CeBit a very cool little wraparound fabric keyboard that doubles (when not in use) as a case for a Palm PDA. It's water-resistant, has hot keys, and folds out to be about the size of a notebook QWERTY keyboard. I think it's retailing in the UK at about £100 ($140), which seems steep, but I'll find it very useful for use in libraries as it's totally quiet. On sale in the UK next month.
/ 4406
The company's press release is here (has pix):
http://www.logitech.com/cf/newsarticle.cfm
Excellent news ... as we know, audio alarms and tracking bugs have totally eliminated theft in the automobile industry, and I imagine these devices will do the same for laptops.
... parents going into their kid's rooms and shouting: "How many times have I told you to turn that table down!"
True - but I'm not so sure their goal was to "make billions off someone else's huge investment". If what Vivendi is claiming is true, the aim was (a) to undermine a rival technology (if Vivendi's smartcard was totally cracked then no other TV operaters would buy it), and (b) to cause pay-per-view rivals that used Vivendi's technology to lose money through widespread cracking - losing subscriber payments and having to spend more on counter-measures.
It must be remembered that the smoking gun could be this: NDS is 80% owned by News International. News International owns BSkyB pay-per-view sat network, which competes against Canal+ and, more directly, ITV Digital in the UK.
The Guardian's got two more pieces on this today, with more details about the collusion between NDS and "crackers", including the very seedy past of the NDS security chief Ray Adams. /.ers may recall it.
, 7541,6670 40,00.html
4 1,6669 67,00.html
The guts of it are the connections of NDS with a sat-piracy website called The House of Ill Compute (THoIC), which fell apart in spectacular fashion in the middle of last year when some of the site's members confronted the spy in their midst in a pub with evidence he was recording everything and passing it to NDS, and getting paid for it. Some UK
Here:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0
and here
http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,75
I wonder how many people realise just how big this story is? It was broken in the Wall Street Journal today, which said this:
"Canal officials said in the suit they were stunned when they discovered that the software code that is imbedded in its smart card was posted on the Web site DR7.com in 1999. Representatives of the site -- which appears to cater to people with interest in digital TV, computer code and other things -- couldn't be reached for comment.
"Having identified the public security breach, Canal Plus Technologies engineers set about tracing it. According to people familiar with the matter, they began developing contacts in the hacker community who could help unravel the mystery. Canal's investigation took nearly three years."
What it means is that one of Europe's biggest media companies will be suing one of the world's biggest media companies, in California, over piracy. Can you *imagine* what the damages would be?
It's hard to evaluate the various claims made here based on this survey because there's no link to the original article, and it's subscribers only to see the research. All I see is an argument in search of some facts.
So we're left with a few obvious counter-points:
1) All technology takes time to filter through society. In "Rememberence of Things Past", Proust mentions how his old housekeeper was terrified of the telephone, and would shout at it when it rang. That was at the turn of the 20th century. Now people are much more comfortable with phones: familiarity breeds content.
2) Cost is as much a barrier to use as complexity. Take mobile phones (or cell phones): in the UK, where they are cheap, useage is so widespread, and happened so rapidly, that there appears to have been no technological barrier whatsoever.
3) Even if the tech industry is arrogant when it comes to support, does anyone think it's alone in that - say, compared to car manufacturers?
4) Should we be surprised if people try and fix things themselves first rather than take them back to the seller? That seems a rather natural response, and one that isn't unique to the tech sector - so it doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality of tech support.
.... how many air miles do you need for an upgrade to first class?
Oh please, spare us the "customer is always right" high-horse. Basically all /. has done is set up a donations system with an added bonus that you can turn off ads if you want to. That's it. In fact it hardly merits the description "subscription". If you like the ads then don't subscribe, or if you do then use the option to keep the ads switched on. So nothing's being got rid of.
/.'s bottom line or how much it pays for its feckin bandwidth. Hell, subscribe to wallstreetjournal.com if that's what gets you horny.
Nobody's asking you to buy shares in the company, f'chrissake, so spare us all the "cared about the bottom line" crap. I'm glad they don't. I don't care about
Enron and VA have got something in common: both use Arthur Andersen as their accountants. It's true - check the VA 2001 annual report.
/. and I'd pay for it, but not this model. $5 per 1000 impressions is a bad idea I'm afraid. Look, if you can learn anything from the pr0n industry (and I'm serious here) it's this: their subscription model is tried and tested. Do they charge per 1000 anything? No. They charge for time periods, one month, three months, one year subscriptions. It's the magic 3% of readers/posters who get hit any other way.
/." scheme, where people like me can send in $$ just because we want to support the site. Everyone now knows that advertising ain't gonna support the site, so another model has to be found. The one you're suggesting isn't the best, although I can see the logic behind it. The sites that have gone "premium" (eg, Salon, the Wall Street Journal) have another model that you should consider.
/. what it is.
My 2 cents: I like
Please, at least set up a donations file, a "Friends of
Some British politician said that taxation is like plucking a live rooster - you've got to do it very carefully to avoid a lot of squawking. Why not try a voluntary subscription scheme (an annual $25 sub?) that gives something warm and fuzzy to donors as well, like arts companies do (ballet, orchestras), and see how that goes first. Use that as a base. Use that group as a test bed for developing a premium service. Otherwise you risk detracting from the community that makes
No, seriously, have a wedding registry somewhere. I got married last month, we didn't tell anyone about our wedding list and all we got was bowls... bowls, bowls, bowls. Everyone thought, en masse, "I know, I'll buy them a nice bowl." We got 20 bowls. And a sleeping bag... and a DVD player. But mostly bowls. So unless you want bowls....
(And Liz, if you're reading this: happy Valentine's day, I love you. R xx.)
Uh, dude, I have to say that knowing there are two minor errors in the book (I spotted the Altair one but not the modem one, if that is an error rather than an over-simplification) doesn't detract from the rest of it. Yes, I know what you mean, but Cassidy's overall argument isn't harmed by either, because they are trivial points in relation and I wouldn't get too hung up about them - at least not as much as the reviewer. Shakespeare puts a clock in Julius Caesar, a huge anachronism, but it doesn't detract from the quality of the play. (Not a great example, but I hope you see the point.) I guess Cassidy's publishers will correct them (and the typos) in the second edition/paperback.
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I'd be more worried if the financial stuff was wrong. As it happens, I read an interview with Jeff Bezos last Saturday, where he mentioned that Amazon's share price hit an intra-day high of $115. I was reading Dot.con at the time and the Amazon chapter mentioned a $113 high for the company. So I checked - and Bezos was wrong, it was $113.
Generally this book has been well reviewed. Anyone who wants to read a balanced review should try this thoughtful Financial Times one:
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/artic
That was not so much a book review as one long sour grapes session ... in truth this is a very well written book that deserves to be read by a wide audience.
John Cassidy is The New Yorkers' business writer, and I've been reading his weekly column there for some time. He's an insightful writer with a good turn of phrase and an eye for strong themes. And that's what Dot.con is about: why did the US economy get transfixed by a speculative bubble involving the internet? That's the question he's exploring, and it's a complex issue, so readers shouldn't be disappointed (unlike whoever wrote the Slashdot review) if he doesn't come up with black and white answers. It's not that simple, and only a moron would expect it to be. However, Cassidy is pretty plain who he blames for letting the whole circus get out of hand: Alan Greenspan, the media, and the investment banking community. But he has the insight to explain why each of those groups did what they felt they had to do.
It's true there a few typos (mistakes) in the book, and I have no idea who invented the modem and it doesn't matter. From what I can see the guts of the book is accurate, and any (minor) mistakes don't detract from its strength. What Cassidy has done is write an excellent narrative of the financial markets and the internet from 1995 to 2001. As a history of its type it can be compared to JK Galbraith's The Great Crash - and it's no coincidence that Galbraith has been a big fan of the book, supplying a glowing endorsement.
Nothing new in here? Well, it's a history of the very recent past, so lots of the events are very familiar to most readers, but Cassidy's ability to tie it all together makes this better than so many cut-and-paste jobs. And its aimed at the good old general public - the type of people who might have been tempted to buy some Priceline shares because their brother-in-law made big money on the IPO.
Slashdot readers can still enjoy it though, even if it is too general for them: the hubris, the schadenfreude, makes it very enjoyable. Cassidy paces the book so well, almost like a good novelist, that the book has a racy plot. And he focuses in on some key parts of the bubble as it expanded: the chapter on Amazon is particularly good. It doesn't bear any resemblence to Michael Lewis's book: that was written at the top of the "the internet's going to change everything, man" phase, which (as Cassidy points out) turned out to be hyperbole at the very least.
Don't trust whoever wrote Slashdot's review: this book actually stands a good chance of being the standard history of the dotcom boom-and-bust. It's the book that, years from now, when someone asks you, "why did everyone go so crazy about the whole dotcom thing?", you can pull out this book and say: "it's all in here...."
According to blurb: GPRS multi-slot class 10 with wireless data transfer to 53.6 kbps.
Transparent and non-transparent Circuit Switched Data over GSM networks to 14.4 kbps.
Note: this is in the UK.
On the physical sixe: it's smaller than a Palm by 2cm in length, but the screen's the same size.