I agree with you on the strategy of creating brand value, but the press reports on the iPod mini have suggested that margins on it are lower. I think that Apple are hoping that the lower price will get them bigger volumes. Plus, a lot of the sunk cost on the iPod, in the form of software development and product design, has already been done, so that would make the economics more attractive.
I don't think this contradicts the basic thrust of your argument, though: the new Mini shows that if something looks stylish, this will persuade people to pay more for it. There was a comment higher about the fact that, as far as one Slashdotter's 13-year old female relative was concerned, there is no such thing as an MP3/digital music player, only an iPod.
This is not intended as a Mac bashing comment, but I have been disappointed by the "worldwide" guarantee on my iBook. I have looked for Apple to repair it under guarantee, only to be told that the guarantee does not apply in Russia, where I spend most of my time. The same with the iBook "recall" for faulty motherboards. Fortunately I was able to get the computer back to the UK in the first instance, and the Russian Apple service partner gave me a cheap repair in the second. I would be suspicious about Apple's ability to deliver on their worldwide guarantee in other marginal markets, too. *sigh* If only their hardware quality control was as good as their software!
While I commend the original article as an interesting dissection of an attempted attack via spam, the heading is a little sensational. It mentions Russian spyware sites, but the site in question is Spylog.com, a reputable Russian monitoring site. Not everything on the Russian internet is malicious, and Spylog does some good work on reporting statistics about the Russian internet.
Well, I agree with you about parody, but there is really nothing creative about this - they've just borrowed the look of Google to create a porn portal.
Unless there is some very subtle joke here, I think that Google have a point. If Booble were using its revenues to say, fund free speech sites which are suppressed (allegedly) by Google in China, then that would represent some sort of statement. I don't see that Booble is making a statement, except that they are cheekily borrowing someone else's artwork to make money. Not exactly mass murder, as crimes go, but trademarks are legally protected for a reason.
You are probably right that eventually the copyright owners will win the DRM wars, although they are not doing too well at the moment. However, I think that the genie is out of the bottle in that there is an awful lot of open content and hardware out there. I can take my home computer, and my iPod, and even if they discover a perfect DRM for CDs tomorrow, pretty much all the music published to date is still available.
They can't ban existing CDs or minidiscs or vinyl or cassettes, and I can get all of them on to my computer or iPod. Maybe they can ban filesharing, but I find it hard to believe that there won't be a way round it - hell, we could just have encrypted email buddy lists for swapping files, or IRC, or online swap meets, or, well, you get the picture.
You are probably right that the mainstream will be closed, and that open systems music will be marginalised, but that seems to be the case for open software in general. Its existence is tolerated, as long as our corporate overlords have control of the mainstream.
The problem for the corporate overlords is that each generation will be more technically savvy than the next, so the marginalised will eventually become the mainstream.
It means that Microsoft has gone from treating Apple as a marginal player, that is so insignificant that they could buy shares in it to use as a trivial defence against the charge of being a monopolist. There was a Doonesbury cartoon that said that you had arrived when Microsoft decided to either buy you out, or spend 1% of its development budget on recreating what you had done.
As an Apple shareholder, I would rather have Microsoft frightened of Apple, than a patronising co-owner.
I think this is very insightful - I think that it does make sense that Ebay will increasingly encroach on Amazon's territory. There is a certain hurdle of trust that you have to cross - the first when you start using Amazon, the second when you start using Ebay. Amazon will find it harder to persuade its users, who are probably more timid to use its auctions. On the other hand, Ebay users have overcome more trust barriers, so they won't have any problems in buying online from publishers, and big companies.
Ebay's weakness is that Paypal seems to have annoyed a lot of people. I am sure that Amazon has had billing problems as well, but I don't think that the unhappiness is as virulent as that with Paypal. So although I agree with you in principle that Ebay should win out, it's possible that there will be an equilibrium with both companies surviving, with Ebay predominating amongst more sophisticated users, and Amazon having greater market share of the technophobes. Technophobes relatively speaking of course, as there are still millions of people out there who will never trade over the internet.
I think most of Apple's manufacturing is outsourced to Taiwan, although of course they do their software in the US. But then, Microsoft's software operation is mainly done in the US also, as far as I am aware, although I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of operation in India.
Even Microsoft's general evilness has not got to the point where they have exported their software engineering to India. But then, they manufacture the X-box in Mexico, IIRC, but I have a dim recollection that they were going to move that to Asia as well.
My general take on this is that the "commodity" aspects of software development are being outsourced, as are the commodity parts of IT service, like basic call centre management, where people are mainly reading scripts from a screen. I'm sure that many of these people in India are capable of more, but I'm not sure how much US companies will trust people with higher end functions if they are not immediately under their supervision. For instance, Lehmann Brothers, a major investment bank, tried outsourcing its internal helpline to India, and brought it back, because it wasn't what they wanted.
The bottom line is that there will always be room for project management, and software design jobs in the homeland, but the grunt work will be offshore. Which means that there will be a high return on investment in skills development. Not just in programming, but in how those programmes are used.
I like sagas, so I would point out Heimat, to you, which was shown on German TV as a miniseries, but was also conceived as a film, to be shown in four parts over two days. Which was how I saw it - 16 hours in a cinema.
Or there is Little Dorrit, which is two separate films, about three hours each. Or The Mahabharata, which is about nine hours in three parts, originally a play, but also adapted for the cinema.
The main rational for going public, from the company's point of view, is the fact that employees will be more motivated by the fact that their share options have a cash value set by the market, rather than by the company. There is a secondary reason, which is that having publicly traded shares creates a currency for acquiring other companies.
This logic works best when you are dealing with a company that does not generate dividends. When you have dividends, then shareholders get their rewards from these, and so there is less of a need to go public. The problem is, it takes time for companies to mature to the extent that they pay dividends, and everyone involved is generally too impatient to wait.
Having said that, it's usually the shareholders and the management who decide to go public, not the workers. The main reason for an IPO, in reality, is to allow venture capitalists and management to cash in, generally by capitalizing on market hype. This was the pattern for the nineties - everyone involved in taking the decision is in favour of the IPO: VCs and management want the cash, and the investment bankers and lawyers and accountants want the fees. And the press wants an interesting story. And, sadly, the investing public (including their so-called professional advisers in the mutual funds) seems to be willing to buy into all of this.
There have been suggestions that Google is worth $25 bln, in the press, who generally know nothing. Even if it's half that, then it's still valued at more than 10 times revenue. Just to give you an indication, my company will be criticised by its board, and the analysts, if we pay more than 2 times revenue for a company.
So you are right, that the main interest is a one-off sum of cash, plus the hope that you will be able to attract good staff with options, even though most of the upside from options has already been appropriated by the early movers. And that you might be able to use your inflated stock to buy other companies. It's known as the "bigger fool" theory of company valuation - you might think this is a silly price for our company, but we're sure that you will be able to find a bigger fool further on down the line.
I don't see how it violates the settlement, unless they prevent Windows users from using other music services. As long as you can still play the other stuff on your computer, there is nothing to stop you choosing whichever service you want. So they are not using market power to tie people in to their service.
Of course, they may well have a strategy to gradually extend the features available to Windows Music Shop users, while restricting these to other people - for instance, it may become a lot easier to burn CDs from Windows Music Shop than from iTunes, because of some obscure driver incompatibility that you need a degree in CompSci to unravel. Or it may be possible to play only Windows Music files from within Internet Explorer. I should stop now, before I give too many ideas to the folks at Redmond.
Microsoft are still allowed to compete, as long as they do it fairly. The moment they stop competing fairly, there will be a howl of protest, and the lawyers can start dusting off the terms of the agreement.
It's a good question, but you can get all the logging/filtering/restrictions without the government ownership of the pipes.
The key thing to bear in mind here is that there are potential economic benefits from this project that will be felt by the whole community, not just the project owner. My guess is that the cost-benefit study includes such things as attracting internet users (generally more educated, flexible people) to the community, and the changes in behaviour that might come if there is good universal access. For instance, more people can telecommute, which reduces pressure on the roads, reduces pollution, reduces accidents. People who telecommute might be less stressed which also improves public health. I would probably go crazy working from home, but it's nice to have the choice. The Internet broadens consumer choice, which should mean a lower cost of living, and therefore greater spending power. It should also enhance the educational system.
I realise that this probably sounds quite socialist to an American audience, but it's essentially the same reasons that justify public provision of street lights and schools. The thing is, a private company doesn't care about the externalities, however much their PR department might want you to believe otherwise.
That you believe that, if Coldplay started stripping, it would increase their marketability amongst MIT students!
As far as I know, Coldplay have never stripped publicly, for the purposes of advertising or otherwise, and I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully request that they never do so.
I think you mean Ed Yardeni. He was the guy at Deutsche Bank, if I remember rightly, who predicted doom and gloom. This of course does not exclude the possibility that Peter de Jager was also a doom-monger, but I couldn't say either way.
I went to this a couple of years ago, and found myself in heaven! There are hundreds of different types of beer (I can remember two, called "Hammerhead" and "Old Fart" ). If you like your beer warm and dark, there is no finer place to be. Of course, it has a cement floor, nowhere to sit, and the male to female ratio is about 9 to 1, but then, that's what gives it the authentic pub atmosphere.
My high school, which is in England, and has been around a long time, used to have a brewery for the students. The top student got around 4 pints a day, IIRC. The brewery shut down about 200 years ago, and is now a library.
Mind you, back then, the senior prefects were allowed to beat the others with canes, so it wasn't all gravy.
...they were able to roll Congress into passing the DMCA. Verizon had no choice but to comply, because the DMCA forces them to give up the addresses of file sharers. (Or was it the Online Child Protection Act - apologies if it was). IIRC, Verizon and other ISPs lobbied against the DMCA, and were unsuccessful. Once it was passed, they had to obey the Act, because they didn't have the option of retreating to Montana and pretending that it didn't exist.
The fact that this is a daily topic on Slashdot, with a wide spectrum of opinions, suggests that this is a grey area. It's therefore asking a bit much to insist that he start following your agenda without doing some research. Or is it a good thing when politicians react in a knee-jerk fashion without looking at the facts?
He may well be a gubment windbag (the fact that he is a senator significantly increases this possibility) but at least, for the time being, on this issue, he's OUR gubment windbag. The pro-file sharing lobby has been screaming that Capitol Hill is in the pockets of the **AAs, so it's nice to see that one of them isn't. And at least calling for information is a warning shot across the bows of the RIAA that they will be expected to conform to the letter of the law. I'm relieved to see this, because the tide had been running firmly in the other direction, what with the DMCA, and the Patriot Act, and all. It's nice to see the elected representatives doing something on behalf of the people that they are representing, even if it isn't exactly what the file sharers would like him to do.
One thing that the last few years have shown is that once platforms are built, it's very hard to predict which ones will take off, and exactly how they were used. I think that the same will be true about mobile data.
You are right to question the true need for such tools. How many of us really need to update our blogs on the bus to work? Of course, an account of a bus ride would be much more interesting than the drivel that you usually see in blogs, but you get my point.
However, I have found one perfect application for my SonyEricsson P800 - it takes the public domain stock prices, and displays them in an easy to read screen. This is much easier than going to a web page, which is going to be full of graphics that I don't want. I don't really need to send emails or surf, but this little app justifies GPRS to me.
I think that there is another question about whether this technology is going to be on the client or the server side. Designers may not be willing to adjust their code for every single device out there, even though I would dearly love to believe that XML can do this for them. On the other hand, if you can make a client side application that will strip out the useless information, or illegible graphics, this will ensure that content is delivered in a useable way. I think the app will have to be device specific: to use a trivial example, the mainstream games that have been ported to mobile devices, like Doom and SimCity, IMHO just don't work, because they were never meant to be used on such small screen real estate. It's very hard to anticipate every single quirk of every single device on the server side, so the work is going to be done on the client side, where the device knows exactly its own requirements.
There are sites in Russia, like compromat.ru or flb.ru which regularly post transcripts of mobile phone calls between famous people. I have been able to follow the progress of friends/former colleagues in this way, and it's quite amusing. What is not amusing is the ease with which those calls can be tapped, even with encoding switched on. As the poster above says, someone is getting access to the signal after the tower, probably via a direct feed to the mobile operator's exchange.
In the case of those sites above, the tapping is done by various private security services, or maybe by the official security services, moonlighting on behalf of private firms. The output is then leaked to the press, via clearinghouse sites like the ones above, as part of various political/economic squabbles that define the Russian political landscape. The operators have to comply, as the security services are close to the Ministry of Communications, and if you start bleating about civil rights or due process, the Ministry will rapidly discover an irregularity in your license, and make your life hell. In any case, it's not hard for the Russian security services to get a court order, which would force the operator to give access.
So why switch off encoding, when you can get access to the conversations without it? It may be a timing thing, as you say - it may take time to set up a tap for a particular number. Or more likely, you don't know the number that you are trying to tap (it's very easy to get a prepaid SIM card, or to steal one) so you aim to find your target by eavesdropping. If you are looking to tap the phone of a senior politician or businessman, you already know the number you are tapping, so you don't need to go after their signal.
Like all big questions, there is no single answer to why Russia can't do what Estonia has done. I have been living and working in Russia, as a foreigner for over ten years, and in my opinion, Russia's biggest problem is its government. There is a lot of bureaucracy in every step you might take, and it seems to be designed to generate bribe opportunities for government employees. Numerous anti-corruption campaigns have really only made matters worse - what happens is that the anti-corruption bodies just demand bribes from the ordinary bureaucrats, who then increase their demands on the rest of the population. The funny thing is that the government now talks about bureaucracy as an independently-occurring phenomenon, like the weather.
Estonia moved very aggressively to limit the powers of its bureaucracy - they used to be very proud of the fact that there were no tax exemptions (meaning no opportunities for interpretation by government officials) and their tax declaration was one page. There was a big fuss when they introduced exemptions, and the declaration went on to a second page. (I was told this by a friend, the Economist correspondent at the time, and believe it to be true, but if it's not, flame away). I don't know how aggressive they have been about liberalisation, but they have certainly worked very hard to eradicate the Soviet state, which is still alive and well in Russia.
That said, Estonia had a number of advantages. First, there was public support for the hardship imposed by separation from Russia (higher electricity prices, for instance) - this was because it was seen as a natural cost of getting rid of the Russians. Second, the Finns, who feel an ethnic affinity for the Estonians, have been very helpful, and although Finland is not a rich country, Estonia is not very large, so a little money goes a long way (and they didn't waste it, like some other aid agencies in the region)
So to some extent, Estonia had it easier, but they also did a lot more with the advantages they were given. Russia basically didn't de-Sovietize in the way that they should have, and its path will be longer and harder as a result, even if it is richer in terms of natural resources, and (arguably) human capital. The fundamental problem of Russia is its bureaucracy, which existed before Soviet times. The problem is that the task of removing the bureaucrats has been given to the bureaucrats, so it's not surprising that they have not been particularly aggressive. You need an outside motivation, like the removal of the Russians was for Eastern Europe, and Russia doesn't have this.
His point doesn't disagree with yours - the reason why i-Mode works is because people have been able to produce services for it that are different, and appropriate to the mobile platform.
TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?
BROWN: Sureâ"it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something thatâ(TM)s new, it looks like the old thing. Itâ(TM)s only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.
The problem is that most of the firms producing both hardware and software for mobile applications are trying to force people to use handsets as though they are using a desktop. For instance, the browser on my P800 works fine, except that it's such a tiny window, it's a real pain to use for a site that has been designed to read in 800x640, or whatever. What would be good would be a browser that could work out what was interesting, and strip out all the rest. This is a nontrivial requirement though, and maybe I will just have to restrict my browsing to those sites that I know to be set up for my small screen.
For instance, I have an application that takes stock prices, and formats them for my screen, which is very useful. Now if someone could only do the same for sports scores...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you on the strategy of creating brand value, but the press reports on the iPod mini have suggested that margins on it are lower. I think that Apple are hoping that the lower price will get them bigger volumes. Plus, a lot of the sunk cost on the iPod, in the form of software development and product design, has already been done, so that would make the economics more attractive.
I don't think this contradicts the basic thrust of your argument, though: the new Mini shows that if something looks stylish, this will persuade people to pay more for it. There was a comment higher about the fact that, as far as one Slashdotter's 13-year old female relative was concerned, there is no such thing as an MP3/digital music player, only an iPod.
This is not intended as a Mac bashing comment, but I have been disappointed by the "worldwide" guarantee on my iBook. I have looked for Apple to repair it under guarantee, only to be told that the guarantee does not apply in Russia, where I spend most of my time. The same with the iBook "recall" for faulty motherboards. Fortunately I was able to get the computer back to the UK in the first instance, and the Russian Apple service partner gave me a cheap repair in the second. I would be suspicious about Apple's ability to deliver on their worldwide guarantee in other marginal markets, too. *sigh* If only their hardware quality control was as good as their software!
While I commend the original article as an interesting dissection of an attempted attack via spam, the heading is a little sensational. It mentions Russian spyware sites, but the site in question is Spylog.com, a reputable Russian monitoring site. Not everything on the Russian internet is malicious, and Spylog does some good work on reporting statistics about the Russian internet.
Just a minor correction.
Well, I agree with you about parody, but there is really nothing creative about this - they've just borrowed the look of Google to create a porn portal.
Unless there is some very subtle joke here, I think that Google have a point. If Booble were using its revenues to say, fund free speech sites which are suppressed (allegedly) by Google in China, then that would represent some sort of statement. I don't see that Booble is making a statement, except that they are cheekily borrowing someone else's artwork to make money. Not exactly mass murder, as crimes go, but trademarks are legally protected for a reason.
You are probably right that eventually the copyright owners will win the DRM wars, although they are not doing too well at the moment. However, I think that the genie is out of the bottle in that there is an awful lot of open content and hardware out there. I can take my home computer, and my iPod, and even if they discover a perfect DRM for CDs tomorrow, pretty much all the music published to date is still available.
They can't ban existing CDs or minidiscs or vinyl or cassettes, and I can get all of them on to my computer or iPod. Maybe they can ban filesharing, but I find it hard to believe that there won't be a way round it - hell, we could just have encrypted email buddy lists for swapping files, or IRC, or online swap meets, or, well, you get the picture.
You are probably right that the mainstream will be closed, and that open systems music will be marginalised, but that seems to be the case for open software in general. Its existence is tolerated, as long as our corporate overlords have control of the mainstream.
The problem for the corporate overlords is that each generation will be more technically savvy than the next, so the marginalised will eventually become the mainstream.
It means that Microsoft has gone from treating Apple as a marginal player, that is so insignificant that they could buy shares in it to use as a trivial defence against the charge of being a monopolist. There was a Doonesbury cartoon that said that you had arrived when Microsoft decided to either buy you out, or spend 1% of its development budget on recreating what you had done.
As an Apple shareholder, I would rather have Microsoft frightened of Apple, than a patronising co-owner.
I think this is very insightful - I think that it does make sense that Ebay will increasingly encroach on Amazon's territory. There is a certain hurdle of trust that you have to cross - the first when you start using Amazon, the second when you start using Ebay. Amazon will find it harder to persuade its users, who are probably more timid to use its auctions. On the other hand, Ebay users have overcome more trust barriers, so they won't have any problems in buying online from publishers, and big companies.
Ebay's weakness is that Paypal seems to have annoyed a lot of people. I am sure that Amazon has had billing problems as well, but I don't think that the unhappiness is as virulent as that with Paypal. So although I agree with you in principle that Ebay should win out, it's possible that there will be an equilibrium with both companies surviving, with Ebay predominating amongst more sophisticated users, and Amazon having greater market share of the technophobes. Technophobes relatively speaking of course, as there are still millions of people out there who will never trade over the internet.
I think most of Apple's manufacturing is outsourced to Taiwan, although of course they do their software in the US. But then, Microsoft's software operation is mainly done in the US also, as far as I am aware, although I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of operation in India.
Even Microsoft's general evilness has not got to the point where they have exported their software engineering to India. But then, they manufacture the X-box in Mexico, IIRC, but I have a dim recollection that they were going to move that to Asia as well.
My general take on this is that the "commodity" aspects of software development are being outsourced, as are the commodity parts of IT service, like basic call centre management, where people are mainly reading scripts from a screen. I'm sure that many of these people in India are capable of more, but I'm not sure how much US companies will trust people with higher end functions if they are not immediately under their supervision. For instance, Lehmann Brothers, a major investment bank, tried outsourcing its internal helpline to India, and brought it back, because it wasn't what they wanted.
The bottom line is that there will always be room for project management, and software design jobs in the homeland, but the grunt work will be offshore. Which means that there will be a high return on investment in skills development. Not just in programming, but in how those programmes are used.
I like sagas, so I would point out Heimat, to you, which was shown on German TV as a miniseries, but was also conceived as a film, to be shown in four parts over two days. Which was how I saw it - 16 hours in a cinema.
Or there is Little Dorrit, which is two separate films, about three hours each. Or The Mahabharata, which is about nine hours in three parts, originally a play, but also adapted for the cinema.
The main rational for going public, from the company's point of view, is the fact that employees will be more motivated by the fact that their share options have a cash value set by the market, rather than by the company. There is a secondary reason, which is that having publicly traded shares creates a currency for acquiring other companies.
This logic works best when you are dealing with a company that does not generate dividends. When you have dividends, then shareholders get their rewards from these, and so there is less of a need to go public. The problem is, it takes time for companies to mature to the extent that they pay dividends, and everyone involved is generally too impatient to wait.
Having said that, it's usually the shareholders and the management who decide to go public, not the workers. The main reason for an IPO, in reality, is to allow venture capitalists and management to cash in, generally by capitalizing on market hype. This was the pattern for the nineties - everyone involved in taking the decision is in favour of the IPO: VCs and management want the cash, and the investment bankers and lawyers and accountants want the fees. And the press wants an interesting story. And, sadly, the investing public (including their so-called professional advisers in the mutual funds) seems to be willing to buy into all of this.
There have been suggestions that Google is worth $25 bln, in the press, who generally know nothing. Even if it's half that, then it's still valued at more than 10 times revenue. Just to give you an indication, my company will be criticised by its board, and the analysts, if we pay more than 2 times revenue for a company.
So you are right, that the main interest is a one-off sum of cash, plus the hope that you will be able to attract good staff with options, even though most of the upside from options has already been appropriated by the early movers. And that you might be able to use your inflated stock to buy other companies. It's known as the "bigger fool" theory of company valuation - you might think this is a silly price for our company, but we're sure that you will be able to find a bigger fool further on down the line.
I don't see how it violates the settlement, unless they prevent Windows users from using other music services. As long as you can still play the other stuff on your computer, there is nothing to stop you choosing whichever service you want. So they are not using market power to tie people in to their service.
Of course, they may well have a strategy to gradually extend the features available to Windows Music Shop users, while restricting these to other people - for instance, it may become a lot easier to burn CDs from Windows Music Shop than from iTunes, because of some obscure driver incompatibility that you need a degree in CompSci to unravel. Or it may be possible to play only Windows Music files from within Internet Explorer. I should stop now, before I give too many ideas to the folks at Redmond.
Microsoft are still allowed to compete, as long as they do it fairly. The moment they stop competing fairly, there will be a howl of protest, and the lawyers can start dusting off the terms of the agreement.
It's a good question, but you can get all the logging/filtering/restrictions without the government ownership of the pipes.
The key thing to bear in mind here is that there are potential economic benefits from this project that will be felt by the whole community, not just the project owner. My guess is that the cost-benefit study includes such things as attracting internet users (generally more educated, flexible people) to the community, and the changes in behaviour that might come if there is good universal access. For instance, more people can telecommute, which reduces pressure on the roads, reduces pollution, reduces accidents. People who telecommute might be less stressed which also improves public health. I would probably go crazy working from home, but it's nice to have the choice. The Internet broadens consumer choice, which should mean a lower cost of living, and therefore greater spending power. It should also enhance the educational system.
I realise that this probably sounds quite socialist to an American audience, but it's essentially the same reasons that justify public provision of street lights and schools. The thing is, a private company doesn't care about the externalities, however much their PR department might want you to believe otherwise.
It's better than being called Utards
Whoosh! I think the parent poster lives in Utah, and his point is that they are NOT Amish in UT. That is, the traditional co-exists with the modern.
That you believe that, if Coldplay started stripping, it would increase their marketability amongst MIT students!
As far as I know, Coldplay have never stripped publicly, for the purposes of advertising or otherwise, and I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully request that they never do so.
I think you mean Ed Yardeni. He was the guy at Deutsche Bank, if I remember rightly, who predicted doom and gloom. This of course does not exclude the possibility that Peter de Jager was also a doom-monger, but I couldn't say either way.
I went to this a couple of years ago, and found myself in heaven! There are hundreds of different types of beer (I can remember two, called "Hammerhead" and "Old Fart" ). If you like your beer warm and dark, there is no finer place to be. Of course, it has a cement floor, nowhere to sit, and the male to female ratio is about 9 to 1, but then, that's what gives it the authentic pub atmosphere.
My high school, which is in England, and has been around a long time, used to have a brewery for the students. The top student got around 4 pints a day, IIRC. The brewery shut down about 200 years ago, and is now a library.
Mind you, back then, the senior prefects were allowed to beat the others with canes, so it wasn't all gravy.
...they were able to roll Congress into passing the DMCA. Verizon had no choice but to comply, because the DMCA forces them to give up the addresses of file sharers. (Or was it the Online Child Protection Act - apologies if it was). IIRC, Verizon and other ISPs lobbied against the DMCA, and were unsuccessful. Once it was passed, they had to obey the Act, because they didn't have the option of retreating to Montana and pretending that it didn't exist.
The fact that this is a daily topic on Slashdot, with a wide spectrum of opinions, suggests that this is a grey area. It's therefore asking a bit much to insist that he start following your agenda without doing some research. Or is it a good thing when politicians react in a knee-jerk fashion without looking at the facts?
He may well be a gubment windbag (the fact that he is a senator significantly increases this possibility) but at least, for the time being, on this issue, he's OUR gubment windbag. The pro-file sharing lobby has been screaming that Capitol Hill is in the pockets of the **AAs, so it's nice to see that one of them isn't. And at least calling for information is a warning shot across the bows of the RIAA that they will be expected to conform to the letter of the law. I'm relieved to see this, because the tide had been running firmly in the other direction, what with the DMCA, and the Patriot Act, and all. It's nice to see the elected representatives doing something on behalf of the people that they are representing, even if it isn't exactly what the file sharers would like him to do.
One thing that the last few years have shown is that once platforms are built, it's very hard to predict which ones will take off, and exactly how they were used. I think that the same will be true about mobile data.
You are right to question the true need for such tools. How many of us really need to update our blogs on the bus to work? Of course, an account of a bus ride would be much more interesting than the drivel that you usually see in blogs, but you get my point.
However, I have found one perfect application for my SonyEricsson P800 - it takes the public domain stock prices, and displays them in an easy to read screen. This is much easier than going to a web page, which is going to be full of graphics that I don't want. I don't really need to send emails or surf, but this little app justifies GPRS to me.
I think that there is another question about whether this technology is going to be on the client or the server side. Designers may not be willing to adjust their code for every single device out there, even though I would dearly love to believe that XML can do this for them. On the other hand, if you can make a client side application that will strip out the useless information, or illegible graphics, this will ensure that content is delivered in a useable way. I think the app will have to be device specific: to use a trivial example, the mainstream games that have been ported to mobile devices, like Doom and SimCity, IMHO just don't work, because they were never meant to be used on such small screen real estate. It's very hard to anticipate every single quirk of every single device on the server side, so the work is going to be done on the client side, where the device knows exactly its own requirements.
There are sites in Russia, like compromat.ru or flb.ru which regularly post transcripts of mobile phone calls between famous people. I have been able to follow the progress of friends/former colleagues in this way, and it's quite amusing. What is not amusing is the ease with which those calls can be tapped, even with encoding switched on. As the poster above says, someone is getting access to the signal after the tower, probably via a direct feed to the mobile operator's exchange.
In the case of those sites above, the tapping is done by various private security services, or maybe by the official security services, moonlighting on behalf of private firms. The output is then leaked to the press, via clearinghouse sites like the ones above, as part of various political/economic squabbles that define the Russian political landscape. The operators have to comply, as the security services are close to the Ministry of Communications, and if you start bleating about civil rights or due process, the Ministry will rapidly discover an irregularity in your license, and make your life hell. In any case, it's not hard for the Russian security services to get a court order, which would force the operator to give access.
So why switch off encoding, when you can get access to the conversations without it? It may be a timing thing, as you say - it may take time to set up a tap for a particular number. Or more likely, you don't know the number that you are trying to tap (it's very easy to get a prepaid SIM card, or to steal one) so you aim to find your target by eavesdropping. If you are looking to tap the phone of a senior politician or businessman, you already know the number you are tapping, so you don't need to go after their signal.
Like all big questions, there is no single answer to why Russia can't do what Estonia has done. I have been living and working in Russia, as a foreigner for over ten years, and in my opinion, Russia's biggest problem is its government. There is a lot of bureaucracy in every step you might take, and it seems to be designed to generate bribe opportunities for government employees. Numerous anti-corruption campaigns have really only made matters worse - what happens is that the anti-corruption bodies just demand bribes from the ordinary bureaucrats, who then increase their demands on the rest of the population. The funny thing is that the government now talks about bureaucracy as an independently-occurring phenomenon, like the weather.
Estonia moved very aggressively to limit the powers of its bureaucracy - they used to be very proud of the fact that there were no tax exemptions (meaning no opportunities for interpretation by government officials) and their tax declaration was one page. There was a big fuss when they introduced exemptions, and the declaration went on to a second page. (I was told this by a friend, the Economist correspondent at the time, and believe it to be true, but if it's not, flame away). I don't know how aggressive they have been about liberalisation, but they have certainly worked very hard to eradicate the Soviet state, which is still alive and well in Russia.
That said, Estonia had a number of advantages. First, there was public support for the hardship imposed by separation from Russia (higher electricity prices, for instance) - this was because it was seen as a natural cost of getting rid of the Russians. Second, the Finns, who feel an ethnic affinity for the Estonians, have been very helpful, and although Finland is not a rich country, Estonia is not very large, so a little money goes a long way (and they didn't waste it, like some other aid agencies in the region)
So to some extent, Estonia had it easier, but they also did a lot more with the advantages they were given. Russia basically didn't de-Sovietize in the way that they should have, and its path will be longer and harder as a result, even if it is richer in terms of natural resources, and (arguably) human capital. The fundamental problem of Russia is its bureaucracy, which existed before Soviet times. The problem is that the task of removing the bureaucrats has been given to the bureaucrats, so it's not surprising that they have not been particularly aggressive. You need an outside motivation, like the removal of the Russians was for Eastern Europe, and Russia doesn't have this.
IDEOlogues - I'm sure that's what you had in mind, wasn't it?
Or was it IDEOsyncratics?
His point doesn't disagree with yours - the reason why i-Mode works is because people have been able to produce services for it that are different, and appropriate to the mobile platform.
TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?
BROWN: Sureâ"it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something thatâ(TM)s new, it looks like the old thing. Itâ(TM)s only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.
The problem is that most of the firms producing both hardware and software for mobile applications are trying to force people to use handsets as though they are using a desktop. For instance, the browser on my P800 works fine, except that it's such a tiny window, it's a real pain to use for a site that has been designed to read in 800x640, or whatever. What would be good would be a browser that could work out what was interesting, and strip out all the rest. This is a nontrivial requirement though, and maybe I will just have to restrict my browsing to those sites that I know to be set up for my small screen.
For instance, I have an application that takes stock prices, and formats them for my screen, which is very useful. Now if someone could only do the same for sports scores...