In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet's tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of "chaos."
Better to have nothing, and depend on bad PR events than to have full on regulatory capture - because in the latter scenario, arguing over an FCC decision will be like arguing with the local zoning board - only more so.
The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn't been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.
If you haven't brought the cart out "enough", they'll start sorting through your trash and fining you if you throw out "too many" recyclables. This is right up there with the Greek government - scanning Google Maps for pools that haven't been taxed.
Update: The irony of this post is that after I posted this, I charged outside to put my recycling bin at the curb. I had forgotten what day it was, and the truck was coming.
Today's Smalltalk Daily looks some of the simple scaffolding customizations you can make in WebVelocity 1.1 - and shows you how to find out more. To jump straight to the video, click here. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it.
Note class
variableNames
^#('title' 'created' 'description')
NoteListUI
shouldRenderDescription
^false
renderObjectCreated: anObject on: html
html text: anObject asDate printString
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It's another episode of "no one is entitled to a business model". The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) wants to mandate FM receivers in all smartphones, probably due to the audience drop they're seeing. This is all part of the RIAA and NAB fighting over the remaining crumbs in the broadcast music business:
NAB, in an effort to expand radio audiences, has been seeking an FM receiver mandate for digital devices for several years. But the proposal doesn't make sense, with many smartphones able to stream music and other content from the Internet, including streams from commercial radio stations, said Jot Carpenter, CTIA's vice president for government affairs. Several mobile devices available in the U.S. have FM receivers, but they are not among the top-selling devices, he said.
When I'm listening to music, I tend to do one of three things:
Shuffle my entire music collection on my iPhone/Mac
Put on a Pandora station
Create a "Genius" playlist (like Pandora, but limited to my collection)
I haven't turned on the radio more than a handful of times in the last year, and those times happened because I forgot my phone. The sales numbers for devices that include radios show how much demand there is for that (virtually none).
Add to that another reality - many (most?) radio stations now stream live on the net. So I can already get radio stations over wifi or 3g if I want to. I don't want, or need, another radio draining battery in my iPhone, thanks.
The release of Steam for Mac has done something interesting - it's gotten Apple to sit up and take notice of their lagging graphics performance in the gaming arena. I just loaded the update last night, and while I can't say much about what it does yet (I haven't fired up DAO or SC2 since I grabbed the update), it's certainly making Steam users happy.
Authorities investigating the 2008 crash of Spanair flight 5022 have discovered a central computer system used to monitor technical problems in the aircraft was infected with malware. An internal report issued by the airline revealed the infected computer failed to detect three technical problems with the aircraft, which if detected, may have prevented the plane from taking off, according to reports in the Spanish newspaper, El Pais. Flight 5022 crashed just after takeoff from Madrid-Barajas International Airport two years ago today, killing 154 and leaving only 18 survivors.
That's a whole lot more serious than a spam spewing PC bot. Wow. Just... wow.
Well, the latest Mac update does improve graphics performance in games - I've been enjoying the way Dragon Age: Origins looks with the update. However, a problem that's cropped up periodically with that game is still there - the complete lockup. I was playing a few minutes ago, and boom - the game reported an exception, then came back up. Then.... it just locked up hard. Couldn't break out to anywhere from the keyboard, and when I looked from a different machine, it wasn't on the network anymore, either.
While I like NetFlix and Hulu, setting them up on the TV is still something of a chore - you have to hook up a Mac or PC, and then navigate the "not built for a TV screen" interface. So if Apple ships the next generation Apple TV based on what they've learned from the iPhone and iPad?
Expect to see an iPhone/Pad like marketplace for television applications. Video sharing/streaming/recording apps, interactive news apps, and of course games.
That's Kevin Rose speculating on what it could mean. If Apple makes that move, they'll get a real foothold, I think - people hate their cable boxes. The DVR features are sub-optimal, the controls for streaming from on demand are terrible - and there's a monthly charge for each of the crappy boxes.
Give people the ability to easily synch everything they have on their iPads and their TVs, along with casual gaming ad streaming - and an interface that doesn't get in the way - and I think you'll have a hit. I'll be looking at this with interest...
I'll be on vacation next week, so there won't be any new Smalltalk Daily screencasts until a week from Monday. In the meantime, just check the archives, and feel free to send me suggestions for things you would like to see covered!
This is why I have my blog auto-post ton Twitter (and from there, on to Facebook) - otherwise, all that content is owned by someone else, and - if the service(s) in question die off, you're left with nothing. As Leo Laporte just realized:
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.
I use (or used, when they still existed) many of those - but I've always kept my blog (first the corporate one, and now, this one) front and center. That way, I have control over my own web history.
This week's podcast was recorded on the last day of ESUG 2009, last summer. With all the news from Instantiations recently, I thought John O'Keefe's presentation would still be timely - and I realized that I had not posted it yet..
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This is pretty ridiculous, although with the budget issues that so many cities and counties are facing, I guess it's the sort of desperation play one should expect:
She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.
So, what the heck is a "privilege license", and why the heck would a blogger making pennies from AdSense need one?
Ever since I started reading on my iPad, I've been tearing through books like a knife through warm butter - and I've fallen way, way behind on the reviews I normally post here. Sometime in the next week or two, I intend to catch up, but here's a list of what I've been reading:
There's some research into how Germany advanced so quickly - especially compared to the rest of Europe - in the 19th century. One possibility: lack of strong copyright law:
In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.
I'm pretty well convinced that copyrights, as we apply them in the US at least, are a net negative. They tie material up for ridiculous amounts of time, and they benefit big businesses (Disney comes to mind) far more than they benefit individual authors. I think it's well past time for a change.
The next Smalltalk User Group in Frankfurt, Germany takes place on September 21, with Alan Knight and Arden Thomas:
We are happy to invite you to our next meeting on Tuesday September 21st.
Alan Knight, Engineering Manager Cincom Smalltalk and lead developer of GLORP, will talk about the internals and optimization of GLORP. GLORP (Generic Lightweight Object-Relational Persistence) is an open-source cross-dialect OO-R mapping framework available for VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, VASmalltalk, Dolphin Smalltalk, Smalltalk/X, Pharo and Squeak.
Arden Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, will be attending too. He will certainly be open to answer your questions and listen to your suggestions about the further development of Cincom Smalltalk.
We welcome you at 18:30 on Tuesday September 21st in the offices of ITS-People GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, Lyoner Str. 44-48.
Question: Final question, and one I’m sure you’re not super-keen to answer, but I promised one of our tech guys I’d ask it. What truth is there to rumours that you’re also working on a Linux version of Steam?
Doug Lombardi: There’s no Linux version that we’re working on right now.
In terms of client gaming, Windows is the 800 pound gorilla, and I think the only reason that the Mac got Steam is the dominance of Mac notebooks at the high end of the market. Desktop Linux is just a much, much smaller market, full of people who are far less likely to buy a gaming subscription.
Keeping track of time in software sounds simle until you actually start looking into it - to take a trivial example, does a Timestamp include a TimeZone? Then there are the harder issues:
Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Since their introduction in 1971, leap seconds have proved problematic for at least a few software programs. The leap second added on to the end of 2008, for instance, caused Oracle cluster software to reboot unexpectedly in some cases.
As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck. There, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day. Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city's Traffic Management Bureau general office, said in a telephone interview he didn't expect the situation to return to normal until around Sept. 17 when road construction is scheduled to be finished and traffic lanes will open up.
The draconian DMCA and absurdly long copyright periods aren't enough - the RIAA wants more:
"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."
What they want to see is safe harbor removed - which would make the birth of anything akin to YouTube impossible. The RIAA needs to die, yesterday.
Andreas Raab talks about how Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and EToys are helping grow the Smalltalk community - and moving towards cooperation on the core stuff.
There's been (or still is) a bubble in everything else - housing, education, US treasuries - why not game development costs? Over the last few years, there's been something akin to an arms race between vendors in order to create the most impressive graphics for games. Now EA thinks things are cooling off:
"I think budgets for games have actually peaked and are starting to move in the reverse direction again," said David DeMartini in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz [registration required]. He's VP and group general manager of EA Partners, the publisher's third-party distribution arm.
Personally, I'm not so sure. Movie costs have never really dropped, and the closest parallel in entertainment I can think of to games is movies. I guess we'll see over the next year or two.
Okay as for what's so interesting to me about Seaside... it's 50% the framework and 50% the Pharo environment. Seaside itself represents a step forward in web development similar to how Rails did. Rails takes care of a lot of the plumbing for you - you don't have to parse query params, set up response headers, manage the session (unless you want to of course). Seaside does all that of course but also manages application state for you. So you don't have to worry about putting stuff into a database, then pulling it back out and operating on it. I can't do it justice in a few sentences, but that's why I'll be showing lots of examples at the conference! :) At any rate, that same feeling you get when you code Rails for the first time and see how much easier things are, you get that same feeling with Seaside.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Seaside works across all the Smalltalk dialects - so you can move your application to another Smalltalk if you want/need to - for instance, you might want to consider Cincom Smalltalk if you want full commercial support :)
Looks like BioWare is ready to wrap up the story line from DAO, and start getting ready for DAO 2 - September 7 will bring us Witch Hunt, a reunion with Morrigan:
Dubbed Witch Hunt, the content takes place nearly a year since the fall of Archdemon. Players will finally confront the sorceress Morrigan and find out her true motives. You can import your character from Origins and Awakening or create a whole new one if you so please.
I guess we'll find out what kind of entity the "ritual" with Morrigan created - assuming your character took her loophole, that is :)
It looks like Gmail users are already taking advantage of the cheap calling that Google launched yesterday. The company announced via Twitter that there were 1 million calls placed from Gmail in 24 hours.
The H.264 codec that makes a good deal of digital video possible has actually been free to use (under certain conditions) for many years, but following recent controversies over the future of web video, rightholders have agreed to extend that freedom in perpetuity. Whereas originally standards organization MPEG-LA had said it wouldn't collect royalties from those freely distributing AVC/H.264 video until 2016, the limitless new timeframe may mean that content providers banking on WebM and HTML5 video won't have an expensive surprise in the years to come.
That's great news - it means that anyone (like me!) who uploads H.264 video that they (or the company they work for) owns, there's no problem. There's a huge monkey off the back of HTML5.
It's not official, but rumor that Blockbuster is preparing to file for bankruptcy in September is certainly believable. Expected even. According to several sources speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Blockbuster chief executive Jim Keyes along with representation from Blockbuster's senior debt holders met last week with the six major movie studios to announce the company's intention to enter a mid-September bankruptcy.
Blockbuster should have pursued its own streaming deals with the studios years ago - instead, they got clobbered vy Netflix, iTunes, Hulu (et. al.). There's a lesson there for any business that is dependent on an older business model, and is being challenged by upstarts....
I hit the links with my dad this morning - drove the ball pretty well, and had a decent enough outing. Lousy putting, but some nice drives and chip shots. Beautiful day though:
The way music execs blame everything on file sharing, you would think that they had never heard of legal streaming services like Pandora. I think sites like that explain the chart (follow the link) that shows a huge decline in album sales much, much better than file sharing:
Music industry execs blame the dropping sales numbers on illegal downloads. Exactly what percent of music downloads are illegal is difficult to calculate, but estimates range as high as 20 illegal downloads for every legal download. As for the total cost of illegal downloads, it depends on who you ask.
I was driving from Orlando to my parent's house yesterday, and I had Pandora on the whole time. Not iTunes; not FM radio; not talk radio. That's what's killing sales. You can create a playlist that keys off a song (or band, or genre...) you like, and then just have the music play. No need to save anything, or buy anything, or worry about anything.
As I've said before on this blog - No one is entitled to a business model....
Looks like Paul Allen has gone to the dark side - he's decided to sue companies that - unlike the ones he was involved with - actually brought useful technology to market. And no, I don't mean Microsoft - I give Gates most of the credit for that.
Billionaire Paul Allen has made major forays into cable television and sports teams since leaving Microsoft Corp. more than two decades ago. Now he's adding another pursuit: patent litigation.
Patent litigation is the last refuge of the incompetent, IMHO. Along with copyright, I think patents have become more of a hindrance than a help.