I’ve resisted the Twitter call for months. But one of the geek podcasts I tune into – TWiT network, GeekBrief TV, Buzz Out Loud, can’t remember which – finally pushed me to take the leap. Perhaps it was Merlin Mann, the clown prince of productivity and Picasso of profanity. [warning: I alliterate unintentionally, and often. I'm in therapy for it, but progress is slow.]
I’m chock-full of opinions, but I have a tendency to compartmentalize. For purely political commentary, I read a lot of political blogs, and I occasionally comment, but the bulk of my contributions are at Hot Air, where I dove in with both feet during the primaries and found a steady supply of agreement and disagreement. (Sometimes, I prefer the latter. It’s one thing to get kudos from the choir. But I relish the times when I can persuade – or be persuaded – to a better position.)
I dearly love the Gerbils at Teh Squeaky Wheel, where political rants (though they are certainly there) give a back seat to things like friendship, wit, silly pictures, classic pinups, and a camaraderie and compassion that keeps me lurking even when I have little time to comment. They continue to welcome me warmly even when I’m on radio silence for long stretches. And in this very partisan season, it’s a refuge.
I don’t feel that urgently about posting to my own blog, largely because I crave feedback and that’s more readily available where there are many people. When I do post here it tends to be when I have a lot to say, or I chew through complex thoughts. The posts, then, tend to be sporadic, and looooooong. When I need to go on at length, nothing else will do – regardless of whether anyone is paying attention.
But those take time to compose. As rough as they may read at times, I do fuss over them a lot before I post. And it’s tough to find time to devote to lengthy writing. Far more often, I just feel the urge to do a drive-by comment. Hot Air and TSW are good places for that, but sometimes even those places “take too long” because of my temptation to stick around and dive into conversations.
For barbaric yawps of one minute or less, this Twitter thing has potential. 140 character limit. Post from your phone. No logging in needed. No need to check the landscape to be relevant to the thread. Just toss out the bon mot and get on with life.
So…where I have this place to gaze at, contemplate, spelunk into and explore my navel in a leisurely fashion, I also need an outlet for the eeeevil, brief, spontaneous idiocy that flows from my mind like butter from a cow with Parkinsons. The nuggets will vacillate between profound and pitiful, a light nosh or a frothy glass of phlegm, depending on my mood. (I know: ewwwwww.)
Should you happen to care or be curious about the Readers Digest view of the button-down mind of the cuddly dictator, check out http://twitter.com/sulla_puppy. I’ll also use that place to link to my rare blog posts here.
I’m no fan of Huckabee, but I used to be – and one reason was his sense of humor. It has a dark side, which is part of what turned me against him. But in TV appearances with Steven Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Conan O’Brien, Huck’s willingness to self-deprecate makes him frequently entertaining, if not endearing.
Case in point: his appearance on last night’s Weekend Update portion of Saturday Night Live.
Huck’s riffs on (1) his “mathematical impossibility” denial and (2) saying “I know when it’s time to exit gracefully” from the race, followed by awkwardly not exiting gracefully from the stage, was an obvious bit, and kinda funny in an art-reflects-reality sorta way.
Even though Mike Huckabee is still battling for the Republican presidential nomination despite long odds, he said Saturday he won’t “overstay his welcome.” Then he did precisely that, lingering on the “Weekend Update” set of “Saturday Night Live” despite repeated cues to leave the stage….However, he said: “Mike Huckabee does not overstay his welcome. When it’s time for me to go, I’ll know. And I’ll exit out with class and grace.”
Then he remained seated at the “Update” desk even though Meyers made it clear it was time for him to leave.
Part of me wonders how AP could possibly have missed the joke.
The larger truth, of course, is that Huck DOESN’T know when to leave. He may be playing it for laughs…but he’s not going away. My guess, based on my time on stage, is that he’s trying to go out on a high note. Nobody wants to slink off stage; if you start and end strong, the crowd can forgive a weaker middle act.
But Flip Wilson once did a great bit about “staying on too long” (click for audio) Eventually, however good the audience reaction, the time comes to hand the mic over to someone else, especially if you’re not the headliner.
Huck is now joking about staying on too long. And yet he stays.
His parking log reception isn’t gonna be pretty.
[Update] The Nation gets it (which has to be newsworthy).
My angel-of-death ways continue. Fresh from destroying the presidential hopes of Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney by giving them money and vocal support, leading to their withdrawal from the race less within 72 hours of the check clearing, I determined to pick a winner in the High Definition Format Wars by investing money in the loser.
I bought a computer with an HD-DVD drive in it last week. That wasn’t WHY I bought it; I don’t have any HD-DVDs, and it won’t record them. If the drive didn’t record to regular DVD-R/RW media I would have yanked it out to sell on eBay. But apparently my purchase came to the notice of the Powers that Be, and they made their choice:
Blu-Ray it is. HD-DVD is dead.
What does this mean? Well, for me, not much; the only HDTV I have is 19″ in diameter, a holiday prize for extreme cleverness (my work partner’s, not mine – my extreme cleverness won us a couple of Nikon digital cameras, which my wife promptly claimed for Spain. As though her collection of Canons needs the Nikonic interloper….But I digress.) The HD drive does have one nice feature: it upscales my existing discs to 720p, making them a bit prettier and wide-screenier. The thing is too small for the living room, which is serviced by an old-enough-to-vote and too-heavy-to-steal tube TV, but does pretty well in the crowded office. And you can’t beat free…until you start thinking of ways to fill all those connections in the back.
Enter the new PC, an HP media-center monstrosity with four cores and seven hundred gigabytes. wireless darn-near-everything. HDMI out. And an HD-DVD drive.
Sony’s Trojan Horse worked. I bought, and Toshiba’s baby died.
Here’s the thing, though: Sony’s been trying to win a format war for ages. Betamax, minidisc, UML, ATRAC. They usually lose. They’ve spent untold piles of cash putting BluRay into their PlayStation 3, so they could claim massive market penetration. They bought off studios more effectively than Toshiba did.
So…they win.
Or do they?
I have watched a good bit of high definition content this week, while coughing up various internal organs. ALL of it was downloaded.
Who needs a disc format when you’ve got a big fat broadband pipe? I came, I browsed, I clicked, I watched. XBox Live Marketplace offers HD content for download. AppleTV 2 now offers HD downloads. Hulu offers streaming HD.
What, then, has Sony won? I remember owning a Sony laserdisc player, way back when, and buying movies in that format – granted, some advantages over VHS, but when DVDs came along I wasted no time switching. Sony’s format victory in the 12″ disc space just meant a winner in a category that deserved to die.
I’ve got DVDs spilling out of every drawer in the house. 95% of them I haven’t watched more than twice. Given the choice between buying another DVD and setting aside a chunk of hard drive, I know which one I’d pick.
So…enjoy the spoils for now, Sony. I can’t say I expect it to last. I’ve learned from years of watching Microsoft (who backed HD-DVD, but REALLY backed a downloadable HD delivery mechanism):
There are certain politicians that just get my engines running, and not in a good way.
There have been times when I fed off that knee-jerk outrage, and other times when I just wanted to escape to more soothing topics.
The previous post, about Harry Reid, just pushed me over the edge. Time to find my “oooommmmm” side again.
I’m sweating up a storm, packing up my office for a move this weekend (Bigger cubicle! Massive decluttering! Labsourcing half my equipment! I’ll have room for a cot again!) My iPod is set to Baroque (random). I’msteeringclear of some of myfavoritesites for a few days and curling up with book or three and some seriously cheesy television. Maybe check in with some good friends.
It’s the first suit filed by the RIAA that made it to a jury trial, and the RIAA won it…after a fashion. They had sought up to $150,000 per song, but were awarded a total of $222,000 (about $9000 per song). Still, for the defendant: Ouch. “This is what can happen if you don’t settle,” said Richard Gabriel, an RIAA attorney quoted by Wired magazine in the article link.
Let that sink in. If the RIAA comes after you, they want your money, and they’re willing to squeeze it out of you – hopefully before you start to think about fighting back.
Stomping individuals with both feet over file sharing isn’t going to win this war. The economies of scale just aren’t there. How many individuals HAVE a quarter of a million dollars for the RIAA to go after? How many teenagers – the most prolific file-sharing demographic – have even $1,000? This approach is as likely to stop piracy as the highway patrol is to stop speeding.
The only way to change the culture of file sharing is via a mix of education – the piracy equivalent of marching Junior to the corner store to apologize for stealing the candy bar – and more innovation in content delivery. When you can buy a song for under a buck, that’s essentially a candy bar. LET THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A little humiliation goes a long way. If you throw Junior in county lockup over a packet of ill-gotten M&Ms, that’s a bit over the top. (If he ROBS the corner store, then we can talk about orange jumpsuits.)
Not everyone who has tried to sell music in the age of Bittorrent has succeeded, but some have. Apple has sold over a billion songs in just a few years, by making it ludicrously easy to buy. They continue to innovate, such as by partnering with Starbucks; if you hear a cool song while waiting for your latte, one virtual button on your iPhone buys it for you.
This is the difference between iTunes Music Store and the RIAA; the later cares about how much each song is worth to THEM, and tries to get that cost from individuals. Apple’s model focuses on what a song is worth to YOU. One treats you like a customer; the other, like a defendant. (Apple isn’t a corporate model in all ways, though, as their don’t-mess-with-OUR-iPhone brickapalooza this week shows.)
The RIAA should learn from SCO, which recently declared bankruptcy; you cannot sue your way to solvency. Their victory this week is Pyrrhic at best.
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.”
” ‘Making a copy’ of a song you bought is a nice way of saying, ‘steals just one copy.’ ”
–Jennifer Pariser, head of litigation for Sony BMG
Jennifer isn’t just a lone crank; she is testifying on behalf of Sony BMG in a million dollar lawsuit brought by the RIAA against a woman who posted songs (a lot of songs, apparently) on a file sharing service. While I might agree that the Napster Hausfrau did something wrong, I don’t see her crimes adding up to a million-plus. Illegal file sharing among individuals is a problem, and there are billions of dollars at stake in the solution(s)…but a poorly-considered reverse-lottery Scheißesturm crackdown on random individuals like this could cost vastly more in terms of corporate loyalty.
This is not the first time Sony has shot itself in the foot.
In his recent “Don’t Download this Song,” Weird Al Yankovic – who made the song and video available for free download – mockingly sang, “Cuz you start out stealing songs / then you’re robbing liquor stores / and selling crack / and running over schoolkids with your car…” The ethical slippery slope is not that steep. Ripping a CD you purchased to put on your iPod is not the same as chipping in with three friends to buy a CD you all rip to your Zunes, and that is different from sneaking into your roommate’s desk to dump their My Songs folder onto an external hard drive…you get the picture. If you’re running an offshore mirror of Pirate Bay loaded with goat-porn adware, then I’d probably file an amicus brief for Sony. If you have a few bootleg REO Speedwagon CDs ripped ten years ago at 64Kbps WMA, then I’d say you’ve already punished yourself more than the Commonwealth could.
If I buy a CD, I don’t feel the least bit guilty ripping it to my iTunes folder. I can’t say the same about using Google to download that Sesame Street Disco album I bought on 8-Track in 1978. My purchase of The Best of Hall and Oates on vinyl doesn’t entitle me to free copies of the same album on cassette, CD, video and hologram as new technologies emerge…though I did spend hours as a kid making mix tapes for girls (who ended up falling for the fellow making mix tapes with Journey: Escape) or dubbing on cassette for my evening walks. I also taped a lot off the radio. The quality of the dub often sucked, and I killed more than one Walkman when it ate my tapes, but my generic Walkman knockoff player was the iPod of its day – taking a subset of my content away from my main library. This is an idea as old as leaving the pipe organ at church and taking the accordion on on the road – sometimes you want quality, at other moments, convenience.
From the dawn of MP3 encoding, I was making backups of my CDs. The quality sucked, but I was impressed that it worked at all. As the years passed and my hard drives and iPods got bigger, I re-ripped the CDs again, and again, from the same source. The destination was the same in every case: my own two ears. When I played the MP3, I wasn’t playing the CD–and neither was anyone else. One-purchase-one-user strikes me, and I believe most people, as sensible.
Sony, though, would criminalize this behavior. And if they haven’t said so in court, other RIAA suit-weasels are on record stating that customers do not, and should not, “own” music, in any form. You buy a particular, limited license to access their content, and any variation from that license is criminal. Imagine Doubleday stating that you can only read their books in natural light, and reading at night by a lamp violates the service agreement.
a hardware solution – a hardcover book, a vinyl LP – has a natural usage limitation. You can’t share your book with all your friends at the same time, for example; you have to lend it to one buddy at a time. A software solution is much more flexible, which makes usage issues more complicated; more options are POSSIBLE than are ALLOWED, and what is ALLOWED can vary from provider to provider. Jonathan Coulton gives away his music, but won’t be offended if you send him cash. This week Radiohead invited us to “pay what it’s worth to you” for their newest album. Weird Al offers songs and videos for free, but also sells a CD/DVD with vastly higher quality versions of the same. Elton John wants to shut down the Internet for five years.
It’s no wonder consumers can get confused about where the line is. And with the vast move in 2007 away from DRM (digital rights managed, or copy-protected) music toward more open formats by Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody and others, it’s hard to see what Sony is thinking by going in the exact opposite direction. The more you treat customers like thieves, the more thieving they are likely to do. Robin Hood was a “hero” because the Sheriff of Nottingham was a tyrant; when a multibilliondollar entertainment giant tries to put a hausfrau a million in the hole for being a bit too generous with her music collection, it’s not just the scofflaws who start wishing for Little John to deliver a swift uppercut to The Man.
This is Sony, who has been bucking standards and releasing propietary – and ultimately doomed – formats for years in an attempt to control all aspects of their content. Remember Betamax? 12-inch diameter, quarter-inch thick laserdiscs that played movies 30 minutes per side? minidiscs that only they supported? UML format movies for their PSP? Memory Sticks in an already crowded field of flash memory? Blu-Ray? Even when their technology is superior, as it often is, the lack of openness has torpedoed their hopes for market domination time and time again. Their biggest successes, like the Walkman cassette player, used standard media (ordinary cassette tapes). Their computers are often gorgeous, but heaven help you if you try to open one up to add memory or swap out a disc drive. You, the unwashed masses, are not worthy to tinker with the perfection that is delivered to you from Mount Sonai.
And if you buy their music CDs and let it anywhere near your computer, you might get a little added bonus – a rootkit monitoring your behavior. The lengths to which Sony has tried to go to “protect” themselves has repeatedly infringed on the rights of people who shelled out hard-earned money for it. What was once a name synonymous with quality has taken some serious hits in recent years for stunts like this.
So if Sony wants me to call me a criminal for copying their music, my option as a consumer to not touch their music in any form becomes more attractive. If enough customers stop buying Sony music, then recording artists will be more likely to seek new contracts with companies other than Sony. If they want absolute control, they can have it…over an ever-decreasing domain.
That’s how the market works. Try Googling “whatever the market will bear” – it’s everywhere. But that philosophy is a two-edged sword. If you as the producer are not sensitive to changes in the market, you can find yourself not just caught up with, but bypassed so thoroughly you become irrelevant. IBM used to be the center of the PC universe; now their entire PC business is in the hands of Chinese company Lenovo. Railroad monopolists were quite proud of their lock on cargo and passenger transport…until the trucks and cars and roads and planes came along that didn’t share the constraints of trains. No cash cow lasts forever, and you either adapt or perish.
It’s why companies that once sold software at a grand a pop no longer exist, but others can give their stuff away and still make a profit (in installation, training, support, or advertising). Think of all the “free” television you can get, sponsored by stuff that takes up a quarter of the time you spend watching, on top of what you may be paying for in cable or satellite and/or TiVo fees. And if you miss an episode, you can go to iTunes and grab it for a price, or use your expensive broadband internet to find a bittorrent. Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch) dictum bears out: one way or another, we all pay.
And for the most part, we’re willing to. That Sony’s nickel-and-dime approach can lead them to thinking they’ve been wronged to the tune of millions by an individual who COULD simply have misconfigured her firewall is not surprising, but it is disappointing. I can only take solace in knowing that their mindset has cost them vastly more than that over the years, and if they don’t wise up, they will eventually run out of rope.
I could be wrong, but Andrew Meyer – the idiot leftist who got himself tased by leftist cops at a leftist college forum where a leftist Senator was speaking – sounds a LOT like idiot comic Dane Cook (link to an impressionist who doesn’t swear nearly as much as the original).
If so, his performance here beats Good Luck Chuck all to heck.
The fool from Florida has the same staccato, nervous-tic repetition and too-hip snottiness that earns Dane top dollar. Sad thing is, I got more laughs from Meyer.
Went to Fry’s over the weekend. They didn’t have the iPod Touch, but they did have the new Classic, Nano and Shuffle on display.
We bought nothing, but we were both deeply impressed with the new Nano. Honey liked the green one, which was available to play with on one of the docking speakers.
It’s about 1/3 shorter than the 2nd generation device, 1/4 wider, and close in depth. It’s light as a feather, and the brushed metal looks great. the Lock switch is now – finally! – on the bottom, along with the docking connector and headphone jack. Aside from the front edges being almost sharp enough to draw blood – a little honing work and it could replace a ninja star – I liked the feel of it in my hand.
Software: the split screen looks nice, giving a preview of the song or video you’re scrolling past…but navigating with it is a bit sluggish compared to previous generations. The display unit didn’t have any songs with cover art, so I couldn’t test that, but it didn’t look like something I’d use in any case.
The big enhancement to the new Nano is the enlarged screen and support for video (movies, tv shows, music videos). the display unit had some music videos, so we checked them out.
It quickly drew a crowd of viewers; the video on that little puppy is gorgeous. I almost bought one on the spot, despite my vow not to. It was that good. My PDA has a larger screen, but the Nano display was easier on the eyes.
I must say, the Nano may well continue to be my iPod of choice, whatever the new Touch looks like.
I have more media players than I need. But not more than I want.
I blame Steve Jobs. The seductive turtlenecked bastard.
On September 5 he refreshed the entire iPod line. My first two ipod Nano devices are gone (stolen and flushed) but my high-end 2nd Generation Nano has been a bloody workhorse for over a year. There’s nothing wrong with it…except it’s no longer the Alpha Pod. Now there are video-capable Nano Fatties and the Buddha Pod (“scuze me while iTouch the sky…”), which beckon in their slutty Siren ways at The Steve’s behest.
Need? Not yet. I’ve bought too many MP3 players over the years, most of which still work…but not well enough. Intel’s 32Mb flash player. the Audible Otis. A couple of Creative players with no screen. A few “MP3 CD” devices with navigation as smooth as Iggy Pop’s face. a “Nano Killer” from Sansa that does have some nice features but just annoying enough to gather more dust than attention; I refresh it once a week, whether I need to or not.
No, for the past couple of years, my go-to devices have been my Palm PDA (for video and ebooks) and the Nano (for audio). The third Nano was the charm.
The new Nano would be a decent one-for-one replacement of my current iPod, but for video? For music videos, perhaps, but for Stargate reruns and Top Chef? Um, no. So what of the iPod Touch? Definitely replace my current iPod, and a partial replacement for the PDA, though there would be tradeoffs; I’m addicted to some PalmOS apps, for which there are at present no Apple equivalents. But given time, it could inherit the PDA mantle.
Given time. So, why not wait?
I’ve resigned myself to holding onto my current devices until they die. There is no Grand Unification device yet. I am not tempted to “accidentally” flush my Nano…yet. When Steve talks, I earphone up, like Odysseus lashed himself to the mast, for my own safety.