February 2005
Monday, 28 February 2005
Industry analysts attack plans to increase prices: “whoever came up with this idea understands the online music industry about as well as a cow understands algebra”
Jim Lejeal has opinions on the “Real Time Enterprise” : “Target had a choice – do what Wal-Mart did or do what K-Mart did – become an RTE or file their bankruptcy.” - having done some work on this, I’ll second his opinion. (Small businesses owners who don’t have Dell’s or Wal-Mart’s budget and are thinking about what they want to be when they grow up will need to approach the problem in a different way, and I suggest they start by reading The E-Myth Revisted: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (and thank you, Bill Trenchard, for pointing me to that one).)
Searching for the Why of Buy: “In that sense, some people may indeed be born to shop; but others may be molded into consumers. ‘We think there are branded brains,’ Asp said.”
Sunday, 27 February 2005
The man who named the Apple Macintosh, GUI pioneer Jef Raskin dies at 61: might read more like “the man who invented the modern personal computer”
Monday, 21 February 2005
Two years and five days ago, Phil Ringnalda hit the same problems I hit two days ago: XHTML? Huh. What is it good for?. You’d think my “stay on the trailing edge” attitude towards HTML would keep me safe from bleeding edge breakage, but it appears the breakage has been standardized.
Saturday, 19 February 2005
Huge ‘star-quake’ rocks Milky Way: “an object only 20km across, on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years”
Friday, 18 February 2005
While Switching to Mac Will Improve Security, It Isn’t for Everybody: “If you need an ultralight laptop for traveling, you’re out of luck with Apple. The Mac laptops are great, but the lightest one weighs 4.6 pounds, compared with three pounds or less on the Windows side.”
Wednesday, 16 February 2005
Thinking about the We Hate The 80s article, it occurs to me that the labels have another problem: the target market already has all the music in question. Want to sell me bad eighties music? Too late, I already bought it – often when it first came out. There’s no point selling me on the nostalgia of Duran Duran, I already have a CD with the one song of theirs I can stand. If I didn’t have it, I’d be buying it via the iTunes store. Ditto Wham, Tears for Fears, and any of a number of other acts I ought to collect on a shelf labeled “embarassing”. The average person who’d go for the nostalgia thing had both the desire and the means to acquire this stuff 18 years ago, why buy it again now?
Subscription Pricing: “To hedge our bets, we also offered a metered access plan. We didn’t want to lose out on people who planned to spend less that $19.95 per month. To our surprise, people typically converted themselves from metered access to subscription when their monthly bill was around eleven or twelve dollars. And their usage didn’t spike after conversion.”
The persistence of really bad ideas: “More than a hundred years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to get rid of his enemies in the German government. He noticed that they were all over 65. So he decreed that this was the official retirement age, and it still is.”
Saturday, 12 February 2005
We Hate the 80’s: “Yet despite the grass-roots enthusiasm and VH1 dogma - not to mention millions of dollars in marketing - the 80’s are not selling. People may be donning the once-again fashionable styles of the era (even leg warmers and Flashdance tops) and dancing to the bands of their youth, but they are not going to the store to buy the albums. For the industry that bet on the revival, it’s mourning in America.”
I changed the site feed over to Atom format. Please mail me if this causes breakage.
Irrational Physics: The most common thing in the universe is space
I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately: there is a lot more space than matter in the universe. What if space is more relevant of an actor than we thought? What if quantum uncertainty is inherent to space, not matter? Etc.
Friday, 11 February 2005
Time in the future seems to go further: “That suggests people gauge their financial situations better than their schedules. ‘Barring some change in employment or family status, supply and demand of money are relatively constant over time, and people are aware of that,’ the researchers report.”
Battlestar Galactica writer Ron Moore talks about the end of Star Trek (for now).
Monday, 7 February 2005
High Voltage Mars: “Hydrogen peroxide is a strong oxidant, and would destroy any organic materials existing on the planet’s surface.”
Sunday, 6 February 2005
Music industry sues 83-year-old dead woman: “Chianumba said she faxed a copy of her mother’s death certificate to record company officials several days before the lawsuit was filed, in response to a letter from the company regarding the upcoming legal filing.”
Saturday, 5 February 2005
Additional to the boring point: “When I see people talking about Vonage market share and how they are immovable and unstoppable, I see CompuServe.”
Thursday, 3 February 2005
Social Robots Without Leaders: “the number of informed individuals required to lead a small group was about the same as the number needed to lead a large one”
Why Napster will be a fully-integrated flop: “What is this marketing program integrated into? Is it possible to have a partially-integrated marketing program? Are we to be excited by logos now? When the bullshit generator goes this far into overdrive, you know there are problems.”
Wednesday, 2 February 2005
Why we need bubbles: “It was irrational exuberance which provided the capital for the huge overbuild of Internet infrastructure. The overbuild of infrastructure led to plummeting costs. The plummeting costs for access and for hosting as well as even more capital encouraged the development of a wealth of content. Users helped by investing in their own modems and more graphic computers as well as shopping, gingerly at first, on the Internet and creating a wealth of content they value greatly – email.”
Tuesday, 1 February 2005
New roads can cause congestion: “The same process of analysing the costs associated with moving across a network could help solve a long-standing problem in biology: why some natural networks are centralised like cities, whereas others are decentralised like the internet.” - only the Internet isn’t as decentralized as people make it out to be