Interesting note here about how the MPAA is blaming piracy for 9% less revenues last year. Why is it always piracy? maybe Lucas is right; maybe the era of the blockbuster is over. If so, blaming the customers for demonstrating a market need for something else delivered differently won’t solve the motion picture industry’s malaise.
Continue readingLucas Speaks
It’s an odd experience to have Steven Spielberg [er, I meant George Lucas] validate a speculation I made only a few weeks ago:
"Those movies can’t make their money back anymore," he explained. "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theatres will be indie movies. I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15m."
Lucas: "Blockbuster days are numbered" by Miriam Zendle, Digital Spy, Monday, March 6 2006, 16:43 UTC
A few weeks ago I compared Hollywood comedies to Restoration spectacular plays and wrote:
Continue readingHollywood will either adapt eventually to some form of production that doesn’t involve ever-higher costs for ever-larger blockbusters, or people will stop buying them and Hollywood will have to adapt.
Restoration Blockbusters, Perilocity, February 04, 2006
The Chinese Net Routes Around Political Stonewalling
According to this BBC story,
the Chinse government got tired of waiting for ICANN to approve top level domains in non-Roman characters
and rolled their own for use in China, using a combination of client-side software, domain name translation by ISPs, and other hacks to make it work.
With 110 million people online, China is already the second largest net-using nation on Earth.And most of the other 900 million people in China don’t use English, so Chinese language domain names make a lot of sense in China, and China has proceeded to implement them. This is not news to people who follow domain name implementations, and the new Chinese domains were mentioned in the Wall Street Journal in January 2006.Big push for Chinese net domains, By Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent, BBC News website
So the legendary recalcitrance of ICANN to move ahead with top level domains has led to the world’s largest country going ahead anyway, in order to promote their domestic economy. Continue reading
Online Education: Risk or Opportunity?
Online education has been booming, and now probably will boom more, since the U.S. Congress is proposing to lift its requirement for 50 percent of courses to be held in physical space to qualify for federal student aid. Extensive lobbying by the for-profit online educational lobby helped produce this change, and high level connections didn’t hurt:
Sally L. Stroup, the assistant secretary of education who is the top regulator overseeing higher education, is a former lobbyist for the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, with some 300,000 students.
Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress By SAM DILLON, New York Times, Published: March 1, 2006
The risk comes here:
Yet commercial higher education continues to have a checkered record, particularly for aggressive recruitment and marketing. The Department of Education’s inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., testified in May that 74 percent of his fraud cases involved for-profit schools.
The article didn’t say what percentage of online degrees involved fraud; one would guess it’s a small percent.
A related risk that I’ve heard some executives complain about is that online education doesn’t provide the socialization for which college is famous. But of course we’ve heard that about everything online from electronic mail to IM to World of Warcraft, and we’ve seen that online communications, while indeed lacking in the face to face aspects, provide certain socialization advantages, such as time-shifting, global reach, and the ability to communicate with more people of more different types.
So I’d say the jury is still out as to whether online education is a risk or an opportunity. Like many things, it is probably both.
-jsq
PS: Seen in a posting by Dave Hughes on dewayne-net.
The Internet for Free Speech in China
Sometimes the Internet can still be a force for free speech:
Li Datong, shown outside the China Youth Daily, challenged a plan to dock reporters’ pay if government officials took issue with their stories. The speed and power of the Internet helped launch a campaign that ultimately compelled a government retreat from the plan.
The Click That Broke a Government By Philip P. Pan Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page A01
Apparently sometimes even the People’s Republic of China has to bow to public opinion, and the Internet can be used to mobilize that opinion.
-jsq
What Not To Send on Valentine’s Day
A friend of mine forwarded me a tearjerker of a chain letter about a little girl who goes to school and talks about her daddy who’s in heaven because he died at 9/11. I was thinking it’s a nice thought, so I won’t complain, even if it is a chain letter, until I looked at the end:
If you don’t send it to anyone, it means you’re
in a hurry and that you’ve forgotten your friends.
That’s got to win a prize as the most emotionally extortionate chain letter ever. Many real people died at 9/11; whoever dishonored their memory by writing this tidbit of melodrama should be ashamed.
Continue readingElevator Convergence
As I was leaving the Folk Alliance at the downtown Austin Hilton yesterday midnight (went to see a friend of mine perform),
a couple got on the elevator and punched the wrong floor.
“And it doesn’t have an undo button!” she said, punching the correct floor.
“You’re right,” I said.
“That interface hasn’t been redesigned in a hundred years!” she said.
“Telephones, too!” he said, as they got off at their floor.
How do we live like this?
Soon, younger people will demand these interfaces change. And that they all be on the net. Interesting new security problems and risk management there, when anyone can query the most recent elevator stats from their cell phone to see which bank has the fewest riders and go there.
-jsq
Back to the Future In Egypt
Well, it turns out the first newspaper to republish the Danish cartoons was in…
Egypt
on
17 October 2005, four months ago.
Yet nobody is burning Egyptian flags nor threatening the editors of that paper.
It looks like somebody decided months after the initial publication to promote this whole cartoon row for purposes not terribly holy.
The things you find out on the Internet that aren’t being reported in the mainstream media.
-jsq
The other 20% have fouled the nest
Interesting article here about difficulties of switching end users from Windows to Linux:
Six months later," 80% of users have and had no problem with OpenOffice," Holt said.
Unfortunately, the other 20% have fouled the nest. One had some minor issues with a table inserted into a document and others reported number of everyday formatting issues. This vocal minority has rebelled against OpenOffice.
The OpenOffice migration is floundering, as, once again, some employees have returned to using MS Word.
Microsoft’s mindshare with some employees has been harder to overcome than the problems with the table and formatting. Holt now knows that the success of an OpenOffice migration can depend on early identification and deprogramming of employees who are fiercely loyal to MS Office. "Just one person like this may upset the whole project," he said.
Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption, By Jan Stafford, 09 Feb 2006, SearchOpenSource.com
The article has a number of specific tidbits about problems encountered, and some speculations about how many of these problems are orchestrated by Microsoft, either directly through impeding OEMs from supplying anything else, or indirectly by convincing users that only Microsoft is good enough. That latter reminds me of the old days, when nobody ever went wrong by buying IBM.
And it reminds me of something else I just read.
Continue readingiPod v. Broadcast Flag, or Innovation v. Government Mandates
While the Senate Commerce Committee was considering the broadcast flag proposed by the Motion Picture Association
of America, and the audio flag proposed by the Recording Industry of America, Sen. John Sununu, R. NH remarked:
“The suggestion is that if we don’t do this, it will stifle creativity. Well…we have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development…new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation…why would we think that this one special time, we’re going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?”The ARPANET was started by government funding innovation; GOSIP (requirement for computers sold to the U.S. government to have the ISO/OSI protocols) was government mandating technology. The history of technology has numerous other examples. What sometimes frightens me is that so few of the legislators at the national or local levels, in the U.S. or other countries, seem to know this history or the simple lesson from it that Sen. Sununu so pithily describes.History and Senator Stevens’ iPod, Danny O’Brien, January 25, 2006, EFF Deeplinks
But it took an older Senator to save the day. Continue reading