So many billions lately. In the Wall Street Journal from this weekend you can read page 16 an interesting story about Steve Jobs. No, not about the iPod or how brilliant he is.
In March his 10 Million Apple shares vest. That would be 800 Million by today’s price.
What’s there not to like?
Well, according to the WSJ, Steve sold shares in 2003. Lot’s of them. When the stock price was on it’s lowest point in five years. He lost 2.5 Billion by doing that.
What is it with four letter acronyms?
RIAA
MPAA
AACS
The last one I had never heard of. The “Advanced Access Content System” is a brainchild of everybody who is involved in either one of the upcoming HD disk systems.
DVD came with DSS copy protection. Since 1999 it has been hacked. DVD was a success for everybody involved. Despite the fact that it’s copy protection wasn’t working.
The job of the AACS is to make sure that this will not happen again. The digital connector for both Blue-Ray and HD-DVD are HDMI which is more or less DVI with added copy protrection via HDCP. Yes: 4 letter acronyms spell TRBL.
Since there are no actual devices yet to hack the xxxx institutions still live in the the phantasy world that their content will be save and their maginot-like system will work this time. For the first time.
But then there is the ‘analog hole’. They feel they need to close that one real fast.
According to this press article the solution will be that all players will down sample their analog output to 960×540. That’s a quarter of the original 1920×1080 resolution. Many existing HD displays don’t have digitally-kosher-drm-compliant HDMI inputs yet. That’s what you get for being an early adopter: your image will be downsized and then upconverted in the display again. Yes this probably much like a normal DVD at that point. But since you are an early adopter you gonna buy a HD DVD AND Blu-Ray player anyway. Right? Hey, come back here. Early adopter: your friends in the industry need you now more than ever …
The real tragedy is, that this crippling will not cure the issue. There will be hacks for HDCP. And pirated content never cares about quality in the first place. People will continue to ‘get’ a pirated movie. Maybe those four letter institutions should have a look at their enemies first before they punish the people that pay their bills (again). Pirated content exists because it is easy to access and/or cheaper. NOT because it features more pixels or samples. Most of the time it does not.
So our friends at the AACS just made the whole thing more complex, added a little bit to the price of the every player and made probably lots of people with non HDCP screens pretty unhappy. For zero gains. Brilliant!
Ars Technica comments on the same matter.
Ferrofluid Sculptures by Sachiko Kodama
Beat’s a lava lamp
The BBC has an widely discussed article about google out. It does not contain any real news, and it’s tone is missing the point.
But they write that Google’s ad revenue was one point five billion US$ in the quarter ending in September. According to Wikipedia has 5,000 employees. Let’s stick with that number here even though they might have hired a couple hundred more people in the meantime. Probably smart ones.
Those numbers come down to the simple fact that google makes 100,000 US$ in earnings per month and employee. That feels profitable to me.
No wonder the telcos become greedy.
Their cause is lost though.
The internet is not an aqueduct.
It’s the content that matters.
TCP/IP is so commodizied that it will always be cheap.
Worst case somebody comes up with a hack to mesh wifis together. [kidding]
Afer six years I updated the method software site. It is interesting how times have changed. Back in the day I put allot of efforts into navigation and menus. There was allot of content.
It all is gone. The world is full with plugins. Now I believe that you can sell software easier if you cut to the chase. All that thoughtfull navigation and documenation seemed not to help it seems. I still have to answer emails about details when people want the software.
So in case you happen to have an image integration system from the Autodesk Advanced Media Devision aka Discreet aka Discreet Logic flying around in your backyard: Now you can purchase software much quicker.
Sponsored is the whole update by the nice person that leaves his Wifi open so that T-Mobile can shove it.
Or maybe it’s my local Starbucks itself is providing this: They certainly would make their 30 US$ a month for the DSL
back on extra lattes that they can sell since Wifi is free and not stupid in the store.
8 minute piece. skip one or two in the beginning instead of clicking away.
You will not regret it.
You an apply the Broken Windows Theory at spam blogs as well. There was always ample opportunity for spammers in blogs. Now they are in, and they make revenue. So they enhance their spam blogs to stay in the game. Here two splogs out of a current campaign:
They certainly get better.
Installing fedora core4 on a software raid1 with two disks.
Running yum update.
grub will get stuck in ‘stage2’
rinse – repeat.