Publishers in Lando's shoes?

I irregularly listen to Ben Thompson's podcast, Exponent, and the latest one was a very interesting discussion of publishing in the facebook age.

I think most of the discussion was very good, but there were at least three things, two major and one minor, that Ben overlooks.

The first major one is his contention that the big newpapers were completely knee-capped (my term, not his) by internet publishing.  There are a couple facets to this.  The first is that, right before (and for the beginning of) the emergence of the internet, many of these (major) papers took on huge amounts of debt buying other newspapers.  That debt has significantly contributed towards their finances looking bad.

Second, the small, local papers to which he briefly alluded, are, by and large, doing pretty well.  Not rolling in money, of course, but not hurting, either.  It's the big players who haven't been doing so well.

Third, related to all that M&A activity, the big newspapers largely aren't negotiating one-by-one with Facebook, as stated.  The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, would be negotiating on behalf of half a dozen or more other papers as well (this was my minor point).

The other big bone of contention I have is with his mention about people not saying bands are ripping off the music publishers because most of them fail.  Remember that bands aren't given that money; it's a loan, even if cloaked in different terms.  Bands that haven't paid it back yet ("unrecouped") are regularly screwed badly by the RIAA member companies.  Basically, with a big label, it's just about impossible to eke out a living; it's "win big or go home".  Because the amount of money being recouped tends to be pretty huge, and the lien, as it were, comes from the copyrights of the band's music being owned by the label.

Anyway, the discussion was very interesting, though I did not find myself persuaded that it would be in any publisher's best interest to be subsumed into facebook.  I'm definitely with Gruber on that.

But his talk of "destination sites" was an interesting one (though his saying that he hoped his site was that, then later saying that being able to charge money for access was proof positive of success in that endeavor felt a bit... off, I suppose).  I had never thought in those terms, but I suppose I have half a dozen or a dozen personal destination sites that I check something close to daily.  And no, none of them are newspapers.

What does accessibility mean?

I was listening to the latest Debug podcast, which was talking about Swift.  There were a number of interesting technical bits in there, but they made a detour into accessibility, and there were several eye-opening things for me when they talked about that.

The first was thinking of accessibility a little differently; thinking of it as just "inclusiveness".  And one of the guests, Ms Natalia Berdys, after bringing that up, also brought up an pretty amazing Vimeo video by Robin Christopherson, that showed a lot of what Apple's accessibility enabled.

I'd heard of adding accessibility before, of course, but never thought a whole lot about it.  It was just incredible to see how it all worked, and how fast he could manipulate his iPhone, despite being blind.

It's fairly lengthy, but even the first ten minutes is enough to give you quite a feel for how it works.

Patent-ability

I just listened to Planet Money's latest podcast, The Case Against Patents, and had several comments on it.  (And perhaps I should preface this by mentioning that I'm a regular reader of TechDirt, and if you search for patents there, you'll find a lot of problems with the system.  And probably links to the works of the economists interviewed for the show.)

My biggest problem with the podcast has to do with the language used.  In particular, referring to working from someone else's patent as "stealing".  It isn't stealing; nothing is being taken.  And if I invent something, and can't use that idea better than someone reading my patent, I deserve to lose the possible opportunity cost losses from that person using that idea.  That opportunity loss is the only thing "taken", and under no circumstances should that be referred to as stealing.

Further to that point, developing a patent is roughtly one percent of the cost of developing a product.  If I develop that patent first, I've got a leg up on doing that other 99%; I've started first.

And frankly, if the market opportunity itself isn't enough incentive, in its own right, to turn that idea into a product, then the idea isn't worth a patent anyway (or shouldn't be).

And a note on drugs: putting the government more directly in charge of choosing directions would certainly have some downsides, but here's one upside.  There would be development on antibiotics again; right now, there's almost nothing, because it doesn't pay well enough.  They'd rather develop drugs for chronic conditions, because it forces people to keep buying the drug.

Also, the governments review all the studies that drive approval forward already, so the government knows how it's done.

There's another benefit as well.  When studies show bad side effects, they are sometimes re-done to try to avoid those showing up (which is one of the reasons we get things like Fenphen and Ephedra going on the market, even though they'll sometimes kill people.  Not the only reason, but it does happen).  When those studies are re-done, the government usually doesn't see the bad studies until after the fact (if ever).  If the government is directly running the studies, they'll see all of them.

Debugging Vesper

I've listened to the last couple of Debug podcasts, and the latest involves Vesper (an iOS note-taking app, if you haven't heard of it).

There's a lot in there about sync, which is what they've been working on for the last couple of months.  One thing that didn't get mentioned, is why they decided to announce that they were working on sync.  Gruber mentioned a couple things (on The Talk Show, I think) about why, but a couple of podcasts (reinforced by this one) have led me to think that the real reason is that Bret wanted to blog about the process, and he couldn't do that if it hadn't been announced.

But the thing driving me to write this is that they came across one of my major irritations with a lot of online sites.

The whole point of asking for the password twice is as a sanity check (so you don't make the same typo twice, basically), because the user can't see the data being entered.  If the user can see the data, then asking for it twice is just asking for the user to make a mistake.  So if your site is asking for the email address twice (and I can't count how many times I've seen this done), don't do that!  You're not providing additional security, and you're probably annoying the user.

The incomparable Kiki

I sporadically listen to the podcast The Incomparable, and had to listen to the last one when it was about one of my favorite movies, Kiki's Delivery Service.

There's a bit of irony, there, though.  I watched the movie a bunch of times back in college; a friend had the Japanese laserdiscs (plural to refer to other non-Totoro Miyazaki movies.  He refused to watch Totoro for some reason) so we watched the repeatedly.

I got my own copy when Ghibli ga Ippai laserdisc set came out, a few years later (IIRC, it was a couple years before DVD came out; for sure before they became popular).

Many years later, I got the Disney DVD (I didn't buy it as soon as it came out, for whatever reason), and have since watched that a couple of times.  The reason I mentioned irony, earlier, was that I haven't watched it much at all in recent years; I've only watched it once, I think, with my kids.  I really need to remedy that.

But to get back to one of my points, the vast majority of times I've watched it was watching the untranslated laserdiscs.  The little bit else was watching it in japanese, with the subtitles turned on.

So the discussion about the dub entirely went over my head.

But there was a lot more to the discussion; I hadn't really thought about how much of the movie (pretty much all of it) was driven by Kiki's decisions, rather than things happening around her.  That might factor into why I like it so much, but I hadn't consciously noticed it.

The music certainly factored in; I'm a big fan of Jo Hisaishi.  About the same time as the laserdisc set above came out, they also came out with a CD set of the soundtracks (picture above; the laserdisc set had essentially the same packaging, except a bit square).  That made my second copy of several of the Miyazaki movie soundtracks (definitely including Laputa, and I think including Kiki's as well), but I was very happy to get the set.  And I listened to those discs a LOT, for quite a while after that.

A couple less substantial things to mention, about pronunciation.  They were debating between "jib-lee" or "gib-lee".  Both are sensible.  The Japanese write it (in katakana) as ジブリ(ji-bu-ri, and they usually swallow the 'u'), hence the "jib-lee" pronunciation.  But you can see, from the way that they write it in roman characters, that it is originally an Italian word, "ghibli" (a type of wind, IIRC; and that's why, in Japanese, it is written in katakana, rather than hiragana.  That's how they write borrowed words), which is pronounced (in Italian) as "geeb-lee" (and, to be super pedantic, that's not a 'j' sound at the beginning).  So either one is perfectly defensible.

John's pronunciation of Nausicaa, on the other hand, was a bit weird.  Here's a bit of a guide to the pronunciation.  As mentioned there, the katakana (again, borrowed word) is ナウシカ, which is 'nah-oo-shi-ka' (to be super pedantic again, the 'sh' sound doesn't exist in english; it's identical to the soft 'ch' in German.  An english 'sh' is a close approximation, though).  I had to look at that guide for the original Greek, though; I only know a few words of Greek.  And that only because of English cognates.  The point being that 'nah-si-kah' is a bit... odd.

Anyway, moving back to more substantive things; I'd never considered that Jiji might be an imaginary voice.  I'm definitely going to have to rewatch it with that thought in mind.  In fact, I need to rewatch it anyway, to show it to my daughter again (and show it to my son).

And I liked how John talked about how the various women in the movie were potential role models for Kiki to follow.  I've never been big on role models, and had never even considered them functioning that way (other than the artist (Ursula?)).

I also liked that he mentioned how much of a change of pace it was for an American audience to see a pregnancy in a movie that's just a pregnancy, rather than a big plot point.  I'd never really thought about how rarely we see pregnancy in movies over here.  Certainly part of that is the puritanism he mentioned; I wonder if part of it is the opposite end of the spectrum.  That is, playing up romance and sex (the latter especially happening recently).  Babies do a lot to get in the way of both of those (and generally follow both, coming after the movie ends).

Anyway, as someone who has seen the movie dozens of times, I learned new things about it (and have more things to consider, as well).  I'd recommend anyone even slightly interested in the movie, or Miyazaki generally, to take a listen.

Who is a gamer?

I was amused, listening to the latest ATP, as they talked about gaming.

Especially the talk about gamers, and having console machines.  They mentioned gamers having consoles.  And I've got several sitting around.

I've got a Turbo Duo (I had a Turbo Grafx as well, but got rid of that a long time ago), a Dreamcast (pissed that I recently went looking for Crazy Taxi for that, and couldn't find it), a Playstation or two (not sure if any of them still work, though), a Playstation II (still gets used occasionally for DDR-related exercise), and a Wii (which I enjoyed for a while, but haven't turned on in several years).

Mostly, I was amused because I do have several around (actually, I'd forgotten a couple of them), but none of mine are even recent, let alone current, and they rarely get turned on.

I did recently turn on the Duo to play around with Bomberman (wanted to see if I could get the Saxophone powerup again).  But other than occasional DDR (and even more occasional Karaoke Revolution games), I don't use any of them anymore.

And none of them really for gaming, per se.

I'm not sure what that says about me, really, but I thought it was interesting.  And I wonder whether that sort of thing is typical.

These days, almost all of the gaming is iOS-based, and mostly games that can be played in very small chunks.

I do have games on my Mac, but those are also very rarely played.  I did, recently, get a couple new games, but I haven't played them either.

I need to do a bit better, somehow, I think.

More on net neutrality

The latest stratechery (now pronounced "strah-tek-ery", apparently) podcast had a lot of good information in it.  There was discussion of what "common carrier" status means, which I should have probably explained better in my last mention of the issue.  And there was an excellent discussion of what "rent seeking" means, in economic terms.

(And a brief sidenote about the Andreeson quote.  Utilities probably did have 10x as much poop to handle every three years for the first decade or more of laying pipes to deal with that.  I wish my grandfather was still around to ask about that; he spent most of his career putting in sewer lines.)

There's also some interesting things I never considered, like how Netflix' behavior might be rent-seeking, and how metered usage would solve a number of problems.

The problem with metered usage is a simple matter of cognitive load.  Until the prices get much lower (in line with the cost of providing the data), it adds much great transaction costs.  Very few people would have signed up for broadband at all, if it had been metered; they had no idea how much they used.  And even now, it'd be a big shift.  But maybe that's where things need to go; I've been solidly against that, but they've got me thinking a bit more about it, and maybe it's inevitable.

But there were a couple places where I thought the discussion fell down.  One was that they failed to mention how, back in the 90's, the telecomms were given hundreds of billions (yes, that's with a B) of dollars in tax breaks to provide Fiber to the Home (FTTH).  How much of that exists?  Yes, basically zero.

Another was that there was no mention of how the governments provide rights of way to put in cables.  That's also a hundreds of billions of dollars subsidy.  Not that I mind it being provided; I do agree with them that, at this point, internet access is a basic right.  But it does bear on the discussion.

A final one (and this is the important one) is the idea of content delivery networks.  The basic idea is that the CDN provider (Akamai, for instance) puts their servers in the ISP's data center, and Netflix, for instance, provides data to the CDN, and the CDN delivers to the customers.

What that means is that, despite the fact that Netflix is the bulk of all internet traffic, most (read: probably 99% or more) of their traffic is only going from CDN to end user.  And that means, as far as the ISP is concerned, the data is staying within the ISP.  And bandwidth within the ISP is, effectively, infinite.  The cost to the ISP is the cost of electricity.  In aggregate, that's a lot, but it's mostly the cost of having the system operating; data traveling adds very little.

So I fundamentally disagree about Netflix being rent-seeking.  And about the reasonability of the ISP charging extra for Netflix.  Netflix pays the CDN, and the CDN pays the ISP, so they're actually looking to triple-charge, not double-charge.

The other major issue is that they missed, as I mentioned, Wheeler mentioning "common carrier" status, and mentioning reclassifying ISPs.  Not a huge deal, as I don't believe Wheeler when he talks about it, but it's worth mentioning that Wheeler did add it to the discussion.

Still, well worth a listen, despite it being quite long.

The Nike experience?

I'm listening to the second (I'm an episode behind, I guess) Stratechery podcast, which is working its way towards discussing Nike's impending dumping of the Fuelband as a hardware product.

But along the way, they're talking about the experience of using Nike products and the Nike brand.

This is pretty interesting to me, on a couple of levels.  The first is that I have no idea what they're talking about with the Nike Experience.  I've been playing sports all my life; I just stopped playing competitive ultimate last year.  But I have very little in the way of Nike products.  One pair of shorts that was the cheapest pair I could find in that store (I was on my way to an ultimate game when I realized I had no shorts, somehow); I like them, but it's a pair of shorts.

The other that I can think of is one of my pairs of cleats.  Similar situation, insofar as I was buying them on my way to a game, although it was not a situation where I said, "oh shit, I've got nothing"; I did plan on buying them that day.

I went to a store that was mostly carrying soccer stuff, and needed to find cleats that didn't have a spike on the ball of the foot (was nursing a stress fracture there at the time).  There weren't many options, but those Nike's fit the bill well.

So I haven't really seen "The Nike Experience", despite being an athlete all my life.

The other part of it is that I've never been one to care about branding.  Well, not with general products, thinking about it.  I suppose you could make an argument for books and music, because I certainly had favorite groups and authors.  But when it came to products, the closest I got was preferring Coke products at one time (I hate Coke and Pepsi equally, these days).

Well, until I got to using Apple products about fifteen years ago.  And they've been stable and useful enough that I love them for all non-server uses (linux has far, far better context switching performance, so anything server-related, I'll pick linux.  Probably ubuntu).  I guess I could go to full-time linux use, but I'm definitely more productive on a mac.

When the iPod came out, I was thrilled to get one (it was a gift), and found it was unbelievably better than any of the other competitors that were out, then.

I actually waited a long time to get an iPhone; I wasn't interested in being an AT&T customer (we knew they were part of NSA surveillance; the others we could at least hope were better).  But I didn't rush out and get one when Verizon got them immediately.  I debated and debated, and finally broke down when I heard Verizon was about to end unlimited data plans.  So I got it the last day they offered those plans.

When the iPad came out, I passed on the first generation.  I have a vague recollection of saying I wanted three or four specific features before getting one.  The second generation was close enough that I bought one the day they were announced (and waited a couple weeks for it to arrive).

Anyway, the point is that I'm very deeply into the Apple ecosystem, these days, but it's really the first time I've had significant feelings about a brand.

In any event, the discussion in there was very interesting.

Hypercritique

I've been listening to old episodes of Hypercritical lately, and one of those (I forgot to write down which one; maybe #6?) got me thinking about a few things.

The first was talking about old computers, and how magazines used to always just talk about specs for new computers.  I'd never thought about it before, but I think that's due to a few different factors.  One was that magazines were attempting to be unbiased (or, at least, to appear so).

But the big thing, I think, is that most of the magazines (certainly, all the ones I read) covered hardware, and once you get past specs, the rest of it is user experience, which is software-driven.

And given that there were few magazines that covered multiple platforms (PC World would occasionally have a mac- or amiga-focused article, but we're talking one or two a year), there wasn't really anything to differentiate, except the specs.  Microsoft's de facto monopoly played into this as well.

The other part was that there was some discussion of car magazines, and especially of Car & Driver (as that's Siracusa's favorite).  I've never read any of those magazines regularly, but my biggest problem with them has always been that the comparisons aren't terribly useful.  In particular, they do Top Ten lists every year.  That's a fine concept, but the execution problem is that they have so many different categories, that it feels like every car you've heard of has gotten onto the top ten list for its category.  And at that point, unless you're completely restricting yourself to vehicles in one category (which I've never done), it's of very limited use.  And even if you are restricting yourself, if all the competitors you've heard of are on the list, it's still pretty close to useless.

What's desired is something to narrow focus for the reader, and that doesn't seem like it does the job.

Anyway, listening to the old Hypercritical's has been very interesting, and I'll probably keep doing it.

Ab Phablet

I listened to the latest Vector podcast, and I think they missed one big thing (the biggest, actually) driving Asian demand for phablets.

Our family went to Hong Kong for vacation a year and change ago, to visit family over there.  And the biggest thing that struck me was how many people were watching TV shows on their phones on the MTR (Hong Kong's metro; they were going to and from work, presumably).  Seriously, it was a large majority of the young people.

And that's a big application that will look best in 1080p (I'd hate to think how big the tablet would need to get for 4K to make any sense, even ignoring the streaming bandwidth demands of that).  If you're going to spend half an hour or an hour every day watching TV on your phone, you'll damned-sure want to do it with maximum resolution.  So I can certainly see why people would want a bigger phone.

(And while I'm talking about this, let's also point out what this says about our crummy public transportation, that we can't even offer free WiFi on trains and buses.  And what it says about our telecomm infrastructure, even more than what it says about our transportation infrastructure.)

The downside, of course, is that the phone looks ridiculous when you're using it as a phone.  I remember one young lady using one of those phones with a case on it.  It looked like she was holding her purse up to her ear to talk.  Looking cool, she was not.

All that said, if Apple were to make one, would I want it?  I'm leaning towards no, but I'd definitely have to hold it and play with it a bit to be sure.