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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Sunday, May 15, 2005
Another 'Broadcasting is Dead' Story
This article, Piracy is Good, over at Australian site Mindjack, is a good description of the effect technology is having on broadcast television. Author Mark Pesce discusses, in some detail, the use of p2p filesharing technology BitTorrent and, more importantly, proposes some interesting business models for how producers and advertisers can collaborate to create a viable business.
Mark uses a couple of good case studies, including recent download scenarios for Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica, to make the case that downloading does not necessarily equate to lower viewership. He also offers good analysis of the economic situation broadcasters face after 50 years of training viewers that TV is free, trying to suddenly convince them they should be paying for everything isnt going to work.
This, of course, is not news to anyone who regularly reads weblogs, RSS feeds, or uploads pictures to Flickr. But Pesces is one of the first articles Ive seen to dig into the figures around p2p distribution, broadcast viewership, and the relative impact for popular TV episodes.
Im not ready to concede broadcast is dead even the latest bittorrent clients are too geeky for mass use but Pesces case for advertisers is compelling. And if one thing is certain, its that advertisers follow the market. A commericalized, ad-supported p2p distribution network with viewer tracking cant be far away.
Terry Frazier at 1:14 AM
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Saturday, May 14, 2005
New b.cognosco Wiki
I know nothing about how this is going to work, but I just installed a new wiki over at wiki.terryfrazier.com. I used mediawiki, the same wiki that runs Wikipedia. Seemed like a good choice.But this is still really, really geeky. I mean, try searching Google for "wikimedia admin" and you get pages telling you to run sql queries to set user rights and such. My manhood is pretty much assured, I don't need shit like that. Just give me some text file to edit or something I don't have to think about too hard. It's not like sql queries are human-readable. But I think I can probably do it through the cPanel interface that my host provides.
It's like everything else - those things that are self-evident to geeks and don't seem to need explanation aren't, and they do. But I did this for the fun of it and to learn something about it. So I'll learn as I go and see what happens. Drop over there make a page or two, put in a comment, or something...
Terry Frazier at 5:41 PM
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Frank Zappa Was THE Man
As Zappa would have said — “Poot”
But that Would Have Killed the Music Industry, Right?
“We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1…
All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.
The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.”
-- Frank Zappa invents Rhapsody, Napster in 1983 [Good Morning Silicon Valley, via Shawn] via Jenny Levine
Terry Frazier at 1:24 PM
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Thursday, May 5, 2005
Update on Skype Performance Issues
I got some help from Skype tech support on the CPU usage issue. In addition the list of conflicting programs listed on the Skype site, I was instructed to turn off the built-in speech recognition function in Windoze:Also, be sure to turn off Windows XP speech recognition feature. The speech recognition engine kicks in when you begin a call and can cause your CPU to run at 100%. Turn off the speech recognition by opening the Control Panel and selecting Regional and Language Options. On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details. Under Installed services, click Voice Recognition under the language you are using, and then click Remove.
I didn't even know this was on, and removing it did make a significant difference in performance. Skype still hogs CPU at logon, and whenever I initiate new activites, but it doesn't seem to hang during calls, or when I send an IM during a call. I tested it for about 15 minutes this afternoon and results were acceptable.
Terry Frazier at 5:54 PM
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