Monthly Archives: April 2006

iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each

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Apple’s latest wheeze: iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each. Nice satirical piece in The Onion.

CUPERTINO, CA—Apple Computer, producer of the successful iPod MP3 player, is now offering consumers limited rights to buy their own home movies from the media store iTunes for $1.99 each.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the future of home-video viewing is now,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at a media event Tuesday morning. “As soon as you record that precious footage of your daughter’s first steps, you’ll be able to buy it right back from iTunes and download it directly to your computer and video iPod.”

Jobs emphasized that the videos will be presented unedited and in their original form, save for a small Apple logo in the lower right-hand corner of the image to protect the company’s copyrighted materials from Internet piracy.

Added Jobs: “No more searching through your movies folder for that footage of your 50th wedding anniversary. Now all you need is a 768Kbps broadband connection and your credit card, and every timeless personal memory you’ve ever shot will be right at your fingertips.”

“Apple has always been about access,” said MacAddict editor Ian Smythe. “Thanks to this revolutionary new software, all your clips—from your son’s bris to your father’s dying message—are available to you, your loved ones, and the 20 million iTunes users, who will be able to view them on up to five different computers.”

Thanks to Pete for the link.

Guess who came to dinner.

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Well, well. Who was the first guy the Chinese president went to see when he touched down in the US today? George Bush? No way. Hu dropped in on Bill Gates at his lakeside mansion (aka San Simeon North) in Seattle. Here’s an excerpt from the Bloomberg report:

April 19 — Chinese President Hu Jintao pronounced himself “a friend” of Microsoft Corp. as he toured the largest software maker’s headquarters and dined on smoked guinea fowl at Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ lakeside home. “Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I’m a friend of Microsoft,” Hu told Gates yesterday during a demonstration of new software at the company’s Redmond, Washington headquarters. “Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day,” he added, drawing laughter from Chinese officials.

Wonder what’s the Chinese for “Fatal Error”.

Philips files for patent to stop people skipping ads

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More insanity. According to Ars Technica, the troubled electronics giant Philips has filed a patent application for a device which prevents a user from changing the channel during commercials.

It’s a given that the TV networks need to somehow generate revenue in order to produce content. With commercials becoming less lucrative, TV has borrowed a dirty page from the movie industry and begun engaging in product placement within the programs themselves.

As a result, in the past few years, we’ve seen sitcom plots involving competition for a role in an Herbal Essences TV ad, various characters discussing how much they enjoyed “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and a wife waxing philosophical about a Wal-Mart perfume as her husband lays dying a few feet away. Enter Philips, a company prepared to put its foot down on that sort of artistic compromise.

The device Philips envisions would scan any broadcast or recording for digital signals labeled as commercial content. Just as many new DVDs begin by displaying ads that the viewer cannot bypass, a channel running a commercial would be locked until that commercial was over. Similarly, the fast-forward or skip controls on your digital video recorder would be disabled while a commercial is playing…

Yahoo’s squalid collaboration with the Chinese regime

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From Reporters sans frontières – China…

Reporters Without Borders has obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles, showing that Yahoo ! helped Chinese police to identify him.

It is the third such case, following those of Shi Tao and Li Zhi, proving the implication of the American Internet company.

The verdict, made available and translated into English by the human rights group, the Dui Hua Foundation, can be downloaded below.

“Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo ! is implicated in the arrest of most of the people that we have been defending,” the press freedom organisation said.

So who says the Net doesn’t matter?

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Latest research report from the Pew Internet Survey.

The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005.

And for many of those users, the internet has become a crucial source of information – surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that fully 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.

To explore this phenomenon, we fielded the Major Moments Survey in March 2005 that repeated elements of an earlier January 2002 survey. Comparison of the two surveys revealed striking increases in the number of Americans who report that the internet played a crucial or important role in various aspects of their lives. Specifically, we found that over the three-year period, internet use grew by:

  • 54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness.
  • 40% among those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness.
  • 50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers.
  • 45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions.
  • 43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live.
  • 42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children.
  • 23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car.
  • 14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs.

    • Greedy little China

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    You could not make this stuff up. According to today’s New York Times, Dubya is planning to lecture the Chinese president on the need to curb his (i.e. China’s) thirst for oil! Yes, that’s right — the US is going to hector the Chinese for guzzling too much oil.

    WASHINGTON, April 18 — The competition for access to oil is emerging high on the agenda for President Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House this week. President Bush has called China’s growing demand for oil one reason for rising prices, and has warned Beijing against trying to “lock up” global supplies.

    With crude oil selling for more than $70 a barrel and American motorists paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, American officials say the subject cannot be avoided at Thursday’s meeting in the Oval Office, as it was sidestepped when Mr. Bush visited Beijing last fall.

    China’s appetite for oil also affects its stance on Iran, where a growing confrontation with the United States over nuclear programs has already unsettled oil markets. China has invested heavily in Iran, and as a permanent member of the Security Council, its position on the question of sanctions is crucial.

    Even as Mr. Hu arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, Chinese and American negotiators were debating a proposal for the two presidents to announce a joint study of both nations’ energy needs as a way to ward off conflict in coming decades, when China’s rapidly expanding need for imported energy to sustain its growth may collide with the needs of the United States, Europe and Japan.

    In 2004 China used some 6.5 million barrels of oil a day and overtook Japan as the world’s second largest user of petroleum products. The largest, the United States, consumes about 20 million barrels a day…

    I’m not known for my admiration of the repressive Chinese regime, but in this case I trust that Hu tells George where to stuff his demands.

    A different London

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    Serendipity. I stumbled on this lovely essay by Ian Jack while looking for something else. Sample:

    Perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life happened in June 1970, when I walked across Hampstead Heath from an interview with Harold Evans, which closed with his saying that I’d got a job on his newspaper. It was sunny, warm enough for the Sunday Times editor to wear nothing more than a dressing gown (he’d told me to be early, but he was in bed when I got there) as he conducted the conversation over his breakfast orange juice at a table in his back garden.

    His house was a Tudorbethan villa on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate. I remember he said, in the context of where I could afford to live, that a house like his would cost about £20,000, but that flats could be had for £5,000 or £6,000. My salary as a sub-editor would be £3,000. All these amounts seemed large.

    I walked across the Heath to the tube at Hampstead in a daze of excitement. The sun sparkled on the ponds, couples walked dogs or kissed each other on the grass, the dome of St Paul’s shivered far away in the haze, a kite bobbed up on the horizon….

    F’s the letter when it comes to reading web pages

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    From Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox) newsletter…

    F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

    In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

    Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.

    Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.

    Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

    Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like a rotated L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies…

    Posted in Web