Daily Archives: October 4, 2007

Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube

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Yep — according to TechCrunch…

The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.

The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…

Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.

Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.

The future of recorded music: an asymptotic decline to marginal cost

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Interesting, if slightly utopian, column by Michael Arrington…

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.

P2P networks just exacerbate the problem (or opportunity) further, giving people a way to speed up the process of creating free copies almost to the point of being ridiculous. Today, a billion or so songs are downloaded monthly via BitTorrent, mostly illegally.

Eventually, unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero.

When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.

Hmmm…. I wonder.

Dream Realisation, release 1.0

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When we embarked on the Ndiyo Project we always knew that the realisation of the vision depended on shrinking the thin client down to a chip. Well, our colleagues at DisplayLink have done it! This is the USB version of the Nivo, and it’s now in the back of monitors from two of the world’s leading manufacturers of displays — Samsung and LG. It’s an amazing achievement. And there’s more to come. Stay tuned.

Blackwaters run deep

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Maureen Dowd in the NYT has been mulling over the Blackwater affair…

Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

But W. outsourced his presidency to Cheney and Rummy, and Cheney and Rummy went to war on the cheap and outsourced large chunks of the Iraq occupation to Halliburton and Blackwater. The American taxpayer got gouged, and so did the American reputation.

The mercenaries inflame Iraqis even as Gen. David Petraeus tries to win their trust.

Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, summoned the 38-year-old crew-cut chairman of Blackwater, Erik Prince, to defend his private security company yesterday.

Once there was the military-industrial complex. Now we have the mercenary-evangelical complex.

Mr. Prince, a former intern to the first President Bush and a former Navy Seal, is from a well-to-do and well-connected Republican family from Michigan.

He and his father both have close ties to conservative Christian groups. His sister was a Pioneer for W., raising $100,000 in 2004, and Erik Prince has given more than $225,000 to Republicans…

Dowd says that Blackwater has been “the beneficiary of $1 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract with the State Department worth hundreds of millions.”