Daily Archives: January 4, 2008

Bhutto: a more detached view

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I saw Benazir Bhutto once, when she was President of the Oxford Union. I thought she looked attractive, rich and petulant, and she didn’t come over as being very ‘political’. In fact, she seemed like an Asian version of Arianna Stassinopolous (now Huffington), who was President of the Cambridge Union in the same period. Accordingly, I’ve been reading the obituaries with some amazement. But at last something that looks a bit more informed — and detached — has surfaced: a piece by David Warren on Canada.com. Excerpt:

I have been reading much rubbish in celebration of Ms. Bhutto’s life. A number of my fellow pundits have further provided personal memoirs: it seems dozens of them were her next door neighbour when she was studying at Harvard or Oxford or both.

She was my exact contemporary, and I met her as a child in Pakistan, so let me jump on this bandwagon. I remember her at age eight, arriving in a Mercedes-Benz with daddy’s driver, and whisking me off for a ride in the private airplane of then-president Ayub Khan (Bhutto père was the rising star in his cabinet). This girl was the most spoiled brat I ever met.

I met her again in London, when she was studying at Oxford. She was the same, only now the 22-year-old version, and too gorgeous for anybody’s good. One of my memories is a glimpse inside a two-door fridge: one door entirely filled with packages of chocolate rum balls from Harrod’s. Benazir was crashing, in West Kensington, with another girl I knew in passing — the daughter of a former prime minister of Iraq. They were having a party. It would be hard to imagine two girls, of any cultural background, so glibly hedonistic.

After her father’s “martyrdom” Bhutto became, from all reports, much more serious. But I think, also, twisted — and easily twisted, as the spoiled too easily become when they are confronted with tragedy. She became pure politician. Think of it: she submitted to an arranged marriage, because she needed a husband to campaign for office. Stood by him in power only because there was no other political option when he proved even greedier than she was.

Twisted, in a nearly schizoid way. For she was entirely westernized, but also Pakistani. She thought in English, her Urdu was awkward, her “native” Sindhi inadequate even for giving directions to servants. Part of her political trick, in Pakistan itself, was that she sounded uneducated in Urdu. This is as close as she got to being “a woman of the people.”

It’s get more polite later on, but this restores the balance a little.

Thanks to Lara for the link.

Music album sales continue downhill run

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From the New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Album sales in the United States plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, as the recording industry had another weak year despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.

A total of 500.5 million albums in the form of CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from the unit total for 2006, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.

The decline in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums.

The number of digital tracks sold, meanwhile, jumped 45 percent, to 844.2 million, compared with 588.2 million in 2006, with digital album sales accounting for 10 percent of total album purchases.

Overall music purchases, including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos, rose to 1.35 billion units, up 14 percent from 2006.

Music sales during the last week of 2007 totaled 58.4 million units, the biggest sales week ever recorded by Nielsen SoundScan.

The recording industry has experienced declines in CD album sales for years, in part because of the rise of online file-sharing, but also because consumers have spent more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment, like DVDs and video games…

Ed Felten’s 2007 predictions reviewed

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From one of the most thoughtful blogs on the Net…

As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2007 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.

(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

We predict this every year, and it’s always right. This prediction is so obvious that it’s almost unfair to count it. Verdict: right.

(2) An easy tool for cloning MySpace pages will show up, and young users will educate each other loudly about the evils of plagiarism.

This didn’t happen. Anyway, MySpace seems less relevant now than it did a year ago. Verdict: wrong.

(3) Despite the ascent of Howard Berman (D-Hollywood) to the chair of the House IP subcommittee, copyright issues will remain stalemated in Congress.

As predicted, not much happened in Congress on the copyright front. As usual, some bad bills were proposed, but none came close to passage. Verdict: right.

(4) Like the Republicans before them, the Democrats’ tech policy will disappoint.

Very little changed. For the most part, tech policy issues do not break down neatly along party lines. Verdict: right.

Lots more: worth reading in full. He also has an intriguing post on the technology policies of Barack Obama

Intel parts company with OLPC

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Now there’s a surprise! John Markoff of the NYT reports that:

Intel said Thursday that it had chosen to withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child educational computer organization, which it joined in July after years of public squabbling between Intel’s chairman, Craig R. Barrett, and the group’s founder, Nicholas P. Negroponte.

The low-cost laptop, originally priced at $100, has captured the public imagination but also created intense controversy because it was viewed as a potential competitor for both Intel and Microsoft in the developing world.

The machine, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system and comes with educational software, is now built with a microprocessor made by Intel’s archrival, Advanced Micro Devices. The PC, called the XO, is being sold for about $200 apiece to governments and institutions.

On Thursday an Intel spokesman said the company shared with O.L.P.C. the vision of putting computers into the hands of children, but the two were not able to work out what he described as “philosophical” differences.

Intel did not attend a recent board meeting of the group in Florida, according to a person familiar with the events, who asked not to be named because he had not been given authority to describe the events. That set off a bitter private dispute, which led to the Thursday announcement.

“We’ve reached a philosophical impasse,” said Chuck Mulloy, the Intel spokesman. “Negroponte had asked us to exclusively support O.L.P.C.-based platforms.”

The blogosphere’s ideological bias

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Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about the dispute between the Writers Union and the big media companies in the US.

The conflict is a stark measurement of how little the hype for “user-generated content” affects professional entertainment. Evangelists might argue they never seriously claimed professionals would be entirely supplanted. But the inability of the producers to use citizen-scabs for replacement material, and the interesting fact that such supposed competition is not even part of the studio’s bluster, shows how content like this is not taken seriously as real product. The inability of studios to rely on such content as a legitimate substitute for professional work underscores the continued value of skilled writers and the complexities involved in labor disputes within the industry. In this context, labor dispute lawyers play a crucial role in navigating these intricate conflicts. Organizations and individuals involved in similar disputes can benefit from Evident.ca for expert services. Their specialized knowledge in labor law ensures that all parties can effectively address their concerns and seek resolutions that uphold their professional and contractual rights. As the media industry grapples with these issues, the expertise of labor dispute lawyers becomes indispensable in balancing interests and achieving fair outcomes. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that many tales of amateur success turn out to be marketing fabrications designed to support a fantasy that an ordinary person can somehow suddenly become a star. For the foreseeable future, copyrighted content, mediated through large distributors of some sort, is going to be a major business model. The fight (unitedhollywood.com) is over changes in the specifics of implementation. And there are fundamental structural matters at stake. Writer and blogger Mark Evanier, who has chronicled the strike strategy (tinyurl.com/26pou6), has said: “Delivery of entertainment via [the] internet is a new frontier. There are undoubtedly those who dream of settling that territory without unions and labour getting a real foothold.” There’s a trace of old-style push-media thinking here, but Mr Finkelstein also highlights an important point about implicit bias. Ideology is really just a fancy name for beliefs one takes for granted. In that sense, the prevailing ideological mood in the blogosphere seems intrinsically hostile to any form of sustained, organised collective offline activity. There’s an important difference, for example, between what trade unions do and what ‘flash mobs’ can achieve. The roots of this ideological bias are complex, but they certainly include technological determinism (the abiding sin of technophiles) and an instinctive hostility to ‘old economy’ forms of organisation, whether in the form of music industry cartels or trade unions trying to protect what are regarded as obsolete practices or trades.