Beach sandals now available with hollow sole, liquor for the storage and transportation of. A snip at $44-$46 from Amazon.com. Form an orderly queue. Hic. No shushing or poving. Er, pushing and shoving. Hic.
I am reminded of Myles na gCopaleen’s design for trousers with hollow pipes running down the seams which could be filled with Guinness by publicans just prior to closing time, thereby enabling customers to continue drinking on the bus journey home.
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Nice essay by Charlie Stross. The gist of it is:
publishers don’t manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra bells and whistles that sells for $350. We’ve had the tech for a $20 (or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they could sell the beast, they’d be churning them out by the bucketload — and it’s perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160×160 green screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The reason nobody makes such a beast is because it’s simply not profitable to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain’t gonna happen.
Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters of the “pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry” theory, until ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore them. And that’s regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and having the cultural artefact — is, well, it’s just bogus.
We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you’re paying $20 a pop. After a year you’ve got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and you’re out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will stay in (they’re set up for the club and they’ve already got a small bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the profits to pay for that first year’s loss-leader.
But 80% of readers don’t do book clubs. I’ve seen my book club sales, and they’re piss-poor (except in France, which is different).
Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter — at least for this generation — for the same reason that it’s near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more than US $24; consumers don’t like being milked.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the link.
From Owen Barder’s blog…
I have just learned from DFID’s Chief Economist, Tony Venables, that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.
I’m baffled by all this enthusiasm for ethanol (not to mention BMW’s absurd obsession with hydrogen-fuelled limousines). A good rule of thumb is that if George W. Bush is keen on something, then it’s baloney. And he’s very keen on ethanol.
Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…
It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.
It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:
In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.
Nick Carr has been pondering some contradictory data…
Some hard data is coming out this week on the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by companies. Yesterday, Forrester released some results from a December 2006 survey of 119 CIOs at mid-size and larger companies. It indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises. Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools – blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging – and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools. Although Forrester didn’t break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging.
Tomorrow, McKinsey will release the results of a broader survey of Web 2.0 adoption, and the results are quite different. In January 2007, McKinsey surveyed some 2,800 executives – not just CIOs – from around the world. It found strong interest in many Web 2.0 technologies but much less widespread adoption. McKinsey also looked at six tools. While it didn’t include tagging, it did include mashups; the other five were the same. It found that social networking was actually the most popular tool, with 19% of companies having invested in it, followed by podcasts (17%), blogs (16%), RSS (14%), wikis (13%), and mashups (4%). When you add in companies planning to invest in the tools, the percentages are as follows: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%).
More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
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Well, well… Looks like I was wrong to be sceptical about Dell’s attitude to Linux. At any rate, the BBC is reporting that the company has decided to ship desktop and laptop machines with Linux pre-installed.
Computer giant Dell will start to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems, the firm has said.
The second largest computer maker in the world said it had chosen to offer Linux in response to customer demand.
Earlier this year, 100,000 people took part in a Dell survey. More than 70% of respondents said they would use Linux.
Dell has not released details of which versions of Linux it will use or which computers it will run on, but promised an update in the coming weeks.
“Dell has heard you,” said a statement on the firm’s website. “Our first step in this effort is offering Linux preinstalled on select desktop and notebook systems.”
In mitigation, I plead that I was just going on what Dell said at the time — i.e. “There is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. We don’t want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.”
Well, perhaps not exactly. But see what Quentin’s up to.
From Technology Review…
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In another reminder of technology’s quantum leaps, Yahoo Inc.’s free e-mail service will provide unlimited storage space to its nearly 250 million users worldwide — a concept that seemed unfathomable just a few years ago.
With the move, Yahoo will trump its two largest rivals in free e-mail, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., which currently provide 2 gigabytes and 2.8 gigabytes of free storage, respectively.
Yahoo’s e-mail users currently get 1 gigabyte of storage. Yahoo plans to gradually lift all space constraints in May, but it will take several months before all of Yahoo’s e-mail users have infinite storage space.
Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, the fourth largest e-mail provider, began offering unlimited storage for free last summer…
Note the misuse of ‘quantum leap’. It’s almost as prevalent as misuse of ‘decimate’. Sigh.
It’s one of London’s iconic buildings, and a magnet for photographers (like my son, Brian, whose photograph this is), but there are rumours of a new attempt to replace it with a glass-walled monstrosity. Brian writes:
Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the new owners of the £400m prime 36+ acre riverside site, Treasury Holdings, had scrapped development plans approved by Wandsworth Council in November last year and speculated whether London might be about to lose the four iconic chimneys altogether to yet another bland, luxury, residential development if the Power Station is allowed to further deteriorate beyond the realms of renovation.
Wandsworth Council and previous owners, Parkview, refused to even consider an alternative report by a team of three companies of concrete experts brought together by the World Monuments Fund & Twentieth Century Society, who have revealed that the chimneys can be repaired for half the cost of demolition and rebuilding.
The independent report also revealed there is no sign of structural distress in the chimneys. When Parkview bought the site thirteen years ago, they promised to restore it, but instead sat on it and did nothing, merely hanging onto it as property speculators. They pushed through planning permission to demolish the chimneys, full of promises to restore the building, but instead immediately flogged it for a £240m profit, since the value of the site had increased hugely as a result of planning permission to demolish the chimneys. Profit not renovation was evidently their aim.’
There is a Number 10 e-petition that UK citizens can sign to put pressure on the developers to honour their agreement.
I’ve signed the petition. It reads:
‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the proposed demolition of the chimneys of Battersea Power Station and to legally oblige the current owners to renovate the site, rather than sit on it and speculate as the previous owners did.’