Salocin

Unfortuantely, I am no longer a card-carrying member of the Linux brigade. For compatibility reasons, I am currently constrained to XP running on a Thinkpad. But nevertheless, I feel a strong empathy for people who write software and don't sell it with a 3-page license that appropriates all your rights, which is why I laugh myself silly when I read things like

This ridiculous [Linux and Free Software] movement is nothing but a vain socialist attempt to marginalize the software industry. Moreover, it has been rather unpleasant to watch you and others over the past three years develop the single largest false advertising campaign in the history of commerce
...
With all due respect, your fantasy world of so-called "free" software is about to end, God willing.

All that from a letter to C|Net News in response to an article by Bruce Perens.

No doubt the Linux programmers are committing suicide at the walls of SCO and Microsoft. Excuse me while I laugh myself to death.

Blogshares is a pretty neat idea that creates a phantom market for the trading of "shares" in Weblogs. I recently claimed Salocin.com and decided to try to drive the share price up slightly.

But I have a few criticisms...

First of all, I registered over 2 hours ago and I have yet to receive the confirmation email to activate my account. It doesn't take hours to send an email, only seconds, so I wonder as to why this is taking so long - you have to strike while the iron is hot, and many people may find their interest fading as they wait for some activation code to allow them to start playing.

Second, a whole bunch of the links that exist on this page are missing from my record on Blogshares. I don't really know why this is. Also, a bunch of the links that I have coming into the blog are either not there, or split over 2 URLs, one with the / on the end, and one without. You'd think software would be able to determine this.

Other than that, I quite like the way the system works - it would be nice to have a "next update in xxx hours" feature, to avoid checking back when there have been no changes, and an RSS feed you can include on your own page to report the price, volume, ownership and other interesting features of a blog's stock.. I would probably put that on the page somewhere, and it would help Blogshares get additional exposure.

Someone recently bought two other players out for real cash. They paid $100 to each of the players in return for their approximate $100m holdings in Blogshares. I supposed if you've got the money to burn you might as well burn it, but the person in question argues that a potential real economy may arise from the phantom economy that is Blogshares.

I disagree. In it's present form, blogshares may find a way to make some modest income from some of the various applications it may develop. It already has premium members. But I doubt very much many people will be willing to play for real money, other than in controlled rounds of simulated tournaments, as happens in the fantasy football and the like. The reasons for this are...

• Unless the market becomes extremely finely balanced, with all of the forces of a free market working on it, those that have money already will always be advantages, which means a game where real cash was up for grabs would need to happen in rounds, where everyone started from zero, paid up front, and there was a "finish date", just as in fantasy sports leagues.
  
• Given the ability of individuals to control the links on their pages, and the lack of oversight, and the role that interlinkages play in the valuation of a stock, the system is remarkably open to manipulation.
  
• On the flip side, the system remains opaque. One of the key determinants of a free market is good (if not perfect) information, but the equation by which stocks are valued is opaque, and as I pointed out above with respect to my website, unreliable.
  

So unless all of that gets worked out, I don't really see anyone seriously considering pushing money into the system, especially when they don't have a very good perspective on the rules that will decide if they win or lose.

Despite this, as a fun tool to track your weblog with, it's definitely got value, and it should be able to make enough from its concept to costs and pay the coder a modest amount.

This was just too good to pass up. Psy Ops have begun using Rock Music as a torture tool, the BBC Reports. In case you hadn't guessed, they're using Metallica.

Sergeant Mark Hadsell, of Psy Ops, told Newsweek magazine: "These people haven't heard heavy metal.
 
"They can't take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them."
 
"In training, they forced me to listen to the Barney "I Love You" song for 45 minutes. I never want to go through that again," one US operative told the magazine.

Bet they never thought of that when they drafted that pesky convention.

A new type of self-destructing DVD is being created by Flexplay. It is reportedly being prepared for use in a number of Disney releases including The Recruit, The Hot Chick and Signs. The DVDs are red, but become opaque within 48 hours when exposed to sunlight, thus becoming unusable. According to Reuters...

The technology cannot be hacked by programmers who would want to view the disc longer because the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology.

Of course 48 hours is plenty of time to copy a DVD onto another medium like, say, a hard disk. But this is not the paradigm that's getting kicked about. This technology has some very interesting potential consequences in the movie rental market!

The DVD/VHS rental market is currently all about enforcement. You have to subscribe, provide details about your home address and proof of identity, then you have to "open an account" with a local rental service. All this is designed to ensure that the movie comes back to the store, because at over $60 per movie, each one has to be rented several times to ensure that they not only pay for themselves, but also for the costs of holding a back catalogue.

Enter the disposable DVD - since it's not the medium but the content itself that people try to protect, this new medium changes the relationships in the supply chain in two ways. First of all, it removes elements of the supply chain, releasing a bunch of value there. If the supply chain looks something like this...

... then for renters of these disposable DVDs, you can cut out the Membership, Return and Disposal segments of the chain. But there's much more to it than that.

The second change this provokes is in the dynamic between the rental service and the movie provider. This is much more profound.

The reason content is released in the staggered way we know today is to do with price skimming. For each consumer who is going to want to watch a specific movie, they have several choices.

• They can go see it at the movies, on the big screen in Dolby surround sound.
• They can see it on video/DVD by renting it
• They can see it when it comes out on cable
• They can buy the DVD/Video when it comes out or borrow it from a friend.

These cost progressively less (and generate less revenues) as you go down the chain, and so film distributors want to make sure that each consumer sees the movie in the most expensive way that they are willing to. Releases are therefore staggered to make sure filmgoers are incentivised by their impatience to not "go cheap", and see the movie at the most expensive price point they are willing to endure.

This new system means that DVDs can be released at the per-rental price minus whatever margin the distributors want to give to the rental services, and there is no additional risk of the content going on wide release. It effectively shifts power upwards towards the studios and away from the retailers like Blockbuster, because the upstream providers can now acquire a per-view margin rather than charge a single price for a DVD that can be rented several times. By imposing the right conditions on the downstream shops, distributors can acquire per-view revenues but leave the risk with rental outfits: They would do this by forcing rental shops to buy "per-view" discs in bulk quantities and then not accepting returns of unused DVDs. I doubt they would go this far, but the fact that they could is indicative of where the power will lie.

Of course this doesn't stop those that know how and have the inclination from copying the DVDs during the 48 hour period in which they are copyable, but that threat exists already anyway, so it has little influence over the changes this new technology brings about.

Due to the reduced enforcement costs - if this new technology is widely adopted - some savings will be made. Who will benefit from these savings? As illustrated above, it seems likely that any benefits will accrue to the studios and distributors, since they have the power to acquire them and they probably perceive a need to build up funds to fight piracy. At the very least, however, consumers will no longer have to give away personal details to rent a DVD, or have to bring them back to the shop the next day.

Of course this is really bad news for the rental shops, because with a product like this, any shop at all can rent out DVDs - at a low price point consistent with those in grocery shops (that already sell full-release videos and DVDs), and without the need for overheads such as membership systems, "48-hour DVDs" of the latest and greatest blockbusters can be sold over the counter at your supermarket or corner shop. Widely adopted, this new product is a serious threat to movie rental providers that already make tight margins and depend on heavy rentals of big hits to make up for the costs of holding a heavy back catalogue.

Another issue this raises is the cost of all that plastic. It may be cheap to manufacture, but it certainly isn't cheap to dispose of. Can they be recycled? If not, I think the cost of disposing of them should be incorporated into the price of distributing them, lest we end up with hundreds of black discs littering the streets.

What do researchers at top institutions study? Where do your tax contributions go? Well, that bastion of modern intellectual pursuit, Leicester University, has a team working on... wait for it...

One in three people in Britain are suffering from Celebrity Worship Syndrome after becoming obsessed with their idols, according to new research.

 

Extreme sufferers of the newly identified condition admit they would lie, steal or worse if the object of their admiration asked them.

As reported by ITV News and copied (filed) by Ananova. Surely this is a hoax, I hear you say. Nobody would pay someone to write a paper on this! You're right, it's not one paper, it's eight papers.

But this must be an isolated case, the exception that proves the rule, the odd example that has nothing to do with reality! Not so. Not to be outdone, the University of London's very own Sue Clayton has provided us with the formula for the perfect movie...

An academic claims to have discovered the formula for a perfect film and says the closest match for the Platonic form is Toy Story 2.

I always knew Toy Story was better than Casablanca, Cinema Paradisio, Carne Tremula and Jaws, and now I have the equation that proves it.

So the performance of a film can be predicted by comparing it's ingredients with this "ideal" list that Ms. Clayton undoubtedly obtained through some objective scoring method and regression analysis. The target, for those of you thinking of preparing a movie script, is as follows...

Action: 30%

Comedy: 17%

Good v Evil: 13%

Love/sex/romance: 12%

Special effects: 10%

Plot: 10%

Music: 8%

So let's consider this logically for a second. This formula reinforces the popular wisdom that a film that's all action must (by simple subtraction) have no plot. However, it also implies that a film that is 100% plot can have no music, and that for every 1% of music added, the plot must deteriorate (or somehow absent itself) by 1%.

Shows that are 100% about comedy must be 0% about sex, which can only be seen as a bit of a blow to the British sense of humour. Shows that are 100% about Good vs Evil can have no special effects, so there go Star Wars, Face/Off, MI2, etc.

Is anyone else unconvinced? And is this lecturer/film director getting paid for this research?

Thought this was funny - saw it at the bottom of a rarely updated webpage which you can find here

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.

Although it's admittedly not as good as my all-time favourite self-referential comment...

All generalisations are bad.

Correction: The webpage isn't that rarely updated, but the articles on the front page are in a funny order.

During the sailing trip back during Spring break, a particularly hyperactive friend of mine introduced me to a new band. They're Australian, but don't let that colour your judgement, they're really very good! Check them out at Amazon, the tracks I like most are The Freshmen [win | real] and Never Let You Down [win | real], which is actually from a different album, Underground.

Last exam of the year was today, 1:30 to 3:30, Operations and Information Management: Supply Chain Management. It's all over for year one of the MBA. Now we get a 3-month break to make final decisions about the direction life should go in afterwards. Only we're all working during the break, we have money to earn and experience to add to our resumes!

In retrospect, there's always more you could have done to take advantage of the opportunities you were offered. I look back on the last 9 months and I think that I got a great deal more out of it than I did out of any given year at my University or my Masters College. There's still that nagging suspicion, however, that there's something more you could have done to enhance the experience further.

That's probably something to do with the environment in a place like Wharton. With so many clubs and activities, so many things to do on any given evening, so many people to meet and so little time in which to do it, there's always a feeling that by having had to make trade-offs and decisions about where to focus scarce time and energy, you have been tricked into missing out on a great many things.

The truth of the matter is that regardless of all that, I've still made good use of the opportunities here. I have made many new friendships, met very impressive individuals, learned to deal with new situations and - most importantly of all - breathed new life into my motivation to achieve. There's nothing like an MBA crowd to spur you on to greater things.

Next year is all about electives - I get to pick the courses rather than having the prescribed "core" indelibly impressed upon my mind. Positives are that the courses are mostly twice as long, and therefore will go deeper and teach more durably their concepts and ideas. Better than this, I chose the skills and knowledge that I will subject my mind to next year, and this makes me more enthusiastic as I have already thought about the uses I have for these skills. Slowly but surely, a plan is emerging from the blurry, foggy road ahead.

Now if only the economy would emerge from the toilet bowl, all would be well.

Greenfairy.com got hacked today - I was wondering why it was down earlier. I'm very annoyed about it getting hacked - can't really explain why. It's a bit too much like gratuitous vandalism I guess.

Usually, I couldn't care less when someone gets hacked, but it's usually a company with backup servers and more IT personnel than they know what to do with. In this case, it's one person who runs a small website that quite a few people like to read. Some teenage idiots decide to run in and perform the digital equivalent of spray-painting the facade of someone's home. It feels cheap and malicious.

I guess my annoyances in this case fall into two categories. The first is that it's like going after the easy target. It's not like they attacked something like Slashdot, or something run by similarly tech-savvy individuals, so you can't even respect the challenge of breaking in.

My second gripe comes because I know the typical defense the "hacker community" employs: If you can't be bothered to patch properly, or you don't know how to secure your server properly, then you deserve it. This really makes my blood boil. What kind of an idiot thinks this is justification for anything? Perhaps a bystander can say that there are enough creeps out there it's predictable poorly secured sites will get hacked, but it's when the blame somehow gets shifted to the owner of the website for not knowing every nook and cranny of their webserver that I get irate. I get particularly irate when I visualise the hackers: poor UV-deprived melanin-deficient jerks with so few creative juices that they feel the need to destroy what others build in order to make their presence felt.

I love the idea of searching out deficiencies in security systems, but when it comes to inflicting damage on another website, even in passing, it'll never be criminalised enough as far as I'm concerned.

There. I feel better now. Let's hope she gets her site back up soon.

It's amazing what people will fall for - there must be a lot of people out there willing to suspend critical judgement in the face of large numbers. The 419 scam is the 3rd to 5th biggest industry in Nigeria. If it weren't for the huge numbers involved, you have to admire such a determined exploitation of foreign greed.

Here is a copy of my latest 419 solicitation :

FROM: MR ADEMOLA WILLIAMS 

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO.

REPLY TO EMAIL ADDRESS:   adewilliams1@k.ro

Dear Friend,

 

SEEKING YOUR IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE.

Please Permit me to make your acquaintance in so

informal a manner. This is necessitated by my urgent

need to reach a dependable and trust wordy foreign

partner. This request may seem strange and

unsolicited but I will crave your indulgence and pray

that you view it seriously. My name is MR Ademola Williams of the Democratic Republic of Congo and One of the

close aides to the former President of the Democratic

Republic of Congo LAURENT KABILA of blessed

memory, may his soul rest in peace.

 

Due to the military campaign of LAURENT KABILA to

force out the rebels in my country, I and some of my

colleagues were instructed by Late President Kabila

to  go abroad to purchase arms and ammunition worth of

Twenty Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States

Dollars only (US$20,500,000.00) to fight the rebel

group. But when President Kabila was killed in a

bloody shoot-out by one of his aide a day before we

were schedule to travel out of Congo, We immediately 

decided to divert the fund into a private security

company here in Congo for safe keeping. The security

of the said amount is presently being threatened here

following the arrest and seizure of properties of Col.

Rasheidi Karesava (One of the aides to Laurent Kabila)

a tribesman, and some other Military Personnel from

our same tribe, by the new President of the Democratic

Republic of Congo, the son of late President Laurent

Kabila, Joseph Kabila. 

In view of this, we need a reliable and trustworthy

foreign partner who can assist us to move this money

out of my country as the beneficiary.

WE have sufficient ''CONTACTS'' to move the fund under

Diplomatic Cover to a security company in the europe

in your name. This is to ensure that the Diplomatic

Baggage is marked ''CONFIDENTIAL'' and it  will not

pass through normal custom/airport screening and

clearance.

Our inability to move this money out of Congo all

This while lies on our lack of trust on our supposed

good friends (western countries) who suddenly became

hostile to those of us who worked with the late

President Kabila, immediately after his son took

office. Though we have neither seen nor met each

other, the information We gathered from an associate

who has worked in your country has encouraged and

convinced us that with your sincere assistance, this

transaction will be properly handled with modesty

and honesty to a huge success within two weeks. The

said money is a state fund and therefore requires a

total confidentiality.

Thus, if you are willing to assist us move this fund

out of Congo, you can contact me through my email

address above with your telephone, fax number and

personal information to enable us discuss the

modalities and what will be your share

(percentage) for assisting us.

I must use this opportunity and medium to implore You

to exercise the utmost indulgence to keep this Matter

extraordinarily confidential, Whatever your Decision,

while I await your prompt response. Thank you and

GodBless.

 

Best Regards


MR WILLIAMS .

NOTE:

adewilliams1@k.ro

If you receive anything like this, you should always look at...

• 419 Coalition Website

Students in numbers
Despite repeated warnings
Leave their cell phones on

How is it, that despite knowing full well that 3 people have suffered the public embarassment of having their pathetic ringtones sound out in a silent exam hall, a fourth person nevertheless fails to turn off their mobile phone?

I'm supposed to be writing a Global Competitive Strategy final that's due in by 4pm, but a website called The Memory Hole has caught my attention and is unashamedly monopolising my time. It looks at all the things that have been changed, suppressed, edited, or somehow refused publication or airtime. It's quite frightening, although I think it's always happened. Only now, with the internet, we can see it happening.

Finally getting around to sorting through the hundreds of digital photos from the BVI - there are some amazing ones, and I keep getting pangs of nostalgia from a trip that lasted only a week.

It's been hard work getting an internship this year. I think I've finally broken the back of this one, and while it's not the golden egg I envisioned when I first started my MBA, in this market, it's an achievement to get anything paid at all, especially in Venture Capital, so I'll take the job and be grateful, and give it everything I've got.

I've been spending a little time trying to figure out how, on this website, people were hitting ads that had expired, and therefore shouldn't be displayed on the screen anymore. I finally figured it out: they are viewing my webpage in the Google Cache, clicking on ads, and leaving little cryptic notes in my logfiles...

I was receiving strange entries in the user logs :

2003-05-04 18:05:32 guest from 195.229.xxx.xxx hit advert 10

2003-05-04 05:37:58 User guest from ip 159.134.xxx.xx viewed article leo

2003-05-04 04:48:25 User guest from ip 64.235.xxx.xxx viewed article bond20

2003-05-04 02:37:32 Advert submitted by 65.214.xx.xxx

I couldn't figure out how adverts could be getting hits when there were none in the system, and therefore none getting displayed. In fact, Google cached some pages with adverts in them and that's where the hits came from, users clicking on these get redirected to my redirection page (!) and the log records this as a hit. Since the adverts are still in the system, they then get shunted to the right place.

On another note, thanks to the anonymous person who sent me feedback about needing a better way to view old articles than some long list. I finally got around to writing the archives box on the left. Thanks also to The Weblog Review for emailing me the same suggestion. It results in an extra little cookie on your machine to track the current month displayed.

Finally, thanks to the anonymous donor of the latest piece of feedback: Post More. I'll take that as a compliment!

I asked the remarkably knowledgable man behind the counter in my local video store for a recommendation. I wanted a good film, mainstream, that wasn't going to stretch my overused and underfunded intellectual resources.

He gave me The Truth About Charlie, and said, "You should absolutely watch the original, Charade, which is on the reverse of the DVD. If you really want to, you can then watch the feature on the front".

He was right, Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn are amazing in Charade, the plot tight and the dialogue supreme. It just doesn't quite wash in the modern version though.

Charade is a 1963 film starring Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It is an extremely well put together film with taut story, extreme internal consistency, great continuity and sharp, fun dialogue. It is in particular the dialogue that give the characters that 'larger than life' aspect, rather than an ability to jump tall buildings and drive fast cars.

The Truth About Charlie is a modern remake of Charade starring Mark Wahlberg and the scrumptious Thandie Newton that completely fails to deliver the goods for a number of reasons...

First in my mind is that they messed around with the roles of the characters. In particular they changed the relative ages and thus the underlying relationships; they changed the detective from a man to a woman, they equalised the roles of the male and female lead, giving them similar strengths and weaknesses to avoid the more traditional "male" and "female" roles of the 60s and they made some very bad people in Charade victims of a conspiracy in Charlie. Finally, they cut out or dicked around with a number of scenes that were intricate parts of the exposition in Charade.

None of these changes would have mattered had the structure been altered in a way that made the new story consistent with the changes. Unfortunately they didn't bother to rewrite to this extent, and so what was originally consistent becomes confusing, and more time is spent figuring out what the hell is going on in the remake than the original because it is not so clearly communicated.

This leaves a lot less time to appreciate the performances. But that's a good thing, because they're really nothing special. Mark Wahlberg impressively underwhelms, whereas Thandie Newton is not nearly helpless or hapless enough to justify the attention she gets. The romance fades like a wilted leaf and has to be postponed to the end and the other characters are mere window-dressing. Particularly galling to me was that where the original used French in a charming and nonchalant way that meshed nicely with the character's lives in Paris, the second movie jolted uncomfortably though the French bits, almost as if it can't wait for them to be over.

Having lost the old storyline, a number of adjustments need to be made to reconstruct moments of energy and suspense, including a very pointless race through the streest and metros of Paris.

I think I would be much less nasty about this film (particularly since I could watch a silent movie with Thandie Newton in it and walk away with just a comment on how pretty her face is) had I not seen the original moments before the remake. Unfortunately, Charlie has less than half the class of it's elder sibling, and I would suggest that putting them both on the same DVD, while it certainly cheered me up, did no favours to the more modern of the two movies.