DISQUS

This may sound pithy, but I wonder if you've submitted it to the New York Times?

It's not hard at all, it's software. The interface for such function can also be pretty easily done through the iTunes/iPod management view that they introduced back with iTunes 7.

I doubt you'd ever find a home for this idea at Apple, though. Customization isn't really what they're interested in, and in fact is in many ways antithetical to their primary mission which is to provide a fantastic user experience for the 85% use-case. You see, the Shuffle isn't meant to be used for AudioBooks. It supports it, but it's not the primary use case (as opposed to other iPod devices which are better suited to within-track navigation tasks). They could have done a lot of things with the Shuffle UI to enable more complex navigational tasks (ie: double click brings you to an "audio menu" which allows you to navigate through playlists, etc) but doing so would add significant complexity to the UI, and that crosses a line that Apple's unwilling to cross.

Apple produces fantastic design entirely because they limit the use cases which they're willing to support. God help you if you'd like to do something with one of their devices that they don't think you should want to do.

While I can't speak for Germany and New Zealand, I know that voter turnout statistics for Canada are deeply flawed in the way they are reported, and from what I understand, shouldn't be trusted in the slightest.

The problem rests with the divisor in the "votes cast / eligible voters = voter turnout" equation. In a nutshell, our electronic list of electors contains a lot of stale data which isn't cleansed between elections. As an example, if I were to move from one riding to another, then file my taxes from that new address, I'd be on the electors list in two places. As another example, if you were to die, your name wouldn't be removed.

I went into more detail about this two federal elections ago if you want more detail.

Comedy Central is "extended" cable in most US States. In Canada, the Daily Show is carried on broadcast television. This is why you'll actually find a lot of references to Canada on both Daily Show and the Colbert Report - we canucks, for once, make up a non-trivial portion of an audience.

Hard to enforce Can-con requirements are nothing new: this issue first came up with ham radios, and again when people starting using satellite receivers to pull down signals which didn't offer the appropriate mix of approved content. The most interesting aspect to the Joost model, from a legal standpoint, is that since the application creates a peer-to-peer network, everyone running the application is not only a viewer, but also technically a broadcaster.

The purpose of Can-con is ostensibly to expose Canadian talent, but it seems to me that benefits only the Canadian companies who publish that talent. Successful Canadian artists get a lot of exposure in the USA (ref: Nickelback, Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion) and I don't think it was because they had recording labels in Canada that they were successful. Presumably the artists will be successful if they have talent, and the labels will be successful if they find that talent, both within and without the Canadian borders. That said, I like some of the proposals for CanCon "Progressive" where Heritage Canada awards credits to media outlets who choose to play Canadian content on their networks. It is the mandate of Heritage Canada to promote Canadian content, not to enforce it.

Turning to the latter portion of your post, where you posit that the negative of a potential cultural crisis is offset by the positive of Joost's ability to turn more people into producers, there's a flaw in your logic. Joost's business model is to behave like any other TV broadcaster, purchasing television productions from studios using revenues generated from advertisers. That's not really an "open" game, and Joost hasn't made any significant moves towards enabling everyday content producers, or connecting them with potential viewers. The only product that I've seen do that is Miro (http://www.getmiro.com/), which is a video podcast viewer that also allows people to create channels as well as view them.

Dude, I told you about "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined" like a billion times, and offered to lend it to you like, half a billion of those times.

Sheesh. Here I am, takin' hits for you, and all you can do is dole out ... more hits. ;)

I sincerely doubt that Google Canada has a political lobbying arm with heavy financial backing, but it might be worth asking the question. They're growing their presence here.

What frustrates me is that Canada isn't thinking of exploiting it's potential to differentiate from the US on public policy in order to experiment with the different possible models. We're a micro-economy within the G8, which to my mind makes us ripe for this sort of experimentation. Sadly, fear of US reprisals or inability to compete with US copyright mechanisms seems to be driving our politicians.

You're welcome! :)

Well, I don't think that the courts in Canada have ruled that gun manufacturers are responsible for having supplied the equipment, but our government has obviously made it more difficult to purchase handguns.

Were the image of a rifle, or a switchblade, I think the analogy would still hold.

Leaving this comment here 'cause I can't on the review page ... you give it a rating of "5", but neglect to mention the scale. :)

There's a subtle tools problem here, and in many cases I think that people do work collaboratively whenever possible, but end up partitioning and co-operating when tools fail them.

In the realm of Open Source Software Development, for example, I often bear witness to two or more people working together to solve a problem on IRC. The conversation is fluid, collaborative, a back and forth sharing of ideas and a convergence towards a solution that represents the best of all that was put forward.

But then, once the discussion is over, a single person will write the patch and submit it for review. Many people can look at that code and comment, but only one has the ability to actually do the review which incorporates the feedback. At this point, the tools don't allow for true collaboration - it's somewhat muted and forced into being partitioned.

Throughout the lifecycle of a bug there are many interaction points between people working together on problems, some of which are collaboration and some of which are co-operation.

I think Wikis suffer some similar tool problems, in that they aren't tailored towards collaborative editing as much as they are towards sucessive editing. Better tools for indicating "this is still rough" and "what about this approach?", and for having sidediscussions about those topics, and I think you might see more genuine collaboration.

I'm actually not so sure about Jobs wanting to preserve the status quo. Maintaining FairPlay is a huge maintenance headache. Every time some enterprising/bored college teenager figures out a way around it, Apple is currently contract-bound to create a new version of the DRM system, as well as patches for their entire line of iPods (3 generations of the original iPod, 2 generations of shuffles, a line of minis and a line of nanos; even if they share the same firmware in many cases, it's still a software maintenance nightmare in terms of packaging and distribution!) as well as for their software. They need to make sure that the new system will deprecate gracefully for things encoded in the old system. In short, it's a huge PITA.

Further, while the iTunes Music Store has sold over 9B songs, the Apple cut from that is estimated to be about 35%. Out of that 35% comes the costs for: maintaining FairPlay, maintaining the server infrastructure, maintaining the editorial content on the site, etc, etc. There's a lot of evidence - not only provided by Jobs in his open letter, but from other sources as well, that people are avoiding purchasing music digitally because it's DRM'd. I know that's certainly true for me, and when I do buy music from iTMS, I immediately burn it to CD and re-rip in in a non-DRM'd format. I used to subscribe to eMusic, for which I paid a flat fee for a certain number of non-DRM'd music a month; I was happier to pay for it since I knew it would work anywhere I took it.

So now, think of it from Jobs' angle:

- you have market dominance on the music player in terms of brand recognition, "cool" factor, penetration and mindshare; everyone else is playing catchup, and your guys aren't stopping with line innovations (see: nano, new shuffle) or extensions (see: iPhone) anytime soon;

- you have market dominance and the best experience in terms of an online music store (although right now it only works when using the iTunes software - more on that later!);

- your cost per song sold includes costs of maintaining a system which all evidence shows as reducing the number of songs that can be sold;

- evidence to date shows that DRM doesn't work as a massive disincentive to piracy; people who want to pay for music will do so in the way that gives them the most control over what they've paid to receive, and those who don't want to pay for music will find a way to not pay for music.

From where I sit, Apple is more likely to make money if they could sell songs without DRM. The incentive to buy songs from iTMS would be higher for those looking to pay for their music, as they'd have more control. All Apple cares about is throughput in terms of songs-sold-via-iTMS. Increasing the value prop to consumers will boil down to a net win for Apple, even if it increases the risk of casual piracy. People want things that work, and that are easy. $0.99/song is easy, but right now, it doesn't work (hard to take to your car, to move between computers, etc, etc.) Removing the DRM would make it work.

I said I'd talk a little more about the limitation of the iTunes Music Store only working through iTunes software. I can see Apple moving away from that decision, and allowing the store to work from any web client. It's tied right now because, well, any downloads from that store will only work with devices that can only be synchronized with the iTunes software. But if Apple can open their store to people using all other kinds of music hardware, or even to just computer users, why wouldn't they do that to dramatically increase their potential subscriber base?

I don't think Jobs is being entirely up-front and genuine here, but I also don't think he's lying or being forced into this position. The DRM experiment has lasted a few years, and I think he's reading the signs as saying "you can make more money without it, and now you've got some good reasons to try that experiment out for a while."

(Note: some of my ideas were inspired by John Gruber's "Reading Between the Lines" blog post)

So, first, a couple of factual errors:

The only thing that the iPhone will synchronize with on Windows is iTunes (that's right, no Outlook sync for Windows is planned, nor any other address book/calendar sync conduit.) On Mac it will synchronize with iTunes, and with Address Book and iCal using the iSync application which handles conflicts pretty nicely - no word yet whether or not it'll sync over the air with .Mac, but I kinda doubt it.

Email will be pulled directly from your email server (using either POP or IMAP) over the wire, using your cell carrier's EDGE/GPRS data network or WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n when that's available. This nicely sidesteps the email sync problem, and is actually a bit of a leg up on BlackBerry, which doesn't have true IMAP "push" support and requires users to go through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server in order to preserve read/unread state. What'll be interesting is to see whether or not the iPhone's email sync will work with any IMAP server, or if they'll require some addons for data transfer optimization. What'll also be interesting is to see if the iPhone's IMAP support is better than Mail.app, which let me tell you, isn't that great.

The lock-in is very sad, especially since there had been a lot of rumour that they were going to disrupt the North American market by trying to sell unlocked phones. I guess that plan kinda fell through.

So, I think there are some other problems here. The price is a little high for a cell phone, and even high for a 4GB Video iPod, especially when .5GB of that space will be taken up by the applications. So far people spending that much money for cell phones are business users, who will be looking for a kick ass email experience, and I'm not sure if they'll find it on a device without a keyboard. I think Apple's expecting that people will think to themselves: "I get a kickass cell phone and an iPod all in one!", but they're really only getting half of an iPod. A nano-memory size in a bigger-than-video footprint. That seems somewhat flawed to me.

At the end of the day, the most ridiculous thing about the announcement was the market's punishment of RIM. There's no reason to think that the markets intersect in ways that will see people stealing RIM's share to switch to iPhones. It might impact RIM's foray into the consumer space, but it's a little premature, I think, to knock them 12% for that!

Glad to hear the future basketball star is OK. Now he knows that a mere saltine cannot defeat him. Builds confidence and character. :)

Safe trip to you, Kathy and Sam!

The irony is that it's unseasonably warm in Toronto. Gets chilly in the evenings, but when the sun's shining during the daytime, it's fantabulous!

Oh, and to avoid this problem, you'll want to install Video Downloader for Firefox which adds a little icon to your status bar that generates download links for the FLV files on myspace, youtube, etc.

Then get VLC or another media player that can play them back.

Someone archived it on myspace, apparently!

Oh, and, uh, I'd borrow that book from you ...

He's doing his one-day course in SJ in early December. Dolske and Faaborg are going, and if you've never been to one and can spare the day, you should think about it. He's a great speaker, and I found the presentation to be a lot richer than his text. Also, you can see first-hand just how eccentric and devoted to data visualization the man is, which is fun.

Beltzner's Not-Quite-Patented Power-Songs: "Chop Suey" by System of a Down, "Little Sister" and/or "No One Knows" by Queens of the Stone Age, "One by One", "Low" or "Monkey Wrench" by the Foo Fighters, "Since You've Been Gahan" (mashup of Kelly Clarkson vs. Depeche Mode).

Any of those will perk me right up. Of course, I can't jog to save my life, but they're good for the gym. I kinda fill my shuffle with crap like this before heading off.

You'll be happy to read this:

http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2006/10/06/med...

It looks like NBC is remaining bullish about Studio 60 despite initially disappointing ratings, and media buyers are being surprisingly rational saying things like "meh, once football goes away, what else are people going to watch on Mondays?"

Almost more importantly ... http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2006/10/06/media_buyers_optimistic_about/

Optimism! Hurrah!

Thankfully, it looks like NBC is happy with the ratings (http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/entertainment-20060926000000-039heroes039d.html) despite losing share week-over-week. This week's episode ("The West Coast Feed") starts to add a bit more depth to the show, IMO, fleshing out a lot of the personal relationships and characters who have been in the background. It's really a huge cast, the more I watch the show, and I'm kind of eager to see what Sorkin does with it.

Assuming NBC keeps it around :(

Hm. Very myspace-y, but with far nicer layouts. Are you going to post pictures of your favourite bands? :)

Fix! Fix!