Earth reached its human capacity in the 1980s. Our planet is in crisis, and Bill Ryerson is using media to change behaviors that contribute to global overpopulation.
Fifty-seven years ago, something happened in school that left me puzzled until recently. Our sixth-grade teacher wrote an arithmetic quiz on the blackboard, but this time the quantities were stated in words rather than numerals. My answers were all wrong. She helped me see that the mistakes came in translating the words into numerals. What puzzled me was why this translation was so much harder for me than other students.
A possible explanation came along in the 1980s with when I first saw news reports of dyslexia - reading ability that lags unexpectedly behind intelligence. Dyslexia made sense of many mortifying experiences. My third grade teacher told my parents that I would be held back unless my reading improved over the summer. A high school English teacher told them that, and they reluctantly quoted him to me, "your son is literate in no language." Only through high math and science grades did I get into Yale. But, once there, poor results on a reading test given to entrants led to a warning that I would have trouble graduating.
I found ways to improve my reading by the second year of college. Even so, I struggled with massive readings in a history course. But, the day before the exam, while sitting on the beach, it struck me that the professor was likely to ask certain questions. In a few minutes, I outlined the answers. These were, indeed, the questions and my grade was close to 100. While the big picture did not always come to me so clearly, my grades that year were near the top of the class and I graduated in three years with a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford. I was nonetheless a laborious writer until a law school professor had us students write short articles about the law in the manner of, say, the New Yorker and read them aloud to the seminar. That way, we heard our clunkers, and might eventually acquire the skill of "hearing" them even when reading silently to ourselves. This made writing an extension of talking rather than reading. What a relief.
By the 1980s, when dyslexia came to my attention, I had succeeded in a career dependent on word skill - practicing and teaching law. This ruled out my being dyslexic.
Or so I thought until a quarter century later, at my 45th college reunion, when I was drawn to a lecture, "Dyslexia and Creativity: Two Sides of the Same Coin." Two medical school professors, Bennett and Sally Shaywitz, reported that dyslexia stems from an impediment in translating letters on a page into sounds and then words - both written and spoken. MRIs of dyslexics' brains show low activity in the region that most people use to make this translation. The MRIs also show that some dyslexics develop compensating mechanisms in other regions of the brain. These allow reading, though with greater effort. Finally, the MRIs show unusually high activity in still other regions. These explain why dyslexics "are intuitive, excel at problem solving, seeing the big picture, and simplifying," as Sally Shaywitz writes in Overcoming Dyslexia (Vintage). This fit me. I now also understood the relief I felt in linking writing to talking rather than reading.
The lecture on dyslexia moved me to tears because I had met the burden that I had carried so long and its compensating blessing. How many mortifications would I have been saved if I had known more as a child? My father, I suspect, was dyslexic. He proudly told me of his high IQ score, but never that he failed to graduate with his high school class. This I learned only decades after his death from a cousin who suspects a learning impediment. My father and the sixth grade teacher who spotted my difficulty in the quiz were high school classmates. She advised my parents to have me evaluated, I don't know for what and I wasn't, but wonder if she saw similar problems in my father and me.
The dyslexia is still with me. I have difficulty in taking down a name that is spelled out. Proof reading is best left to others.
Still, I count myself lucky. Indeed, if I could erase dyslexia from my life, I wouldn't. But I would erase ignorance of it. One out of five people is dyslexic and more than three-quarters of them don't know it. I stumbled onto solutions, but systematic help is now available, as the Shaywitz book explains.
Going forward, I have several resolves. I will be open about my dyslexia with students. I will support dyslexic students getting extra time on exams. Previously, I was skeptical because I did without, but my case is mild and I was lucky.
Finally, I will sculpt. In the summer after that worrying first year at college, I rested my mind by working on construction during the day and sculpting in the evening. Then, sculpting was pushed aside by word-work. But I talked so much about resuming that two friends each gave me carving tools as wedding gifts. They lay unused for almost a half century, but after the Shaywitzs' lecture I started sculpting again. I don't have the words to express the pleasure it gives me.
Mr. Schoenbrod teaches at New York Law School, is a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, and coauthor of Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work (Yale, 2010).
Filed under: TV News
Just in time for its 25th anniversary, 'Voltron,' the memorable, classic cartoon from the 1980s is being reincarnated for a new generation of viewers.
The last place you want to find The Other Woman is on her back next to your husband. Especially when he's dead. A woman named Lillas Hawkins in California found just that when she went to visit her husband's grave two weeks ago. When she pointed out the error to a cemetery worker, she says he responded, "We are in terrible trouble." The cemetery is owned by a company named Dignity.
Dignity says that their records show the plot was sold twice back in the 1980s, before they took over the cemetery. According to Hawkins, they also said that digging up the strange woman "isn't an option," but that they'd be willing to dig up Hawkins' husband and rebury him somewhere else. Otherwise, she can be buried on top of him.
I would just like to point out again that the name of this company is Dignity.
"Cemetery Sells Gravesite That Belongs To Widow" [CBS13.com] (Thanks to Kurtis!)
Well you knew that already:
Today’s take on the full beard “is very playful,” he says. “You grow it with a scent of masculinity, of maturity and of irony to mean ‘I don’t take myself too seriously.’”
“As gay guys can be more adventurous, they have always been at the forefront of new looks,” says Allan Peterkin, a Toronto psychiatrist and co-author of The Bearded Gentleman... Peterkin thinks the recent shift to a more masculine look may be a bit of a backlash to the gay culture of the 1980s, where everyone was so clean-shaven, top to bottom.“This new facial hair praise goes across cultures, ages, and reaches straights and gays,” says Peterkin. “It’s kind of a universal expression.”
Tips, role models, videos, grooming advice .... you can't beat beards.org.
Veteran broadcaster at the Hay festival admits he worried about what people thought about his weight
Veteran broadcaster John Simpson today said that thinking about the global audience of the BBC drove him "insane". The corporation's world affairs editor said he had to think about viewers from around the globe when preparing a report and the numbers involved were overwhelming. Speaking at the Hay festival, Simpson said: "When I do a report for the BBC now I have to recognise 350 to 360 million people are going to see it. They are all saying to each other: 'Doesn't he look fat? Do you think he can go on for much longer?' When you think of all the languages that's being said in you go insane." Speaking to the audience about researching his new book, How The Twentieth Century Was Reported, he said he noticed similarities between three prime ministers and their attitudes to the press.
He said: "There have been three prime ministers who dealt most ferociously with the press, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Neville Chamberlain.
"The last was similar in the way Thatcher's government and Blair's government tried to control the press and, in Thatcher and Blair's case, the BBC.
"From the 1930s, the 1980s and the early part of this century, not much has changed."
He said he believed newspapers still had a place in the modern world but people were more likely to select one with views in line with their own.
He said: "I remember time and time again people saying newspapers are finished. Radio came and newspapers were finished. Television came and newspapers were finished. The internet came and newspapers were finished. The internet has damaged them in terms of readership but they are not finished."
He added: "People just seem to want the loud voices of people who agree with them." Veteran broadcaster Simpson also said that since the advent of the coalition government, he felt the BBC was no longer "doomed".
Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival, the corporation's world affairs editor said that he had felt it was "finished" as a public service broadcaster because of Labour's policy to give parts of the licence fee to other organisations; he had felt equally dejected by the Tories' policies.
Now, he said: "When you have [David Cameron] saying he's the best friend of the BBC a Tory leader has ever been, that is not saying much; but you have some hope. I think the BBC will survive now."
The woman who lived in our house before us loved roses and planted eight of them on our property. Every day when my husband comes home from work, he picks one and brings it to me.
Adam’s a plant guy, and he has spent the past two weeks potting succulents, the only plants our cat won’t eat. He’s not big on flowers and last night I found out why.
“Look at those poppies on the table,” he said, pointing to the orange poppies he recently picked from a ditch here in town. “They look so happy. They don’t even know that they are dying.”
I’ve always kind of felt that way about roses. They are so Miss Havisham.
Even growing up in Pennsylvania’s Red Rose City, I always knew that their beauty was lost on me.
But not here!
The roses in our neighborhood here in Salem are heavy with blossoms at this point – droopy heads bending over to reach the grass. But all across the micro-hood we call home, roses are doing their languid burlesque.
My neighbor has a red rose growing on her front wall, the Ingrid Bergman rose, that has blooms larger than my baby’s head. We have roses woven through the fence in our back patio that bloom and rebloom for several weeks each summer — sure puts those ideas about temporality to shame. And now I’ve discovered this rose, which reminds me of an 1980s dress one might wear while roller skating, at the Portland International Rose Test Garden.
Even if you don’t love roses. Even if you think that the scent of a rose reminds you of the toilette of an 115-year-old woman. Even if No rose has ever smelled as sweet. It is almost impossible not to be happy when you’re surrounded by these gently unfolding pink ladies.
Remember the novelty “executive toy” of the 1980s, the panel of pins that could be squished onto hands, faces or any other object and the metal rods would form a 3D portrait in steel pixels? Well, this concept KitchenAid “Variable Grill” is something very similar, although you’d never want to push your face into it.
The grill is of the hinged type, and the top surface has 140 separate elements, or heat-pixels, if you will. Each pixel has a glass top which actually touches the food, and a heating element which sits behind it, providing the BTUs. Because every heat-pixel moves independently, they can settle onto the surface of the food and the elements are all the same distance from the surface. Thhe glass stopping the elements from actually touching it.
It’s ingenious, but the rendering is a little on the long-and-thin side: wouldn’t a square be better? I also wonder if the heat would really cook any more evenly than a normal grill, if well attended by simply turning the target food often.
These kinds of grills could be considered slightly gimmicky, and don’t achieve much that you couldn’t do with a broiler or a cast-iron grill=pan. On the other hand, George Forman hasn’t done too bad in the same market so perhaps the designer, Roberto Bertran, is on to something.
KitchenAid Variable Grill [Yanko]
Nate Silver and Jack Neff argue that American's love of cars is in decline. Richard Florida puts this in context:
Younger people today -- in fact, people of all ages -- no longer see the car as a necessary expense or a source of personal freedom. In fact, it is increasingly just the opposite: not owning a car and not owning a house are seen by more and more as a path to greater flexibility, choice, and personal autonomy.
Underlying all of this is not so much a shift in "car culture" values but a shift in economic realities. Owning a car and a house are very costly, for individuals and the economy as a whole. What distinguished "savers" from "spenders," according to a Canadian study (.pdf), is outlays for housing and especially for cars. The amount of money the average American family spends on housing and cars went from 22 percent in 1950 to 44 percent by the 1980s to more than half today. It's not so much that America is a society of wanton over-consumers -- though some surely fit that bill -- it's that they've been trapped by the housing-car-energy complex that once stood at the very heart of the U.S. "Fordist" economy. And as any number of studies have shown (.pdf), America's over-investment in housing has badly distorted its economy.
But what this also shows is that change with the right incentives is possible. Imagine the impact of a dollar tax on a gallon of gas, balanced by a FICA cut.
In 1997, James Cameron made “Titanic,” the highest-grossing film ever made.
Thirteen years later he did it again: “Avatar.” And as much as “Avatar” stretched the boundaries of the box office, it has stretched the boundaries of cinema as well. The 3-D film features a staggering 2,500-plus special-effects shots, set a new standard for movie-making technology, and may have ushered in a big-screen renaissance in the process.
Sorry, missed a couple Qs.
Dumb question: I don’t get how you filmed it but it’s all CG.
Cameron: It’s not all CG. It’s about 60 percent CG. The film was shot in a virtual world, with a virtual camera. But another part shot in live action.
Cameron: I’ve been concerned about the environment for a long time, and Avatar is about that, of course. So after the movie came out, it was so well receivec by the environmental community, that all this stuff came flooding to me. I ended up going into “cause shock”. Ended up working people in Brazil who are going through a situation that’s eeriely similar to the Avatar plot.
Kara: What did you do for them?
Cameron: I created a rapport with them, and then created a series of media events, that bubbled it up to public consciousness in Brazil, and eventually put a halt to the dam they were building there.
Can you talk about the Brazil controversy?
Q&A
9:04 pm: So where does Hollywood go?
Cameron: It doesn’t change much. You still need good stories, good casts, etc. Regardless of windows, augmented reality, etc. Still the same business. People have been talking about interactive movies since the 1980s. But we have those. They’re called games.
Walt: What do you think about games?
Cameron: Love them. Want to figure out ways to merge games and movies in next couple projects where you can experience them in different ways.
9:01 pm: Kara. Tell us about piracy. How big a problem is that for you?
Cameron: 3d counteracted that for us. You could pirate the movie, but not the 3d. That won’t hold forever, though.
9:00 pm: So you’re a big deal director so you can work with Microsoft. Can other directors get help like that?
Cameron: For a movie like this, you need help from someone.
8:58 pm: Walt: Is Silicon Valley involved in any part of what you do?
Cameron: Yes, but not in way you think. I went to Microsoft, for instance, and asked them for help with archiving and data. We started a year before the movie started on digital asset management. Microsoft has been a great partner.
8:54 pm: A discussion about what technology can’t solve. You can make movies for less money, but the apparatus of promoting movies still requires a lot of money. And note that people who have success without a studio’s marketing arm with an indie movie – the next movie they make is a studio movie. I believe in letting people do what they’re good at. Studio marketing people do this every day. A day-and-date release, worldwide – that’s something to behold. A ton of work. We had something like 76, 78 discrete versions of Avatar that had to be prepped w/in 5 weeks for that.
8:51 pm: A tech discussion about frame rates, followed by Walt asking him if he’ll deign to watch a movie on laptop.
Cameron: depends on the film. I won’t watch 2001 on a laptop. But a funny movie would be fine. But “the Hangover” would be just as funny on a laptop.
8:48 pm: Walt still pressing on windows, and the limits they put on consumer choice.
Cameron: I don’t really care because I won’t have another movie for 3 years, and by then all of this will be worked out.
Kara: What’s the movie?
Cameron: Maybe four years. Either Avatar 2 or some other big movie that uses the same technology. 3d.
8:47 pm: Walt mentions people who havent seen Avatar in the theater [ahem]. They feel “trapped”, he says, because they want to see it in 3d.
Cameron: I know. So we’re helping them out and rereleasing the movie in theaters in August.[Thanks!]
8:45 pm: Kara attempts to talk about music, but stumbles on a Beatles album example. But the big idea is that albums have gone away, replaced by singles, but movies don’t have that problem.
Cameron: Nope. But people do watch movies in different ways. Some are super respectful and ritualistic, others multitask and watch picture-in-picture. At least here, the pendulum swung back from doing that.
8:43 pm: Walt. But why can’t I have it when and where I want?
Cameron: Now we’re at the first time where there isa real question: Do I want it now, or do I want it great? People had a choice of watching a pirated version, on a small screen, and enough people chose the theatrical experience to make it the highest-grossing movie ever.
Walt: But some people want to watch it on a small screen without stealing.
Cameron. Perhaps there are 2% of people under 30 who have a qualm about stealing. They went to the theater because it was a better experience.
8:41 pm: Walt. There’s a lot of consumers, and tech folks, who think that you should be able to see a movie or TV show whenever, whereever.
Cameron: You hear a lot of that. But it’s usually not from the people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making the film. [Scattered applause. Pretty sure I hear Rupert Murdoch, who's in the front, guffawing].
8:40 pm: Kara: Let’s talk about Hollywood economics.
Cameron: “I think there was a time when Hollywood really didnt’ get the rapidity of change. But we’re past that now.” But there’s a limit to how quickly they can change andn still keep their business.
8:34 pm: Kara: Let’s talk about BP briefly. Tell us about your connection.
Cameron: THere’s a story that the government went to hollywood for help. But that’s not the case. I’ve just been interested and really involved in subs, and wrecks for a long time. So over the last few weeks, I’ve been watching what’s happening, and saying “those morons don’t know what they’re doing”. And then I realized I know a lot of people who work in deep submergence. They don’t do oil, but they know the engineering. So I got 23 people together for a brainstorming session at EPA headquarters. The EPA guys weren’t there – they were in the Gulf. But they hosted it.
Kara: You went to BP first?
Cameron: They could not have been more gracious. “But they said “we’ve got this”". Here’s the thing: We sat in a room for 10 hours and worked this problem. It’s a very complex problem, and it starts 18,000 feet down. Steel fails like its made out of butter. So you find out there are things that prevent them from doing obvious fixes.
But there are things that can be done. I want to say, I’d never thought I would be defending BP. Anyway, I started to shift perspective, to thinking that the government should be monitoring this stuff inddependently, and I can help with that.
Walt: Doesn’t the Navy have submarines?
Cameron: Yes. We work with them. Anyway, we’re working on a report, etc.
Walt: Is the White House involved in this?
Cameron: No, it’s a private effort.
8:33 pm: Walt. And most people have just bought sets recently.
Cameron: Right. But it will change over time. And if you’re buying today, go ahead and future-proof yourself by buying 3d.
8:33 pm: Walt: So what about 3D TV sets?
Cameron: Problem is that there’s not enough content right now. If you get every 3d movie, you’ll have a goood 3d days, and then you’re done.
8:30 pm: Kara: Would you do this with Terminator and other older movies you’ve done?
Cameron: Depends. We’re going to spend months and millions converting Titanic. But if do lousy jobs of conversions, “pop-up book style” that’s going to get old quickly.
8:28 pm: Can you remake Titanic in 3D?
Cameron. Yes.
Walt: Are you thinking about doing that?
Cameron: We’re not thinking about doing that, we’re doing it. We’ll have it ready for the ship’s 100th anniversary.
8:23 pm: Kara. Let’s talk about the tech involved in Avatar. What’s different about your 3D and other 3Ds?
Cameron: 3D has had a rocky, start and stop experience. He walks through the chronology of different tech. Fast forward to 2000. First prototypes of projectors with very high frame rates. And I was working on the different end, working on a specialized camera. It still took a long time. It was a very flat curve for along time. Now it’s practically vertical. But prior to that, exhibitors didn’t want to pay to retrofit theaters for one movie a year. Studios wouldnt do 3D if there were no theaters, etc. I was proseltyizing, but most people ignored me. By 2005, I decided to make a big film in 3D, “without the wink and snigger”, a serious film. “you know i’m just going to go out there and do this, and let the chips fall where the may”. I don’t want to take all the credit. There were a small number of people who were doing this: Robert Zemeckis, Katzenberg, Peter Jackson said he would do a 3d movie, but didnt. But the announcement was valuable in itself.
8:21 pm: Kara: We saw a not good movie the other night [Prince of Persia - terrible] and every preview was for a 3D movie.
Cameron: Yep. There’s going to be a period of time where we risk “debasing the coinage”. If we make people pay extra for a lousy movie, we’re going to be in trouble.
Walt: Who does it well?
Cameron: Jeffrey Katzenberg at Dreamworks. “How to Train Your Dragon” was sumptiouous.
8:20 pm: Walt: So will there be a movie that *requires* 3D?
Cameron: Sure. That could be an interesting experience, but it would be a failure of narrative. Good movies scale – they work on iPhones, and on theater screens.
8:18 pm: Walt: Do you think there’s a way to enjoy Avatar without seeing it in 3D?
Cameron: Sure. Most of the work I do as a director doesn’t have to do with 3D. The 3D should be viewed as value-added. Everyone said that you had to see Avatar in the theaters, in 3D. But the DVDs have sold really well. If people have the choice, they use 3D. If they don’t 2D works fine.
8:17 pm: Kara: You’ve embraced tech for a long time. Where did that start?
Cameron: I started as an FX guy. I had to figure out how all of that was done. We no longer use any of the tools that I learned how to use. The artistic skills I developed, haven’t changed.
8:17 pm: Walt: “We’re not going to talk about privacy”.
Walt and Kara are bathed in blue! They look vaguely Avatar-like. And here comes Cameron, who lavishes praise on the red leather hot seats.
A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.
Warner Bros. Animation has announced they have begun production on a new ThunderCats animated series for Cartoon Network. Strangely, this comes only a few days after we learned that 56-year-old Stephen Perry, who wrote for the 1980s cartoon series, was found murdered. I remember loving the Thundercats as a kid, and there was constant talks and rumors of a live-action big screen adaptation in recent years. Check out the first concept image and press release, after the jump.
Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…
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What Is Conde Nast Doing Making Kenneth Cole's YouTube Ads?
- Chris BroganApparently That Text Can't Wait -- Not Even During Sex. http://bit.ly/bt90d2 /via @adage
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- Steve RubelIndia's copyright office website is "best viewed in 1024 x 768 true colors, Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above."
That might sound a bit dated, but it has nothing on the country's copyright law, which was last overhauled completely in 1957. Although it was updated five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the law does not comply with numerous international treaties such as the WIPO Internet Treaties of 1996.
Read the comments on this post
Plus d'infos sur la proposition de loi indienne sur le droit d'auteur, chez Ars Technica : http://bit.ly/96LQan
- Rubin Sfadj"You don't want your phone to be an open platform..." and with that brief statement, Apple justified the closed iPhone and then quickly followed it with the monitored and controlled app store. But Steve, the iPad isn't a phone at all so why not open it up again? If people are concerned about the safety of their apps or need you to protect them from porn, you can do an "app store approved" program or something can't you? And really, do we even need an app store to tell us which apps are good in an era of ubiquitous user feedback and preferential attachment?
The thing is, Jobs' argument was always a bit disingenuous. Closed follows from his brain architecture, not from an argument on behalf of his customers or their network providers. Those are post facto justifications supporting an already-held point of view. And the reason the iPad is going to stay closed isn't because it is good for users, it's because it is good for Apple.
The bottom line is that the iPhone was a relatively open phone and we accepted it, but the iPad is a relatively closed computer, and that's a bummer. Jobs probably believes that he is doing it for the users, finally giving them a post-crank-the-handle-to-start-it experience, but it doesn't take a genius to see how it benefits Apple. Beliefs and self interest usually go hand in hand and here's what I think is really happening...
Microsoft in the 1980s was the perfect business. The kind of business every MBA would like to invent. It had network effects to drive adoption, products with near-zero marginal cost, and a distribution channel that was controlled and constrained enough in the days of the floppy disks in boxes to enforce direct monetization. In short, it had leverage. The kind of leverage that delivers a very steep-sloped relationship between enterprise valuation and market penetration. Or, put the way an economist would put it, the kind of leverage that captures greater than economic rents. We paid more than we had to for Windows and Office during all those years, but at least we can take some comfort in the fact that a big part of it turned out to be an involuntary tithe for Bill's charitable efforts.
The music industry worked the same way. The constrained distribution channel of the vinyl record gave artists and the music companies that distributed their work tremendous leverage, and get them paid for it. Even if a lot of that economic surplus ended up the noses of label executives...
The last decade has been tough on business models like these though. Open Source software is eroding pricing leverage. Digital has unconstrained content delivery and taken away the ability to monetize at the point of distribution. Businesses that had leverage are returning to more linear business models. Plus, companies like Google have figured how to move network effects into the cloud where they are ad supported instead of monetized directly, further eroding our expectation to pay for things. Proprietary software vendors, music industry labels, movie studios, newspapers, etc. all find themselves suffering from their lost control over distribution and the fact that when they lost it they lost their toll booths. Excess rent is hard to come by these days.
In this context the iPad isn't a computing device at all. Jobs is using his knack for design and user experience to build, not a better computer, but a better distribution channel. One that is controlled, constrained, and can re-take distribution as the point of monetization. You aren't buying a computer when you buy an iPad, you are buying a 16GB Walmart store shelf that fits on your lap - complete with all the supplier beat downs, slotting fees, and exclusive deals that go with it - and Apple got you to pay for the building.
The iPad by itself would be just another physical product living in a nearly linear world. Doubling revenue would require Apple to double the number manufactured; and that would mean roughly doubling labor costs etc. It could be profitable, and there are advantages to building at scale, but not in the greater-than-linear leveraged manner that software or content can deliver. As Apple well knows, a business built on that model builds enterprise value linearly with unit sales. But... the iPad as a distribution channel for fungible goods reasserts the non-linear leverage that Microsoft enjoyed back in the day.
One interesting twist is how the iPad combines network effects and constrained distribution. The bright shiny object design of the iPad leads to network effects at the app store which in turn drives more consumers back to the device itself. Then to the degree that those two forces hold consumers in thrall of the device, Apple can use the device as the point of sale for content worth more than the device itself. The leverage is linked - the first leads to market presence, and then the market presence makes for stronger monetization opportunities in the device-hosted channel.
The other interesting thing is that so many of those "apps" are really just web pages without a URL. Or books packaged as an app. In short, this is content that is abandoning the web to become a monetizable app.
History is never completely new and we've seen things like this happen before. Prior to the 1980's essentially all television was broadcast in the clear. An unconstrained distribution channel like broadcast TV could only be monetized through ad sales, but along came cable with its point-to-point wave guides and surprised consumers were suddenly faced with paying for access. HBO made the content "interesting" enough (i.e. soft porn in your living room), so lots of people did. Even more surprising, before long they were paying for the right to view ads too. In this analogy the Internet and commodity PC are broadcast TV, and the iPad and its app store are HBO over cable.
What happened next in cable is going to happen in computing too though if these device-specific distribution channels accumulate enough power. It wasn't long before HBO and Cinemax were signing exclusive content deals with the studios to lock up content on one network or the other. That left consumers in the odd position of having to pick the network with the studio deal they liked, or pay for both so that they could see any first run movie they were likely to want to see. iPad, Nook, Kindle, ... picture the day when you are sending your kid to school with one of each so that they can get access to all of their MacMillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Prentice Hall text books.
Who knows, if Apple's app store gets enough lock-in we may even see exclusive distribution deals on apps. Imagine Pandora strong armed into being only available on iPad/iPhone. That would be a new twist.
Ok, this is beginning to sound like a polemic and that's not really what I set out to do. Let me reel in and focus a bit. The Mac was a commodity platform. Anyone could write applications for it and distribute them in any way they saw fit, from physical packaging in a store to digital distribution online. Or you could just write something yourself and use it. The iPhone seemed a lot like a computer but "for the safety of the network" introduced a constrained software and content distribution channel that imposed checks, and perhaps more importantly, contingencies on a developer's right to distribution (i.e. they can be taken back).
The commodity PC had a good run but now we are finding ourselves in love with task-specific or content-oriented devices like the Kindle and iPad. And while they are attractive for their intended tasks, they come with a cost. They offer us a trade of task-specific design in exchange for important constraints on use and distribution of content. The iPad is essentially a "computer" at the technical level, but one that is intentionally constrained to be a delivery channel for content and applications from or via one company, Apple. You "own" the iPad, but ownership in this case means about as much as owning a television that can only be hooked up to the cable television network that sold it to you would mean. It's a fetishist's Minitel with brushed aluminum and a touch screen.
So where does Google and Android fit in to all of this? Well, it's hard to say. Android may yet win because it has an open platform and seeks leverage only in the old fashion way, the network effect connected to a profitable ad-delivering set of services. If that happens I'll probably write another polemic, slightly tweaked.
At low levels of market penetration maybe none of this matters. After all, we can still buy a laptop and stick Ubuntu on it. But before you decide it doesn't matter at all, ask yourself why there is no Tor client for the iPhone or iPad. Then ask yourself, even if there were one, how hard would it be for a pissed off government to use the many forms of leverage available to them to force Apple to remove it from any device deployed within their borders, or perhaps even within the borders of another country that annoys them.
Even that may be no big deal right now, there are still so many more open-platform personal computers out there. But that is changing and the "content creating" laptop may go the way of the desktop PC, reduced to serving niche developers and content creators, while mobile and task-specific devices (with all of their constraints and beholden to a few large companies with contingent power over anything deployed to them) become the primary way people interact online.
The iPad isn't a computer, it's a distribution channel
- Ted LouieThe iPad isn't a computer, it's a distribution channel
- Kenneth Younger
Three tech companies seem to come up over and over again. They’ve become the trinity of tech, at least as far as most IT consumers are concerned. They are Microsoft, its long-time rival Apple, and Google.
Both Apple and Microsoft are veterans, having started their operations in the 1970s and gone public in the 1980s. In IT, that’s a very long time ago. Just think about it, these two companies were part of the birth of personal computing!
We thought it would be interesting to see how their fortunes (as in “business success”) have changed through the years, and how Google, a much later arrival, compares.
We didn’t look at stock prices or anything that has a measure of speculation to it. No, we looked at cold, hard numbers: Revenue and Profit.
To get a feel for the momentum of history we collected numbers as far back as we could. The charts we’ve made for you go all the way back into the 1980s.
First let’s look at revenue, how much money these three companies have been pulling in through the years.
When you look at these charts, keep in mind that these numbers are all per year, not accumulated over time.
Now here’s an interesting observation: In the 1980s, Apple was a much bigger player than Microsoft in terms of revenue. Microsoft’s revenue didn’t pass Apple’s until the mid 1990s. However, look at how fast Apple’s revenue has been growing lately…
Then of course you have Google’s late but big-impact arrival (seen from its IPO in 2004). Google is a success that’s been pretty hard to miss, and here you can see the effect of that.
Now let’s look at the profits, which paint a different picture.
In terms of profit Apple was ahead of Microsoft in the 1980s, but was then passed and left behind. This chart actually reveals that Apple’s upswing the last few years is the first time the company’s profits have really taken off in a big way.
Another interesting observation is how closely the profits of Apple and Google match, even though Apple’s revenues are significantly higher. That’s impressive. Google, a company barely a decade old, is matching the profit of a company that not only has been around for a long time, but is now on a serious roll.
And then there’s the elephant in the room (almost literally). These charts show how Microsoft still towers over both Apple and Google when it comes to revenue and profit. Perhaps not so strange when you consider how big they are:
Now let’s examine each company a bit closer.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they know how to make money, and lots of it. The company that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world has managed to stay profitable every single year since 1985 (which is when they went public and our numbers start).
You can clearly see how Apple stumbled in the 1990s. The company was growing its revenue up until 1995, but profits didn’t really keep up and revenue started plummeting. Apple even started losing money for a while.
It’s no wonder Apple was desperate to get Steve Jobs back in 1997. Their revenues were going down, they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Apple needed to be saved. And now in retrospect we can see that after a few rough years, he did just that. Once Apple had gone through the initial fiddling with everything from introducing Mac OS X, switching to the Intel platform, and introducing the iPod, both revenue and profits started to soar. Apple is way bigger and way more successful now than the company has ever been.
Google’s graph shows how steadily the company has been growing. It’s been a model of profitability. Revenue has been rising rapidly, and so has profit.
The remarkable part is what we commented on earlier in this article, that Google is keeping up with Apple’s recent success and matching that company’s profits year by year.
Another interesting thing to look at, and that is partly revealed by the revenue/profit graphs we’ve shown, is how much of the revenue becomes profit. Here are the numbers for 2009:
Google and Microsoft are really close here, at just under 28%. Apple with its 17.8% lags behind, but it’s getting better. Go back just five years (to 2004) and Apple’s profit was just 5.2% of its revenue.
Microsoft is quite impressive in that through all the years it’s never gone below 20%. Ok, one exception: in 1985, Microsoft’s profit was “only” 18.8% of the revenue. On the other hand, it’s also gone as high as 40.4% (in 2000).
These days we are so used of thinking of Apple as the David to Microsoft’s Goliath, so it’s interesting to look back at a time when the situation was actually the opposite. Microsoft was a much smaller company than Apple back in the 1980s, and it wasn’t really until after its success with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 that the company really (really) started to approach its current Goliath status.
And consider this: Both Apple and Google have been growing both their revenues and profits at a much faster rate than Microsoft in the last few years. Is that a sign of things to come? Will Apple once more be a bigger company than Microsoft at some point in the future? Will Google?
Stranger things have happened.
Note: Apple’s IPO was all the way back in 1980. Microsoft on the other hand went public in 1986, and Google in 2004. In other words, the numbers we presented don’t go back to the absolute beginning of when these companies were founded. Just to be perfectly clear on that. 
And thank you WolframAlpha for making the data collection relatively painless.
great data and for now BillG and SteveB remain the Kings
- Thomas PowerThe money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today
- LouCypher
You Are Not a Gadget: The Continuing Case Against Web 2.0 http://bit.ly/acAJn6
Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of "virtual reality" in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book "a torrent of petty designs" and "freedom [...] more for machines than people."
Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."
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Many new iPad owners might object that they're a reduced person because of their new gadget. Nevertheless, Lanier offers an intriguing counterpoint to web 2.0 philosophies and so it's worth exploring that.
Lanier is of course just the latest in a long line of web 2.0 cynics. They range in quality from the sharp critiques of Nicholas Carr, to the sensationalistic rantings of Andrew Keen. Lanier is thankfully more akin to Carr, in that he's thought provoking and brings something new to the table.
Lanier's theories are intriguing and in some cases very compelling. However, ultimately I found his "manifesto" to be fragmentary and lacking a definitive conclusion. I was not entirely convinced by the end of the book - which is a problem, because a manifesto should ideally provoke further action from its readers.
Wikipedia comes in for the most criticism in the book, because it is written by an army of mostly anonymous people. Therefore, Lanier claims, Wikipedia stifles individual expression. According to Lanier, Wikipedia is "intellectual mob rule" and "seeks to erase point of view entirely." He goes so far as to call the individual voice "the opposite of wikiness."
Although this is an extreme view of Wikipedia, and wikis in general, I did find one point to be particularly compelling: Wikipedia dominates search results and for that reason it is suppressing individual voices. As Lanier put it, "Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy" - by putting Wikipedia results at or near the top of search results for millions of topics.
Other Web 2.0 stalwarts don't escape Lanier's withering gaze.
Facebook is criticized for encouraging people to create "standardized presences," due to its black and white categorizations of people. Later in the book Lanier writes that Facebook organizes people into "multiple-choice identities."
Blogs are also criticized, for their "standardized designs" that encourage "pseudonymity" in features like blog comments. Lanier doesn't highlight though that the rise of blogs and other social media websites have given a voice to hundreds of thousands of people, who were previously excluded from the mainstream media landscape because they didn't have access to an adequate publishing platform.
This is where I found myself most in disagreement with Lanier. Here is a highly intelligent and successful software architect, who hangs out with scientists and Internet intellectuals. Is it any wonder then that he is so gung-ho on individual expression? The people he associates with on a daily basis are the intellectual elite!
In my opinion Lanier is a bit too quick to dismiss the content of blogs and Twitter, simply because the design of those publishing platforms are "standardized." The design may well be standardized, but many people have created original and compelling content using these web 2.0 platforms. Even Lanier recognizes that if you look past the first layer of Wikipedia results in Google, you'll often find compelling individual voices.
Lanier's argument that web 2.0 designs "actively demand that people define themselves downward" is a compelling one. I agree that Wikipedia and Facebook both have significant flaws and that both are indeed contributing to a more standardized, less creative culture. In particular I am sympathetic to the notion that individual expression is suffering - every time I see an anonymous comment on ReadWriteWeb that is critical of something, I wince and immediately place less value on it than if the comment had a real name attached to it.
So, Lanier's concerns about the 'hive mind' and loss of individual expression are valid. He puts is rather poetically here:
"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush," he writes. "You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful."
However, I also think that Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 - that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.
Regardless of what you think of the resulting content - whether it's largely unoriginal, or the best of it gets lost in noise, or aggregators make "mush" of it - the fact that web 2.0 has democratized the publishing industry is something that should continue to be celebrated. Lanier's book tends to dismiss this blossoming of new media as simply the product of web 2.0 "standardized designs" - and that comes across as elitist and pompous.
Overall, You Are Not a Gadget is a thought provoking and compelling book. If, like me, you find yourself iPad-less this weekend, then I'd encourage you to spend some time consuming this book.
Discuss
You Are Not a Gadget: The Continuing Case Against Web 2.0
- Rob DianaRecent evidence suggests that bacteria in clouds may have evolved the ability to make it rain as a way of dispersing themselves around the globe.
Tags: biology weatherThe theory-called bioprecipitation-was pioneered by David Sands, a plant pathologist at Montana State University, in the 1980s. But little information existed on how the rainmaking bacteria moved through the atmosphere until Christner and his colleagues began their work in 2005. Sands told National Geographic News that the critters may even employ creative means of transportation: For instance, they could "ride piggyback" on pollen or insects. "We thought [the bacteria] were just plant pathogens [germs], but we found them in mountain lakes, in waterfalls, in Antarctica-they get around," Sands said.
This week, the IETF is holding its 77th meeting in Anaheim, California. Last year around this time, the IETF met in San Francisco, and the Internet Society took advantage of this large gathering of Internet engineers to promote IPv6 and tell us that that it's high time to trade in the dusty 1980s Internet Protocol for the shiny 1995 version. Tuesday, the news was that people are actually starting to heed the advice.
Geoff Huston of APNIC, the registry that gives out IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region, looked at various numbers that could tell us how much traction IPv6 is gaining. One metric that's easy to observe is the global routing table. After all, if you want people to reach your IP addresses, you'll have to tell them what those addresses are so packets can be routed in the right direction. This is done with the BGP routing protocol.
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