Odd Lots
- Yet another take on the Amazon vs. Hachette dust-up: The publishers contributed to Amazon’s monopsony power by demanding platform lock-in via Kindle DRM. And now they’re surprised that Amazon controls the ebook market. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Pete Albrecht sent word that some guys at the University of Rochester have figured out how to trap light in very small spaces for very long times, on the order of several nanoseconds. (This is a long, long time to be stuck in one place if you’re a photon.) It’s done with evolvable nanocavities–and that gives me an idea for a tech gimmick in my long-planned novel The Molten Flesh. So many novels, so little time…
- Related to the above: The reason I stopped working on The Molten Flesh three or four years back is that I ordered a used copy of the canonical biography of Oscar Wilde (who is a character in the story) and the book stank so badly of mold and mildew that I threw it out after sitting in a chair with it for about five minutes. Time to get another copy.
- Yet another reason not to bother with The Weather Chanel: WGN’s weather website is hugely better, doesn’t require Flash, and works nationally, not only in Chicago.
- Lazarus 1.2.4 has been released. Go get it.
- OMG! STORMY, have you been messing around in Nebraska again?
- Over at Fourmilab we have a superb scan of the 1930 Allied Radio catalog, which carried not only radios and parts but waffle irons, home movie projectors, coffee percolators, toasters, copper bowl heaters, electric hair curlers, and much else for the newly minted upper middle class. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
- One interesting thing about the radios in the Allied catalog above is that they’re shouting about screen grid tubes. Tetrodes were invented in 1919 and weren’t in mass production until the late 1920s. I’m guessing that tetrodes were what separated the extremely fussy triode-based radios of the 1920s from the turnkey appliance radios of the 1930s and beyond. What the tetrode began the pentode completed, of course, but the watershed year in appliance radio seems to have been 1930.
- Our current Pope has abandoned the bullet-proof Popemobile. It’s one step closer to the end of the Imperial Papacy.
- What dogs think of dog impersonators. Hey, man, the lack of a tail gives it all away…
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: dogs · ebooks · electronics · lazarus · nanotech · pascal · programming · publishing · radio · weather
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One of the links from the TechCrunch article is telling: Charles Stross pointed out the issue with publisher-demanded DRM enabling an Amazon monopsony nearly three years ago.
And, of course, DRM doesn’t actually reduce piracy; Stross found all his E-books in DRM-cracked form on BitTorrent.
Really, this is the same lesson the music industry learned when they insisted that iTunes incorporate DRM, and only later found out that Apple had them by the short hairs as a result.
Hell, I found a perfect print-image PDF of my third edition on Usenet and several pirate sites six weeks after the book came out. I can’t imagine how that wasn’t an inside job. And as Bruce Schneier pointed out what may have been fifteen or more years ago, a DRM system only has to be cracked once.
In the late 1920’s RCA’s patent monopoly was challenged by the Federal Trade Commission with the result that competitors could obtain licenses to use RCA’s patents on reasonable commercial terms.
It’s sad to see how polarized the situation has become.
On one side, there are customers who think everything should be “free”, and so will cheerfully download and copy every book, video, music and program they can get a hold of. They view the producers as rapacious robber barons that deserve to be cheated.
On the other side, you have huge companies that view their own customers at best as sheep to be fleeced, and at worst as fools or pirates. There are extremists on both sides, unwilling to treat the other fairly.
The patent and copyright situation is broken, and no one seems inclined to fix it.
How can we get back to some kind of “civil society” for publishing? I remember Ted Nelson imagining a system of micropayments for online content. Would that work?
To Lee’s comment above; I pick up a BD/DVD of some movie for the grandkids, but I want to put it on the tablet for them to watch on car rides. Per the MPAA rules, my ripping it (thank you MakeMKV & HandBrake) leaves me theoretically liable for $150K for breaking the dubious encryption to create an MP4, even if it never leaves my personal systems.
I have no problem with compensating authors/musicians/etc, but there should be *some* way of saying “I’ve already bought in , how do I get it in without having to pony up twice for the same content?”
Replacement last line: “I’ve already bought it, how do I get it in new-format without having to buy it all over again?” Should have known better than to angle-bracket stuff…
Re: light trapping
The figure in the article seems to indicate that the light is trapped in a 1 picometer region. Light travels about a foot (~0.3 m) in a nanosecond, so the photon bounces back and forth ~0.3×10^12 times in a nanosecond. Pretty good mirrors.
Re: the popemobile. IIRC it was adopted after a scum took some shots at the Pope. I think abandoning it is misguided populism by Pope Francis. If, God forbid, he is assassinated it will be huge setback for civilized people and lead to a lot more ‘tribalism’.