Author: Serkadis

Nintendo might not have plans of slugging it out in the 3D gaming market just yet, but they do have plans of taking the Wii into another plane. This week saw two more institutions, schools specifically, will

One of the things commonly repeated when talking about the PlayStation Move is that it’s basically a souped-up Wiimote. There’s also a lot of wonder when it comes to how core gamers would receive the new controller,

Updated daily: Articles from external newswires filtered for the keyword “Haiti”… more

Firefox may be the most popular browser around, as long as we leave out Internet Explorer, which probably isn’t that fair, but, for some time, it has seemed to be lagging behind Google Chrome when it comes to new features and development momentum. Maybe Chrome’s break-neck release cycle makes it look like it’s adding new features f… (read more)

Capcom’s back with another eye candy of a trailer for Super Street Fighter IV. This one’s much in the meat, with both the beautiful cinematics, a montage of the fighters’ special attacks, and a run-down of the

from narconews, 2 April 2010: “The invitation reads, “We propose a coming together, a convergence, to which we can all bring: our histories, what makes us difference, and our dreams.” And in February 2010, rebel voices from throughout the world came together in East Harlem, New York at the Third New York City Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement. Hosted by Movement for Justice in El Barrio (Movement), more than 200 people and 40 organizations joined the gathering…” more

from qwertyuiop, 1 Apri 2010: “Did anyone notice the summer of rage? Like all British summers, it was disappointingly non-existent: a few letters in the guardian, a climate camp of Cath Kidston tents and, to top it all, hardly a day of sun. At the beginning of the year, the forecast was hopeful. We were told we were in the midst of a crisis…” more

from email, 29 March 2010: “The Stockholm Programme, the latest in a series of EU agreements on security policy, was endorsed in December 2009. Based on the “principle of availability”, the Programme plans to enable the cross-border collection, processing and sharing of data on a massive scale. Supposedly promoting “openness and security”, it is a further step towards a hi-tech Fortress Europe…” more

In so many ways, God of War III is a straight up bloody masterpiece as it is. The artists at the Nucleus gallery think so too. In fact, they liked it so much that they have a

Thanks to Mike Hubbard for the info that Bob Partridge, the Editor of Ancient Egypt magazine, is to appear on BBC1’s “The One Show” on Monday 5th April at 7:00 pm.

Mike is sorry about the suddenness of this message, but they have only just now found out when Bob’s interview will be broadcast.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Article Tags: ClimateGate

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

Life has become “awful” for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming.

Those days are now gone.

Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the “Climategate” affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.

His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. “We know where you live,” his detractors taunt.

Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.

Click source to read FULL report

Source: spiegel.de

Read in full with comments »   

The media has been making a huge deal about how the iPad is supposed to “save the business,” because suddenly everything will return to apps, and people pay for apps, and toss in a big dose of “Steve Jobs!” and there’s some sort of magic formula which includes some question marks and inevitably ends in profit! Now, the iPad does look like a nice device, and I have no doubt that it will do quite well for Apple, and many buyers will be quite happy with it. But it’s not going to save the media business in any way, shape or form. It’s just the media chasing a rainbow in search of gold that doesn’t exist.

A few months back, I tried to ask a simple question that we still haven’t received a good answer to: all of these media companies, thinking that iPad apps are somehow revolutionary, don’t explain why they never put that same functionality online. They could. But didn’t. There’s nothing special about the iPad that enables functionality you couldn’t do elsewhere. But, it goes deeper than that. People are being taken down by app madness. Because the iPhone has sold a bunch of apps, suddenly old school media players are suddenly dreaming of the sorts of control they used to have, and pretending it can be replicated on the iPad. But that’s a big myth.

Danny O’Brien has a brilliant post on the similarities between the iPad and the CD-ROM. The CD-Rom was supposed to save old media (as the iPad is supposed to now) — but tried to do so mainly by trying to make the old format move to a digital world, by retaining the control, and by adding a little digital razzle dazzle. But what it failed to do was really enable what the technology allowed — and that was because what the technology allowed totally undercut the old business model.

The media is running to the iPad because they think it’s magically going to transport them back to a world where there is scarcity and they can charge ridiculous prices again. The Wall Street Journal, for example, is apparently offering an iPad app that’s more expensive per week than getting a combined subscription to both the paper version and the online version. There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here.

Cory Doctorow does a great job further unbundling this myth, by pointing out a key fallacy that many in the media are making: that the average consumer is as dumb as a doorknob and needs a super simplistic device to function:

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares.

In effect, the iPad, as beautifully designed as it is, is trying to take away many of the benefits and flexibility in digital computing these days. It’s trying to limit what you can do, because it thinks people want to be limited. And, while closed platforms often are great at the beginning to get people to move to something new, in the long run, they are regularly superseded by more open platforms.

But, as Cory points out, the whole interaction model of the iPad seems to have been developed with the mindset of the media companies, not the real end users:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Again, the beautiful design and the power of Apple/Steve Jobs to market the product will undoubtedly allow the product to do well initially. For Apple. But it’s not going to save the media industry… and it seems unlikely to be any more revolutionary in the long run than the CD-ROM was.

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By now, hopefully, you’ve seen that clip of comedian Louis CK on Conan O’Brien’s show (the old, old one) which went kinda viral, where Louis talks about how “everything is amazing and no one is happy”:

When I was a kid in the 1960s and we came back from a visit to my grandmother’s, my mother used to call my grandmother, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. It was important for my grandmother to know that we’d arrived home safely, but long-distance telephone calls were too expensive to indulge in unnecessarily. When I entered Vanderbilt University in 1971, my parents had to decide whether to pay for a telephone in my dorm room. They decided to do so, but most of the thoroughly upper-middle-class students on my floor did not have phones. Phones cost real money back then. Then came the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in 1984. Phone technology and competitive service provision exploded. In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.

Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon.  You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos — oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago.

But the point of the post is to question why some are now putting together an event about “Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible,” pointing out that it’s a bit silly to complain when you compare it to what we had.

It’s a really good point — but I have to admit I can see both sides to this argument. It’s the very fact that, even when we do amazing things, we can still see the faults with it and that drives us to keep improving and to keep innovating. It’s the very “culture of improvement” that drives growth and innovation. So, while I can agree that it’s sometimes a shame how much we feel a sense of entitlement towards making things better when those amazing things didn’t even exist just a few years ago, it’s hard not to sympathize with the feeling of wanting things to be even better.

And, by the way, I’m not alone in seeing both sides of all this. That Louis CK video at the top? The one where he mocks the guy sitting next to him on an airplane for getting upset that the WiFi in the sky suddenly stopped working? Yeah, he later admitted that it wasn’t someone sitting next to him, but himself getting pissed off at the WiFi not working, even though he didn’t even know in-flight WiFi existed until he got on the airplane. So yes, everything is amazing, and no one’s happy… but maybe that’s a good thing.

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If you’ve never seen Kevin Smith’s long, but quite funny, explanation of his week of making a documentary for Prince, it’s quite worth watching — just to get a sense of “Prince World” and the way Prince will have big ideas that he starts, but never does much to follow through on. With that as background, it’s really not surprising to read about the absolute disaster that his recent “fan club” business model experiment became:

The result, LotusFlow3r.com, resembled a galactic aquarium, featuring doodads like a rotating orb that played videos. The promise: fans who ponied up $77 for a year-long membership would receive the three new albums, plus an ensuing flow of exclusive content, like unreleased tracks and archival videos.

A year later, LotusFlow3r has gone dark, thousands of Prince’s fans are very annoyed and Clay has been dismissed from Prince’s kingdom almost as abruptly as he was invited in.

The mess got a lot more attention lately when a supposed “glitch” (uh, ok…) started automatically charging fans credit cards for membership renewals, despite the fact that the site had gone dormant and people had specifically asked not to have their membership renewed.

There was a point, a few years back, where it looked like Prince would be the first rockstar to really embrace these sorts of new business models. He definitely was doing all kinds of experiments that involved getting people to pay for scarcities, often while giving the music away for free. And many of the experiments looked like they were done in a way to better connect with fans. But it quickly became apparent that Prince was missing a big element in all of this, in that while he wanted to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy, he also wanted to be massively controlling about it.

The one thing that artists who are successfully embracing these models are discovering is that, in part, you have to go with the flow, and see where your fans take you. Part of the connecting is listening to the fans, rather than just telling them how they must enjoy your works. Prince has never been particularly good at that aspect of the fan relationship. We’ve talked about the value of improvisational business modeling, where you do regular experiments — and Prince certainly does that, but at no point does he seem to pay attention to how the fans react to the improvisations.

In the end, he seems entirely focused on his own whims, and while that may be entertaining for himself, it appears to be pissing off an awful lot of fans. If you’re Prince, and you’ve got fans to spare, perhaps that’s fine. But it’s hardly a model worth emulating.

But there’s a bigger point here as well. If you’re trying to use a CwF+RtB-style business model, you have to actually connect with fans in some manner. You can’t just leave them high and dry. Is that difficult? Sure. Does it take work? Absolutely. But isn’t that part of the point? The value that’s built up from genuine connections is what makes these business models work. Taking people’s money and then leaving them feeling empty handed may be the way the recording industry used to work, but it’s not the path forward.

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Nintendo blamed the lack of marketing support for the awful sales of Rockstar’s GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS, but Take Two thinks otherwise, citing the usual suspect, “piracy” and the weak demand for handheld software as

Filed under: New York Auto Show, Etc.

At many auto shows there are usually several hundred – if not thousand – images that we’ve taken that don’t make it into our posts. Sometimes we categorize them and create several themed galleries, other times we create megagalleries of all of the random sites from the auto show and the surrounding soirees, sights and scenery. New York 2010 was such a case.

At the 2010 New York International Auto Show, we saw some cars that we’ve lusted after before but now saw in a new light, race cars that didn’t necessarily deserve a separate post but still revved our engines, models who smiled just long enough to give us hope… for the future of the industry at least, and just random sights that helped create the overall atmosphere of excitement we felt at this year’s event.

While the number of press conferences seemed down, the number of debuts actually seemed to increase (see here). There wasn’t the sense of gloom and doom we’ve felt at other recent shows, the parties actually felt like celebrations for a change and the announcements didn’t sound like words of desperation. Perhaps it’s the spirit of the city that never sleeps, but New York 2010 seemed like a signal that the industry is really starting to make a turnaround. Click below to get started on your tour of the rest of the show’s random impressions.

New York 2010: Random sights from the Big Apple originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you only listened to the entertainment industry spokeslobbyists, you might think that Canada had no copyright/anti-counterfeiting laws at all. Europe is pushing for massive changes to Canadian copyright law via CETA, and the US entertainment industry insists that ACTA is needed to to drag Canada into the 21st century. Clearly, the laws must not exist. Except… Canada already does have copyright/counterfeiting laws in place, and they seem to work pretty well. Anshar points us to the news that existing laws were used to seize over a quarter of a million counterfeit DVDs. So, what, with CETA or ACTA it would have been half a million?

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