Month: April 2003

Crazy week

Lots of things going on this week that will probably keep my blogging to a minimum. While I’m sidelined, check out any of the fine folks in the blogroll.

Happy birthday, TJ

Thomas Jefferson was born 260 years ago today in my home state of Virginia. Ten years ago, I spent the day at Monticello with the Virginia Glee Club, singing on the Today Show (and standing at a urinal next to Willard Scott, but that’s another story (and, speaking of other stories—Aven, if you have the photo of Stancil, Tyler and Scott holding Katie Couric aloft as she wears her VMHLB cap, I’d pay money for a scanned copy!)), before riding on a bus to Washington to sing at a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial and shake Bill Clinton’s hand.

For those of you who don’t know who Thomas Jefferson is (e.g. apparently most members of the current Presidential administration and leaders of the Justice Department), he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, was ambassador to France, and founded the University of Virginia. Oh yeah and he was president too.

In the spirit of Jefferson, then, a few of his words:

  • “I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.”
  • “If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”
  • “I have much confidence that we shall [Col 2] proceed successfully for ages to come, and that, contrary to the principle of Montesquieu it will be seen that the larger the extent of country, the more firm its republican structure, if founded, not on conquest, but in principles of compact and equality.”
  • “The government of a nation may be usurped by the forcible intrusion of an individual into the throne. But to conquer its will, so as to rest the right on that, the only legitimate basis, requires long acquiescence and cessation of all opposition.”
  • “Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.”
  • “The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”
  • “It should ever be held in mind that insult and war are the consequences of a want of respectability in the national character.”

Oh, and check out this year’s winners of the Jefferson Muzzles awards, given to those who seek to abridge freedom of speech and press. This year’s awards included many of the usual suspects at this blog, including everyone’s favorite singing ex-senator, John Ashcroft—and the 107th US Congress, who passed the PATRIOT Act.

Follow up to Apple and Universal

Generally lots of positive follow up to the article I wrote Friday about Apple’s possible purchase of Universal. A few of the comments, and some of the other articles on the subject, touched on the one question I didn’t hit: digital rights management, or DRM.

DRM is technology intended to restrict access to digital content so that the rights of copyright holders are enforced. Unfortunately, most current implementations of DRM support the rights of the copyright owners to the detriment of the rights of the purchasers of the content. Apple, mercifully, has so far avoided the issue by implicitly encouraging the use of MP3 (a DRM-free music format) through products like iTunes and the iPod, rather than pushing a proprietary format which could be extended to restrict use of the content (e.g. Quicktime).

Emphasis on so far. If Apple purchases a major content provider, the temptation to go over to DRM may become too great to avoid. After all, it will have the bottom line of Universal to think about. Or will this be Apple’s opportunity to prove that a content business model without DRM can actually work?

God, I hope so.

Second career

This weekend, in summary:

  • Friday: Thanks to Dave, about a thousand hits to the article about Apple and Universal (more on that in a minute). That night: dinner party and wine tasting (thanks, Catherine and Peter!). Guests stayed until after 1, laughing and talking.
  • Saturday: brick laying (what a fabulous way to follow up a wine tasting party!). We dug out a pine-bark covered path, laid in sand, put the bricks down, poured more sand over the path, and swept the sand down into the gaps between the bricks. Then we both felt a disturbance in the Force: as though a thousand back muscle cells cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced. Afterwards we went to a friendís cocktail party and reawakened the muscle cells, only to put them asleep again with some great sangria.
  • Sunday: laundry and more bricklaying, this time the muddy path between our fence and the brick pad where the garbage cans rest. Then a quick trip with our friends to Molbakís, where we bought dill, marjoram, thyme, basil, rosemary, mint, camomile, and oregano for the garden. Then lawn mowing, grass seeding, flower plantingÖ and near total collapse, before rallying to make angel hair pasta with shrimp in olive oil and lemon, salmon with Thai herbs, asparagus, and new potatoes. Followed oddly enough by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Oy. I think Iíll give my second career as a garden maintenance guy a miss.

How was your weekend?

Apple and Universal?

The LA Times’s scoop on Apple’s reported negotiations to buy Universal Music Group had me shaking my head this morning as I drove in. What the heck is Jobs thinking, I wondered. So I ran down what I knew about Apple’s strategic situation:

  • Item. Apple has “miniscule” market share, in the words of the LA Times (greater than the share of BMW in the auto industry, but who’s counting?).
  • Item. Apple is betting that the future of the personal computer, its main product, is as the “digital hub,” the connected center for a set of digital media products including MP3 players, digital cameras (still and movie), and DVD burners.
  • Item. All of the things that plug into the digital hub rely on content to make them useful. For digital cameras and DVD burners, the user creates his own content. For MP3 players, someone else creates the content.
  • Item. The music industry is scared to death of what piracy will do to their bottom line and looks at MP3s as the instruments of their doom. They’re desperately trying to legislate digital media and space-shifting out of existence.
  • Inference. Apple is as desperate as everyone else in the hardware business about finding a recurring revenue stream. .Mac, its online subscription service for email, web page space, online backup, and related services, has apparently done pretty well, but overall its segment, which also includes boxed sales of Mac OS X, QuickTime licenses, and other software and Internet services products, is still a small portion of Apple’s revenue streams. Everything else is in hardware.
  • Scurrilous rumors. Apple has been rumored for months now to be in talks with the labels to start an online music service. Such a service would provide recurring revenue, assuming that people would actually pay for the content, and would theoretically drive demand for iPods and Mac hardware.
  • Item. The music industry has been seen as unlikely to let Apple have access to its catalog (though the LA Times article thinks otherwise). The CEO of Disney has accused Apple of encouraging piracy with its “rip, mix, burn” slogan.

That’s the situation. So why might Apple buy Universal?

  • Diversify away from hardware? If this is their only reason, it’s not a good one — not for shareholders with a basic understanding of portfolio theory and the poor history of conglomerates, anyway.
  • Content for its hypothetical music service? Possibly. But why does it need to do an acquisition to get that? Wouldn’t a JV be a reasonable alternative? Maybe not. After all, the music labels would have all the holdup and might be able to learn enough from Apple in the partnership to start their own service. Look what’s happening with Travelocity and Orbitz.
  • Leverage in the content creation space? Yeah, having a more direct relationship with artists and music producers would be a Good Thing. Why? Restoring credibility as the producer of the best hardware and software for audio creation. The Mac isn’t the only player in that game anymore, and I’m betting that getting XServes and Mac OS X into the music industry is potentially an important long term strategic move to keep one of the company’s historic core segments.
  • Opportunism? Definitely. Vivendi paid $34 billion for Seagram, the parent company of Universal and Polygram, a while back, but is now cash poor. It’s conceivable that the reported $6 billion price discussed in the LA Times article is a bargain.

Which brings us to the reality check. Wouldn’t acquiring one of the big five music groups make it that much harder to do business with the other four??? And the price…. $6 billion??? Come on. Look at Apple’s balance sheet, for crying out loud. All of Apple’s assets together are only worth (accounting value) $6.26 billion, of which only $4.4 billion is in ready cash or cash equivalents. Apple doesn’t have a lot of long term debt, but I can’t see it levering up to a minimum 33% debt for an acquisition in this economic climate. Not even for a make or break strategic move, which acquiring Universal isn’t.

Sayonara to sunset in the PATRIOT Act

LawMeme, riffing on NYT: Patriot Act may not ride off into the sunset. Summary: Orrin Hatch wants to do away with the “sunset provisions” of the Act, which put a five year time limit on the various flagrant Bill of Rights violations therein. As a parallel act, The Kyl-Schumer measure, currently approved by the Senate Judiciary committee and facing an uncertain future in the larger Senate, would eliminate the need to prove that a suspect is linked to a foreign agent or terrorist group when getting a secret warrant. This would eliminate the last vestiges of due process currently standing between the justice system and a world where warrants are easy to get and impossible to contest. I think it’s time to write your senators, folks.

The Year of RSS?

A slew of articles recently about RSS’s growing popularity:

Jon Udell in Infoworld points to an article about using RSS for corporate communications (including some excellent commentary, including the role of blogging in raising awareness about data that flows through RSS).

Jenny the Shifted Librarian writes about turning on the crowd at the Government Information Locator Service conference by discussing RSS’s role in making structured data of all kinds available. Her co-presenter, Ray Matthews, won an award from the CIO of Utah for his work in RSS advocacy.

Hmm. Add this to Don Box and the GotDotNet bloggers going through a public RSS lovefest, MSDN adding RSS support… it’s feeling like the Year of RSS, folks.

Burned by CAPPS

Farhad Manjoo in Salon: “‘Please step to the side, sir.’” Good article summarizing recent occurrences around airline screening, including newly-FOIA’d complaints of customers mistakenly profiled on the “no fly” blacklist. Also points to the MIT grad student paper on the flaws in CAPPS, which I had forgotten about. A nice complement to the earlier piece in the Data Mining Review that I wrote about last week.

Catching up: GetContentSize

Whew. A huge deliverable (far huger than it had to be) off my desk; a blocking task on three major objectives cleared; no meetings for the rest of the afternoon. There’s a lot of stuff going on in blogland right now that I want to note while I can.

First, the fun one: John Robb points to GetContentSize, which shows you how much stuff your readers have to download to get to your content (my interpretation). This blog (static version) is 36.13% content. By way of comparison, Slashdot is 28%; Scripting News is 29.89%; and John’s own weblog is 32.76%. By way of further comparison, Mark Pilgrim’s is 34.17%; I suspect it’s relatively low because Mark only has one article on his home page, meaning that there is a lot of header text etc. delivered for a single article payload.

Sayonara to sunset in the PATRIOT Act

LawMeme, riffing on NYT: Patriot Act may not ride off into the sunset. Summary: Orrin Hatch wants to do away with the “sunset provisions” of the Act, which put a five year time limit on the various flagrant Bill of Rights violations therein. As a parallel act, The Kyl-Schumer measure, currently approved by the Senate Judiciary committee and facing an uncertain future in the larger Senate, would eliminate the need to prove that a suspect is linked to a foreign agent or terrorist group when getting a secret warrant. This would eliminate the last vestiges of due process currently standing between the justice system and a world where warrants are easy to get and impossible to contest. I think it’s time to write your senators, folks.

Gems from Georgia

Greg’s been on fire this week, reporting on outrageous political news from all over, including:

  • Norm Coleman, the Republican senator elected to replace Paul Wellstone, dissing the late Democrat: “To be very blunt and God watch over Paul’s soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone”…
  • Putting the war in Iraq in its proper context: “it was never the first three weeks, or three months, that worried me. It was the first three years of discovering festering, unintended consequences of conquest—or, God help us, the first three decades”…
  • and my favorite of this week, providing eyewitness testimony to the filibuster of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus to block further efforts at bringing Confederate symbolism back to the Georgia state flag, effectively killing the legislation: “Payback’s a mother, ain’t it?”

Anyway. Work has gotten hellish and my own blogging is falling off, but Greg is burning up. So go read.