Ivory Terminal

 Last week, hulu.com was forced to remove Boxee media center compatibility. As someone currently calibrating my very first television (not a typo), I find this maddening.

Admittedly, my willingness to get a television centered on the fact that I could use it primarily as a large computer monitor. I imagine that computing/viewing will be about a four to one ratio. Personally, I have never been a cable television customer, and I do not intend to ever be one. To me, viewing Hulu content via Boxee would have added a set of eyeballs to Hulu content without taking away a customer from broadcast or cable television. It would have been a win for everyone. Little did I know that when I signed up for Hulu (after signing up for Boxee), the content stream already had a kill date.

The biggest advantage of Boxee is the easy interface with remote controls. I could use Boxee without having a keyboard and mouse on the couch, something rather important to me when watching content with other people. I have been busy ripping my movies (all owned) to a hard disk so they are all available on the panel.

I set up my media center around Boxee, not around Hulu, and I almost feel bad about punishing Hulu’s great model by no longer watching it. However, I just do not see myself breaking out the keyboard to access Hulu programming. I would like to have some space between myself and the keyboard when entertaining myself or others.

I realize that I am in a small minority being so averse to television, but I feel like it is worth mentioning that there are technologically inclined users with disposable income for whom Hulu via Boxee added net eyeballs with no corresponding loss to traditional broadcasting methods.

Related, it must be a humungous victory for Boxee, OSX, and Linux to have a media center that terrifies the broadcasters before even having a public Windows version. My guess is that anybody hacking an Apple TV (is there a use for them stock?) or creating a dedicated computer-based media center was probably not a huge cable customer in the first place, and in this case the content owners are angering an enthusiast market that will find a way around them out of spite in addition to necessity.

And now back to my regularly scheduled computer interface…

Previously, I wrote about how Facebook was becoming another Myspace, and it was time for the nerds to move on. Taking my own advice, I deleted both accounts today.

As when leaving a job, I thought for a moment about sending a mass message, but that seemed to be completely besides the point. I did use both services to keep up with marginal friends, mostly from previous geographic locations. In my haste, I will lose contact information for some of them, but I figure if they need me, I am easier to find than I would like to be, and if I truly need them and a search is not working, I can always write a mutual aquintance and get contact info.

The process was a little different for the two services, and I would give Facebook a win* **. Deleting a Myspace account was a surprisingly easy task. I think it shows how little money these sites make per user by how easy it is to delete. Try to do the same with a Verizon wireless account (still pending for me, and it is sure not making me want to use them ever again).

I am going to keep my Twitter account for now, figuring that it is good for most of what I used other social networks for, and Twitter is at least on the rise of the social network lifecycle.

*Only easy because instructions to permanently delete an account was the top FAQ after the privacy thing.

**Account is only deleted if one does not log into the service for 14 days, an impossibly long time in the virtual world.

My top reasons why Facebook is about to get paved over by easy-to-start more trendy competitors:

1.   The marginal facebook user knows less and less about computers. Once a social network expands beyond the college kids and the nerds this will always be true.  The people that originally made up the group to not necessarily want their every move broadcast to the linked world.  The feature allowing users to view albums of non-friends that friends are in was the end.

2.   Once social networks go public (shareholder public), they are required to (quickly) monetize a model with a very short halflife, made up of consumers who will revolt if you charge them a cent for the service.  Setting up the next twitter might take a couple of days and a couple of servers.  There are no barriers to entry and few paths to monetization.  This point is often expanded upon on this site when recommending that niche-market companies avoid growth-models that require them to abandon their enthusiast customer-base.

3.   The networking effect is not as pronounced as the economists think it is.  Having an extra 30 million users does not make the service more valuable to the people using social networks as semi-walled gardens, in fact, it makes it less so.  

4.  Facebook is making all of the same mistakes as myspace:

a.  Opening the doors to everyone (including 419 script-kiddies).  Hacked account-holders often do not come back, and requests for Western Union wires* piss off everyone. 

b.  Allowing increased customization (profiles are starting to look like old geocities flash sites and myspace pages [not flattering]). 

c.  Encouraging (paid and annoying) app development in an environment where everyone only wants to hear “free” or “easy”. 

d.  Allowing ever more intrusive ads to generate revenue, which turns off the desirable users.

e.  Datamining as a last resort to generate revenue, at which point the sophisticated users find the next social network where we are not getting annoyed by promoters.

 Citi broke the double-buck today, as the market considers nationalization. It looks as though Citi and Bank of America are both being viewed through the scope. This is certainly not comfortable, but it is likely time. These two monsters are managed by clueless and passive boards and some of the most arrogant executive leadership in power today. Things are not getting better.

When things first went south, BofA bit off CountryWide and Merrill Lynch, tasty uncooked morsels that simply expanded too much. Coming from the other direction, Citi made so many bad decisions that there is likely not a “turning point” to be found, although we will hear of claims of many in the coming years as the “Citi story” turns from that of a centuries-old banking conglomerate to case-studies designed to insert fear into the hearts of business students.

Burying the shells of these companies will likely be the first step to recovery, and will go a long way to showing “Wall Street” that the government does not exist to enable their tantrums. In percentage terms, those that bought Citi in 50’s will hardly notice the difference, but the speculators will get a proper spanking. I has been far too easy in the past few months to collect quick profits from insolvent companies when bailouts are announced, and wiping out some of the vultures (including myself) is in the long-run a positive move. It should not be simple to profit by temporarily throwing money behind companies that the investors believe to be insolvent, so in some ways a wipeout will be a return to normalcy.

Welcome to the weekend…

Disclosure: I still own a small position of Citi common equity, which I plan to take down like the band playing on the Titanic. I already have some Zimbabwean Currency, and I figure a Citi stock certificate would be nice to have when teaching some of the above-mentioned case studies.

Right now, Microsoft and Apple (and Linux and other OS friends) are busy working on their next-generation operating systems, seemingly focused on increased efficiency and communication among existing powerful components. These systems promise to unlock the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs. But there is an interesting place where MS and Apple diverge, and that is compatibility. Microsoft is looking backwards, creating a Windows 7 that will run more efficiently on any hardware that would run Vista (and probably some hardware that would not), including netbooks. Apple is taking the opposite approach, more or less requiring Intel processors (alienating many users of older Macs) and vastly preferring high-power GPUs, which is unfortunate for the legions of relatively new Macbook owners.

This divergence highlights the different schools of thought in each company. Microsoft is hoping for a knockout punch with 7, encouraging users of hardware old and new to upgrade via an individual or OEM fee. Apple, in the hardware business, is hoping that Snow Leopard will encourage users to upgrade their comparatively obsolete systems to new Apple-branded hardware. These two revenue models begin to explain Apple’s hostility towards netbooks.

To Microsoft, netbooks represent additional OEM fees, even if they are smaller on a per unit basis. An overly simplified model of Microsoft’s netbook-related revenue effect is: (Netbook OEM Fee * Number of Netbooks Sold to Users That Would Not Have Purchased a Full PC) – ((Full PC OEM Fee – Netbook OEM Fee) * Number of Users That Would Have Otherwise Purchased a Full PC). To Microsoft, even a healthy mix of both additional/new and cannibalized purchases will still likely result in increased revenue, especially when considering the world market.

To Apple, a cannibalization purchase would be much more costly, because they would lose hardware profits (very significant). However, there are still multiple ways for Apple to create a netbook-class computer while minimizing cannibalization. As mentioned before, an Apple tablet based on the iPhone operating system would be a logical progression. Something that looked like a Kindle with the interface of an iPhone would be a compelling product. Apple is of course not confined to Microsoft’s supposed netbook limitations, which would allow the OSX product touchscreen interfaces and superior hardware, an instant competitive advantage. Any device based on the iPhone would not be a serious competitor for a laptop, and would likely only encourage adoption of OSX.

These two philosophies will become more of an issue as netbooks continue to become more popular. Both companies (not to mention all of the PC hardware manufacturers) do not want to see netbooks become a dominant PC category, but I believe they need to explore innovative solutions to segregation instead of ignoring or crippling the category. In my mind, removing keyboards in favor of touchscreen inputs would be a logical progression and segregation. Maybe the one-button Macbook pictures circulated showed a netbook with one too many buttons, and it is time for life to imitate art.

As the British government should well know by now, the problem of hiring people who know what they’re talking about is that they tell you what you don’t want to hear.  

Chairman of the UK’s Government Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Proffessor David J Nutt, has advised the government to downgrade the legal classification of LSD and MDMA from Class A down to Class B.  In the US system, this would be tantamount to reducing these drugs from their current Schedule 1 status to a non-existant grey area between Schedule 2 and 3.

Side word; A quick search has left me without a cirriculum vitae for Dr. Nutt, but I have found evidence that he at least has had graduate students and he conducts research (gasp, shock).  You would think that being chairman of a nation’s governmental council would be enough of an indicator that you have the right stuff. But, you know government…

Some quick words on British and American drug policy and history:  Britain dropped marijuana from a Class B to a Class C drug, only to bring it up to Class B again this year (1/26/09).  In the United States, marijuana still stands tall next to all other drugz that DARE told you were bad, m’kay.  The legal classification for Meth Amphetamine, in both countries, defines it as being more safe than LSD and MDMA (Schedule 1 vs. 2; Class A vs. Class B).  Now, if you cook it in your basement, that’s a prison sentence.  But, if you get it in a schedule 2 pill, you’re in the clear, because of meth’s obvious beneficial medical properties…  Which, I might add, are totally more valid than psychologists recommendations for MDMA therapy for numerous disorders, most importantly PTSD.  I could explode over the court cases of good people apparently doing the wrong thing But, the ACMD gives me hope that government will pay attention to reality over ignorance.

Happy 1234567890!

The past few days have brought the world a couple of celebrity mishaps; Michael Phelps getting photographed supposedly engaging in drug use, and Chris Brown (who?) running into a domestic violence issue.

I find the reactions of the sponsors interesting. Both situations are less than ideal for the sponsors, but Phelps appears to have weathered the storm without long-term issue, while Brown is being booted from the world of celebrity endorsements.

I imagine the dataset for celebrity improprieties and subsequent endorsement changes would be relatively small (would there be a separate category for things like kidnapping with a samurai sword?), but I think it would be interesting to see if there was a significant difference between corporate penalties for drug use and violence as a whole.

Outside of the regimented and often odd world of law, the change in sponsorship, interview schedule, and so on might tell us something about our society’s true opinions regarding drug use.

The new limit for the C-class at some of the United State’s least popular companies.  Any additional compensation will be withheld until funds are paid back with interest.

The CEO’s might stay, but I would guess that a policy that actually has teeth will lead to some retiring CFO’s, and an exodus of people that rode down with the companies while in charge of profitable divisions.  The jar has been shaken, we will see if they fight…

The past few years, at many different venues, I have driven a car to a parking lot mostly populated by the same cars that arrive approximately the same time each day. The same group of people then populate one or more buildings.

What I find interesting is that those people park in vastly different locations every day, but end up in the identical workstation/office/class seat. In a conventional office, the interior seating is obviously regulated, but in a classroom, there are often no assigned seats.

Each day, in offices or classrooms, the population parks in a radically different fashion, and then heads to their destination to sit in what is likely the same place every day, mandated or not. It appears that many park in the closest available parking space, the “efficient” space. Because of that conventional behavior, I am curious why the same people do not find the “efficient” seat.

The only difference I have found is in graduate classes in economics, where after daily lectures about efficiency, the students occasionally switch seating arrangements.  Everyone notices this, and even comments on how out of the ordinary it is, supporting that a constant seating arrangement is almost assumed by our culture.

My hypothesis would be that cars are impersonal, and each person feels anonymous in the parking lot, comfortably taking the closest spot. However, in the public classroom environment, where anonymity is unavailable, a social order is unconsciously created.

Given a large budget, experimental group, and lack of more important research, it would be interesting to create a few twenty person classes, give everyone a car, and release them from a location different from the classroom in a random order. I would assume that the group would park differently every day, and sit in similar locations. Upgrading to a controlled release, where each group member was allowed to enter the parking lot in the same order every day, I predict the cars would tighten up.

The fun would begin with a second group, which would have cars with a facial photograph on the hood, each door, and the trunk. I would hope to see that a random order release would result in a parking lot like the unmarked controlled release, and the controlled release would result in a parking pattern as consistent as the classroom pattern.

The point? Something about how anonymity leads to a looser structure. This is why I did not specialize in psychology. I just wish I could park in the same parking lot (let alone parking space) going to the same place with the same people each day. There is nothing resembling a capacity problem. I would wrap my car if it would take care of it…