January 7, 2007
10 entries filed this day
The Virtue of Closed Platforms: Album Sales Slump while Ringtone Sales Soar
Editor · Platforms
From the Reuters article R&B sales slide alarms music biz we learn With the exception of new age, the smallest genre tracked by Nielsen SoundScan, R&B and rap suffered the biggest declines in 2006 of all styles of music. R&B, with album scans of 117 million units, was down 18.4% from 2005, while the rap subgenre's 59.5 million scans were down 20.7%. Total U.S. album sales fell 4.9% to 588.2 million units. Since 2000, total album sales have slid 25%, but R&B is down 41.4% and rap down 44.4%. In 2000, R&B accounted for 25.4% of total album sales, and rap 13.6%. In 2006, their respective shares fell to nearly 20% and 10%. ... Merchants point to large second-week declines in new albums. For example, Jay-Z's 2006 "Kingdom Come" album debuted with 680,000 units in its first week and then dropped nearly 80%, to almost 140,000 units. ... "Downloading and Internet file sharing is a problem and the labels are really late in fixing it," Czar Entertainment CEO and manager of the Game Jimmy Rosemond says. "With an artist like Game, his album leaked before it came out, and I had 4 million people downloading it." ... In 2006, the best-selling rap album was T.I.'s "King," which sold 1.6 million copies, while the best-selling R&B album was Beyonce's "B'Day," which moved 1.8 million units. But those are exceptions. ... A senior executive at one major label says ringtone revenue now exceeds track download revenue. And since Nielsen RingScan started tracking master ringtones in September, rap and R&B have comprised 87% of scans generated by the top 10 sellers.
Filed at 2:38am
Changes in storage architectures in the last 20 years
Editor · Storage
Do you remember what life was like twenty years ago? Some of you who are younger may have been sitting in front of your TV playing Super Mario. Those of you who were working in IT at that time were probably working with IBM Mainframe systems. A few of you were working on those new UNIX systems. PROFS was the email of the day.
Filed at 4:09am
Fashion Meets Storage
Editor · Data Management / Storage
An interesting article crossed the transom yesterday about storage getting an “image makeover.” I was intrigued by the title and decided to read the piece by AP.Seems that some vendors have come to the conclusion that storage is boring.
Filed at 10:49am
Pew on Social Networks: 7 out of 10 teens have non-public profiles
Editor · Intrusion Prevention / Security
This afternoon, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released data from their recent survey of teen Social Networks use . Needless to say, the data is very interesting, and offers data affirming some of the themes we're seeing in recent SNS research. danah has blogged her reaction to the data , and I'm sure this report will echo substantially through our corner of the blogosphere.
Filed at 5:38pm
Windows Home Server will live in your closet, simplify your life
Editor · Software Development / Storage
A show of hands: Who here among us is storing all of their important data (media and otherwise) in a safe location where it’s constantly accessible, as well as backed up to prevent loss? Not a lot of hands here at the 10 HQ, and probably not many of the rest of you.
Filed at 10:31pm
Sony adds RSS to televisions
Editor · Platforms
Sony's latest HDTVs will support an optional component capable of streaming Internet video and downloading content defined using RSS syndication. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link is a small optional module attached to the back of your HDTV and connected to your home broadband network over Ethernet. Price and availability are still unannounced, but the first televisions supporting the new module will be available this Spring.
Filed at 12:41am
Lunch with Bill Gates
Editor · Networking
Robert Scoble posts a video of a blogger lunch that he and a few others had with Bill Gates .
Filed at 12:59am
Wi-Fi Protected Setup Details Announced
Editor · Wireless
Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) will use push-button or PIN to simplify secure network setup: The Wi-Fi Alliance has rolled out its long-expected and openly discussed WPS system for its members to choose to implement and have certified as a component of their Wi-Fi devices. With WPS, a router can provide strong WPA/WPA2 encryption keys to client devices with the push of a button or the entry of a 4- or 8-digit personal identification number (PIN). The PIN can be generated by software or preprogrammed into a client device and printed on an included card. Push-button authentication will work essentially like Buffalo's AOSS method; PIN authentication like Atheros's JumpStart (which Atheros notes is compatible in version 2.0 with WPS).
Filed at 1:00am
How to Ship Code and Influence People
Editor · Software Development
In 1995 I was working for an AT&T spinoff, Unix System Labs, in the kernel group, but USL wasn't doing too well. It looked like Windows was winning the OS wars (remember those?) and was going to scrape Unix from the face of the earth. My buddy Tom had been trying to get me to come out to the west coast to work for Sun. He was working in a group that did network security. He said that it didn't matter what OS won, we'd always have network security to worry about. That made sense to me. He set up the interviews, and since I didn't know anything about security, told me told me to buy a copy of Applied Cryptography and read it before I got there. So I got hired into Sun's group developing firewalls and IP-level encryption. This was great work. Security is really intellectually challenging and rewarding. Little unseen errors in apparently simple code or protocols can lead to collapse of the entire system. Rigor and thought count. But commercially our group was a bust. In addition to our firewall product, the Sun sales force was reselling a third-party product too. And they seemed to like to sell the third party product better than Sun's homegrown one. We were also trying to sell an add-on security workstation package. The sales force didn't seem to think much of the commission on our $99 software bundle when they were pushing their multi-million dollar hardware orders. Furthermore, the US government didn't seem to want to let us sell our stuff. International sales of cryptographic products are regulated, since they're classified as "munitions". We had Swiss banks that wanted to buy our encrypting firewalls. We'd have to meet with the NSA to get export approval, but were never able to sell the full strength versions. There was a dark story about a rebuffed offer to include a backdoor in the crypto for the powers-that-be, which lead them to subsequently look on us unfavorably. We tried all sorts of shenanigans to loophole around these restrictions but it was an uphill battle. The final nail in the coffin came when Sun's crypto protocol lost out to another faction's in the IETF. I was just an engineer in this group, but the reality of what was happening in the market to our product line started to seep in. Here I was putting all of this effort into stuff that never would be used by anyone. It was still intellectually challenging...like doing crossword puzzles or something. But it had no utility to the world. I started to look around and I saw many other examples of groups working on stuff that no one would ever use or care about. Mobile IP initiatives, endless work around standards that nobody cared about, research from the labs that would never be applied or even cited. Yikes. I had written stuff that people actually used, before. It felt good. I had written a usenet newsreader that was used by hundreds of thousands of people. I was running an online game, as a commercial hobby on the side, which had several hundred paying customers. Sheesh, I thought. My side projects have more customers than my day job. So I made a simple resolution. I wanted to work on stuff that people would actually use. This sounds simple. But if you walk the halls of Sun, AOL, HP, IBM, AOL, Cisco, Siebel, Oracle, any university, many startups, and even Google and Yahoo, you'll find people working on stuff that isn't going to ship. Or that if it does ship, it won't be noticed, or won't move the needle. That's tragic. It's like writing a blog that nobody reads. :-) People make fun of bloggers who are writing "only for their mother". But what about the legion of programmers writing code paths that will never be traversed. Wasted effort! Some of that may be inevitable. You try experimental things. Sometimes they don't work. Everyone can't be maximally productive 100% of the time, so there may be lesser-value tasks that still keep the engine warm and have some marginal utility. But still. Evolutionarily, frustration is useful. It kicks us out of non-productive ruts. People should get frustrated more easily. Frustration should be driven by an awareness of futile effort. * * * Without business models, bizdev deals for distribution, and market economics that afford a place for your product, it doesn't matter how pretty the code is. Ugly code and awful products win all the time. From an engineering perspective, it's simply zooming out the field-of-view to include the entire market, including the users, competitors, and so on. They're part of the total engineering solution. If you've written an app with some web forms and a database, but you haven't solved the problem of how to get users to come to the web form, then you've left part of the problem unsolved. Greg Linden details some of the tricks that have been used by startups to get a leg up in a crowded world. He wonders if you have to be, perhaps, a little bit evil to have a hope. I'm not sure, but you should have some idea of how you're going to launch the bird, and the market and distribution economics that let it stay aloft. All of this is a long-winded way of explaining why I include all this gunk about network effects and switching costs and distribution and brand perception on my blog. Because the world, full of competitors and networked humans with their set of behavior patterns, is part of the spec. If you're designing a product, but don't understand how the system of networked humans will work around it, you really can't understand how your product will work either. No minute lost comes ever back again
Filed at 1:02am
Numerous Recent MOM 2005 Knowledge Base Articles
Editor · Patch Management
We've seen quite a large number of KB articles over the holiday week and into the new year. Here is a list for the last 2 weeks.
Filed at 1:22am
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