The PC is, and will continue to be, a device that augments an individual's mind.  It provides mental leverage.  It makes people more productive.  The PC also self selects users.  People who have a voracious appetite for extending and enhancing their minds use PCs. 

In this model, unutilized capacity is an anathema.   Spare processor cycles, unused storage space, and unused bandwidth are an invitation to expand a PC users mind.  Like an entrepreneur, the mind finds ways to fill or use this excess. This is perhaps why Americans have a love affair with the PC and have resisted using interactive phones. American's are entrepreneurs. To us, a smart phone looks like a child's toy when compared to the PC's power and capacity to extend the mind.

With this in mind, it's easy to see that the real driver behind the attack on digital media copyrights is the rapid expansion of storage space on PCs.  It is doubling faster than Moore's law.  The standard $2000 PC today sells with 120 Gb of storage space more than twice what was available on the standard PC last year at this time.   This unused space asks, no demands, to be filled.  What are people filling it with?  Music.  Movies.  Digital media.

The entertainment industries greatest fault is that it isn't finding ways to fill this unused capacity with their products.  They want to keep a system in place that slowly dribbles digital media to customers in a tightly managed way, in spite of the fact that customers demand, and can easily absorb, a firehose of digital media.  Until the entertainment industry finds a way to open the floodgates they will be the losers in this battle.  Personal leverage through the use of technology is the greatest trend of all time.  Fighting that is not just stupid, it's insane. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:25:31 PM    comment   

[CNET] Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of SAP says "This industry will not survive in the next 20 years with applications built by a few big companies," Plattner said during his keynote speech. "This industry will only survive if there is a community of developers building applications that can work together across many systems."

Ok. I agree that interop is a Good Thing. Somehow Plattner sounds quite like Dave when he tells the world, that SmallCo's will have to stand up and work together. Funny thing that Platter comes from one of the larger BigCos ...

I nevertheless believe that Plattner doesn't really care about interop. I guess his only challenge is to keep SAP sales in a market that's somewhat saturated - but ok, as long as his way to reaching the target is the same as ours, it's fine by me.

6:24:59 PM    comment   

.NET Remoting: Today Peter posted his Jabber channel for Remoting. It allows you to use the jabber instant messaging infrastructure for distributed applications. Cool stuff, indeed.

[...] special thanks are due to Ingo Rammer for helping us out with some gnarly Remoting plumbing questions [...]. You're very welcome!

btw. I posted this about eight hours ago but somehow Radio didn't upstream it ... after restarting Radio right now, this and another post have simply vanished without traces. Mysterious.

6:22:23 PM    comment   

The history of how the cable empires were put together may be relevant to the current roll-out of 802.11b networks.  When cable rolled out, it was done on a town-by-town franchise basis.  Each town awarded a monopoly to a single provider because it didn't make sense to have duplicative infrastructure installed.  This resulted in a crazy patchwork of cable ownership with high percentage of the total cable infrastructure owned by local interests.  The cable empires we see today were built by acquiring each of these locally owned franchises one-by-one.   John Malone's TCI was built through over 500 of these acquisitions (without the benefit of an investment banker).   The deals that put Road Runner together (AOL's cable conglomerate of cable franchises) included a partnership with the Newhouse family.  It is the unwinding of this partnership that may cause AOL to lose 2.3 m subscribers. 

An interesting thought (pre-coffee):  what if AOL was run by John Malone? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:52:24 PM    comment   

>>>"But what's not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. We're doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. This will actually match the amount of progress we made in the whole 20th century, because we've been accelerating up to this point. The 20th century was like 25 years of change at today's rate of change. In the next 25 years we'll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we'll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century."<<<
4:13:31 PM    comment   

One of the reasons the time is ripe for Instant Outlining is that email has become so unusable due to spam. With I/O, you choose who to subscribe to. If they spam you, or you lose interest, unsubscribe. [Scripting News]
4:06:18 PM    comment