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Morning Lineup – July 20

4 comments

Unless you’ve been here already in the past 12 hours, you’ll be reading next about FossilMedic’s great memories of the first moon walk from 40 years ago.  And you’ll also be able to understand why he never received an invitation to join PETA.  To be honest with you, I can’t begin to remember what I was doing when Armstrong took that first step for everybody.  I don’t think I was working that night because I’m sure I would have been watching the tv if I was. 

I might have fallen asleep instead.  As I recall, they were taking an amazingly long time to deploy the ladder out of the landing “vehicle” and then they just watched out the door for a couple hours more to see if any wild creatures would come bounding out from behind a pile rocks.  I just don’t know.

*  *  *

Has the bloom started coming off of Kindle’s rose already?  Amazon.com really stirred up the troops late last week when they reached into customers’ Kindles and erased two books that some of them had purchased.  Apparently they had been sold without Amazon having established the rights to sell them.  The New York Times reported:  An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

kindle2-a-cnet

This is kind of weird.  If they had sold the paperback versions of the books, they certainly couldn’t sneak into your house while you’re sleeping and take them back.  But they have no hesitation to reach into your machine and taking something that you’ve paid for.  The publicity backlash Amazon has received over the weekend has mightily embarrassed them, however.  They are doing some fancy double-clutching and claiming that it was all a mistake and they shouldn’t have done it and, and, and….

What’s especially ironic is that one of the books they recalled was George Orwell’s 1984.  You’ll remember that it’s the one where Big Brother kept revising history by tearing out the only copy of an event and sending it into the “memory hole” where it was destroyed and never read again.  But you couple this stealthy electronic retrieval with their built-in restriction that won’t allow you to share your e-book with somebody else by “loaning” them your copy, and now people are realizing that they are not buying books after all.  They are merely paying for the privilege of reading them.  A privilege that can be revoked at any time.  They didn’t tell us that, did they?

We’d better get this equipment checked out now, ok?  No special downloading required.  I’ll get the coffee started.  See you back in the day room.

buckle-up-graphic

Posted by on July 20, 2009 • Filed under: morning lineup
  • Dal90

    Many of the, gosh I don’t even know what to call them anymore, companies are hot to send DVDs and Tivos the way the telegrams and answering machines — replace them with a vast collection of media stored on their network, accessible to their subscribers in multiple ways.

    Say you’re a Comcast subscriber, rather then worry about Tivo or waiting two days for the Netflix to arrive they want to deliver the movie to your home TV, your computer, through a wireless broadband network to your laptop, to your phone. Where I’ve been working the last few weeks they’ve done a demo involving pausing a movie on a TV cable box, and then picking up where you left off later on a iPhone logged into your account.

    While part of it is media rights management (i.e. copy protection) the consumer benefit is availability of shows when you want them, where you want…as long as you have a broadband internet connection which is where 90% of the U.S. population is at any given time.

    Take a look at Sprint — the old GTE is running away from the hardware / network side of their network as fast as they can. They just outsourced the old Sprint/Nextel network for the next 10 years to Erricson to operate and maintain for them. They only own 51% of their new network they’re building (the “4G” one), with Comcast and Google among the minority partners. Eventually you may see the “Comcast” and “Sprint” be more marketing brands over physical networks owned and operated by seperate companies. Or simply the Google brand…

    It’s going to be interesting. Penske is trying to do a similiar deal with Saturn — to decouple Saturn from manufacturing and be just a car design and marketing firm. This is already the norm for most computer companies — Cisco and Apple own few, if any, production manufacturing plants. They design and sell it, someone else builds it.

  • Dal90

    Many of the, gosh I don’t even know what to call them anymore, companies are hot to send DVDs and Tivos the way the telegrams and answering machines — replace them with a vast collection of media stored on their network, accessible to their subscribers in multiple ways.

    Say you’re a Comcast subscriber, rather then worry about Tivo or waiting two days for the Netflix to arrive they want to deliver the movie to your home TV, your computer, through a wireless broadband network to your laptop, to your phone. Where I’ve been working the last few weeks they’ve done a demo involving pausing a movie on a TV cable box, and then picking up where you left off later on a iPhone logged into your account.

    While part of it is media rights management (i.e. copy protection) the consumer benefit is availability of shows when you want them, where you want…as long as you have a broadband internet connection which is where 90% of the U.S. population is at any given time.

    Take a look at Sprint — the old GTE is running away from the hardware / network side of their network as fast as they can. They just outsourced the old Sprint/Nextel network for the next 10 years to Erricson to operate and maintain for them. They only own 51% of their new network they’re building (the “4G” one), with Comcast and Google among the minority partners. Eventually you may see the “Comcast” and “Sprint” be more marketing brands over physical networks owned and operated by seperate companies. Or simply the Google brand…

    It’s going to be interesting. Penske is trying to do a similiar deal with Saturn — to decouple Saturn from manufacturing and be just a car design and marketing firm. This is already the norm for most computer companies — Cisco and Apple own few, if any, production manufacturing plants. They design and sell it, someone else builds it.

  • Dal90

    That whole diatribe above relates to how Amazon’s Kindle is more a kin to a “lease” then a “purchase” of software. Planned obsolences, baby.

  • Dal90

    That whole diatribe above relates to how Amazon’s Kindle is more a kin to a “lease” then a “purchase” of software. Planned obsolences, baby.