Nothing to see here

Sometimes I write a more or less complete post, just to realise it’s not really saying what I want it to say, or it is just plain bad. Instead of going over it to try and try to fix it, I post something else completely, or just delete it. To conclude this rant, here are some words from such a deleted post: This is a bad attitude!

Videogames and too strict gun laws

I have sympathy with the people who need to find someone to blame. Who in their mourning tries to find answers to impossible questions. It is human nature. With 32 people left dead by a student at Virginia Tech and many more wounded, there is going to be a mountain of grief and sorrow to get by. A mountain that will cast a shadow on VT for a very long time after the eyes of the media turns elsewhere.

But, please, spare me of the people using the tragedy as a means to promote their personal agenda. Yes, Jack Thompson, I’m talking about you. Yes, Dr. Phil, I’m talking about you. Yes, Larry Pratt, I’m talking about you. Jack Thompson – the lawyer on a one man crusade to rid the world of videogames – was quick to lay the blame for the shootings on videogames. Dr. Phil – never one to shy away from free publicity – did the same thing as Thomson, with the typical Dr. Phil wording.

Then there is Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, who as a response to claims that gun laws in the US should be reviewed as a cause of the shootings, managed to come up with something along the lines of: “If everyone on campus had a gun, the gunman would have been shot before he could have loosed a single bullet.” Those were not the words he used, of course, but these are: “The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation’s schools at the mercy of madmen.”

The sad part is that they might get more fuel to their fire as more information is disclosed. My stereotypical image of a young South Korean (the shooter moved to the US from South Korea at the age of 8), is a person with an above interest in new technology and videogames. I fear that a connection will be easy to establish – too easy perhaps?
 

I’m an IT-investor

And I didn’t even know it. Vodafone? Yup. Microsoft? You bet. Nokia? Samsung? Ericsson? Yup, yup, yup. Google? Certainly!

So how did I find this out all of a sudden? I read it on the internet of course! At the end of 2006 the Government Pension Fund was worth a staggering 1.748bn NOK, with around 724bn invested in stocks. Of those 724bn around 9% is placed in IT stocks. The Norwegian financial newspaper Finansavisen has done some number crunching and come out with the stakes each Norwegian has of the ten biggest IT companies the fund has invested in:

• Vodafone Group - 993 NOK
  
• Microsoft Corp. - 740 NOK
  
• Telefonica - 654 NOK
  
• Nokia Oyj - 625 NOK
  
• Sap AG - 560 NOK
  
• Ericsson - 537 NOK
  
• Google Inc - 488 NOK
  
• Samsung Electronics - 440 NOK
  
• Telecom Italia Spa- 430 NOK
  
• Deutsche Telecom AG - 424 NOK
  

Now it’s not like I have the option to take out the money any time soon, but it makes me feel good nonetheless...

(For those of you who care, the going rate for one USD is around 5.9 NOK and 8.1 for one Euro)

Via Dagens IT

“We don’t take kindly to your sorts around here”

MySpace: You can’t play in the sandbox with us!
Photobucket: Can too!
MySpace: No you can’t – it’s my sandbox!
Photobucket: But I want to play! And it’s my bucket!
MySpace: Take your bucket and find your own playground! Go away!
Photobucket: I’m not gonna!
MySpace: My dad is bigger than your dad!
Photobucket: Waaaaa! Waaaaa! Waaaa!
MySpace: You’re such a cry-baby.

So apparently MySpace told Photobucket to take a hike and find somewhere else to play. MySpace land is for MySpace people and not for strangers. The problem with this whole issue is that quite a few of the MySpace people also are Photobucket people. And alienating a large portion of the user base is not something to take lightly.

It is not like there is no alternative to the two sites. There are several sites out there that offer uploading, storing and sharing images. And not surprisingly MySpace is one of them. And new social networking sites spring up left, right and centre almost daily.

Photobucket has got 36 million registered users; MySpace is somewhere up in the 100 million plus range. Assuming that half of Photobuckets user base also have got a MySpace account then the number of shared accounts reaches 18 million. Assuming half of the people stay with MySpace and half with Photobucket the outcome looks grim for one of them. MySpace stands to loose 9 million accounts from the imagined scenario – something they would take in stride. Photobucket on the other hand stands to loose one quarter of their total user base. Not a fatal wound, probably, but a severe one nonetheless.

The above math is flawed. The number of shared accounts is taken out of thin air, and I have not taken into consideration the many people who will retain dual citizenship even after the content has been blocked. But flawed as it is, it is still clear who stands to loose the most on such an exclusion. Also, social networking sites are all about the people in them. And there MySpace is unparalleled by its sheer number of people. “Switching storage facility or abandoning friends?” is an easy question when asked that way.

When this story first appeared on Digg there were quite a few (rash) people to comment on not to bite the hand that feeds you. But who’s feeding whom in this case? Is it MySpace with its hundred million plus users; or Photobucket with its thirty-something millions? It’s not so much biting the hand that feeds you, as it is the hand that stopped feeding – biting suddenly seems like a viable option.

So is YouTube next? If MySpace is intent on following this line of blocking content in favour of their own services, then things could point in that direction for sure (and YouTube has even been blocked in the past). But I can’t see it happening though, and there are a few things speak in favour of my point of view. One is YouTubes size. YouTube is in the video sharing world what MySpace is in the social networking world: the name everyone knows. While blocking out services like Imeem, Revver and Photobucket has had little impact on MySpace numbers, the same would (most likely) not be the case if blocking out one of the few sites out there that are bigger than MySpace.

Then there is the other part of it: Money. In August 2006 Google coughed up $900m for the rights to provide search and advertising in MySpace. And in October the same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65bn. As long as the deal between Google and MySpace stands, the services under the Google umbrella should be safe from harm.
  

Random musings

Earlier today, while watching a program on the Greatest Rock Anthems on Showtime (don’t ask), me and my flatmates got to wondering is any of today’s artists could gather a crowd like Queen did. And what concerts are the largest held (single concert, not a festival or world happening)? I decided to write a little bit on the subject

I had it all set up. I was going to write about how all the big names in music are gone. How none of today’s big names can really draw an audience like they used to do back in the days… Beatles drew a number of 55.600people at Shea Stadium back in 1965, and would have gotten many times more had the venue permitted it. The Rolling Stones drew two and three hundred thousand in the UK and US respectively back in 1969. Granted they were both free performances, but the numbers are still there.
Queen drew 72.000 people to Wembley Stadium two nights in a row in the summer of 1986 and under a moth later Knebworth Park got packed with 120.000 people who got to experience the group’s final live performance with Freddy Mercury on the stage. Not to mention the 325.000 people the group drew at the Rio Rock Festival early in ’85.

I had it all lined up and ready to go. Who can draw those numbers today? What band is big enough that people are more than willing to stay all the way in the back at Wembley just for the possibility to say “I was there when they played that time”? There are some names that draw such a crowd I’m sure – U2 is one that springs to mind. And there are probably others that have the name to draw such crowds all by themselves.

There is a ‘but’: A huge, friggin giant of a ‘but’. Look up a bit and see if you can connect a name and a place. If not I’ll give you a hint: the year is 2006.

The Rolling Stones, Rio de Janeiro, 2006: Estimated one-point-five-million people present.

(Yes it was a free concert. Yes they are oldies. Yes only paying attendants should count. But it is 1.5m people at a single location gathered to see one band. I have nothing)

…If you were wondering: Queen – We Will Rock You won the title of Greatest Rock Anthem…

Link Hike

Sometimes I follow links just to see where it takes me. And no, I don’t mean I follow the links that tell me that I can get free Viagra if I only fill in my credit card and personal information, or the ones that tell me that I can help launder money for a rich Nigerian mobster who is not really a mobster but the heir to a fortune that only he knows about. No one follows those, right?

Today one of those link hikes got me to an article on dinosaurs. Now for those of you who remember back to my post on blogs that I read, you might remember that I tend to stop by blogs that are well written: and this one is no exception.

What the Discovery Channel Doesn’t Tell You About Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are more famous now than when they were alive and ruled the planet. They are the Elvis of the Animal Kingdom. This is in large part to the Discovery Channel which promotes and disseminates a pro-Dinosaur agenda nearly 24 hours a day. Surely, no advertisers are demanding this content. The target audience is extinct after all. Who is really behind this Paleozoic propaganda and what are they not telling you?

Internet Zillionaire has been added to both my bookmark folder and the list to the right. Go read! It will be time well spent. I promise
 

So I dropped my computer…

from about table height down to a very hard and unforgiving floor. And it didn’t like it very much. At all. So it shut down in protest.

After refitting the parts that fell off (part of a USB port and the IR-port cover), I tried to turn it on – no luck. No lights were lit, including the one indicating charging. So naturally the next step was to check if the battery was loose. It wasn’t, but I took it out anyway just to be sure. After refitting the battery I tried the power button again. No luck.

At this point I started to get worried. Really worried. But I would not give up (partly because I had no battery on my iPod, had forgotten my charger at home and there was nothing good on TV. Normally I would have waited and hoped it had resolved itself by the time I got back to it). So with a little help from my trusty IKEA toolkit and a screwdriver that kinda sorta fit, I got the covers away from the RAM and HD slots.

It is virtually impossible for an untrained eye like mine to see if anything is broken on the two components, but I pried them out anyway to have a look. The both looked ok (meaning they were not broken in two or bent at funny angles) so I put them back in again: after a bit of trial and error and prying with the aforementioned screwdriver they slotted into place. You should think it is as easy to put them in as it was to take them out - but it never is.

At least now I know that I have a HD from Fujitsu and RAM from some manufacturer I had never heard of and have already forgotten…

After refitting the covers I tried the power button again. Lo and behold: it worked! My trusty old computer booted up, no problems. I love electronics that, when broken, gets fixed after looking sternly at the individual parts…

This was Saturday evening, and it still works. It’s as good today as the day I got it! Apart from a broken keyboard that had an unfortunate run-in with some coffee, cracked cover around the hinges and middle due to an unfortunate run-in with a shoe, partly busted audio out due to tripping over a headset cable and a partly busted USB port due to the mentioned run-in with the floor. But aside from those minor details it’s all good!

I should take better care of my computer...
 

The real Truman Show?

So I was going to write some words about justin.tv: the site that features 24 hour live coverage of the life of Justin Kev. But I’m really uninspired, so this will be short.

24 hour a day coverage of any one persons life is boring. I really don’t need to see Justin trying to install a printer for 10 minutes (something he has been doing while I am writing this).

I sort of get why he gets all the attention that he does. Having him appear on one show or other creates a fun segment for that show. Watching him sit in front of a computer for 10 minutes doing nothing is a totally different thing altogether.

I think I’ll skip this internet hype…