better than a t-shirt
June 2007 Archives
Even though I did recently join Facebook, I'm very much of the same opinion as Jason Kottke regarding Facebook vs. the Internet.
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007.
Facebook is the new AOL [kottke.org]
After avoiding it for some time, I am now on Facebook.
Note, I'm only friending people I've met IRL or people I've known online for a long time.
American rapper Kanye West, French house musicians Daft Punk (some of my favorite music) and imagery from Japan mixed together. Semi-interesting...
woo! (^-^)/
Of course the big news this week is Semel out at Yahoo! and Yang in as CEO. That topic has been over-analyzed to death and I don't have anything new to add to the discussion there.
What I'm sure no one noticed in the midst of the big news in Silicon Valley is that Paid Content reports that at long last Sony Connect is dead as a business.
Sony Connect To Close Music/Video Services; Focus on Servicing Playstation Group; 20 People To Go
And to add insult to injury, Sony's Japanese music service, Mora has been replaced by Apple's iTunes at Yahoo! Japan Music.
I've written a lot about Sony Connect over the years highlight all the problems with that business:
July 05, 2004 - Sony Connect FAQ
November 10, 2005 - Sony Connect Player 1.0 review
November 22, 2005 - Sony Connect Player fiasco
January 24, 2006 - Cleaning up after Sony Connect Player
April 26, 2006 - Sony Connect E.O.L.
To me, it's absolutely indicative of the malaise within Sony that Connect wasn't killed in mid-2006.
But really, no one cares about Sony anymore, because there's nothing to care about. Wii is killing PS3 in every market around the globe. the DS is killing the PSP in every market around the globe. Sony stock is up on account of Bravia, but "Bravia" is another name for "made by Samsung." Things may be turning around, and we're seeing desperately needed management changes, but I don't yet see new hit products to turn the tide.
Larry Lessig, probably most famous for starting the Creative Commons movement, has announced that he will be spending the next 10 years of his life investigating and trying to help solve problems around the corruption in politics. This is an incredible statement for many reasons.
I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.
I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That's true in this case.
Nor do I believe I have any magic bullet. Indeed, I am beginner. A significant chunk of the next ten years will be spent reading and studying the work of others. My hope is to build upon their work; I don't pretend to come with a revolution pre-baked.
Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of "corruption" as I've devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.
I think history has already shown that Lawrence Lessig is one of the most visionary of men alive today, especially when it comes to intellectual property and law. It's incredible to think he will be changing fields completely, to attack a problem even larger than the problem around copyrights, which is certainly large enough for one man or even one movement (Creative Commons.)
I think what is most impressive about Larry Lessig is his fearlessness. I wish him luck and hope there may be some way I can support his efforts in the future.
I love these kinds of Marxy posts- "your cool new trend is now a boom. Still love it?"
Profile of Japanese high-end denim in the NY Times: Out-Levi-ing Levi Strauss.
This is the kind of thing that is emblematic of Japanese kaizen: attention to detail, interest in authenticity/history, making the item even better than the non-Japanese original. Considering how much time I spend in denim, I do want to check out Hinoya Plus Mart.
Longish profile of Steve Jobs by John Heileman in New York Magazine: Steve Jobs in a Box.
Very nice vocal/deep house mix from DJ philE.
1. Ramus Faber Presents Apollo Vs. Melo - Divided / United (Interlude)
2. Ellectrika - Sunflower (Orienta-Rhythm Club Mix)
3. ElektroOrganik Feat. Christian Fontana - Revolutions (Roberto De Carlo Mother Funkin Mix)
4. Joshua Heath - Stradegy
5. Ralf Gum Feat. Akira Dee - Everything U R (Ralph Gum & Crisp Original Mix)
6. CityZen - Travel (Instrumental)
7. Francois DuBois - I Try (Jamie Anderson Remix)
8. DC Productions - Back 2 The Motherland (Los Dos Latinos Remix)
9. Funkelite - To Refuse
Who knows if this is true or not but it's certainly plausible and certainly entertaining.
Hello, I'm Amy Jiang. On the surface, I could be a poster woman for the face of modern China. I am a mostly successful 20-something, savvy English-fluent woman with international business experience as a buyer and translator. But the truth is that I'm currently working for shady Russian businessmen posing as legitimate buyers in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. And while much of Shenzhen seems occupied with smuggling counterfeit handbags and shoes to the west, Sacha and Bogdan, as we will call them, are preoccupied with smuggling more serious stuff.
...
Officially I work for a textile exporter that supplies a distributor in St. Petersburg with cut-rate Chinese lingerie, swimwear and sportswear. But even that side of the business gets complicated when Bogdan and his partner delay payments to the Chinese textile sellers in order to juggle the wobbly finances fueling their major unofficial business — shipping Shenzhen-manufactured counterfeit Nokia, Motorola and Samsung cell phone parts and accessories (cases, chargers, batteries, head sets) both in crates of Chinese-made clothing or simply the parts themselves in boxes marked with Cyrillic letters as “anything a customer wants to say it is,” according to a Chinese co-worker who handles the bulk of the several thousand phony phone parts shipped to Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Georgia per month.
I'm quoted in SFGate on a long-ish profile of .Asia, a new TLD that is coming in 2008.
My two quotes are:
".Asia will fill a niche for organizations that target 'Asia' as a whole or that are based in Asia," says Gen Kanai, a leading Tokyo-based blogger who has actively followed the DotAsia initiative. "A good example would be 'MTV Asia' or the 'Asian Games.' I'm sure there are numerous other examples of businesses or organizations who want to be larger than a specific country but not global."
and
"In sports and entertainment, there's evidence of a growing sense of 'Asia,'" says Gen Kanai. "There are competitions like the Asian Games that are focused on Asia as a region, and there are certainly entertainers that have expanded regionally out of their original countries -- good current examples are singers like Rain and Ayumi Hamasaki. Korean dramas are popular in Japan and China, and Japanese pop stars are often popular throughout Asia. It's not a science -- more of a global trend that's fueled by the ease with which media now travels."
I thought the article was well-balanced with both pro and con voices, and seemed to be pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
I have a post at MetaFilter for those who might be interested in da Vinci or Tokyo.
In 2003, I bought both a Powerbook G4 as well as a Shuttle XPC which was semi-hand-built (semi in the sense that the Shuttle machines already come configured with a lot of options and one only has to had a CPU, HDD, RAM, CDROM, etc.)
My Powerbook gets daily use as my personal machine. I hadn't booted my Shuttle in probably... a year?
So today I hauled it out of the box, configured it with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and tried to get it going. No luck. 2-3 hrs of chkdsk, Windows Restore, and lots of other crap, and nothing. It was running fine when I boxed it up, but today I got errors which basically meant that I had to reinstall Windows. That's fine because I have my data on the D drive. So I reinstalled Windows. Cue another 1-2 hrs for that, plus installing some drivers from Shuttle. Now it doesn't recognize the mouse or keyboard, nor the Ethernet.
I'm ready to junk this thing. I just need to delete the data on the HDD.
I'm not sure why I wanted to try to use the Shuttle. It was a waste of much of my Sunday. I won't make that mistake again. My next computer will be a new Powerbook to replace my G4.
One of the things I love about being in Japan is being able to have excellent sushi. I don't go very often, but when I do go to sushi, I'll either go to a local place that's very good and not cheap, or I'll go with friends who are visiting to Tsukiji. So I was a bit blase when I saw folks on MeFi going gaga over this piece by Nick Tosches on Tsukiji. But after reading it, I am impressed.
Letter from Tokyo - If You Knew Sushi (vanityfair.com)
My favorite deep house DJ has a new mix out - Sky Blue.
Sky Blue
Deep House: 2007.05
Tracklisting
01: Nomad – When A Love Walked In [New World Records Japan]
02: Esperanza – Corners [Iwani Music]
03: Anthony Nicholson – Twisted Energy [NiteGrooves]
04: Pops Mohamed – Code 2005 (DJ Christos & Blackcoffee Remix) [Soul Natives Music]
05: Glenn Lewis feat. Mjojo and Bongani – Life Everlasting (Dennis Ferrer’s Passion of C Dub) [Funk La Planet]
06: Lusito Quintero – Aquilas Coisas Todas (EOL Mix) [Vega Records]
07: Graceland feat. Billie – Just A Little Bit (Dub) [Osiris Music]
08: Blaze Productions presents James Toney Jr. Project – Lovely Ones (Shelter Deep Vocal Mix) [Life Line Records]
09: Lisa Shaw – Think My Heart Is Telling On Me (Restless Soul Mix) [Sonar Kollective]
10: Spin Science – Fill Your Soul (Remix) [Cabrio Records]
11: Ronin – Luxuru [Driftwood]
12: The Nature Soul EP – River Benue (Ibadan Dub) [Ibadan Records]
Wow. Very nice day for StumbleUpon. I hope they remember that they got popular on the platform that is Mozilla and Firefox.
I'm with Ken Worsley. Don't lie to me, Miki Tanikawa of the IHT.
Headlines on Japan that Make you Laugh: Japanese companies embrace diversity
Can this really happen via the US-Korea Free Trade Act?
awesome.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. Pinktentacle is quickly becoming daily reading for me.
Very funny post from Joey deVilla
I just wish I had bought AAPL at $22 (that's what I remember the price being at when I switched from XP to OS X.)
Ev writes about why Obvious Corp. is raising a VC round for Twitter. It will be interesting to see who they end up with. I would imagine that the list of firms they are speaking to would be fascinating.
Danny Choo expands his closet.
Expect to see more Darth Vader in Tokyo.
This is not news to anyone who reads my blog but here it is directly from Steve Jobs. Hardware is a commodity. It is software which is the differentiator. Software is what separated the iPod from the rest of the pack. No one in Asia, certainly not Japan, which is the home of consumer electronics manufacturing, has the software skills to compete with the likes of Apple. I don't know how Asia (as a whole) would be able to make up the difference in software development vs. the West.
Kara: How do you look at Microsoft from an Apple perspective? I mean, you compete in computers and…Walt: I mean, you can say you don’t compete, you know, the era of destructive whatever, whatever you said in 1997, but you think–you’re consciously aware of what they’re doing with Windows, you followed Vista closely, I think.
Steve: You know, what’s really interesting is–and we talked about this earlier today–if you look at the reason that the iPod exists and the Apple’s in that marketplace, it’s because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn’t do the appropriate software, couldn’t conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod’s really just software. It’s software in the iPod itself, it’s software on the PC or the Mac, and it’s software in the cloud for the store. And it’s in a beautiful box, but it’s software. If you look at what a Mac is, it’s OS X, right? It’s in a beautiful box, but it’s OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it’s software.
And so the big secret about Apple, of course–not-so-big secret maybe–is that Apple views itself as a software company and there aren’t very many software companies left, and Microsoft is a software company. And so, you know, we look at what they do and we think some of it’s really great, and we think a little bit of it’s competitive and most of it’s not. You know, we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80% of the PC market. You know, we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple’s fundamentally a software company and there’s not a lot of us left and Microsoft’s one of them.
This is a little 'inside baseball' but it was kinda funny to watch Stephen Colbert make fun of open source software during his introduction of Viacom CEO, Philippe Dauman, at the D Conference.
