Archive for November, 2005
No fun
Bloody hell, did I get out of the wrong side of the bed and wake up in the dark ages? From today’s Evening Times:
COUCH-potato Britons whose unhealthy lifestyles make them ill should be penalised when it comes to medical treatment, according to a new survey.
One in three people wants financial penalties slapped on people who smoke, drink and are obese.A severe one in 10 people in Britain takes the hard-line view that smokers and drinkers who become ill should be refused treatment altogether.
The study from Bupa also revealed 44% of Britons feel the Government should be most responsible for looking after their health.
Britons say they want more nannying from the Government on health advice, not less, with four in 10 wanting even more lifestyle guidance.
While three quarters believe the Government should introduce annual health screenings for all adults, almost half believe the taxes should rise on cigarettes and alcohol.
Another post about shoes
I was round at the in-laws a few weeks ago, and my wife and I were talking about going shopping. I mumbled something about looking for some work boots. “You don’t need any more shoes,” my wife pointed out. She’s right: I have far too many pairs of shoes, because I can’t resist a decent pair of clumpy boots.
My father-in-law overheard the conversation, and it piqued his interest. “So how many pairs of shoes do you have?” he asked. Not sure, I replied. More than ten, anyway. “Ten pairs? Ten pairs of shoes?” Yep. Probably more than that. “Jings! That’s a lot of shoes!” It is, yeah. “I’ve probably only got three pairs!”
I didn’t know it at the time, but my father-in-law had found a new obsession. He’s a great bloke - we get on like a house on fire - but from time to time he gets… ideas. And as I discovered this morning, his latest idea is shoes.
It turns out that my father-in-law has been asking everybody - family, friends, colleagues - how many pairs of shoes they own. Seven pairs. Ten pairs. Twelve pairs. The more he asked, the more he felt that his own shoe collection wasn’t big enough - so he decided to go shoe-shopping.
My father-in-law doesn’t shop like you or I would shop, because he has absolutely no patience. He tends to run into a shop, pick something at random, shout “that’s fine! Fine! Genuinely, it’s fine!” and thrust some money at the cashier before running out of the shop again.
So, he went shoe shopping yesterday. True to form, he ran into a shoe shop, grabbed the first pair of shoes he saw, tried them on, and bought them. He went home and showed his wife.
“They look awfully big,” she said.
“No, they’re fine. Genuinely, they’re fine. I’m fine!”
“Are you sure? Let’s see them on.”
So my father-in-law puts on the shoes. They’re big clown shoes, the tips extending in front of him like twin canoes. They’re clearly several sizes too big.
“See? They’re fine! Fine! Genuinely! They’re fine!”
My mother-in-law asks him to take off the shoes and let her have a look. He does, and she reaches into the shoes, removes all the paper stuffing, and gets him to put them on again.
“Jings! They’re too big!”
Firefox 1.5 (final) out
The site hasn’t been updated yet, but Firefox 1.5 is out of beta. If you’re running RC1 or RC2 you can get the final version via Help > Check For Updates.
Later that day…
Looks like I’ve been misinformed. While the About screen says it’s just Firefox 1.5, the site is listing it as RC3 - so it’s still not final.
iTunes prices to go up, says EMI boss
The boss of EMI says iTunes prices will have to go up, because the labels aren’t making enough money. According to the article:
Artists, represented by music publishers, take home only around 6 cents from every 99 cents sale, with recording rights holders earning around 65 cents.
By charging more, the labels will pay the artists more. But perhaps they should be trying to cut their costs to get the same end result.
Here’s an unlikely hero: ginger whinger Mick Hucknall of Simply Red. Where most acts get $0.06, Word magazine reports that Hucknall gets around ten times that amount. The difference? He’s no longer with a record label. SimplyRed.com is completely independent, so not only does Hucknall get the artist royalty, but he gets the record company slice too. That’s a lot of money.
What that means is: you can keep iTunes prices the same but make ten times the cash, simply by not re-signing your record deal when it expires.
Now, let’s say you’re Radiohead. You’re reaching the end of contract with your record label (I think, but I’m not sure, that Radiohead are currently between deals). Why bother re-signing for a paltry royalty rate when you can deal direct with iTunes and get all of the money, not just the little chunk left over after the label and distributors have taken their cut? You can jump off the album/tour/album bandwagon, do whatever the hell you like without interference, and make more money.
Record labels are important - without them, many bands wouldn’t break - but as Arctic Monkeys and the various MySpace bands are demonstrating, you can carve out a reasonable career without being on a label. At the other end of the scale, yer U2s, yer Radioheads, yer Robbie Williamses… do they really need record labels at all? The labels need them - the money from their sales pays for the next tier of bands, and a delayed Coldplay album is enough to make a label’s share price plummet - but do the big bands need the labels any more?
If I were the head of a major record label, I’d be absolutely crapping myself.
Blogrolling: bogroll?
Just a quickie: does anybody actually use the blogrolling links over there? —–>
The reason for the question is that the blogrolling code seriously slows down page load times, and I’m starting to think it’d make more sense to zap it and just link to things from the appropriate blog post. Would that be a bad thing?
Update: I’ve removed the links, which means this post makes even less sense than it originally did.
Technorati gets an update
Blog search engine Technorati has been given a damn good tweaking, and the most obvious difference is that it’s much, much faster than before. I’ve added its blog search to this humble tome, and so far the search speeds have been really impressive - particularly compared to Google which, for no apparent reason, seems to have stopped working on my site. Gaaaah.
Napster ups bitrates. Tough luck if you’ve already paid
I hate to say I told you so…
One of the things I don’t trust about digital downloads is the issue of quality: specifically, if you buy a not-great-quality 128Kbps file today because that’s all that’s available, what’s to stop the online shop from upping the bitrate a few months later to something more sensible - but charging full price if you want to upgrade?
So much for my cynicism. Microsoft Monitor reports that Napster US is upping the bitrate of its tracks from 128Kbps to 192Kbps. Guess what?
Napster customers with subscription accounts get the benefit of better quality with no loss. But people purchasing tracks, whether from Napster, iTunes or any other service, only have what they paid for. If the buying customer wants the higher-fidelity version, he or she has to pay up again.
Digital downloads: a big step backwards
There’s an interesting op-ed in today’s Register about the way in which digital downloads are sold in specific territories. The writer makes some good points:
In Australia, under current laws, if physical CDs were 55% more expensive in Australia than the US, or were unavailable in Australia, retailers could simply import them from the US and sell them locally. These rules don’t apply to the digital music market in Australia.
Effectively, the music industry has been able to resurrect territoriality. Territoriality was lost by record companies in Australia in the late 1990s when parallel imports were introduced. To some degree, territoriality was lost to in other countries when free trade agreements were executed allowing cheaper CDs to be imported from “low cost” countries.
With territoriality resurrected, consumers again face excessive prices and limited choice. Despite the atmosphere of free trade, local digital music re-sellers are protected from international competition, record company profits are maximised, and local consumers are left to watch other markets in envy.
…If an Oz consumer wants to access the US Napster, Wal-Mart or iTunes services why can’t he or she do it? For that matter - why can’t ANY international music consumers access ANY international music service? Or are we only supposed to enjoy the benefits of globalisation and the internet as a market without borders when the record companies and content re-sellers say it’s ok for us to do so?
I don’t understand the Evening Times
I’m baffled by the Evening Times web site, which takes a really weird approach to the Net (the Evening Times is Glasgow’s nightly newspaper).
It used to work like this: if you logged on after 2pm, you’d be able to read that day’s edition. If you logged on before 2pm, you’d still see the previous day’s edition.
A few months ago, that changed slightly - presumably to protect early evening sales. The update was moved to 5pm, so pre-5pm you had yesterday’s paper.
Now, it’s changed again. Updates are still at 5pm, but yesterday’s news is gone. Instead, you have a selection of today’s headlines, which won’t be clickable until 5pm.
I really don’t see the point. Either publish online or don’t: this “no content in the afternoons, not even old stuff” is just weird.
Is Sony stopping you from getting cheaper electronics?
This isn’t Sony’s month. According to the Register, Sony is one of several electronics firms that charges 10-15% more to web retailers than to high street shops. The article says:
This “dual pricing” strategy - designed to narrow the price differential between net and high street - was allegedly initiated by Sony and quickly adopted by other suppliers. Big-name retail chains have exerted pressure on the CE giants at a time of falling high street sales in the face of cut-price internet offers.
Online retailers have naturally cried foul and will meet today to decide whether to “name and shame” the guilty parties. Sony already faces Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and European Commission examination of its pricing strategy.
…Whatever the OFT decides in the matter, e-tailer spokesman James Roper, of the Independent Retail in Media Group, told The Times that manufacturers face a backlash from millions of online customers. “For the major brand which has instigated this policy, this appears to be an extremely risky step which will upset a lot of consumers,” he warned.