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Entries for September 2004
More evidence of a Google browser
Following up on last month’s speculation on Google building their own Web browser:
Last summer, Anil Dash suggested that it would be a good move for Google to develop a Google browser based on Mozilla. Give that kid a gold star because it looks more than plausible. Mozilla Developer Day 2004 was recently held at the Google Campus. Google is investing heavily in JavaScript-powered desktop-like web apps like Gmail and Blogger (the posting inferface is now WYSIWYG). Google could use their JavaScript expertise (in the form of Gmail ubercoder Chris Wetherell) to build Mozilla applications. Built-in blogging tools. Built-in Gmail tools. Built-in search tools. A search pane that watches what you’re browsing and suggests related pages and search queries or watches what you’re blogging and suggests related pages, news items, or emails you’ve written. Google Toolbar++. You get the idea.
On April 26, 2004, Google registered gbrowser.com. Here’s the relevent bit of the WHOIS for gbrowser.com:
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1278108)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 USDomain Name: gbrowser.com
Created on…………..: 2004-Apr-26.
Expires on…………..: 2006-Apr-26.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Apr-26 16:46:39.
Thanks to Dave for the tip. Additionally, this NY Post article notes that Google is hiring folks formerly of Microsoft’s IE team as well as other people that would be good bets to work on a browser.
Update: There was a bug in Mozilla’s bug tracking system that was closed because “this is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one.” More info at Blogzilla. Thx, Phil.
Movie listings
I’ve redesigned the movies section of this site. All Most of the movies I’ve seen since April 2003 are listed on one page with my rating and an excerpt of my review (if there is one). You can also view them sorted alphabetically and by rating. Ratings are color-coded…green means good, yellow means OK, and red means not-so-good. When I have something to say about a movie, it’ll appear as usual on the front page and on the movies page, but if I don’t, it’ll just be added to the movies page. Got rid of the monthly archive pages because they weren’t needed anymore. The design is a little unfinished, but it’s better to launch now than to tweak myself into paralysis. I’ll fix it later.
And of course, all this was done fairly easily with Movable Type and a few plugins (ExtraFields, Compare, MTSQL, and MTIfEmpty). I’m continually amazed at how flexible MT is. With all the plugins available for it now, it’s pretty much its own little scripting language/environment, which depending on your perspective, is either fantastic or so very wrong.
New trailer for The Incredibles. Can’t. Fricking. Wait.
Bad Beijing architecture. China’s visible growing pains.
NY Post on Google hires that point to a possible Google Browser. They don’t really call them “Nooglers”, do they? Does everything in Silicon Valley have to be so dorky?
The Tall Buildings exhibit at MoMA QNS. Went and checked this out today…very good. Better hurry if you’d like to see it; it closes on 9/27.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Sky Captain reminded me of the first Star Wars movie, which ordinarily wouldn’t be such a bad thing. However, the problem here is that Star Wars is almost thirty years old and very much belongs to that time. Sky Captain feels like a movie made in the late 70s that recalls the Flash Gordon space westerns of the 30s but using today’s special effects technology. That fits in well with the feeling of the movie itself, where we see the telegraph side-by-side with circa-2070 killer robots in late-30s NYC, but doesn’t help our enjoyment of the movie because we’ve seen all that before. To be sure, the visual effects in the film are great — but not moreso than those in Finding Nemo, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man 2, or any other recent film using extensive CGI — but in another parallel with Star Wars, Kerry Conran reminds me too much of George Lucas as a director…too much focus on the visual and not enough on the actors or emotional flow of the film.
Oblivion
Salon nails the gist of Oblivion:
With his new story collection, David Foster Wallace has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story — so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book’s reviews, few of his readers even realize that’s what these stories are.
Exactly right. It’s Stephen King for the literary crowd. In many of the stories, there’s always something lurking off frame…the oblivion, as it were. Wallace knows, as does Scott McCloud, that what happens between the frames makes the narrative. Wallace never shows us the monster…the reader just gets glimpses of its shadow and is left with a feeling of unease. As opposed to the horror movies of today with their gore and choreographed multimedia frights, the seeming normalcy of Wallace’s stories set the reader up for a later sense of discomfort.
Peter Jackson is giving everyone a behind the scenes look at King Kong. It’s a weblog without permalinks. How quaint!
Collection of senior photos found on the Web. I think I went to high school with most of these people.
Update on Postal Service (the band). “We made that record like two years ago and it’s still selling like crazy. I don’t really know why.”
George Lucas afraid of invisible piracy boogieman
Hollywood is living in some sort of fantasy land. George Lucas had this to say when questioned about why he moved up the release of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD (bold mine):
Just because the market has shifted so dramatically. A lot of people are getting very worried about piracy. That has really eaten dramatically into the sales. It really just came down to, there may not be a market when I wanted to bring it out, which was like, three years from now. So rather than just sit by and watch the whole thing fall apart, better to bring it out early and get it over with.
In the words of a famous sports announcer, let’s go the videotape. The Web site for the DVD Entertainment Group (their BOD is stocked with bigwigs from the large entertainment and electronics companies) states that “DVD [is] the fastest adopted consumer electronics product ever”. There have been literally thousands of news articles written about the explosive growth of DVD sales; here are some quotes from an article on the CBS News Web site (from 10/2003):
Home video sales now account for nearly 60 percent of Hollywood’s revenue. DVD sales are not only the fastest growing part of the movie business, they’re changing the way Hollywood does business.
He says DVD sales can save a film like “Dark Blue,” which pulled in a modest $9 million in theaters. “It actually did more revenues in DVD than it did at the box office,” says McGurk, because the DVD market is a man’s world.
Blockbuster films now often sell more than 10 million DVDs in the U.S. alone. And that’s at $20 a pop. And with DVD players still in only half of American homes, Hollywood believes those soaring sales will just get hotter still.
Finding Nemo grossed $320 million from DVD sales in 2003. “Consumers spend more money on the DVD version of almost every movie than they do on that same movie in theaters, including blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean” (USA Today). CNN/Money reports that the movie studios “pocket roughly 80 cents of every dollar on each DVD sold, a take well above the 50 cents for each dollar at the box office” and The Hollywood Reporter says that “studios are earning about 60% more upon initial release from video sales of theatrical feature films than they did during the VHS-only era”. So, not only are video sales up overall, DVDs are more profitable for the media companies than VHS or the box office.
And the future looks rosy as well. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a sample chapter of their Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2004-2008 report** online which says:
We project filmed entertainment spending in the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and Canada will rise at a 7.5 percent compound annual rate, reaching $108 billion in 2008 from $75.3 billion in 2003. EMEA will be the fastest-growing region, rising by 10.3 percent compounded annually to $36.9 billion in 2008 compared with $22.6 billion in 2003. The U.S. market will expand at a 6.3 percent rate, from $34.3 billion in 2003 to $46.6 billion in 2008. Spending in Asia/Pacific will increase from $13.3 billion to $17.3 billion in the five-year period, growing at a 5.4 percent compound annual rate. Filmed entertainment in Latin America will total $1.6 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 2003, representing a 4.6 percent gain compounded annually. Spending in Canada will rise from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008, 7.7 percent compounded annually.
This is anything but piracy “dramatically” eating into sales. Mr. Lucas, would you like to change your answer?
** The same report also says that “piracy will cut into spending, particularly on rental, with the most pronounced impact in Asia/Pacific and Latin America, although all regions will be affected”, but there is no evidence given. In fact, in all the articles I read, piracy was handled in a very hand-waving fashion with no numbers or evidence to back up claims.
The Sheboygan Museum of Art presents Abstract Expressionist Works by Miss Wensleydale’s Second Grade Class. “Seems just as good to us as anything in some fancy-dancy high-falooting snobby art museum.”
Stripped for parts, on organ donation. The cadaver of the donor is “the safest place to store body parts until surgeons are ready to use them”.
Interview with David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue
Olivier pointed me to this great interview with JetBlue CEO David Neeleman. I liked his take on unions:
Q: Would you resist a labor-organizing effort at JetBlue?
A: We would. I love American history, and I’ve studied it. I understand we had a big need for unions in this country. You basically had unscrupulous people who were building companies on the backs of their people without giving them health care and without giving them other benefits. They made them take on hazardous jobs and work long hours.
We aren’t one of those companies. We don’t do that to our people.
We don’t want a third party who may or may not have our best interests in mind or our crew members’ best interests in mind because they may be serving a union of one of our competitors. They are trying to equalize us and take away our competitive advantage.
We are just interested in dealing with the people we’re paying every day. We know federal law allows them to vote in a union at anytime, but we think we can resist that by talking to our own people and giving them enough upside.
I was also surprised at how open he was in discussing exactly how JetBlue is successful and will remain so. Quite refreshing. So many American companies think that their business plans are so special that they need to keep them a secret from everyone. But Neeleman realizes that while ideas are important, execution matters more. It’s one thing to say you’re going to hire the right people, focus on customer service, and offer better service at a lower price than your competitors, but actually doing it requires a commitment and skills that are impossible to duplicate having read a newspaper article.
What’s the origin of izzle?. Snoop Dizzle: “It’s a way of speaking that’s been around for years. It originated in Northern California.”
If you could fold a piece of paper in half 100 times, it would be as tall as the radius of the known universe. Scroll down to read about the hand-made noodles as well.
Giant robot in Times Square
When there’s a 40-foot tall robot in Times Square, even the most jaded New Yorkers gawk up at it like tourists. It was next to the Good Morning America studios; I think it’s a promotion for the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Belle de Jour quits writing her blog. “Don’t ever turn down pleasure because you were afraid of what other people might say”.
Hossein has a wrap-up on the crackdown on reformist Iranian bloggers. Lots of arrests and filtering going on.
Renaming NYC skyscrapers in light of the Freedom Tower’s 1776 feet. “Trump World Tower, 861ft: Paris Raped Again by Vikings World Tower (Vikings sack the city 845 AD, 856-7 AD, and again in 861 AD)”
iPod guilty pleasures
It’s only Wednesday, but we’re gonna have some Friday-grade fun anyway. I found this iPod guilty pleasures article wherein folks confess the most embarrassing songs on their iPods. Britney, the Carpenters, New Kids on the Block, and Air Supply are all mentioned. I don’t have it in front of me, but my iPod contains the likes of White Town (Your Woman), some post-Thriller Michael Jackson, White Zombie, Guns and Roses, and a bunch of trance that’s probably pretty cheesy and non-credible. After reading the article, I’m gonna have to put some Ace of Base on there at some point as well. How about you? Any dirty little secrets on your smooth white machine?
Ridiculous semi truck SUV. This should be illegal.
Stanley Milgram’s subway experiment, thirty years on. Asking people to give up their seats on the subway turned out to be more of an inconvenience for the person asking the question than for the person having to give up their seat.
Personality tests
In his article about personality tests for this week’s New Yorker (sadly, not online), Malcolm Gladwell offers a less-serious alternative to Myers-Briggs:
Once, for fun, a friend and I devised our own personality test. Like the M.B.T.I., it had four dimensions. The first is Canine/Feline. In romantic relationships, are you the pursuer, who runs happily to the door, tail wagging? Or are you the pursued? The second is More/Different. Is it your intellectual style to gather and master as much information as you can or make imaginative use of a discrete amount of information? The third is Insider/Outsider. Do you get along with your parents or do you define yourself outside your relationship with your mother and father? And finally, there is Nibbler/Gobbler. Do you work steadily, in small increments, or do everything at once, in a big gulp?
I think I’m pretty much a FDIN although I have definite M & G tendencies, along with a little bit of O. How about you? Also, crude poll time. It’s well known that there are really only two personality types: those who know their Myers-Briggs personality type by heart and those that do not. Which are you? (I only know the ‘I’ for sure because that’s a no brainer…dunno the rest.)
Quote of the day: “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” - Kristian Wilson, Nintendo VP, 1989. Link updated…the quote is fake.
Windows security checklist
A few months ago, a blogger at Everything Hurts (everythinghurts.com) posted a quick and very useful Windows security checklist. The site and the checklist have since disappeared, but I managed to find a copy of the original list which I have reproduced below in the hopes that it will help you out as it has several friends and coworkers. If your machine is being hosed by spyware, virii, and malicious popups, this list is a good place to start.
8 steps to better Windows security
1. Run Windows Update regularly.
2. Install ZoneAlarm (Firewall)
3. Buy and install NOD32 (Anti-Virus)
4. Install WinPatrol (Anti-Hijack)
5. Buy and install AdMuncher (Ad and Popup Blocker)
6. Install and run AdAware (Anti-Spyware)
7. Replace Internet Explorer and Outlook Express with Firefox & Thunderbird
8. Disable Autorun.
Thanks and apologies to the original author of this list.
US Open champ Roger Federer could be greatest player ever. He’s got lots of strengths and no major weaknesses.
Map of where spam is coming from. Info from Postini service indicates the most activity in the US, west-central Europe, Brazil, Korea, China, and Japan.
Socials & More