NBC Universal’s boss Jeff Zucker is angry. He only made 15mio USD from sales over iTunes last year. There are plenty of postings on the Internets, reporting (German) on this.

I see 2 arguments there:

• Apple doesn’t want to share it’s hardware revenues with NBC and is “freeriding” on NBC’s content and
• Apple is refusing to adapt it’s fixed pricing scheme of 1.99$ per TV show to allow some to be sold at a higher (not at a lower) price.

I don’t know whether I should start laughing or crying first. I don’t know if all the reportings are true, but if yes, then some people have lost contact to reality.

“Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content.” Why the heck should Apple hand out a share of its hardware sales to NBC? Is it only fair that consumers should pay twice for each content now? And does Siemens pay me for my phone calls which might get routed through Siemens-installed hardware at some Telecoms switchboard? Heck, they are freeriding on my content, on my conversations, so I think I deserve something back.
This argumentation only makes sense in some parallel universe which is actually orthogonal to our world.

The second issue makes more sense. NBC wants flexible pricing, but iTunes strategy is a simple pricing model. This is a free world and if that is Apple’s strategy, it’s their right to stick to that. If NBC doesn’t want to provide their valuable content (some of the shows they want priced higher are aired for free over US tv channels) to Apple under these conditions, they should simply not offer it through them, that is their right too. But since when is it deemed only fair that one side of the value chain can negotiate flexible prices? I can’t remember last time I could negotiate the price of a Music CD in a shop either.

If Music companies still don’t understand that times of automatic and absurdlyconveniently high margins are over, they should start taking some courses somewhere, quickly. And quotes like the following “we know that Apple destroy the music industry -concerning prices- and if we don’t take control, they will do the same to videos.” (freely translated from the German Spiegel article) seem to indicate that Mr Zucker did not understand yet that not Apple is responsible for decreased profits of the incumbants in the music industry.

P.S. This is my private personal rant and has got nothing to do with my employer.

I am not satisfied with the state of bibliographic software on our Macs. If we used WinWord there were a number of plugins that allowed us to interact with both open source bibliography managers and commercial ones such as Endnote. But writing on OpenOffice/NeoOffice doesn’t work out well because there is no support. The included bibliography features in OpenOffice just don’t cut it, and solutions such as bibus don’t work on Mac yet (plus development seems to have stalled). So far I keep my references in a bibtex database, using jabref and that works OK, but doesn’t allow the automatic creation of reference lists. And honestly, I am not sure the development of jabref progresses quickly enough to satisfy my needs in the mid-term future. This is nothing against jabref development, but I am not sure their needs equal mine.

I now rediscovered Zotero which is “a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.” This is a Firefox add-on (working on Linux/Win/Mac) which provides a bibliography manager.

Zotero as part of a Firefox window

Even better it offers a plugin for OpenOffice/NeoOffice which allows to insert citations and automatically create reference lists. Apparently the reference list output format can be adapted using some citation style language.

Neooffice plugin

I’ll keep a close look on Zotero, but if it works well, this might just have been what I was looking for. Now if there were some possibility to even share references within a team, that would be perfect :-).

A posting by LWN highlights an Linuxwatch report on an article in eweek that reports findings on a study by IDG. (credit where credit is due :-)).

Der Spiegel berichtet heute über den “erfolgreichen” Streik der GDL. Ich bin an beiden vergangenen Streiks zufällig in Deutschland Zug gefahren und musste Verspätungen und Komplikationen in Kauf nehmen. I am not amused!

Es geht den deutschen Lokführern nicht allzuschlecht, und Ihnen wird eine (durchaus beachtliche) Lohnerhöhung angeboten, gleichermassen wie andere Bahnangestellte auch. Grundsätzlich bin ich ein Freund von Gewerkschaften und bin sicher wir lebten noch vom Frondienst, falls es keine Gewerkschaften gäbe. Aber ich finde es eine Frechheit, dass man, getrieben von Egomanie, Starrsinn und Grössenwahn, auf Forderungen beharrt, die unrealistisch sind.

So etwas kann auch nach hinten los gehen. Ich jedenfalls bin sauer auf die GDL und nicht auf die Bahn. Und an Stelle des Bahnmanagements wäre das ein Grund für mich, die Entwicklung Lokführerfreier Züge zu forcieren.

I am back from a nice family weekend in Frankfurt. I never thought of Frankfurt as a pretty or interesting city, but it actually is. It is good to get away from your regular day-to-day business and spend some family-time. That is what we try to do each year in a different place. Although I had caught a cold, it was nice exploring Frankfurt, drinking “Äppelwoi” and just catching up with the family in general.

We also went to the cinema and watched “Die drei Räuber”, an animation film, based on a 1960’s children book by Tomi Ungerer, which my brother helped to produce. It is a good movie, with lots of fun details added. It’s told in a slow fashion though, not action packed. I wonder if children are still used – and can stand – such a quiet way of narrating a story. One of my favorites is the sountrack, it’s been composed by “Bananafishbones” and is very catchy.

Short (randomly gogled) review (German) here. The German magazine “Der Stern” also has a favorible review (including Song text). The Internet Movie Data Base website has some basic infos, but is still awaiting 5 votes, so if you have seen the film, go and rate it.

Ebook downloads

• http://manybooks.net Ebooks in many formats
• http://www.gutenberg.org 20,000 PD books, in txt format
• http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/ 4,000 PD books, German, in txt (and other) formats
• http://www.feedbooks.com/
  Ebooks and web conversion tool
• http://www.baen.com/library/
  Free Science Fiction books
• http://www.archive.org Free texts
• http://www.wowio.com Legal free commercial ebooks

Two articles in the BBC on machinima:

Machinima waits to go mainstream by Peter Price

The Machinima festival was held in Leicester

Falling somewhere between film, animation and gaming, machinima is the art of producing films using graphics rendered by computer games.

Hot picks: Machinima by Tracy Harwood

Manager Machinima Festival Europe 07

The Festival was the first in Europe dedicated to machinima
Machinima is a medium that has come of age….

I recently ordered the new Sony PRS-505 ebook reader. It has a e-ink display that only uses power when turning pages and supposedly has a resolution that equals paper print. I hope that the paperless office comes a step closer with this one, as I still rpefer printouts to reading on screen.

What is interesting, but not advertized, that little gadget is based on Linux as well. If you have a look at Sony’s Linux website, offering downloads for used open source software, you’ll be amazed how many of its products are based on some GPL’ed software.

There is – obviously – already a hacker community around that little thing, improving it in unknown and unintended ways. They are adding new file formats and other cool stuff.

It is getting closer!!! Exiting:

10/18/2007
9:21 am	With delivery courier.   	Zurich, Switzerland
8:52 am	Arrived at DHL facility.   	Zurich, Switzerland
7:26 am	Depart Facility   	Basel, Switzerland
6:01 am	Clearance processing complete   	Basel, Switzerland
6:01 am	Processing for clearance   	Basel, Switzerland
6:00 am	Transit through DHL facility   	Basel, Switzerland
3:38 am	Depart Facility   	Brussels, Belgium
10/17/2007
10:21 pm	Transit through DHL facility   	Brussels, Belgium
10:28 am	Depart Facility   	New York City Gateway, NY
 4:45 am	Depart Facility   	Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH
10/16/2007
11:01 pm	Depart Facility   	Pinellas Park, FL
8:07 pm	Depart Facility   	Bradenton, FL
2:32 pm	Shipment picked up   	Bradenton, FL

This is just a post-it to myself…

Captive portals are used to authenticate WLAN users. Two open source projects found in a quick desk research:

Chillispot
WifiDog

This (free) documentary, called code breakers, shows the benefits of Linux and FOSS ( Free and open-source software) for development countries.

From their website:

The Team of independend producers visited nearly 12 Countries worldwide to see how the adoption of FOSS presents opportunities for industry and capacity development, software piracy reduction, and localization and customization for diverse cultural and development needs.

Stories from The Codebreakers include computer and Internet access for school children in Africa, reaching the poor in Brazil, tortoise breeding programmes in the Galapagos, connecting villages in Spain, and disaster management in Sri Lanka. The documentary also includes interviews from key figures around the world.

Production company: UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme, International Development Research Centre of Canada and UNESCO, The International Open Source Network (IOSN)