firehose

San Francisco Chronicle

Chicago Sun-Times Lays off Photography Staff ABC News The Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire full-time photography staff Thursday, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, in a move that the newspaper's management said resulted from a need to shift toward more online video. The union representing many of the ... Chicago Sun-Times lays off entire staff of photojournalistsTheCelebrityCafe.com Sun-Times photographer talks about being laid offChicago Daily Herald Union protests Chicago Sun-Times photo layoffsWilkes Barre Times-Leader all 62 news articles »

Coub lets users create looping videos up to 10 seconds in length using videos from Vimeo, YouTube, or their own work. The browser-based tool lets users edit the video loop and alter the music, and then share their catchy short video on Coub and other social networks.

Patrick Stewart's answer to a fan's question about his most important work outside of acting is something everyone should take some time to watch.

This is Part 2 of an exploration of what changes, if any, may be coming to TV. Yesterday I examined why cutting the cord yet keeping the shows you watch (i.e. unbundling) was a fantasy. Also, I should note that yesterday and today’s post are very US-centric; more on the international potential in Part 3

Pay-TV is a good deal for networks, cable companies, and users. It’s socialism that works.

But what about the content? Isn’t that the point? Free the content from the networks, and at last we can pay a nominal fee to watch what we want on any Internet-connected device.

Well, yes, it is about the content; in fact, it’s the content that, in my mind, protects the current system from being significantly disrupted.

Great content has low elasticity of substitution

Not all Pay-TV is created equal; while filler content is everywhere, it’s truly great content that drives affiliate fees. Look at the most expensive networks on a per-subscriber basis:

• Sports is obviously huge here. There is no substitute, and the affiliate fees reflect that
• Disney Channel and Nickelodeon have fantastic brands; Dora, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and Phineas and Ferb¹ are the Lakers, Yankees and Cowboys of kids programming
• TNT, USA, TBS and FX all have original programming with sizable fan bases, and TNT has the NBA
• FOX News has highly differentiated itself. I’ll leave it at that.

None of this content is easily substituted, which allows networks to increase affiliate fees, which serves to preserve the current system.

Great content production has a high barrier to entry

Sports is, once again, the obvious story here. There is a finite supply of programming, it is rarely time-shifted (which drives advertising dollars – see the right-side of the chart above), and it’s incredibly expensive. At the national level:

• $4.4 billion a year for NFL rights (beginning in 2014) link
• $930 million a year for NBA rights (contract ends in 2016) link
• $800 million a year for MLB rights (beginning in 2014) link

This doesn’t include the myriad of college sports, nor regional deals. It’s a lot of money that is directly connected to rising affiliate fees.

But great scripted programming is expensive as well. AMC pays an estimated $2.71 million for an episode of Mad Men, and Netflix paid $100 million for two 13-episode seasons of House of Cards (more on Netflix in a moment).

Anything that conceivably draws customers away from the pay-TV model will need to have compelling content, and said content has a very stiff price of entry.

Networks matter just as much as content

Several folks noted that yesterday’s post focused on networks, not shows.

An interesting economic analysis of cable – at the network level. Drop to the “show” level; does it still hold water? stratechery.com/2013/the-cord-…

— Paul Curcio (@pcurc) May 29, 2013

I think it does hold water, and I’d actually use Silicon Valley as the analogy: what makes Silicon Valley possible, and so hard to replicate, is not just the presence of startups or willing entrepreneurs; rather, the critical factor is Sand Hill Road. Angels and VCs with substantial war chests and the willingness to make ten deals knowing that nine will fail are essential to what makes the Valley go.

In the case of TV, networks are the VCs. They pay for expensive pilots and concepts, many of which don’t turn out, and bank on making money on the ones that do. They’re just as critical to great content creation as are the producers, directors, actors, etc. And networks love the affiliate system.

Netflix is just another network

Netflix famously pivoted from DVDs-by-mail to streaming, but that was only pivot number one. Pivot number two was their transformation from a content delivery provider to simply another network.

Think about it: Netflix invests millions of dollars in new TV shows to drive growth, and has reruns and old movies as filler. They’re HBO with a unique delivery system. Or, to fit the analogy, Netflix is just another VC, with a war chest built by a completely different business (the aforementioned discs-by-mail).

Netflix is unique, but ultimately uninteresting, and unlikely to be replicated.

YouTube is Kickstarter

One final analogy: just as Kickstarter lets entrepreneurs forego VCs, YouTube lets content creators forego networks. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the likelihood of a breakthrough hit is low, and if one were to occur, it would likely be snapped up by a network.

---

This is a three-part series.

• Part 1: The Cord-Cutting Fantasy. Getting only the content you want without paying for everything is a fantasy. Pay TV is socialism that works.
• Part 2: Why TV has resisted disruption. Great content is differentiated, has high barriers to entry, and depends on networks.
• Part 3: The Jobs TV Does. The key question is attention, not set top boxes. What jobs do we hire TV to do?

Also see Steve Jobs on TV, my Apple TV prediction, and my Additional Notes on TV

1. This originally said Phineas and Herb. Oops. Thanks to Mike Byrne for the correction

Last week I composed an email. I was trying to address a delicate situation and so finding the right words often takes several attempts. I wrote and rewrote the email several times before finally giving up and discussing the issue face to face. The message was never sent and was immediately discarded from the “Drafts” folder in my Gmail so imagine my horror when the downloaded MBOX contained this message. Not only that but nineteen different iterations of the email were saved and available for download from my account. Each iteration had a slightly different time-stamp associated. As I reviewed them in sequence I could see where I had written a something, then gone back and changed it upon review. So I had nineteen iterations of an email message that I had never sent or actively saved in my account. ///// Moreover I found that this was not only the case for unsent and discarded email. This was indeed the same for every email message that I had sent during that week. I could trace how each one of my emails was formed and edited before sending them on to their eventual destination. In one instance I found over 40 versions of the same email message. ///// Can you imagine a company executive writing an email message on a sensitive topic and then reviewing it several times before sending? Can someone really be held responsible for something they’ve written if those portions of the message were never actively saved or sent to any recipients? That argument is certainly for the courts to decide but it should worry everyone else in the mean time. The potential consequences are quite staggering. Why does Google need to keep this data? Why does unpublished/deleted material need to be discoverable? ///// Now, I understand that Gmail for businesses is handled somewhat differently to that of the ‘standard’ Gmail account but I have to wonder if Google stores this data for business accounts, is there any reason for it not to store the data from standard, free accounts? What data exists on GMail servers that you thought was long gone?

tastefullyoffensive:

Star Wars Yoga 

[youwillnotbelieve]

Beardydog writes "From the ReactOS.org bulletin, 'The ReactOS project is proud to announce the release of version 0.3.15. A culmination of over a year of development, 0.3.15 incorporates several architectural enhancements to create a more compatible and conformant implementation of the NT architecture. Perhaps the most user visible enhancement is initial support for USB devices, both storage and input.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Lochte is just barely a person. He is a walking treatise on bro culture: driven only by his basest impulses, no restraint, going hard, going big, getting your back, shredded abs, hot dog/penis jokes, iPhone pictures of friends mid-vomit.

The Fed has been pretty clear. The whole point of its plan to create new money and push it into the economy—quantitative easing—was to lower borrowing costs and raises the price of assets like houses and stocks.

And rise they have, especially stocks. The stock market is some 145% higher than it was during March 2009, some of the bleakest days following the financial crisis.

Risings stocks have done a lot of good. For one thing, the climbing market has done wonders for consumer sentiment over the last few years. That’s no small thing; consumer sentiment is closely tied to spending. And in the US, consumer activity accounts for roughly 70% of the economy. In short, if the consumer didn’t recover, neither would the US economy.

But for the record, feeling good doesn’t necessarily make you rich.

The cold hard fact is that the rich have benefitted the most from the Fed-fueled surge in stocks. Even the Fed says so.

In its annual report, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis looks at the net worth of American households and comes to this conclusion:

The recovery of wealth has not been uniform across families. Of the total recovery of $14.7 trillion between the first quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2012, $9.1 trillion, or 62 percent, of the gain was due to higher stock-market wealth. Stock wealth is unevenly held, with the vast majority of stocks owned by a relatively small number of wealthy families. Thus, most families have recovered much less than the average amount.

Roughly 50% of all US families hold stocks either directly or indirectly, according to the most recent 2010 edition of the Fed’s survey of consumer finances. (It conducts the survey every three years.) But among the richest 20% of American households, 91% hold stock. And they own a ton of it. The median value of the holdings among the richest 20% of families is $268,000, dwarfing the median $29,000 stock portfolio held by all US families.

In other words, there’s reason to be wary about assertions that the US consumer balance sheet is healing fast. St. Louis Fed economists use this chart, below, to argue that less affluent Americans still have a lot of healing to do.

nevver:

This is not a love song

niknak79:

why not zoidberg

gazpachoblog:

Me equivoqué de clase.

futsingaround:

HaVve YOU SEen my SoN?!?!

The family physician stopped accepting all forms of health insurance. In early 2013, Ciampi sent a letter to his patients informing them that he would no longer accept any kind of health coverage, both private and government-sponsored. Given that he was now asking patients to pay for his services out of pocket, he posted his prices on the practice’s website. ///// The change took effect April 1. ///// “It’s been almost unanimous that patients have expressed understanding at why I’m doing what I’m doing, although I’ve had many people leave the practice because they want to be covered by insurance, which is understandable,” Ciampi said. ///// Before the switch, Ciampi had about 2,000 patients. He lost several hundred, he said. Some patients with health coverage, faced with having to seek reimbursement themselves rather than through his office, bristled at the paperwork burden. ///// But the decision to do away with insurance allows Ciampi to practice medicine the way he sees fit, he said. Insurance companies no longer dictate how much he charges. He can offer discounts to patients struggling with their medical bills. He can make house calls.

retrogasm:

Keep dreaming toots…

Having a serial port on any Linux box is always useful, but with the tiny computers we’re carrying around in our pockets now, that isn’t always an option. Some of the more advanced phones out there break out a UART on their USB OTG port, but the designers of the Nexus 4 decided to do things differently. They chose to put the Nexus 4′s serial port on the mic and headphone input, and [Ryan] and [Josh] figured out how to access this port.

Basically, the Nexus 4 has a tiny bit of circuitry attached to the microphone input. If the Nexus detects more than 2.8 Volts on the mic, it switches over to a hardware UART, allowing everything from an Arduino to an old dumb terminal to access the port.

The guys used a USB to serial FTDI board wired up to a 3.5 mm jack with a few resistors to enable the hardware UART on their phone. With a small enclosure, they had a reasonably inexpensive way to enable a hardware serial port on a mobile device with GPS, cellular, a camera, and a whole bunch of other sensors that any portable project would love.

Filed under: Cellphone Hacks

Montreal Gazette

Toronto mayor loses two more staffers as crack scandal roils Reuters By Julie Gordon. TORONTO | Thu May 30, 2013 4:21pm EDT. TORONTO (Reuters) - Toronto Mayor Rob Ford lost two more staff members on Thursday, two weeks after allegations first surfaced that the leader of Canada's largest city was caught smoking ... Rob Ford crack video scandal: More staff quit mayor's officeToronto Star Toronto Mayor Loses 2 More Staffers in ScandalABC News Two more staff members from Mayor Rob Ford's office resignGlobe and Mail CBC.ca -Toronto Sun -Ottawa Citizen all 192 news articles »

A reader asked via email:

How do you store your coffee?

I get this question a lot.

Good coffee storage needs to be airtight in one direction — for the first day or two after roasting, the beans emit small amounts of carbon dioxide, so air should be able to escape whatever the beans are in. But to prevent early staleness, outside air shouldn’t be able to enter.

My solution is quite simple: since I roast my own, I just use zip-top valve bags from Sweet Maria’s, the same place I get unroasted beans.

If valve bags aren’t your thing, I also like the Airscape jars. I suggest getting the tall “64 ounce” size, though — the short “32 ounce” jar won’t hold a full pound of beans.¹

Proper storage will prevent the beans from going stale early, but they’ll still lose most of their flavor and settle into a dull, flat flavor profile by about two weeks after roasting. Refrigerating or freezing the beans doesn’t seem to extend this timeline and can introduce moisture in practice, so don’t do it — just put them in something airtight and leave them somewhere dark and dry, like a kitchen cabinet.

Because of that two-week flavor timeline, most storage tips only matter if you’re getting freshly roasted beans from home-roasting, a local roaster, or a fresh mail-order service such as Tonx.

If you’re buying beans from Starbucks or most grocery stores — yes, even Trader Joe’s (especially Trader Joe’s)² — they’ve probably been roasted more than two weeks ago, so the flavor has already become dull, and it doesn’t really matter what you put them in. Use whatever’s convenient.

WOBURN, MA—Local IT security firm Acronis International has organized an enjoyable little office party after work Thursday for staff members to get drunk and complain about their jobs, employees reported.

EDMOND, OK—Following weeks of deliberation during which he carefully considered what sort of life he wanted for himself, 4-month-old baby Nathan Reynolds announced Wednesday that he had decided to be homosexual. “I thought about it for a long ...

19 Tweets From The Audubon Society/Barack Obama Twitter Feud

Petraeus gets job with investment firm KKR York Daily Record FILE - In this Feb. 2, 2012 file photo, retired Army general and then-CIA Director David Petraeus testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington.Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. is appointing Petraeus as chairman of its newly created KKR Global Institute, the investment ... and more »

Adam Kokesh Calls Off Armed March On D.C. In Favor Of 50 State March For "Orderly Dissolution Of The Federal Government":

anticapitalist:

Adam Kokesh is cancelling his planned July 4 armed march on Washington, D.C., and instead calling for a march on all 50 state capitols with the goal of overthrowing the federal government.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(eyeroll) (pointing at image above) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: UNCLEAR-ON-THE-CONCEPT GUY

ETA: This guy needs to be sat down with his eyelids propped open like Alex in Clockwork Orange and made to watch Passport to Pimlico about ten thousand times. What, does he imagine that just on his say-so and a few hundred thousand peoples’ wishful thinking, the Freedom Fairy is going to descend in a cloud of sparkles from on high and magically render each and every state financially independent with a wave of her wand? HEH. (eyeroll)

Today, the ACLU announced that it is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility. The suit alleges that EMCF is "hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous." One example of the jail's dangers: this handwritten letter from an inmate describing his own rape.

New submitter agizis writes "Alex from Connectify here. I wanted to say thanks to all of you who commented on the Slashdot story about our Kickstarter campaign It was super-educational discussing Switchboard with all of you: you wanted your own servers, and we weren't doing enough to communicate what was so special about Switchboard. Based in a large part on your feedback, we blew up our Kickstarter campaign, and changed almost everything. Thanks, Slashdot. This isn't reddit, but ask me anything."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This could be the first 3DS flashcard

I say “could” because who knows if this is legit, what with this news coming out of nowhere from a company no one’s heard of, but this demonstration video looks credible. Gateway says its device supports both standard and XL 3DSes, and works with any back-up ROMs. It’s disappointing that the first product of this sort seems geared more toward piracy (which, we must once again remind you, we absolutely do not support) than homebrew purposes…

MaxConsole claims this video was put together before the Gateway team created some kind of “game manager” for the device, hence all the MicroSD switching you see here. However, there is also speculation that Nintendo could easily cripple the flashcard with a firmware update due to the presumed nature of its workaround (which doesn’t look like it would even circumvent the system’s region-locking). 

BUY Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL consoles, upcoming releases