January 2004 Archives
I'm used to work in widely different modes all day long, switching my mind from pure intuition, dream, creativity, to pragmatism, analytical, rational, engineer and business thinking in very short periods of time (and probably lots of other unconscious modes that I'd rather leave that way). I must have had some hidden skills in my childhood that prevented years of scientific education to take over my brain, and the business experience did the rest. It has many advantages, such as being an engineer with a CIO diploma and 24 years of IT experience, and still, not be considered like the alien in the Nostromo by my colleagues of Corporate Communications (I know of other CIOs who have met their Ripley here).
It also has its quirks. Such as my habit of having lots of ideas popping into my mind and making perfect sense, as long as they remain in my intuition pipeline. The trick lies in the baking before getting them out. And the trouble comes when I start expressing them while they are half-baked -- it looks like I've been doing that more often than not, lately.
That said, I'll take the risk to blog this one that came as a series of metaphors for one of my subjects du jour: web standards.
The network is like a highway. When you start to have too much traffic, one way to handle it is to build more lines to increase the bandwidth. But it's expensive and once you've reached the double six-ways superhighway, what can you do? Reduce the length of cars(*). Your web pages are cars on the highway. If switching a page to web standards halves its size, it's equivalent to divide cars length by two. It means that you can have twice as many cars on the same portion of the highway, effectively doubling the flow for the same bandwidth.
And while we're at this car metaphor, on the information superhighway IE is an SUV. Unless it starts to behave like a good citizen on standards, the IE factor won't do good to the global warming of the tag soup. Unfortunately, it seems that too many people fancy the SUVs, and they're going to remain a big annoyance unless we convert their drivers to better vehicles.
(*) Ever wondered why cars are really smaller in Europe than in the U.S. and why all brands have small cars, even Mercedes and BMW? Because we can't extend our roads by making them wider, we decided to reduce their size to fit more cars on the same surface. The EU actually imposes to all manufacturers selling in the Union to have at least one small car on their catalog. Plus they suck less oil and reject less pollutants, which is not bad either. By the way, the EU wants to cut Windows in half, but I'm out of metaphors for tonight.
Microsoft advises surfers to not click on links but type URLs in their browser address bar:
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
If you trust Microsoft's wisdom -- and why shouldn't you? -- then rather than click on the link above, you may want to take note of its very easy URL and type it in:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;833786
Of course, you are web-savvy enough to parse such gibberish and understand that both % signs in the above URL are perfectly safe.
Sarcastic slashdotters have already noted that all this is the fault of those who use the proprietary attribute href. Conscientious webmasters take note and stop that bad practice, please.
Malicious webmasters, on the other hand, may want to take a look at hugeurl.com which is a handy service to turn simple URLs into really huge ones. For example, the huge URL to Microsoft.com is:
You can type it in your browser, in its full glory. Or even copy-paste if you prefer.
Don't you feel perfectly safe now? Thanks Bill.
Pixar today said that it is ending its discussions with The Walt Disney Company to extend their existing five-picture deal, and will begin discussions with other studios to distribute its films beginning in 2006. After completing the final two films under the current agreement with Disney, The Incredibles in 2004 and Cars in 2005, Pixar intends to retain full ownership of its future productions.
"After ten months of trying to strike a deal with Disney, we're moving on," said Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. "We've had a great run together - one of the most successful in Hollywood history - and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes."
The last sentence is harsh, almost a stab in the back, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Pixar surpass Disney in the animation business within a couple of years. They're a little amazing company with impressive results:
To date, Pixar's five films have earned more than $2.5 billion at the worldwide box office and sold over 150 million DVDs and videos.
Of course, Disney disagrees and lists its other partnerships and production in the pipe (of which I know none apart what has been created by Pixar).
P.S.: pardon my webmaster's geeky habits, but while sneaking around Pixar's sites I discovered this:
% curl -I http://www.pixar.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:07:17 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux) [...]
% curl -I http://corporate.pixar.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 [...]
Come on Steve, your corporate site is served by Microsoft IIS on Windows! You surely know better, I'm sure Apple can strike you a deal for an Xserve (even a G4 would suffice) ;-). No, wait, ColdFusion runs on Mac OS X for development purposes only (ah! Macromedia and their Mac afterthoughts). Well, what about WebObjects then or, simply, plain vanilla Mac OS X Server? ;-).
- The Register: Jedi recognized as an official religion in the UK census -- Shall I move there once I graduate?
- Jason Kottke: Guidelines for focusing on learning [via Seb's Open Research] -- Thou shall learn that, my young padawan
- From Netcraft, Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and HTTPS URLs -- removing the @ in URLs, mostly used for Internet scams
- Jeffrey Veen: The Business Value of Web Standards -- add that to the list for management education
- Daniel Burka: Forming Style Sheets -- formating forms with CSS as opposed to tables remains challenging. If you consider the table to be a tabular list of questions and answers, is that a semantic sin?
- Netcraft: www.sco.com Site Alerts Available -- Geek voyeurism: assist to the DoS attack from the comfort of your browser. Reminds me of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- And meanwhile, a MyDoom variant attacks Microsoft.com -- hey Netcraft, no front seat for this one?
- From /., Confessions of a Mac OS X User: "Have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?" -- Have I ever felt guilty of drinking champaign instead of Coke? Never
- How to land a 747 -- always handy for frequent flyers but better pick one with ALS
- Nupha music store -- an iTunes/AAC compatible alternative to Apple's iTMS (currently down, being slashdotted)
- MacJams.com: MIDI Basics for Apple GarageBand Users -- now where can I find a pipe organ setup (at least two keyboards and a pedal)?
- Darwine is WINE for OS Xrunning Windows apps without Windows. Holy cow (says Brent).
And a little shameless plug, what has been described as the first French Google bomb has hit its target today. Welcome to our first député liberticide, Jean Dionis du Séjour, who is the guy defending this incredibly freedom-killing law project to regulate the Internet in France.
Wired News reports that Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno just announced MUDDA, "Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists", an alliance designed to shortcut records labels and offer more choices to artists:
"Unless artists quickly grasp the possibilities that are available to them, then the rules will get written, and they'll get written without much input from artists," said Eno, who has a long history of experimenting with technology.
By removing record labels from the equation, artists can set their own prices and set their own agendas, said the two independent musicians, who hope to launch the online alliance within a month.
Peter Gabriel will provide the technology from his European download platform On Demand Distribution.
It just had to happen.
Jeffrey Zeldman advices his fellow designers to never design on spec, concluding that "those who insist on getting free designs anyway are simply advertising the fact that they would not be good clients to work for."
Nor do they always do themselves a favor by choosing a designer on RFP.
I would say that, for the curious and open-minded, it is far better to surf the web and discover, among the lot of brilliant portfolios and creations, the ones that will strike a chord like no answer to an RFP ever will. Some consider enough to select musicians by requesting tapes, I much prefer to go to concerts.
Folklore.org is a site compiling anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it. It has 69 stories currently, and as John Gruber writes:
Its like a giant 20th-anniversary-of-the-Mac birthday present for the entire Mac community. Insanely great, indeed.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force last night, as if millions of web servers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Fear the Commerce Federation Jason, and its Viagra cargos coming from all over the Galaxy, for they are going to blockade your weblog. Communications disruption will mean only one thing: invasion.
By an interesting turn of cards, Kazaa file-sharing software owner Sharman Networks will sue the entertainment industry for copyright infringement (Reuter reports):
Sharman, targeted by studios and record companies because its software is used to trade music and video files, has sought to turn the tables on the industry, accusing it of misusing Kazaa software to invade users' privacy and send corrupt files and threatening messages.
I'm looking forward to seeing the result of this David against Goliath case.
Loïc Le Meur, head blogger of U-Blog, on blogging at Davos:
I have recorded in MPEG the panel and was about to video blog it but I am checking with the WEF if that is OK. In fact, there are many sessions in Davos where only selected journalists can go (some where no journalists can go) so that discussions can remain quite confidential within an industry and participants can openly express themselves.
I bet that bloggers will soon join journalists in their ban from certain sessions! Wait for the "do you have a weblog?" question in future registration forms.
Happy birthday, Macinstosh.
MacMinute reports that Apple's iTunes Music Store now has customizable RSS feeds. Now you can consume more than weblogs posts through your favorite aggregator.
Running two weblogs in parallel is a bit challenging, and the French side of the force is taking all my time as I'm trying to cover a hot political debate here, and launching the first French Google Bomb(*).
Our government is trying to pass a law -- dubbed "confidence in the digital economy" (loi sur la confiance dans l'économie numérique aka LCEN, aka LEN) -- that, with respect to the Internet, will move France 10 years... backwards and have it compared in rather bad ways to Barman, China and Iran! I can't translate all the articles I've written already in the past few days, but here is a backgrounder.
This political project is a mix-bag meant to accommodate many things at once (and that, alone is a problem):
- clean up a bunch of laws passed since 1986 pertaining to communications
- (re)define the responsibilities of hosting providers and ISPs
- transcribe in French law two directives from the European Parliament and the Council: Directive 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce and Directive 2002/58/EC on privacy and electronic communications.
- modify existing laws regarding cryptology
The first point is related to the regulation of the telecommunications sector and the relations between our former state telecom body (France Telecom) and the public municipalities, allowing them to become operators where the incumbent fails to provide service. This part is not contentious (except where it mandates the phone companies to bill by the second, not using their customary "indivisible first minute" to sell you 30 mn cards that turned out to work for only 20 mn). The third point is an obligation, France should have transcribed the first directive two years ago and the second one last October. The fourth point is a rather pragmatic recognition of the current state of affairs in terms of cryptology and a welcome relaxing of the existing rules (there is one contentious result, but it's fairly obscure and not à propos here). The second point is the gordian node from where the scandal came.
The project started to draw a line between the telecommunications sector, including TV and radio, and the "online communications" world, i.e. the internet. The government initially wanted to include the internet as part of the existing legal corpus regulating TV and radio -- incidentally, that's what our local RIAA wanted too, as this corpus is very protective of their interests. When the project hit the parliament, our MPs started to break it apart and decided to create a whole new legal corpus dedicated to online communication. They were not happy to let the public body that regulates our TV and radio channels regulate the French internet (it was asking for it, but that reasoning couldn't stand when one compares a mere hundred channels with tens of millions of web sites). Then our senators played with it, then our MPs played with it again and now we have a brand new project that sets telecommunications operators apart from TV and radio operators apart from internet operators. Cut down this way it seems rather innocuous, but as of today, it's hard to find a French internet actor -- operators, ISPs, editors, bloggers and surfers -- who isn't raving mad because of it.
I need to explain the context about the freedom of communication in France. Communication is free, provided it does not endorse a precise list of things which are in particular all the legally forbidden discriminations (because of one's race, political opinion, religion), nazism apology and revisionism. France does not have anything like the U.S. First amendment and anybody can be held criminally liable for illegal speech (e.g. calling for murder, racism, etc.). That has been the case for as long as I can remember and I know of no one sensical who wants anything like the U.S. First amendment here, so far we are not a lesser democracy because of this difference (but that's a subject for another debate).
Because our criminal code does finger a few types of content, there was already some heat coming from ISPs and operators hosting web sites. Presently, the operators are not liable for content they merely transport or host on behalf of their clients. However, operators collaborate with justice officers on cases judged in court and the law forbids them to pass along the identity of their clients without a court order. So far, so good, it worked until now without too many cases cluttering our legal system.
This project redefines the responsibilities of the internet operators, making hosting providers liable for any illegal content they host if they do not take it down or prevent access to it as soon as they are aware or made aware of its illegal character (and in addition to the examples above, anything that goes against someone's property would be illegal according to this project, so it's not just criminal content anymore but copyright infringement, etc.). The judge is out, anybody can claim that some content is illegal and hold a provider liable for it. What will happen is that since private companies are not competent in that matter, they will systematically abide and promptly take the content down, leaving their client and the plaintiff sort that out in court, if necessary. Worse, the project wants to force the hosting providers to preventively scan all content for illegal materials and take them down before anyone complains. Not only are they turned into content judges, but they are supposed to do a police job too! Even worse, all ISPs on a simple court order, are supposed to filter the whole internet and prevent French citizens access to any identified internet resource that is deemed illegal, no matter where it is hosted (a measure that only the three aforementioned countries continue to do). Take the Yahoo affair from a few years back (nazi memorabilia on sale), a judge would be able to ask all ISPs operating in France to shut the access to certain pages of Yahoo for the whole country.
That none of this pleases anyone but the parliament, that none of these measures makes sense, is applicable or simply efficient (they either won't work or can be very easily bypassed by just being hosted in a foreign country) has not influenced the authors of the project law nor our representatives. Needless to say, the French internet world is upside down, and will be until our government or senators stop smoking crack (apparently the MPs are hopeless). The project will go for the second time to the senate on Feb. 12 for its second and final review.
(*) The MP whose job is to defend the project in the parliament has claimed during a chat with surfers that monitoring content was very easy because Google does a very good job at finding pertinent content (then providers can easily do it too, QED). So I launched a google bomb on député liberticide (freedom-killer MP) as an acid-test to this claim. It is reported to be the first French Google bomb, and has narrowed its target a few days ago.
Despite the barrier of cultural difference, Starbucks has finally landed in Paris. Don't worry, since in this city there is a café between each cafés, there are still zillions of places where you can get both a good coffee and the bad treatment that is the trademark of les garçons de cafés parisiens.
I've seen this headline on a French newspaper today: "Bush limits himself to the Solar system".
It's too modest to be true.
Today I came across a painful "feature" of Safari that I'm willing to call a bug as it is the most annoying one I have found on this otherwise excellent browser that has become my browser of choice since almost its first day of public light.
Selecting a bookmark folder set as "Auto-tab" will replace any already open tabs. I just lost ten tabs I kept for writing an article. This is, to remain polite, a very stupid UI choice. Add to that the lack of a way to save open tabs (very useful in situations when you really need to quit the browser, or when you are about to quit and forgot about open tabs), and clearly the user experience regarding tab-browsing on Safari (something I'm now highly addicted to) has room for improvement.
This grabs the first place to the now second most annoying UI behavior: the habit of Safari to constantly change the window height when showing or hiding control bars (tabs, status, bookmarks)*. This is particularly annoying for me as I always maximize the window height and find myself constantly re-maximizing it just because I closed the penultima tab and the window shrunk. The reason why I find this stupid is that -- to the exception of the tabs bar which does it by itself -- I close those bars to gain browsing space, I therefore don't want to see Safari reclaim that space only to force me to maximize the window again. The behavior I expect is: don't change the window height at all!
And the last gripe I have is actually a plug-in bug I already mentioned: the propensity of Safari to stop loading pages once it reaches some QuickTime and Flash movies.
Sorry for the rant, but loosing one hour of web digging because of Auto-tabs made me really angry. A long time ago I was almost used to loose data when an Office application decided to crash every other hour and take the whole system with it, now that I'm back to the stability of Unix, I just don't expect an Apple application to thrown away my data by design!
[Update] (*) This has been corrected in Safari 1.2 (v125) which no longer changes the window size when adding or removing toolbars.
Six Apart releases Movable Type 2.66 which brings new features to protect a weblog against comments spamming:
- a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds
- a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time
- new behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog (but too bad it doesn't extend to URLs present within the comment itself. Expect all comment spammers to move their URLs into the comment body soon
Six Apart also advise to close old comment threads. I've never liked this line of defense for two reasons: it prevents legitimate comments on old entries (and I've got a few ones that are worth more than ten times their weight of spam, so I'm only closing comments on entries that get regularly spammed based on specific keywords), and I have the intuition that it will only make spammers start commenting on new entries.
But for those who want or need to close old comments automatically on an MT weblog, here are a few scripts:
- MT-close from David Raynes
- A perl script from David Sifry (he advises to run it every hour but I don't see the need for more than once a day)
- blog_close_comments.pl from Jeremy Zawodny
- Close comments from Geeksblog (PHP script, for a MySQL-driven MT)
Keith Robinson shares an interesting experience of creating a Movable Type intranet for an hospital, dubbing the exercise as pushing Movable Type beyond the blog (Matt Haughey, along with others, has done that one before). Digging into flexibility and scalability issues, he rightly notes that, even so MT creates static pages by default, the fact that it generates code from templates when posts are created or modified, not when they're viewed, allows one to use whatever "dynamic" technology afterward. MT will happily generate code that include PHP, ASP, JSP or whatever server-side language is used to perform the dynamic rendering of pages.
Keith and others (read the comments on his first post) mentions the issue of the administrator interface of MT, which is not configurable yet (it will be in the upcoming version 3). While I can easily argue that haven't seen many CMS so far that clearly beats MT in terms of user-friendliness AND performance/price ratio, I still maintain that the best user experience can be achieved by using a desktop application and in the future, this application will be your Office tool. Right now, tools like NetNewsWire (Mac OS X) and ecto (currently Mac OS X with a Windows version forthcoming), provide a much simpler experience for posting than the web interface of MT and allow you to prepare content offline (the padawan confesses having no experience with equivalent tools on Windows, as he seldom touches this OS, please post examples in the comments below). These applications are not free but I reckon that an organization will immediately recover the cost by saving on the training costs, plus they include an aggregator which, I argue, becomes a definitive must-have especially if your intranet generates RSS or Atom feeds.
On the issue of tweaking the admin interface, I remember having seen something similar done for the redesign of Adaptive Path but can't find where anymore (unless it was on a different project but still, this is another great example of experience sharing on the same subject, plus you can see the resulting site!)
I should mention that MT is certainly not the only weblogging tool that one can "push beyond the blog" and use as a CMS. pMachine, WordPress and surely many more are interesting candidates. And we're still waiting for the now delayed MT Pro...
It's funny how a new hair cut can change a man (QuickTime).
Update: the joke apart, this guy, John Stone, has setup a web site to explain his training program and why he did it. I particularly like this bit of the FAQ:
The purpose of this web site is to provide motivation, inspiration and (hopefully) sound advice based on my personal experiences and research.
And I can see it serve that purpose very well (gosh, do I need a hair cut ;-). The webmaster just can't help notice that it's a perfect generation two design (generation one was a linear list of items separated with <hr> tags on the famous Netscape gray background color, G2 = G1 plus a background image, G3 is when people discovered the <table> tag and all hell broke loose).
The winners of Bush in 30 seconds have been announced. Do a major public service to the world at large, advertise them like crazy.
You have been receiving more and more of the following by email lately:
elute middle megabyte maximal coop unbeknownst border shako thatch armata mask iq emolument chisel pip decrypt axiomatic asiatic acceptant angle decker infield thrombosis spawn flounce chink leninism compassion desperado bourgeois bordeaux ginsberg pentagram shan't theocracy columbus bellyfull duplicable reflectance lawmen obfuscate derogate tv
Or this, a little easier to decrypt:
fe.eling hun.gover? - use mira.cle ha.ng.over magi.c
enlarg.e your manh.ood - magn.arx peni.s pa.tch
Wired pretends that these random acts of spamness reason are done to fool anti-spam filters:
This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.
But The Register has been fact-checking this against a real spammer. Yes dear: Sp@m: the myst.eries xp1ained!!!
Following Occam's Razor, I say that El Reg is right. Besides, none of the above tricks have fooled my Apple Mail filter, QED.
OQO is launching a small PC they call an ultra personal computer (uPC). They have posted a video of it, which amazes me not so much for the product itself than for its first minute of flask-back in computer history, showing a disturbingly high number of computers I've known, seen, played with or owned in the past 24 years. Incidentally, the OQO design team includes people coming from the Titanium PowerBook project team, and besides a few cultural references that I can spot in the video, the OQO has a familiar touch and seems packed with all the trendy technologies.
As a side note, this concept of a small device replacing both a notebook and a desktop computer doesn't click yet with me. There is a gap between my needs for a good phone/PDA combination and my computing needs and the uPC seems to be in between. The trouble is, I don't need anything in between. The phone/PDA combination is already there and it what it needs is autonomy and usability in the smallest form-factor possible. The computer absolutely requires big screen and as much power as possible, and high-end laptops are already coming close to replacing desktops for really demanding environments. With things like the iPod to help carry loads of data between home and office (wait for your portable user account between Macs), I don't need anything between those ends (I'd actually expect the iPod to blend into the phone/PDA side).
[Source: The Register, small review]
Tim Bray has found the RSS feed of Libération, a popular newspaper here in France, and subscribed to it for some language learning. What surprises me is the reason why Libération is his journal of choice:
Among other things, because its a tabloid and easy to carry; if you walk into a café or restaurant or store in France with a copy of Libération stuffed under your arm, the locals will instantly assume youre not a gringo and youll probably get treated a lot better. Try it, it works.
Come on, is that true? May be I'm more open than my fellow compatriots, or may it's an effect of living in the most visited city in the world, but I do have a hard time with the idea that the French would automatically treat someone better just because they carry a French journal.
Have you experienced something similar? Have you felt being treated less favorably because you were a foreigner? Or on the contrary, better treatment because you blended perfectly with the locals? I'm really curious.
A study just released in Science Magazine claiming that farmed salmon poses risks of cancer is already contested by French scientists who find its methods and figures debatable. I've heard one argument that strikes me as evident: this study makes statistical claims on samples as small as three fishes bought on a local market (incidentally, this is how they assert that Northern European fish is more polluted while, as I understand it, the European samples are the smallest hence prone to statistical irrelevance), while measures done by European agencies are made on much bigger samples and show levels of pollutants below the WHO acceptable levels. The U.S. FDA finds this study over-alarming.
However, it's always good to make people aware that between an animal which feeds itself naturally and one that is forced-fed to grow as fa(s)t as possible, there are differences likely to cause health problems. As for the fish, this will be true as long as the sea is big enough to dilute all the junk we throw in it, of course.
Note: Science Mag's site is apparently down at the moment and since Wired has this nasty habit (widespread amongst journalists) of not linking to others' sites, I haven't seen the study itself.
HP has partnered with Apple to deliver an HP-branded digital music player based on the iPod. HP will also ship its PCs and notebooks with iTunes pre-installed. Carly Fiorina sings praises to Apple:
HPs goal is to bring the most compelling entertainment content and experiences to our customers, said Carly Fiorina, chairman and chief executive officer at HP. We explored a range of alternatives to deliver a great digital music experience and concluded Apples iPod music player and iTunes music service were the best by far. By partnering with Apple, we have the opportunity to add value by integrating the worlds best digital music offering into HPs larger digital entertainment system strategy.
So finally Steve Jobs is allowing some cloning at last ;-), and it looks like a very interesting move to me. Now Apple needs to emphasize the underlying web services that are built into iTMS -- which allow things such as its integration with AOL, or opening its new allowance system (e.g. gift certificates) to other vendors -- to strengthen its place against contenders.
Ask and you shall receive, Apple is considering a price revision on the iPod mini in the UK:
In an interview, Apple vice president Greg Joswiak told Online the price announcement was "subject to change" and that the company would settle on a UK price "closer to the availability date, simply because of the volatility of the currency exchange".
The exact pricing would depend on the strength of dollar relative to the pound, he said. "What we don't want to do is lock Europe into a price now, see the dollar continue to weaken, and have done all of ourselves a disservice by pricing too early," said Mr Joswiak.
Now since the markup on the French price is actually even worse than the UK one, the iPod mini should sell at 199 (VAT not included) in the Euroland (that would turn into 237 VAT incl. in France instead of 299). The trouble is, I don't see such outcries on this side of the Tunnel. It might be time for a little translation.
Ben Hammersley complains about the maxi markup that Apple makes on currency exchange in the UK:
According to the press releases I just received from Apple UK, iLife 04 will be $49 in the US, which is £26.88 under todays rates. Even so, the UK price will be £39. JamPack is $99, which is £54.31 in real life, but £69 in Apple UK pricing. The price for the new 15GB iPod? $299 in the US, £164.03 under the current exchange rate, £249 from Apple UK.
There is only one mistake in this reasoning, Ben lists prices that include the UK VAT, currently at 17.5%, while he compares with the US Apple Store prices which do not include taxes. However, his point remains valid. To compare apples to apples (I had to make this one), let's first compare a few products on three Apple Stores, the U.S., the U.K. and France, prices are listed in the local currency without any sales tax:
| Apple Store local price | US ($) | UK (£) | FR (€) |
| iPod mini | 249 | 170 | 250 |
| iPod 15GB | 299 | 212 | 292 |
| iLife | 49 | 33 | 41 |
| GarageBand Jam pack | 99 | 59 | 83 |
| Final Cut Express | 299 | 169 | 250 |
| Xserve G5 monopro | 2999 | 2042 | 2999 |
Now let's normalize this in Euros at today's rates (1$=0.79, 1£=1.44). I could have used USD but this will give an idea to the U.S. reader on what the prices should look like for a European:
| Prices converted in euros | US | UK | FR |
| iPod mini | 197 | 245 | 250 |
| iPod 15GB | 236 | 305 | 292 |
| iLife | 39 | 48 | 41 |
| GarageBand Jam pack | 78 | 85 | 83 |
| Final Cut Express | 236 | 244 | 250 |
| Xserve G5 monopro | 2369 | 2940 | 2999 |
And now, here is the extra markup earned by Apple on the currency exchange rates:
| Difference vs. US prices | UK | FR |
| iPod mini | 24.4% | 27.1% |
| iPod 15GB | 29.2% | 23.5% |
| iLife | 23.5% | 5.8% |
| GarageBand Jam pack | 8.1% | 5.8% |
| Final Cut Express | 3.2% | 5.8% |
| Xserve G5 monopro | 24.1% | 26.6% |
As you see, there are differences from as low as 3.2% for FCE in the UK to as high as 29.2% for the iPod 15GB in the UK. Also, it is obvious that the price scheme is different between the two countries, with a surprising difference for iLife which incurs a markup of 23.5% in the UK vs. 5.8% in France.
Apple has always been very conservative in protecting itself against currency exchange risks, and when you see the huge variations recorded for $/ over a year, there have been variations of 10% in about two months. However, when you see that, on two products with the same price (iPod 15 and FCE), Apple is applying 3% in one case then 29% for the other, one may wonder how the exchange risks are managed exactly. Add the VAT on top of that (17.5% in the UK, 19% in France) and European citizens are entitled to feel a bit over-milked. A price cut and more reasonable exchange rates would be greatly appreciated.
Some quick notes taken fresh from Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld SF 2004, organic with chunks of natural typos.
There are 60,000 QT live streams pulled from 100 countries (mine is running smoothly at 250Kb, that event must be a bandwidth wet dream for Akamai).
A look back at the Corporate boilerplate, focus on reinvented the computer in 1980' (for the youths that weren't even born at that time). The computer for the rest of us, a decade in advance from anything else. First company to bring 32 bits PC (not true, the Sinclair QL went out just a few days before the original Mac in an attempt to grab that place from Apple, and some say it's the reason why it failed). Run the 1984 ad video, which was played only once at that time (actually, they reworked it, the woman now has an iPod!).
Great 20th anniversary year of the Mac with lots of great products along the year.
Mac OS X. With MS copying us again, it feels great. 9.3M users, 10M this quarter (40% of install base).
Final Cut Express 2.0 (raah, I bought the 1.0 just a few weeks ago). RT performance, "RT extreme", up to 5 DV streams in real time. $299, $99 upgrade.
MS Office 2004. Word Notebook, taking notes. Linked to Entourage notifications. Record audio (QT MPEG4). Project software (name?). Xcel page layout (nothing exciting here). Available in the spring, free upgrade from today to buyers of Office X.
Power Mac G5. Virginia Tech (1,100 PM dual G5 cluster). Ranked 3rd fastest cluster, 40 times cheaper than the #2. Nothing new here.
Xserve G5. Single and dual 2.0GHz. Ships in February.
Xserve RAID. 3.5TB. RAID set slicing up to 16 units. Certified on more than Mac OS X (incl. Windows and Linux). $3/GB, cheaper than other big names.
iTunes. 30M songs sold on iTMS. 70% market share. Feels great to get above that 5% doesn't it? Top customer bought $29,500 of songs. 50,000 audio books, 100,000 gift certificates sold. Adding 12,000 classical tracks today, total of 500,000 songs (largest online store). PEPSI and Apple are giving away 100M songs this year.
iLife '04. Like MS Office for the rest of your life ;-). iTunes as known today. iPhoto 4, scale up to 25,000 photos (the demo is impressive, I hope the G5 he's using is not on steroids), Rendezvous photo sharing, time-based and smart albums, paper prints available in Europe in March (this month in Japan). iMovie 4, some editing enhancements and new titles, iSight direct import (yeah!), easy sharing through iDisk/.Mac. iDVD 4, 2h with better video quality, map (allows you to build complex menus). New 5th app: GarageBand, a "major new pro music tool", turns the Mac into an instrument and recording studio, mix up to 64 tracks, play over 50 instruments (USB, Midi keyboard, eh! I could play the organ again or finally try the clavichord), record live performance (amazing demos with a guitarist). Comparing what you need to buy on Windows to come close is $350, iLife is $49 (free with new macs, and what's for recent buyers?). Ships 01/16. Companion products: GarageBand extras and USB musical keyboard both at $99. I wonder how long it will take until we see a community site built around iTMS where one can upload their GarageBand productions.
iPod: 730,000 sold last quarter, 2M sold in total in Dec. 31% market share in volume Oct-Nov, 55% in revenues (#1 in both). Update line to 15/20/40GB. New Apple in-ear headphones at $39 (nice!). Want to go after the high-end Flash-memory players (brings a picture of a 256MB Rio at $199). iPod mini: 4GB, 1,000 songs, size of a business card and 0.5' thick, same user interface as the iPod, $249. Accessories: dock (I suspect it's different from the iPod dock) and arm-band. Comes in colors (er, I'll go for the silver one). Ships in February in the US, April elsewhere.
And that's all folks, for today.
Update: Rio wasn't long to reply, with a 4GB MP3 player at $249.
We're 5 minutes before Steve Jobs' Keynote at MacWorld 2004, the conference site is unreachable and I can't find any information about a webcast of the keynote. Very frustrating.
Update: here we are. All set. Come on Steve, make my day.
Oops, he did it again. DVD-Jon cracked iTunes DRM:
Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store on their GNU/Linux computers.
The reasoning that DRM is just an annoyance for honnest consumers and do nothing to prevent theft does sound quite right, and I guess that hackers will do whatever they can to prove it. Anyway, yet another interesting legal case to watch soon.
Bush in 30 seconds, a project far from being a miserable failure.
This is an old article, but Oh no! My TiVo thinks I'm gay is an interesting read at what the future holds for us in terms of automatic profiling of consumers. The TiVo and Amazon are already doing it, and it has some, er, limitations:
Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity. That popped up because he had previously ordered Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Why does this make me think about Gattaca? I know, it's not sci-fi, it's a glimpse of our near future.
Say with me: bonne année deux mille quatre !
