David Isenberg summarizes the latest news from LaFayette, Louisiana’s community fiber network plans (Madison should be so forward thinking!)
Finally, the price tag on the project is $125 million. The population of Lafayette is 116,000. That’s $1077.59 per person. Would you pay $1100 once to have fiber in your town forever after? N.O.B.R.A.I.N.E.R.
Sony’s non mp3 support in it’s portable audio devices was a mistake, they now admit. Yuri Kageyama:
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management’s reluctance to introduce products like Apple’s iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
But Sony’s divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
Well, duh. Most of these DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) schemes will fail. Slashdot discussion.
Tristan Louis takes a useful look at DRM (digital rights/restrictions management):
What I am trying to highlight is that while proponents and opponents of DRM solutions both see the world in black and white, they may want to start a dialogue and realize that there’s a lot of gray areas out there.
Via Doc Searls.
Travis Fox & Pierre Kattar created a very useful Quicktime VR scene, taken just above President Bush overlooking the Mall. There’s also a protest VR scene. Some great inauguration photos here
The whole thing was a big waste of money, of course. Shutting down a city seems a terrible price to pay for politics (and lobbyists).
Surviving a meeting today, I recalled the essential skill that makes a great salesperson: the ability to listen, sometimes for extensive periods of time. I’m always amazed when a person selling something can’t be bothered to actually listen to what the buyer has to say (another way one might put this, when the cluetrain made a stop, they failed to board).
It can be difficult, for sure. I remember one meeting, where there was 3 or 4 minutes of silence. Anyone involved in sales and marketing should become familiar with the term markets are conversations. Learn more at the cluetrain.
So what makes a good opportunity? A colleague of mine at the University of St. Thomas, Dr. Alec Johnson, has come up with what I think is a simple yet effective framework for analyzing opportunities. It is based on what he terms the “Three M’s”: Me, Market, and Money. All three are related, and if any of them are missing, it’s likely the concept is not worth developing.
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Pearly Kiley – wishoops.net [PDF Version 103K] |
“With all this talent, why aren?t we winning more games?”
“My kid averaged 20 points in summer league, why isn?t he playing more?”
“Why are we walking the ball up the floor all the time?”
“I wish we had the old coach back.”
These unfounded sentiments were also a major reason why over 80 coaches
chose to resign, were relieved of duty or retired since last season.
There are coaches who point to AAU basketball and all its dramatically improving impact. Some blame school administrators for showing more allegiance to parents than them in disputes over individual roles and playing time. Still others say it takes too much time ? and impossible patience ? to deal with the increasingly overzealous parent.
?At the high school level, the rewards aren?t tangible,? said former Waupaca coach Tim Locum, who resigned after last season and is currently an assistant coach at UW-Oshkosh.
Seattle blogger Stefan Sharkansky on voting irregularities their Governor’s race:
Christine Gregoire has said that our recent election was “a model to the rest of the nation and the world.” If what she meant is that the King County Elections Office is her model of how she plans to run the state of Washington, then we should all be worried.
Is it really “good enough for government work” to count 3,500 or 2,000 more ballots than there were voters? The airlines figured out years ago how to match the number of boarding passes with the number of people sitting in the airplane. Why can’t our elections officials match the number of ballots cast with the number of voters who supposedly cast them?
I think most Washingtonians agree that it isn’t good enough for government work to decide an election by a box load of funny votes. It is not the American way for a tainted victory of 129 votes, marred by thousands of illegitimate votes, including double voters, felon voters, cemetery voters and unidentified voters, to take the place of a legitimate decision of the electorate.
Local Cable Monopoly Charter Communication’s CEO Carl Vogel resigned yesterday amid a decline in subscribers and an accounting probe. Charter’s stock closed yesterday at $1.92/share, a 52 week low.
I think the cable folks have pushed the envelope with respect to pricing and “product”. I can’t imagine much growth is left in that business. The action is certainly shifting to the internet. Former Microsoft exec Paul Allen is Chairman of Charter. Allen went on a cable acquisition spree years ago, which loaded up charter with $19billion in debt (quite a bit, even for a billionaire).
Greg Borowski has a useful followup to recent discussions on Milwaukee’s unusual election numbers today:
At issue is a gap between the city’s estimate of 84,000 election-day registrants and 73,079 verification cards that were sent, as required by law.
Local bloggers and others, including talk radio hosts, have labeled the gap as evidence of more than 10,000 illegally cast ballots.
Stone has stopped short of calling the ballots fraudulent but said “it casts doubt over the 10,000 votes, who cast the 10,000 votes, where those people live and whether they were eligible to vote in the city of Milwaukee.”
More on Madison’s numbers:
In Madison, the city clerk’s office doesn’t keep a tally of same-day registrants whose addresses could not be verified. In the November election, 17,467 people registered at the polls, but city officials have no idea how many of those addresses could be verified, said Sharon Christensen, deputy city clerk.
