Community Matters

I really enjoy reading footnoted.org by Michelle Leder – she posts a lot about the things public companies are hiding in their financial filings – and given the world we live in this tends to be about executive compensation and shady inside deals at some companies. And normally this is just stuff that’s happening elsewhere. But today she’s talking about Red Hat and that feels pretty close to home…

Turns out that executives at open source companies are not only well compensated, they also are able to make a penny or two on options… for example, the top four execs at Red Hat made a bit more than $76 million this past quarter on options (scroll to page 17 in this SEC filing).

Not bad for a company that productizes free software – funnily enough, net income in the past twelfe months at Red Hat was about the same – $79 million (according to Yahoo! Finance).

Video sharing is the big thing. YouTube (even got mentioned on NPR this morning), Google Video, or Veoh all generate lots of uploads and downloads and in general enough interest that people are willing to throw venture money at them.

The question that I still wonder about is simple. Once you remove all the illegal content (even Bill Gates watches it… can’t link to the original article in the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription only… how 90s), but many other blogs are quoting the important part), what’s left that people will actually willing to spend time watching?

Personal content tends to be of widely varying quality. And the median is nowhere near “good”, if you get my drift. It’s like blogs (which no one reads, just like this one). Only worse as it is actually much harder to make a good video than to write a good blog entry.

So what’s the solution? In my mind it’s true on-demand (sorry Comcast) delivery of existing TV content over the internet. Veoh is said to be in talks with network television (and hopefully with Comedy Central, as what I really want is “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”) to distribute their content.

That can create that base traffic and viewership that it takes to make a site interesting to advertisers. And that can finance the infrastructure that allows people to share the cute videos of their dog.

Many people are concerned about the government tracking their whereabouts… others (like me) have started playing with a cool little tool that does just that – and even makes it accessible to anyone who’s curious and maps it on a Google-Maps background.

Plazes uses the MAC address of the router you are connected to in order to determine your location. They have a data base of thousands of locations that they recognize, and as a user you contribute to this data base every time you get to a location that they don’t have (i.e., where they don’t recognize the MAC address of the router) which you then get to enter / describe.

There are several things you can do with this, one is the trace of my travel included here

The next one is interactive (but some versions of Firefox AdblockPlus don’t like it) – click on “show recent” ;-)

An even cuter view (with the Google Maps that I mentioned above) can be seen on their site as where is Dirk.

Ok, I haven’t had a Dell laptop since the 11 pound Inspiron I was lugging in 2000, but still… the idea of a laptop exploding in my lap? I don’t know…

Thankfully I use a MacBook Pro as my work computer these days and Apple is quite clear about the fact that this Laptop is not intended for you lap: “Do not place your MacBook on your lap or other body surface for extended periods of time”. Thanks, folks, after seeing the article above, I just might keep that in mind…

I continue to be amazed how few people really understand where open source makes the difference. There are so many people trying (deperately, it seems at times) to explain it to the masses. Yet, I seem to have many more conversations with people who don’t “get it” than the ones that do.

Now there are two conclusions to draw from this. (a) we aren’t trying hard enough for people to actually understand. Or (b) we are wrong.

Watching the bubble-analysts (back in the dot-gone days or just recently with real estate or the web-2.0 companies) have most of their arguments revolve around how the rules have changed and how those who disagree just don’t get it makes me uncomfortable – as this so much sounds like the open source people talking to the non-believers.

Open source allows you to have more smart people work on your project than you could possibly hire. And more people test your code than you could possibly afford in a closed environment. If you are successful in creating a community around your project. And if you get good governance in your project and some motivated and skilled project leaders. And if … There are so many ways that this can fail.

So maybe what is good about open source is that it gives you all this potential. And that it is up to you to figure out how to make that work – with few people stopping you (assuming you avoid mistakes like calling your project something that blatantly infringes on someone else’s copyrights and other easy stuff like this…)

That opportunity in itself is basically enough for me to state “open source is good”. And the honesty about this being nothing more than an opportunity is what in my mind differentiates us from the bubble artists.

Here’s an interesting question that I spent way too much time on the last few weeks. There’s a ton of useless information on the Internet. Tons of content that basically reprints specs or (even worse) vendor press releases. But very very few sites that have really solid technical reviews. Must be because there’s no money to be made with that. Weird – it seems to work in other segments (as Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware seem to indicate).

So I went through the “LCD or plasma” cycle. Well, there are full resolution 1080p LCDs that almost are affordable. And LCD doesn’t burn in. So that one’s easy, right? Not so fast. Doing some side-by-side comparisons I am not convinced that LCD actually looks better. And for the same amount of money you clearly get “more” plasma than you get LCD… for me it came down to angle viewing (hey, my babies are looking at the screen from way low, right?) and value for money. And on that plasma wins.

Armed with that decision I started studying specs and finally narrowed it down to a few Panasonic plasmas – either the industrial TH-42PHD8UK (which means you buy then stand and connection modules for things like HDMI separately), or the consumer model TH-42PX60U (that comes with a stand and a couple of HDMI inputs). (side note – Panasonic makes it so hard to link to their products that I simply decided not to add a link here – it’s their own fault).

And then a sales guy that I end up on the phone with talks me into considering the brand new Hitachi 42-HDS69. And boy am I glad that he did. Comparing the picture at two stores that had it side by side with the Panasonic (of course after adjusting the picture setting… man these stores have contrast and brightness pulled up to 100% – that’s just terrible!) made the decision easy. The Hitachi looks much better – and it has three HDMI inputs instead of just two.

I’ve had the TV for a couple of days now and I love it. So much fun when watching soccer in HD…

So as much as I like the Internet for looking stuff up – nothing beats standing in front of the actual TVs and comparing what you see…

After a complete lack of even the slightest attempt of customer retention on DirecTV’s part (wow – they must have plenty of subscribers) we took the plunge and are back with Comcast.

The ReplayTV seemed to have died (fixed it with a new hard drive and some creative hacking since) and I figured that I finally wanted HD and an HD-DVR. DirecTV said “sure, pay us $500 up front and we’ll lease the DVR to you for an additional $15 a month. And oh-btw: no local channels / networks in HD.” Gee, what a sweet deal.

Comcast had the “Dish Win Back” offer that got us Digital Cable with HD, and HD-DVR, no up-front cost and monthly fees that even after the promo will be lower than DirecTV (and right now are about 50% of what we would have paid there – for 12 months). Pretty good deal, right?

Well, of course this is Comcast. So the installer was un-inspired and clueless (and way late, missing parts, and all in all not very helpful). The DVR (a Motorola DCT-3412) can best be described as “hard to get used to” (another way to put it would be “THE USER INTERFACE SUCKS!!!!!). We have an amazing amount of mpeg artifacts and when watching the local channels on live TV we get tons of little “stop and go” events – the sound will continue but the picture will stop for a few tens of a second. Highly annoying – but doesn’t happened with recorded or even time lapsed content, so it’s something we can work with.

So far what I hate the most is clearly the DVR. OMG. Like so many Motorola user interfaces this one was clearly designed by drunken monkeys who simply hate humans. It is terrible. The ReplayTV is a million times better. And it has the automatic “Commercial Advance” feature. Now we need to manually skip commercials. Like in the dark ages.

On the plus side, the soccer world cup is starting Friday and for people outside the US this is a big deal (actually, this is the biggest TV event in the world, bigger than the Olympics, the final will have about 50 times the number of viewers than the Superbowl). All games are available in HD and Comcast here in Portland gives me two of the three HD channels (of course I’m missing ESPN2-HD which for example carries the opening match Germany – Costa Rica on Friday… Grrrr). I still hope I’ll like it. The biggest fear right now is that this will make me buy a 42″ plasma… I’m so tempted as my 30″ 4:3 CRT is capable of displaying HDTV but is a little on the small side with wide screen content…

I’ll post more about all this as I get used to it (or throw it out the window, whichever comes first).