Eighteen Months ago, I bought a 1 Terrabyte Lacie Big Ethernet Drive from a reseller on eBay for $530.00 (advertised with a three year warranty). I purchased the Lacie because a friend of mine who was in the video production game told me, “You can’t go past the Lacie drives, they’re indestructible.” On [...]
In 1993, I wrote a paper entitled, How Ubiquitous Free Communication will Alter the Status Quo. I noted that because of electronic chat rooms [Prodigy, AOL and Compuserve] as more women became enamoured of the connectivity options available to them via a ubiquitous global network, that the divorce rate would rise dramatically. I [...]
This is the third article in this series entitled: The Economics of Video Entertainment Part 1 Here Part 2 Here For the last couple of days I’ve been leading up to talking about the individual value proposition as to why people purchase, watch, read or listen to certain types of content. Hedonic pricing [...]
Two Sundays ago I was in a shop in Bowral, Christmas shopping. I asked the lady who ran the shop how her Christmas trading was going. She said, “Well, it hasn't started yet. I'm hoping that it will start today….” Last Saturday I went into the local bottle shop in Berry, and asked Justin, who [...]
Prologue Has anyone noticed how cheap Home Media players are becoming? The latest price is $35.00 (hard-disk separate.) Available on Ebay. Those chaps over in Hollywood must be a religious bunch, every Blockbuster film release is these days accompanied with the prayer shawls (being ironed) the yamulkas being brushed and the nails being [...]
When I was a little boy, growing up, my mother attempted to instill into me some manners. For example, on the subject of visiting I learnt never to arrive somewhere [a private house] without a gift for the matriarch of the household. Regular readers would be aware that I enjoy growing Bonsai or [...]
Some people are in denial about climate change. But that already puts a pejorative spin on the concept, doesn't it? And some people are in denial about peak oil. As long as you believe in one of the two above read on… Over the next few years we are going to have to solve a [...]
Every time Governments legislate against or big business prosecutes against file sharing, internet users find a new way to circumvent and continue their activities. As there are more Internet Geeks than enforcement officials, this is hardly surprising. Sometime ago I predicted to Chris that if the “powers that be” continued raining down hellfire [...]
Residents of the Antipodies (that’s Australia for people in England – New Zealand for the Spanish and somewhere else for people in the USA) are used to being the forgotten race. Our claim to fame is the Kangaroo, the Kiwi and a cute little marsupial misnamed “Bear”, the Koala. OK, we also play a [...]
Thanks, Chris, for the introduction! As reader well know, there's a lot of noise in the P2P scene at present, especially following the recent Pirate Bay case in Sweden. http://www.p2pnet.net/story/20434http://google.com/trends?q=pirate+bayhttp://thepiratebay.org/blog.php The legal muscle is coming from the US, which is the largest producer of media content in the world. So how does this sector compare [...]