When Art Becomes A Product

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I was thumbing through a copy of Time magazine (that I don’t subscribe to, yet still shows up at my door weekly), a rare event as most just hit the trash when I found a pull quote from George Lucas (speaking about the Star Wars franchise):

Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are.

Lucas’ position is an interesting place at the intersection of creativity and product delivery. I tend to believe Lucas hasn’t quite found the balance between art and product – something, I would assume, creative types often struggle with.

There’s no doubt that Lucas has been successful (monetarily and popularity-wise) with the Star Wars franchise. Yet, all of the creativity that went into the first three movies (IV, V, and begrudgingly VI) occurred at a juncture where the the films were primarily driven by creativity and art. With Star Wars IV being such a surprise hit, the gravitational mass of the Star Wars enterprise has long eclipsed the creative cycle and become more marketable-product. And when consumers expect a product, they don’t necessarily like divergence from what they originally bought into.

 

Ignorance on the Left Vs. Hypocrisy on the right.

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Coyote has a decent piece up (snippet here or full article on Forbes) primarily dealing with progressive ignorance. In short – it summarizes the (oftentimes willful) ignorance of the left when it comes to public policy prescriptions for “fixing” capitalism.

However we should not forget the need to look at the flip side of the coin. The right has often been long on the talk of capitalism and free markets – but let the left slide and even doing their own part.

Romneycare anyone? What’s a more free market – a market free of government coercion or government coercion as the core means of product delivery?

Earmarks? Nothing beats padding the wallets of the connected and Republicans haven’t done much to conceal their hypocrisy here.

Or how about the tenure of Republican Ray LaHood in his fiefdom of regulation and taxpayer-funded handouts?

So  I’m often torn when I see posts like Coyote’s. The (arguably flawed) choice we’re left with is, which is better: those who deliver all of the wrong solutions because they often don’t know better or those who deliver all of the wrong solutions when the already know better.

Ubuntu 11.10…. meh…

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Ok, I’ve been running Ubuntu 11.10 now for about a week. Now that I have my desktop PC running solo (single user), I decided to flop over to my rarely-used Ubuntu install and upgrade it to check everything out now that Windows isn’t a requirement (had someone using a lot!!1! of Windows-only software and had no inclination to set up a VM and train said person on Ubuntu and VirtualBox).

First impression: Uh, what the…?!

Unity. Meh. Opened a terminal. How do I open a new one? I’ll try clicking on the icon. Nope. It just brings the original to the front. Right click! Yes! ‘New Terminal’ brings up a new window. How about a new terminal in a tab. I thought [ctrl]+t is it. Nope. Where do I go? *Mousing around for a while*…. Where the hell is it? And where are the prior menus for the terminal? Gone missing. Wait a sec… something just flashed as my mouse shot up to the top. Ha! They’re hidden from view. Hrmmm. That’s kind of dumb. Does Apple have a patent on having all of your options show at the top? Well, I’ll just have to fix that.

There has to be a way to configure it. Let’s go to settings. Settings… where the hell are they? Let’s click the Ubuntu icon, maybe… Well this isn’t helpful.  No settings in the default menu. Let’s click around on icons and…. nope. I guess I’ll have to ‘Search’ for my settings. Ok, there we go: “System Settings”. How to fix the stupid menu and show the menubar for the program in focus all the time… No luck. Come on now, there has to be a Unity option for the configuration to get to. Nothing.

We’ll check the Internet. Ok. So I now have to download another application just to make changes. I hope it lets me move this bar from the left-hand side.I’d much rather see it on the bottom, preferrably with smaller icons. Ok. CompizConfig Settings Manager should do… oh. no. it won’t. Well, let’s just make a few small edits and I’ll just force myself to live with it. Save. Close. Now let’s tool around this weird menu full of hidden items that I must be too stupid to view any other way. Filters are kind of cool. But it still feels weird not having some kind of hierarchy of menus. Let’s go back to Compiz. I want to see what other changes I can make…

CompizConfig Settings Manager opens, freezes and then… I lose the launcher bar and the main bar on the top of the screen. I can’t do anything on the desktop. except use what apps are open on the desktop. I can’t close out or… change user! Ctrl-Alt-Del to the rescue. Let’s try logging out and back in. Nope. How about rebooting?… Nope. Let’s log in under the Guest session and – hey, the Unity desktop is working under Guest. Back to doing a web search. Now I need to delete some config file under my regular user. No problem. And everything is back to… not quite normal. Now a little black box shows up under my mouse pointer. I install some updates and reboot. Everything is back to “normal”.

Let’s watch something on Netfl…. Suck. No Netflix player. Roku has one. Ubuntu none. It’s a Netflix issue. Let’s check out Hulu – christ. wrong version of Flash. A couple of hours later and after installing a browser add-on to detect the correct version to install, I’m in business, watching “TV”. No Netflix. Suck. (Not that I’m happy with Netflix… but still something).

Now I’ve got my PS3 within reasonable range. I’m on a automatically-working wi-fi connection (that wasn’t working under 11.04). I can do something like Internet Connection Sharing in Ubuntu. Plug it in and :

Connected. Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.

Can’t keep a connection open on eth0. Must  be a buggy driver or something. Works fine under Windows. Although there is one funny thing, my usb wireless adapter works much better under Linux than it does under Windows! It doesn’t drop connections nearly as often. I wonder if Belkin knows this device they don’t make Linux drivers for works better under Linux than it does Windows.

And that pretty much covers my first week with the addition of some aggravations of getting Netbeans installed, having issues with Enemy Territory sound (and lack of playability)… I swapped over to Windows last night to check in on Netflix, watch a show and play a game or two.

 

Letting Your Partners Ruin Your Business

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Add me to the list of disaffected Hulu users. I’ve watched shows on Hulu a year or two ago and thought it was halfway decent. But after a switch to Ubuntu (and Netflix not having a compatible player), I’ve been watching a few shows on Hulu to add a little background noise while plunking away on the computer.

I’ve been tempted to try Hulu Plus but I just can’t seem to get past the content limitations that are seemingly applied all over the place. It seems as if Hulu has just given up any pretense of running anything more than a paid ad engine for media distributors.

They keep content places for shows they don’t have access to and probably won’t ever provide to their clients. They have an endless supply of clips for shows they can’t even offer to stream through their service. So what’s the point? All of the clips are nothing but advertising. Add in the 10-12 ads I repeatedly see and you have an ad network sprinkled with doses of content.

To add to this, Hulu Plus will give you earlier access to some locked content. But the premium content doesn’t always mean you can stream to a TV. In other words, you’re tied to the computer to really get the most out of your subscription. It’s hard to reach a technology convergence (PC & TV) point when your suppliers force the separation.

The only benefit Hulu seemingly provides customers with is a wide-open view of the convoluted world of content distribution and licensing. Let your suppliers drive your business and your customers suffer.

 

 

A Contract To Deprive Some From Their Gains

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So progressives offer up their own ideas on how to fix America – stop me if you’ve heard this before:

  • Tax the rich (who already pay most of the personal income tax revenue)
  • Free healthcare (pick favorite corporations)
  • Tax the rich
  • Tax Wall Street (pick favorite corporations)
  • Tax the rich
  • Green Energy (pick favorite corporations)
  • Tax the rich
  • End the Wars (token argument – they really don’t mean this)
  • Tax the rich
  • Increase minimum wages (pick favorite corporations)
  • Tax the rich
  • End individual rights (by forcing non-consenting individuals into unions and collective bargaining)
  • Tax the rich
  • Stop certain groups of people (corporations) from exercising their right to free speech in favor of other groups and associations (hiding behind other organizational legal structures)
  • Tax the rich
Did I miss anything? The freeloaders are still the freeloaders. And remember kids, when it isn’t enough for them, they won’t hesitate to send men with guns to your house to beat you into submission.
Who are the terrorists again?

Head In the Sand Awared Goes To….

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Robert H. Frank

The Reuters piece linked above discusses responses to Larry Summers’ recent editorial (but Reuters can’t seem to make a working link to it), Robert H. Frank responds with gems like:

I’d also have hit harder on the claim by ostensible deficit hawks that extra spending right now would impoverish our grandchildren. Some of the most vivid and easily understood counterexamples involve infrastructure maintenance. According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, repairing a damaged 10-mile stretch of Interstate 80 would cost $6 million if we did the work today. But if we postpone repairs, weather and traffic will continue to damage the roadbed. If we wait just two years, the cost of bringing that same stretch of road up to par rises to $30 million. There are thousands of similar projects crying out to be done.

These are the very same “shovel ready” projects that were supposed to be funded by the so-called “stimulus”. And even if this specific project (I80 in Nevada) was not covered by the stimulus program, these projects should be covered by the road and fuel taxes. Yet Congress, the same institution that Frank seems should help remedy this problem, has been looting these fees and spending them on anything but the roads the taxes were designed to support. So in essence, Frank advocates spending more because Congress hasn’t done its job and spent the money on what it was supposed to be spent on.

Because Public Servants Can’t Be Nefarious, Evildoers

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This is a little old but sad. The gist:

A fire breaks out at a strip mall and said strip mall is turned to a smoking heap of rubble. A press conference is called, before any detailed investigation can be completed, and the cause is attributed to an electrical fire. Oh yeah, one of the tenants – he’s missing.

Next day, the boss man, after just announcing the fire was an electrical problem, returns to the scene with a Fire Prevention Specialist, Ken Toh (part of the department). Guess what they find? A body. At the opposite end of the strip mall from where the fire began. Questions start to come up in the Fire Prevention Specialist’s mind. The door is locked from the inside with a piece of wire and neighbors say the door is never locked.

So Toh goes on to ask neighbors questions about the missing tennant as Toh is really the only one able to communicate to the Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in the neighborhood. Lee was depressed. Business wasn’t going well. Hmm.

The following day, Toh tags along with a fire code inspector and they realize there is a camera at a store nearby. Guess what they see on the camera? Lee is shuffling his goods into storage for a few hourse and runs into the building carrying something. Lee doesnt’ come back out.

Toh does some more checking and everything seems to point to arson/suicide and asks boss-man to reconsider the evidence Toh had collected via interviews (and the tape). What happens? Toh gets fired.

It gets worse.

Toh is then charged with interfering with an investigation because he didn’t stand down when pressing the issue with superiors – something one of Toh’s peers contested at trial.

Beloved, dear-government decides to take a (figurative) crowbar and blowtorch to Toh’s life spending more time and money persecuting Toh than they spent on the investigation of the fire. And persecute they did.

The code inspector Toh was with when they found the security camera tape? Toh’s superiors try to get him to wear a wire, trying to dig up dirt on Toh. The inspector refuses. Guess who else ends up getting the axe?