Links and Thoughts 21: 6 June 2014
X OST, Sadame (Satou Naoki)
Good Morning.
Geoengineering:
Moving Mountains.
China’s Mountain-Flattening Experiment Is Not Going Well : Motherboard
*I’m filing this one under Don’t Be A Dick
These Are the Words You Gotta Stop Using : The Bold Italic
Cities and Citizens:
“Garrick says that some cities, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and more recently Washington, D.C., have made good headway in reversing the trend toward massive parking lots that overwhelm the human scale and lead to downtowns devoid of people. ‘It’s very hard for people to realize, and it’s very hard to prove that planning is the reason,’ says Garrick. ‘But this is the result of planning.’ Better planning, he says, could mean a restoration of cities where the streets are for people, not cars.”
How Parking Lots Became the Scourge of American Downtowns : Citylab, from The Atlantic
Tech:
Years after the first prototypes were displayed at trade shows, Qualcomm may finally have solved their Mirasol problem — the next question is how much the new tech costs, and if they can make it work at manufacturing scale.
Qualcomm’s Mirasol display just got a lot more interesting : Geek.com
Tech:
…but don’t cut up your credit cards, yet.
Why American Express Wants to Kill Credit Cards : Wired
Entertainment:
The estimates are from a PricewaterhouseCooper report, so the numbers are probably better than the usual white paper, but are still projections.
Video streaming services could make more money than the US box office by 2017: Report says video on-demand will make up 43 percent of US film industry : The Verge
The ‘magic number’ in 2017 is $14 billion. You know which part of the entertainment industry clears $14 billion right now? Book Retail. (good old fashioned books – and that’s retail trade, not the total publishing number) — well, OK, so I just checked the
Census retail numbers and bookstores only cleared $11.8 Billion in 2013. Total US ‘box office’ receipts for the movie industry in 2013 was $10.3 billion, for comparison.
I love numbers — so plain, black & white, hard to argue with (we do it anyway). Books are boring, movies are sexy (and so is TV again, in this new ‘golden era’) — so of course the books get no respect.
Books might actually be quite a bit more than $14 billion, but Amazon doesn’t break out and report sales numbers on their book (or ebook) business. (Census Bureau reporting on retail does not include online sales.)
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No one is giving me flack for the steady diet of non-fiction, so I’ll stay the course. Today’s Book Recommendation is Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson (Wiley paperback isbn 9780470934326). The book seems thin for this price, but includes a lot of case studies and plans and nuts-and-bolts — not just theory but some solid ideas that really should work. In fact, I’d say it is more solidly aimed at architects as opposed to city planners or the lay reader, but if you want ideas on how to re-use the now-emptying shopping malls that litter the suburban landscape: I’d start here.
I’ll get my to-buy links sorted out eventually. In the meantime, you can still use most readers’ preferred option.
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Diary entry for 6 June:
Netflix got snarky, and instead of an error message, sent some Verizon customers a notice that ““The Verizon network is crowded right now,” placing (I believe) appropriate blame for any degradation in quality or pauses in service.
Verizon didn’t like that. In fact, Verizon just sent a Cease and Desist letter to Netflix, asking them to knock-off all that bad-sounding truth-telling — of course, the technical details are more complicated than that…
But the base argument that Verizon makes is that their network is just fine, there are no clogs, there’s no reason Netflix’s data shouldn’t be streaming just fine over Verizon’s network — so the problems are obviously Netflix’s fault.
Here’s my take: Netflix provides data to any customer who asks for it over the internet. Presumably, this includes Verizon’s customers, and since millions of people subscribe to Netflix, there really isn’t any surprise here. Verizon emphatically states (to the point of getting lawyers involved) that there is *no* problem with their service.
So instead of providing ‘internet access’ as promised, and what their customers are paying for, Verizon is inserting bottlenecks between their network and the rest of the internet. We can be charitable, perhaps, and say Verizon didn’t install the bottleneck, they just refuse to upgrade their network to fully support the customers they have. If you don’t have enough connections to handle the traffic, Verizon, I suggest you build more — or if you won’t, you should at least be honest with your customers as to which ‘internet’ and how much of it you actually provide access to. Maybe Verizon should stop accepting new subscribers until these connections are up to snuff — after all, consumers don’t pay Verizon for fast speed to the local neighborhood sub-router, people pay lots of money every month for access to the internet and last time I checked, Netflix is part of the internet.
Be honest about what you supply, and what is happening here, Verizon. Netflix is big, sure, but Netflix is not at fault. At least, that’s my take on it. —M.
I am not a Verizon customer. I’d gladly pay for FiOS speeds, actually — yes, even knowing what Verizon is doing (or not doing) in the Netflix matter — but Verizon hasn’t been particularly eager to expand their fiber to enough neighborhoods; mine certainly isn’t included.
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