Day: January 9, 2001

Women Join German Combat Units

After losing its case in the European Court of Justice, Germany allows women to serve in combat position.

In January 2000, a female electronics specialist sued in the European Court of Justice claiming that the German armed forces’ policy of not allowing women to join combat units violated the European Union’s principle of sexual equality. She won and in July Germany changed its constitution to allow women in combat positions.

According to the BBC, 1,900 women have applied to join the German armed forces since the constitutional change. The first 244 women were accepted on January 2, 2001, most of whom joined the German army and air force.

Source:

Women join German fighting forces. The BBC, January 2, 2001.

Thank You, Steve Jobs

Okay, I doubt Apple’s announcement of its new machines are going to do the company’s bottom line much good, but on the other hand it is nice to see Steve Jobs stick with plans to offer a DVD-R drive. Currently there are half a dozen different proposals for DVD recordable drives out there and the standards war has really helped keep these drives from finding a mass market.

Apple’s decision should help change that. And they picked the right standard, DVD-R. Most of the other DVD recordable formats can’t simply be played in a consumer DVD machine. The DVD-R format, however, will play in a standard DVD player.

Apple is going to use a Pioneer DVD-R drive, and it should cost about $1,000 initially. That is way too high for broad appeal, but the price of these drives should fall in much the same pattern as the prices of CD-R drives fell.

Making Money on the Internet

The members forum of the web advertising service I use for a couple of my sites, BurstMedia has been awash lately with people complaining about declining revenues from ad sales. Over the past few months the number of straight CPM advertising has declined while the cost per click adding has increased and total ad inventory has dropped sharply. For example, on one site I run, there were almost 2,000 page views on Sunday, January 7, but only 480 ads were actually shown.

Talking with some of the less knee jerk people in this situation, however, this is an across-the-board problem rather than being specific to Burst. Given the dot.com shakeout and falling tech stock prices, that shouldn’t be too surprising. In fact, last year I was kind of surprised by how much dot.coms were paying for advertising campaigns that to my mind seemed inept at best.

At one point, for example, the now defunct Pets.Com paid a lot of money to run several thousand banner ads on AnimalRights.Net. About half of the ads were plugging a Pets.Com special on dog and cat food. I took the money but I was very skeptical that anyone wanted to buy pet food online, which turned out to be correct. That ad campaign garnered one or two clickthroughs at most.

So how do you make money as a small content provider on the Internet? Beats me. I have some ideas (i.e., I know what I would pay for), but I haven’t really thought about them systematically.

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people seem to focus on the price of the content rather than the quality. Scott Adams has an interesting edition of his I Can’t Stop Thinking where he notes that it would be better for both consumers and producers of comic books to cut out all of the middle men and sell comic art directly on the Internet, in this case with micropayments.

I think micropayments are really a dead end, especially for the sort of content Adams is producing, comic books. Comic books are a great example, however, of something I think could thrive on a subscription model. Have you visited your local comic book store lately? If you’re a Batman fanatic, for example, you’ve got to buy half a dozen or more comic books just to keep up. And if you want to read that one issue of Batman published in 1952? Forget about it unless you’re willing to spend a significant amount of money.

But the kicker is that Batman’s publisher, DC Comics, makes no money off of that 1952 issue. Why not put every single Batman comic ever published online, set a subscription fee (with different packages to give people options), and couple it with other features, charge a reasonable price, and I’d wager DC would make a killing

I also think Adams’ emphasis on price competition is misplaced. Certainly one way for web content producers to compete with real world producers is to be cutthroat on prices. But another way is to offer consumers an experience that can’t really replicated in the offline world. The reason it is stupid to charge $20 for an e-book version of a Stephen King novel that costs say $25 in hardcover is that the way e-books are set up now, consumers are actually getting far less value for their $20 with the e-book version than they are for the $25 paper version of the novel. In that respect, large content publishers seem to be replicating with e-books what happened with the early days of CD-ROMs where many companies pushed so-called “shovelware” out the door to make a fast buck.

Copy Protection — Does Size Matter?

JVC is marketing its digital VCR in part by claiming that it contains so much data — roughly 75 gigabytes per 30 minutes of video — that it would be too large to copy. It does have other copy protection schemes as well with the digital VCR. Its designed to work with HDTV sets and so requires and HDCP decoder as well (and JVC claims the HDCP system can’t be broken).

Ignore the central problem, which is that not only is nobody buying HDTV sets due to the huge expense and lack of HDTV broadcasts (and HDTV standards for that matter), and ignoring the fact that HDCP will be broken at some point if HDTV ever catches on, copy protection through enormous file size seems like a silly thing to claim.

I remember people making the same claim for compact discs back in the late 1980s — audio CDs were pirate-free since it was simply too difficult for the average home user to duplicate a CD (remember when a 1X CD-R and a hard drive large enough to make it useful cost upwards of $10 grand?) That mark fell pretty quickly. Pirating a CD is trivially easy today.

But this is precisely where the JVC guy is wrong — almost nobody I knows goes to the trouble of pirating CDs. Most of us don’t need the high definition 650mb version of the music, but instead are just happy with the compressed MP3 version.

This is the fallacy in JVC’s thinking. It isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but within 10 years consumers will almost certainly be able to buy hard drives capable of dealing with the 300 gigabytes or so of data on a digital VCR tape. But nobody’s going to want to trade that on the Internet, just as nobody cares very much to trade the huge files found on DVDs. Instead, people are more than willing to sacrifice quality for file size and trade MPEG-4 versions of DVD movies.

Blocking Malaria

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine are investigating a possible treatment for Malaria which acts by trapping the parasite in its protective sac. Trap the parasite long enough, and it simply dies before it can wreak havoc on the body.

Dr. Daniel Goldberg and his colleagues managed to successfully block malaria parasites in blood samples.

When malaria enters the human body, the parasites infect red blood cells and then surround themselves with part of the blood cell membrane to create a protective sac for the parasite to reproduce. The parasite replicates itself until it bursts the protective sac and then scatter to infect the bloodstream.

In blood cultures, Goldberg and other researchers treated the malaria with a drug that prevented the parasite from bursting from the protective sac. Eventually the parasite would deteriorate and no longer poses an infectious threat.

Much more research will be required to identify the specific mechanism that prevents the parasites from escaping the sac, and any possible treatment for human beings based on the finding is years away.

Source:

Scientists ‘block malaria’. The BBC, December 31, 2000.

Zimbabwe Heading Toward Food Crisis

Political unrest in Zimbabwe is severely harming that nation’s agriculture leading some to predict food shortages in the coming year.

As President Robert Mugabe’s political fortunes have declined, Mugabe has attempted to improve his standing by fomenting discord between white farmers and black veterans of Zimbabwe’s civil war. Supports of the government have seized white-owned farms over the past several months, and Mugabe has simply ignored rulings by Zimbabwe courts that such actions are illegal.

Many of the former soldiers seizing farms have little expertise in large scale agriculture. Other large farmers, fearful their land will be seized, have dramatically cut back on plantings. Zimbabwe can’t turn to small producers either, unfortunately, because the government buys their produce directly but waited 6 months after taking possession of their farm produce to actually pay the small scale farmers. As a result they haven’t had the financial wherewithal nor incentives to keep their production even at last year’s levels.

The BBC reports that some crops could decline by as much as one-third from the previous year’s level. Already prices for some food staples such as bread have climbed so high that they are already almost out of the reach of many people, and the situation is likely to get worse before it gets any better.

Source:

Zimbabwe faces food crisis. Grant Ferrett, The BBC, January 2, 2000.