In a highly anticipated step, Sony has axed Ken Kutaragi, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment International and known as the ‘father of the Playstation’. Because, guess what, Playstation 3s are selling like hot cakes, or any kind of hot things at all. In fact, the Playstation 2 is outselling it, never mind the Wii and Xbox 360.

I don’t think this latest Walkman model will be succesful enough to offset the terrible PS3 sales, but it does seem quite cool with no pesky DRM restrictions.

 

 

 

I just came across this piece by Warren Buffet, originally published in October 2003. It’s interesting and very relevant right now. What I particularly liked was the way in which certain aspects of it can easily be applied to to the Irish property bubble economy.

A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off — or simply service — the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.

Sounds a bit like the whining that followed the broadcast of Future Shock on Monday evening. Whining solely from those with clear interests in seeing the property bubble boom continue. Jim Power, chief economist at Friends First, I’m looking at you and your performance on Prime Time last night, and all the other ‘economists’ paid by mortgage lenders and estate agents who have flooded the airwaves over the past two days to make gentle reassuring noises. Except unfortunately even the reassuring noises aren’t quite so gentle anymore.

 

Jim Power: "If we saw another two or three years of the sort of insanity we’ve seen over the past couple of years in the housing market then I would agree with Morgan."

 

So we’ve had a couple of years worth of insanity, yet the market is still soundly based on fundamentals? I’m confused, Jim …

I’m also confused as to whether you are an independent economist, as you are billed in today’s marvellously deceptive myhome.ie Property Barometer [story (HTML), full report(PDF)]. What makes this article particularly laughable is the accompanying table of house prices. I’ve added some helpful colour coding to the version below.

 

Green columns = not news. Red column = news. Attempt to put a positive spin on this = you have got to be kidding me, right?

Anyway, back in Squanderville, the bookies have suspended betting on there being a decrease in house prices in 2007. Curiously, they’re still happy to take a punt on any kind of house price increases in 2007. I wonder why?

In a superb stroke of irony, the ECB will be meeting in May, when they are expected to announce the next interest rate rise. In Dublin. 

 

 

I’d always suspected as much, but this interview with Giles Slade illustrates the increasing speed at which we are not even waiting for appliances to stop working before replacing them.

In 2003, over 63 million working PCs were trashed, In 2004, that number jumped to 315 million.

Of course, manufacturers are also busy attempting to shorten their product lifespans as much as possible as well.

The British designer known for creating the iPod, Jonathan Ive, probably didn’t have anything to do with the battery inside the iPod. His job was to make the iPod beautiful. But Tony Fadell, the guy in charge of the engineering team and a top executive of Apple, knew very well that the battery would fail after 11 months; it would’ve been his decision to put it inside, where it couldn’t be replaced.

Slade also ties this in to wider cultural differences between more and less material societies.

Related: General Motors Reports Record Sales Of New Disposable Car

Snipshot - basic image editing online. Adobe not very scared yet.
Scrapblog - scrapbook creator / online design tool. From the interface, I’d guess that the people behind Zazzle may be involved. Only seems to work properly in IE at the moment.
Worldprocessor - lots of world stats, and some very pretty globes.
Finetune - music discovery and playlist builder site. There’s a sample playlist at the top right of this page. The interface is nice and simple to use, there’s all the usual stuff like a tag cloud and AJaXy features. Unfortunately, each playlist has to have a minimum of 45 tracks becuase they’re using an Internet radio licence. The ability to skip through multiple tracks on an embedded playlist seems to have been crippled as well.

Oh DRM, don’t leave me this way. I hardly even knew you.

EMI realises that inconveniencing its customers with DRM may be irritating them, and might just be a reason why drops in CD sales have not been offset by online purchases. Steve Jobs will no doubt once more take credit for being the consumer’s champion, despite the fact that he started it in the first place.

Of course, the above could be rewritten as

EMI first major record label to bow to the inevitable - Steve Jobs has the mainstream music industry over a barrel.

or even

New and improved! Two separate pricing models for digital music. Do you want to own the music or just rent it? 

Don’t Leave Me This Way (2007 Remix), DRM-free

 

I take no joy in watching the bizarre ramblings of a menacing fundamentalist lunatic. No joy whatsoever.

Surely a good Christian could find it in his heart to forgive the gross sin of a fellow Christian in creating a naked chocolate Christ? Everyone makes a mistake  sometime, you know. Surely he should be glad that his religion at least permits portrayal of it’s deity, irrespective of the medium used?

Take action! Send Will Donahue’s colleagues an ArseMail (catalyst@catholicleague.org is the email address that’s on their site.)

Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened.

If any of those hate-mongering Buddhists start clamouring about wanting free speech, they can talk to the hand.

PS, I found the image. I have no idea what it’s all about either.