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The main reason the RIAA and MPAA can’t stand college students is actually quite simple–they’re the easiest target. How many times have you heard organizations blame so many of the world’s problems on the 18 to 25 crowd? A quick history lesson on what happened in the ’70s should be enough to satisfy that assertion.

College students represent change, innovation and a new way of thinking. The MPAA and the RIAA represent two industries that would like nothing more than to go back to the days of no video media and vinyl–their comfort zones.

“The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry,” an expert covering the case said. The new figures prove “any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself.”

According to a recent report from the Associated Press, the Motion Picture Association of America–Hollywood’s antipiracy wing–admitted to releasing data that was not only factually incorrect, it grossly overstated the impact college students have on the movie industry’s losses.

Why haven’t these organizations focused on the real pirates who cruise in gunships overseas and account for well over 15 percent of that revenue loss the MPAA is so quick to mention? Even better, why doesn’t the MPAA realize that the 15 percent loss is nothing compared with the incredible box-office losses it’s incurring because of crappy movies and skyrocketing ticket prices?

Let’s face it: The 18 to 25 crowd represents change and innovation. It represents a new way of thinking and the condemnation of the old guard. And it’s the old institutions like the movie and music industries that can’t seem to grasp that the change that’s occurring–the right to own your own digital media after purchasing it–is a rogue tidal wave that will eventually lead to their demise.

The MPAA claims its original figure citing a 44 percent loss due to college piracy was inflated by a whopping 29 percent. In fact, the MPAA admitted that the actual impact college students have on the industry’s revenue loss is just 15 percent.

Unfortunately for them, that simply won’t happen. Realizing this, both organizations made a conscious decision to vilify college students in the hopes the rest of us would jump onboard. We didn’t.

I simply don’t understand these organizations. Instead of being the bastions of progress in an age where everyone can see that a change is coming, the RIAA and MPAA have decided to insult college students and cite faulty statistics to back up their ludicrous claims.

So why do the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America focus so much of their time on college students? Is there something that these disgusting organizations aren’t telling us? Are college students really that bad? Sadly, it’s just another example of these organizations trying to vilify the easy target when the real violators are left to roam free.

Sadly, the MPAA and RIAA just don’t like college students. In fact, why would they? After all, isn’t this the group that, according to RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth, “has reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized, and their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development”?

The MPAA and the RIAA are two organizations that should be looked upon with the greatest amount of distaste and downright condemnation. Trust me, they’re really that bad.

Ever since I played my first video game, the thought of losing or dying was awful. After all, who really wants to spend a half-hour making their way through a dangerous dungeon only to die at the end and be forced to retrace their steps to get to the boss battle?

According to a study performed by a number of researchers in Helsinki, Finland, gamers actually like to die in games and actually prefer that over killing other enemies.

Dubbed “The Psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic Emotional Responses to Violent Video Game Events,” the study examined the psychological responses of 36 young adults while they played James Bond 007: NightFire. In order to compare the results, the researchers also used Super Monkey Ball 2 as the control game to decipher the psychological differences between those who preferred dying over killing.

Nonetheless, the study should act as the backbone to a variety of new studies that examine this phenomenon in the hope that eventually we will find out if people really want to kill or be killed in virtual environments.

Regardless, the study shows something that no one expected and might lend some credence to the idea that gaming has nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the enjoyment of achieving a stated goal. In fact, this study does a fine job of displaying one simple truth: most people don’t really think of killing as the main point of a game, but do believe that it’s a means to an end that isn’t necessarily required.

That said, the researchers didn’t quite do a convincing enough job of ensuring that their results could be projected to the entire population of video game players. Let’s face it–if researchers surveyed only 36 people, how can we be sure that the sample was in fact representative of all gamers?

According to the researchers, they were surprised to find that their subjects displayed a negative response to the death of an enemy. They noted that “the fact that wounding or killing the opponent elicited negative, not positive, emotional responses might be reassuring”.

“Given that the player knows that it is only a game, events that, in the real world, are perceived as threatening may be perceived as positively challenging,” they continued.

In fact, I disliked dying in games so much, I would often find it easier to walk away and do something else rather than risk the health of my controller after losing such an important battle. And while I would venture to say many would agree with my assertion, one study claims it’s actually quite the opposite.

In the end, I can’t say that I truly believe people want to die in video games rather than kill virtual characters. After all, wouldn’t it take more than 36 people and a variety of games to truly prove the point?

Finally, the researchers reported that “there was no evidence for desensitization of emotional responses as a function of repeated exposures to violent game events.”

So what does this all really mean to gamers and those that view gaming as means to violence and uncontrollable violence? Maybe there’s hope after all.

I think I’ll choose the former if that means I’ll win.

With some exceptions. Hewlett-Packard (HP) will offer the 45-nanometer Penryn processor for the first time in its 8700 performance line in the next two weeks.

The HP 8700 performance line, which includes mobile workstation models, does not offer the Penryn chip yet. This is expected to change in the next week or so when HP, for the first time, includes configurations with the processor, Hockey said.

HP 8700 performance series will get Penryn chip upgrade in the coming weeks.

While HP was very quick to bring Penryn to its consumer and business lines, there are only limited processor selections in its business line. The HP 6510, 6710, 6720, and 6820 models offer either the Penryn T8100 or T8300, according to HP spokesperson Mike Hockey. But online configuration options are not offered with faster Penryn chips.

Dell’s newest Penryn-based offerings include Latitude and Precision notebooks, which are business and engineering lines respectively. Dell is already offering Penryn on its consumer line of notebooks, including the Inspiron and XPS lines. Certain high-end XPS models on Dell’s Web site, such as the XPS M1730, can be configured with Penryn processors only. One M1730 SKU offers Penryn T9300 (2.5GHz), T9500 (2.6GHz), and X9000 (2.8GHz) chips only.

One of the notable exceptions is the low-end Dell Vostro line which offers only the older line of Core 2 Duo processors and AMD’s Turion 64 X2 chip.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

Intel’s 45nm Core 2 Duo Penryn processor was announced back in January as a significant upgrade from the previous “Merom” 65nm processors. Penryn boasts improved power saving features and generally better (though not phenomenally) performance at the same clock speed due, among other things, to a larger cache memory. On certain multimedia tasks, there is up to a 40 percent improvement in applications using Penryn’s new SSE4 instructions.

Intel’s newest Core 2 Duo processor has finally found its way into most models in the world’s two largest PC makers’ notebook lines.

Should you buy The Godfather on Blu-ray? I’ll tell you in my latest video.

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I think it’s much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O’Reilly might suggest.

Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.

Data that could be used to map out a wide-ranging social graph.

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Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that’s a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can interweave into its other services.

Valleywag pegs the number to be paid at $200 million. For that data, I’d pay a lot more.

But let’s be clear about one thing: not a lot of people in gaming circles are going to get too excited about gaming on Intel integrated graphics. Intel graphics–at least to date–haven’t provided anything more than a minimal gaming experience–and they have been priced that way, coming virtually free on PCs. While upcoming technologies like Intel’s Moorestown system-on-a-chip may create some new opportunities on small devices like high-end smartphones, it will still be limited in its graphics capabilities.

Sounds like Larrabee to me.

All of this will soon (this year?) be eclipsed by Larrabee. In response to a question about what kind of Larrabee support GPA offers, I got this elliptic but telling response. “In the future, GPA will also support upcoming Intel graphics and many-core related products. There are some absolutely exciting features we are currently developing which will change the way people think about performance tools, and which will allow developers to truly harness unbridled computing power,” said Aaron Davies, senior marketing manager, Visual Computing Software Division, Intel.

Behind the release this week of Intel graphics software looms Larrabee, Intel’s future graphics chip.

Think Intel isn’t getting ready for Larrabee–and, generally, for a bigger presence in graphics? Take a look at this Visual Adrenaline Web site. And in particular, this page: “As multi-core gives way to many-core architectures, graphics processing tasks can be performed faster and more efficiently. Visual computing and parallelism share a common playbook. Developers, artists, and digital content creators, who have tapped the many multi-core and threading resources available from Intel, will reap additional many-core benefits.”

(Credit:
Intel)

First, the news. Intel announced the release of Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA), a suite of software tools that enables PC game developers to analyze and optimize game performance on Intel Integrated Graphics. This is part of the Visual Adrenaline program, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in August, which provides tools, resources and information for game developers, artists, and animators, according to Intel.

GPA is also, of course, targeted at Intel chipsets, allowing developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and optimize games for Intel-based desktop PCs and laptops. But I’ll wait for Larrabee, as I think many at Intel are doing too.

Intel is preparing to become a graphics powerhouse too.

This one is called Startup Labs, and according to a job posting Friday, it’s part of Ray Ozzie’s group. The posting didn’t reveal much else, saying that the effort “will consist of multiple product development projects at varying stages of lifecycle.”

I’ve asked Microsoft for more info and will update if I learn more.

As noted by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is launching yet another “Labs” effort.

Startup Labs joins other, seemingly similar projects, housed within specific business units, including Live Labs, adCenter Labs and Office Labs.

In the end, NIN decided to charge only face value for its allotment of presale fan club seats and to put antiscalping provisions in place: buyers’ names will be printed on the ticket, and buyers will have to go through a special entrance where IDs will be checked. He believes that forgoing short-term gain in the interest of long-term fan relationships is the right thing to do.

A year and a half after I first blogged about ticket brokers and the free market, the rest of the world is finally catching on to the fact that scalping isn’t going away.

More fascinating, however, is Trent’s account of how he wrestled with the temptation to sell the band’s allotment of tickets–10 percent, in NIN’s case–for more than face value. As he rightly points out, as long as there are people willing to pay $1,000 for front-row seats, either the band has to charge that amount and be criticized for looking greedy, or a second market is going to thrive.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor on Sunday posted a fascinating take on the whole practice of scalping. As he points out, Ticketmaster or Live Nation could have stopped the practice of scalping eons ago–all they’d had to do is print the purchaser’s name on the ticket and require a photo ID matching the ticket to get in, as they do with airline tickets. (And hey, some concerts–like the Police tour–have seats that cost more than the average airline ticket.) The reason they don’t is because Ticketmaster benefits from the scalper’s market through its TicketExchange subsidiary.

If you’re sick of paying exorbitant prices for big-concert arena tickets, I promise you that there are plenty of small bands playing in your town tonight that you’d enjoy, that would love to have you there, and that won’t charge you more than $30 for the privilege. You might not get to hear your favorite song, but you’ll actually see and hear the band up close, and you won’t have to deal with that “down in front” guy who always seems to sit behind you.

Eventually, concert tickets will be sold through a dynamic pricing model, just like items in a bazaar.

(Credit: Photo by Babak Gholizadeh, via Wikipedia)

A lot has happened in the intervening time–Live Nation emerged as a competitor to Ticketmaster, then agreed to merge with Ticketmaster, and The Wall Street Journal has published a couple
of articles exposing the fact that artists and managers often team up with ticket sellers (like Ticketmaster) and brokers (like Ticketmaster subsidiary TicketExchange) to sell their own allotments of tickets for several times their face value.

I agree with his prediction of the future: eventually, the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merged company will move to dynamic pricing for all tickets, similar to how airlines price tickets today. If it’s a hot ticket, prices could skyrocket even higher than scalpers’ prices today. Then again, if tickets aren’t selling, there might be a last-minute fire sale–good for fans.

Ironically, Studenmund may be one busy gal on the proxy front. She not only is reportedly a contender for Microsoft’s opposition slate, but is currently on the opposition slate for the Jana Group, which is running a slate against CNET Networks, publisher of News.com.

Should Microsoft ultimately run an opposition slate against Yahoo’s board of directors, don’t expect only a cadre of big brand-name executives, a source familiar with the efforts told News.com in March.

The source noted at the time that the software giant already had its slate set and it was comprised of a “pool of candidates spanning from seasoned executives from brand-name companies to folks with a financial background.”

Chapple and Meyer, meanwhile, did not return phone calls.

In addition to the names mentioned above, the Journal listed Vanessa Wittman, former Adelphia Communications chief financial officer, as a contender for the Microsoft dissident board of 10 members and 3 alternatives. TechCrunch lists Tom Freston, former Viacom president.

John Chapple, former Nextel Partners chief executive who now operates investment firm Hawkeye Investments in Washington state; Edward Meyer, former CEO of advertising powerhouse Grey Global Group; and Jaynie Studenmund, former chief operating officer of Yahoo-acquired Overture Services and former board member of Microsoft-acquired Aquantive, are some of the names mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article Wednesday and a previous TechCrunch post from mid-March.

A few possible names are percolating to the surface of Microsoft’s opposition slate as the software giant gears up for a potential proxy fight with Yahoo over its mega-billions buyout bid.

Studenmund, when contacted by News.com Tuesday, declined to discuss her Microsoft gig and referred calls back to the software giant. She did confirm, however, that she worked at First Interstate Bank of California during the time it too faced a hostile bid from cross-town rival Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo ultimately succeeded in acquiring First Interstate in what later became a “friendly deal.”

Now, the only question that remains is whether this group will get the call.

Okay, what’s changed?

Apple’s iPhone 3G

Well, it’s really just that my Treo 650 is almost dead.

And for all its shortcomings and its high price, the iPhone 3G is the best phone on the market right now for my needs, so that’s that.

It crashes almost every day– sometimes more than once, especially when I’m out running errands. During my trip to Washington, D.C. last month, it crashed three to five times every day, and I need the phone the most when I’m traveling. Starting the Web browser causes a crash about 90% of the time. I’ve been using it for four years, and it’s been great, but it’s gotta go.

The original
iPhone couldn’t really do any more for me than my Palm Treo 650.
The iPhone couldn’t be used to connect my laptop to the Internet.
No voice-memo support.
No 3G networking.
Not enough storage capacity.
No native apps from third-party developers.
No high-res screen.

But why would I get an iPhone 3G when it doesn’t solve most of the problems I had with the original iPhone?

Overall, it seems to me that with the premium price and market position of the iPhone, Apple ought to be including the best possible components, and it isn’t. Independent analysts have estimated that the manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G is much less than half of the revenue Apple receives from each sale, which is rumored to be well in excess of $500 or $600 depending on the model. That’s an unusually high profit margin in the cellphone business.

Let me review my reasons at the time:

(Credit:
Apple)

The screen isn’t any better. It’s still far behind the screens on the Nokia 770/800/810-series gizmos, which offer 800 x 480-pixel resolution on a 4″ LCD. The iPhone’s 3.5″ LCD has just 40% than much resolution (480 x 320), which I consider barely adequate for web browsing.

Of course, it’s a free market; nothing sells unless it’s worth the price, and I’ve decided the iPhone 3G is worth the price.

I’ll be meeting with some friends early Friday morning at a location here in Silicon Valley where there’s an Apple store across the street from an AT&T store; we figure we’ll be able to get iPhones one way or the other.

And I’ll get right back on here to let everyone know what I think about it!

My very first meaningful blog post here (after an introduction), from June 23, 2007, was titled “Why I’m not getting an iPhone”.

Well, the iPhone 3G still can’t act as a wireless modem. That’s less important for me than it used to be, however, since I have this snazzy Option 3G adapter for my MacBook Pro. I’d like to be able to use the iPhone for this purpose instead, but that would be just a backup plan.

Apple still hasn’t announced any kind of voice-memo functionality. Rumors say it’ll appear in the new iPhone 2.0 software load, or maybe later, but some such capability will likely be provided by third-party developers since all the necessary software hooks are present to allow it.

Storage capacity hasn’t improved; there’s still no memory-card slot. That still bothers me.

The third-party development problem is mostly solved. It’s still not possible for developers to create software that runs in the background, which is a serious limitation, but the current level of support is about 80% of what I’d like to see.

I’m not criticizing Apple for finding profitability in a market where other firms often lose money. Instead, I think Apple is missing an opportunity here– to compete more directly with other premium cellphone makers such as Vertu, Mobiado, and Prada/LG while repositioning the iPhone 3G more appropriately against similarly configured models from other makers.

Of course, 3G is definitely there.