Macaroni, cheese, and the end of our Easter ham. And peas. Meg actually ate more than the peas with this dinner!
04.26.11 Dinner
Southwest casserole that we had in the freezer and cheddar cornbread. Somehow, I put cornstarch in the bread instead of baking powder, so they are a bit, ummm, dense. We ate them that night, but I didn’t keep the leftovers.
A View From The Top
While I was sitting at my parents house over Easter talking with my Dad, it suddenly dawned on me that Linux had finally gained supremacy over Windows and Apple, something that I never thought I’d see. However, it wasn’t able to pull off the feat using a traditional PC: instead, it used mobile devices via Android OS.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a new idea. The thought has been broadcast across the interwebs over the past few years, though only recently did Android actually surpass iOS in adoption across the phone and tablet markets. Seeing the range of new products coming out on the horizon, this trend will only continue upwards as multiple companies release products using the Android OS as the backbone for their software.
What some forget, however, is that the core of Android is, in fact, the Linux kernel. My HTC Inspire 4G, running Android 2.2.1, is using Linux kernel 2.6.32. My Linux box at home runs Linux kernel 2.6.35, a slightly newer version. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of differences in kernels (nor do I care…), but let’s just say that there has been some disagreement between Google and the maintainers of the Linux kernel as to whether Android OS technically counts as “Linux,” though I believe most would say that it absolutely does.
I guess I just find it fascinating that this “Little Operating System That Could” finally found an audience and most people don’t even know it. Dad introduced me to computers when DOS and Windows 3.1 were king. However, once our family started having multiple computers, he toyed with other operating systems, including OS/2 Warp and Red Hat Linux 5.2. While he purchased a copy of OS/2, he frequently picked up copies of Linux from the Public Library, installing different flavors of Linux for free on his system(s). As I was curious about these different systems, I learned more about it and once I went to college, grabbed an old Gateway 2000 computer and put Red Hat 6.1 on it, followed by various other iterations of Linux. Over the past decade, it’s been my desktop operating system of choice, always getting better and better.
But few people know how good Linux has gotten. It’s an excellent operating system, as it has been for years. Sure, it still doesn’t run Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or a multitude of Windows- or Mac-only video games, but it does do one thing remarkably well:
Web-browsing.
And if you want to make a device that is constantly connected to the internet, and don’t want to pay high development costs or licensing fees to Microsoft or Apple, which operating system makes the most sense for you to use?
Linux.
As we all move further toward cloud-based computing, and companies like Google keep focusing on Linux as their technology of choice (as it’s behind Android OS and Chrome OS, which will power netbooks and tablets beginning this year), further adoption of Linux will take place in populations that never thought they’d ever use it. Part of this is because the Linux kernel has always had a remarkable “efficiency” to it that Windows has never been able to re-create. You always needed newer hardware to run the most modern Windows systems, while you could run a modern Linux system on practically nothing. Mobile phones, especially, use relatively slow processors when compared to the quad-core monstrosities powering many desktops today. Heck, it was just revealed that an early version of Windows 8 will be the first one to run on an ARM processor, the technology powering practically every mobile phone sold today. Up until now, Windows hasn’t even been capable of running on anything like that, unless it’s the feature-poor Windows CE. Windows will ultimately make it to tablets, but not before Android and iOS have a massive foot-hold on the market, as they already do on phones.
It’s just fascinating to consider how far Linux has come and what ended up actually pushing it “over the top.” We all thought Dell offering Linux on laptops would do it, or the multitude of governments, schools and companies across the world that switched from Windows (or Unix) to Linux would do it.
It was the telephone all along.
F2P – Part II
In “F2P – Part I,” I discussed the two primary forms of making money on media in today’s day and age: advertising and microtransactions. In “Part II,” I look more into how this all applies to other media and where I see things going. Of course, as I am no expert in any of this, you should take anything I say with a grain of salt.
Where’s It Going
Long-story-short? Who knows. The beauty of the internet is that everyone’s trying different things. I think there are interesting trends, however, that are worth considering.
The New York Times, for example, instituted their “pay wall” recently. According to them, most people only look at maybe 20 articles on the site in a given month, so they are preserving that service for those people. For everyone else (that doesn’t have a subscription to their newspaper), they will make you pay for the service after you have hit your 20 article limit. The idea is very similar to the microtransaction: the relative few that use the service the most are subsidizing those that use the service the least. There are other newspapers looking at doing something similar – my hometown newspaper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, has already implemented similar plans.
I think television media is the more difficult anomaly. Hulu, for example, pulls quite a bit of its content from NBC and FOX, and has a good deal of “back catalog” viewing. In some cases, you will get commercials that show up during the breaks, typically either one or two. Sometimes, you’ll get a choice at the beginning of an “extended commercial” that may be 2 min long, and then you won’t get any more commercials for the rest of the show.
Their Hulu Plus service, however, is a crazy hybrid that was released in 2010. The licensing behind these television shows is set such that you can watch them on a computer, or you can watch them on your television through your cable provider (or your antenna), but legally setting up a system so you can watch these shows over the internet and then display them on your television is much more murky. They invented Hulu Plus as a way around this, where you have a subscription service that then allows you to watch some Hulu content on your television, including some current-run shows (i.e. you can watch all of this season’s “30 Rock” over the service). However, there are other shows on Hulu that you can’t watch through your television, including practically all USA Network shows and SyFy shows, to name a few. That means you not only don’t get access to their current-run shows, but you also don’t get access to the same shows that are running on Hulu through your computer.
Let alone the fact that you are paying the $8/mo to get this content on your television, yet you still get commercials to help subsidize the licensing.
Needless to say, the New York Times and Hulu are two separate examples of different ways media are trying to figure out how to get viewers and users over the internet, and make money doing so. In my opinion, the New York Times has a much better strategy for it than Hulu does, yet Hulu is constrained by the “Old Media” way of licensing their content, written when there was no such thing as an “Internet.”
Now For Some Speculation
As I said before, no clue, but it still fascinates me, especially as companies try to find new ways to make money using the internet. I think they all see the writing on the wall and they are doing their best to stave it off as long as they can.
In a relatively short amount of time, there will be no phone lines or cable lines: it will all be fiber optic (or wireless) and we will not only communicate through it like a telephone, but we will also get information and entertainment from it like a television. Your news content will no longer come on paper to your doorstep unless you pay a lot for it. The Internet represents a complete merge of all “Old Media” into something new, and it’s been happening very slowly for the past 15 years. Very soon, however, new houses won’t be built with copper lines or coaxial cables: they will have a single fiber optic line that serves the purpose of both. And old houses will be retrofitted with the same technology. The house we currently live in has that fiber optic line running right up to it, and we live in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. There’s a good chance your houses are next.
And while all that is happening, the companies that make the content will have to merge along with it, and deal with the other companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft that have been in the game and have figured out how to make money on the Internet. Google made a great search engine, but they made their money on advertising. Advertising, I might add, that you barely notice as you browse their various web sites. To the point where they can afford to provide you with web-based office software, Google Earth, Picasa image editing software, Chrome web browser, and even whole operating systems in the form of Android and Chrome OS – for free. They figured out what they needed to do to get you to use their search technology, and they did it with advertising and made a lot of money doing it.
Effectively, whether they like it or not, cable companies aren’t going to have cable going into houses much longer. They need to get their content on the internet, and soon. Personally, I’d rather see this happen along the lines of the New York Times: allow a certain amount of programming for free per month over your web browser or an internet-ready TV, and then charge individuals on a per-channel basis. This should have been done years ago (a so-called a la carte plan) by the cable companies, but they chose to create larger and larger cable packages instead. Now it’s coming back to bite them.
Wrap-Up
How the “Old Media” guard will end up surviving, only time will tell. But there are plenty of companies out there providing free content, subsidized by a fraction of their users. Zynga and Turbine are developers making high-class games and making millions doing it. And they do it using a model that provides services for free to the masses, making money on volume.
Once the “Old Media” groups figure out that they can’t continue doing what they’ve been doing for the last few decades and survive on the Internet, they’ll be better off. Until then, they will continue to lose customers and money.
And the rest of us will simply move on.
F2P – Part I
I’ve been toying with thoughts on the “Free 2 Play” movement (“F2P”) for a few weeks now, as I find the whole thing to be fascinating.
In short, F2P is exactly as it sounds: you get a game, a program, or a web-based service for free, and then your free use of it is subsidized in some way. In some cases, it can be through advertisements. In other cases, it’s in the form of “micro-transactions.” I’ll hit both of those separately, as I think they both contribute in different ways to how the internet is changing, or has already changed, e-commerce.
It should be noted that most people would look at “F2P” as applying solely to the realm of online video games, yet I think its trends extend into other media and have for a long time.
Advertising
The ad-supported model is probably the oldest form of these changes, as we’ve all been exposed to it for generations now. Very few of us could pay for all the programming on any given television channel, yet the advertisements and marketing that go into each program help subsidize it to make each program cost practically nothing to us. In the early days of the internet, when web sites like Yahoo! and AOL were trying to figure out how to make money from consumers and not rely as much on investors, we started getting ads displayed on pages. They started out being banner ads at the top of the screen, and were mostly un-obtrusive. Then, our good friends Adobe established Flash as the go-to web media platform, allowing for moving advertisements. Combined with other web-based technologies like Javascript, the dreaded “Pop-Up” ad gained popularity.
Most large web sites will tell you that their advertisements don’t make a large enough dent in their revenues to fully cover their services. We have come to understand this primarily in the “old media” sense, including magazines, television networks, and newspapers (more on the latter in a few days). In the case of television networks, while Hulu still displays ads during commercial breaks on their programming, the revenue they make from those advertisements barely puts a dent in the costs of production and marketing of a TV show. Quite a few people use the service, but it isn’t exactly paying for new shows.
Enough people got annoyed with pop-up ads (and installed pop-up blocking software in their browsers…) that their development has slowed down, however advertisements still subsidize quite a few web sites, and now, mobile phone applications. You can buy Angry Birds for $1, or you can download a version for free that has small ads on the bottom. Amazon recently announced that they’ll knock off $25 from your purchase of a Kindle e-reader if you get an ad-supported version that displays advertisements on the home screen and screen saver (thankfully, not between pages of your book).
Microtransactions
This is the new way of making money. And it makes quite a bit of money. Mostly, microtransactions have shown up in “the game space,” including free-to-play MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online or Free Realms, and free-to-play games on Facebook, including FarmVille. In general, these games are all free, so you can usually play the majority of the content of the game simply by downloading it, or loading it up in your web browser. However, there are some portions of the game that you can pay a small amount for.
In Lord of the Rings Online, for example, you can “die” and resurrect yourself where you died once per session – after that, you can only resurrect at the nearest town, requiring you to run back to where you were, potentially taking from a few minutes up to an hour. Or, you can pay a small amount, like $0.50, to resurrect yourself again in that location. To many players, that $0.50 is well worth the cost to not have to spend the extra time running back to that location.
In FarmVille, you are growing your crops and getting your friends to do things for you. You need to water your crops in order to earn in-game currency, and this must be done within specific time restrictions. Having your friends visit your farm for you, however, can help take some of the load off your tasks. Of course, you can also visit your friend’s farms and carry out tasks for them, as well. If you don’t want to wait for your friends to do things for your farm, you can pay a small amount to have it done sooner so you don’t have to wait.
This is the idea of the microtransaction. You spend very small amounts of money, or you don’t spend any at all. Statistically, this ends up working quite well for the company. Zynga is the company that makes FarmVille, and more recently, CityVille. The latter had 61 million monthly users last December, helping contribute to the company’s $850 million revenue in 2010. For Lord of the Rings Online, their developer, Turbine, released statements saying that their revenues tripled since going free-to-play. Where players were once spending $15/mo to use the service, they increased the number of people playing the game and actually made more money, having the users spend less.
Effectively, this is the idea of “selling on volume:” get more people to use the product by making it free, and you actually make more money doing it. When interviewed, Turbine will tell you that almost 50% of the users for Lord of the Rings Online pay absolutely nothing, with only a small subset paying a little…and a smaller minority paying a lot. The extreme minority ends up paying for the extreme majority’s fun.
Stay tuned for F2P – Part II, appearing on Friday. I’ll try to apply these two models to media in general, including newspapers, television, and so on. Then again, I’m no expert in these matters, so…take it as you will…
04.25.11 Dinner
Farm-fresh eggs (not our farm yet, but look how yellow they are!!), leftover Easter ham, hashbrowns, and orange smoothies.
Primer: Cell Death
These posts, tagged “Primer,” are posted for two reasons: 1). to help me get better at teaching non-scientists about science-related topics; and 2). to help non-scientists learn more about things they otherwise would not. So, while I realize most people won’t read these, I’m going to write them anyway, partially for my own benefit, but mostly for yours.
A good portion of my graduate work centered upon how a given cell will die when exposed to a specific toxin. In order to develop therapies to prevent the death of that cell, the means by which a cell dies is important. It’s also important how a cell doesn’t die, as I’ll explain later on.
We’ll keep this somewhat simple, though. There are two (very) basic ways that cells will expire: necrosis and apoptosis. Necrosis involves the destruction of the cell and, frequently, damage to surrounding cells. Essentially, the cell ends up swelling and exploding, allowing the intracellular materials to leave and get into the surrounding tissue. Frequently, necrosis is accompanied by extreme inflammation, causing things like white blood cells/macrophages, the cellular defenders against infections and invaders, to get to that area and try to clean it up. In the process, they end up creating more damage. Think of it like a “Scorched Earth” policy of eradication of a given problem. “Take it out and everything around it to make sure we cleared it up.”
Apoptosis, on the other hand, is thought to be much more controlled. It is a form of “programmed cell death,” meaning that there are mechanisms built into a cell to allow it to fail properly (unlike the United States banking industry…). Effectively, when specific signals are received, the cell begins the process of dismantling itself, chewing up its own proteins, shutting down its processes, and packaging itself up for a clean removal by nearby macrophages. Rather than the “Scorched Earth” means of cleanup, it’s more like putting things in trash bags and putting it out on the curb for the garbage truck to come by and pick them up for you.
Apoptosis is an extremely important process for other things, though. In the early development of an organism, for example, the neural pathways of the brain and spinal cord are set up such that some neurons will make the proper connection and others won’t. Those that make the proper connection with their target are strengthened, while those that don’t receive an apoptotic signal to shut themselves down and make way for other neurons. Cancer, however, is an example of a disorder where the proper apoptotic signals are not received and the cell decides not to shut itself down as prescribed. Instead, it can’t receive or interpret the signals and continue to reproduce themselves. Eventually, it gets to the point where even the “Scorched Earth” means of eradication by inflammation doesn’t work.
So in general, your body would prefer to go the “apoptosis” route over the “necrosis” route, as the latter tends to produce quite a bit more damage to surrounding cells and tissues that your body would have to repair afterwards. Once a cell has started down the path of necrosis, it’s difficult to turn back and save it. Apoptosis, however, can be limited because it is so dependent upon intracellular signals.
This image is only a fraction of what’s actually going on in apoptosis, but does contain some of the basic signalling mechanisms. Each of those little acronyms is a protein, coded for by a gene in your DNA. Some of them are turned on because of a signal sent from outside the cell, while others are turned on when the cell starts doing something it shouldn’t, so it tells itself it needs to shut down and dismantle itself. However, the key point is that there are ways to use inhibitors toward those proteins to slow down the death of cells, if not stop the death entirely. Alternatively, in the case of cancer, some of those signals above aren’t functioning properly, and if you can determine which signal isn’t working, you can try to replace it, or “skip over” it and start the signal further down the line. Think of it as a game of telephone where each of those acronymns above is a person, but “cancer” occurs when one of those people decides not to continue the game of telephone. We could potentially use drugs to “skip over” that person and keep the game going, or to finish the analogy, to keep apoptosis going.
A lot of what I just said, however, is determined by the ability to personalize medicine. There are a battery of tests that people are run through when they are diagnosed with cancer, but right now, only a few types of cancer can be targeted in such a way. Usually, we just go the “Scorched Earth” route, much like your own body does, but instead we use radiation and chemotherapeutics. Eventually, however, once drugs can be personalized to the individual (e.g. figuring out which person along the telephone line isn’t continuing on with the game), then we should be able to target that cancer specifically and shut it down. Unfortunately, each person is different and each cancer is different (i.e. it isn’t the same person stopping the game in everyone’s situation: it’s sometimes someone else). Each cancer has to be checked individually for which signal isn’t working, and that takes lots of time and lots of money.
But science and medicine is getting there. Slowly, but surely.
04.14.11 Dinner
Maid Rites, California blend, and fries. Nothing fancy, but very satisfying!
04.12.11 Dinner
It was actually nice enough to grill last week, instead of this week when you barely walk outside without freezing right where you are. So, we had grilled pork chops, shells and cheese (from a box-it’s delicious!), and peas.
04.06.11 Dinner
This was awhile ago, but it was yummy!! Breakfast bake with potatoes, sausage, peppers, scrambled eggs, cheese, and guacamole. And, of course, strawberry-orange smoothies. Meg LOVES smoothies. She’ll down a 10 ounce sippy cup full before I even get our glasses filled!
