Printing Newspapers, Digital Text Books

Over at the corporate press there is an article about whether newspapers, and the NY Times, will continue to be printed.  The corporate press discussion is a bit shallow, but they go on to say they may be good news in print for textbooks.

Let's analyze all this a bit more...

I took a little deeper look at the NY Times situation.  First off, they are planning to implement a "pay wall" at the NY Times next year.  This means that you will be able to access some articles per month for free and after that you will have to pay.  This is, however, for the casual user.  If you'd like a web-based subscription that is offered as well.

This is common.  The Wall Street Journal, for example, does basically the same type of thing.

I guess its a good thing that the NY Times realizes they need to be paid.  According to Aurthur Sulzberger, Jr., the chairman and publisher:  "Our pursuit of the pay model is a step in the right direction for us," Sulzberger said. "We believe that serious media organizations must start to collect additional revenue from their readers," and "information is less and less yearning to be free." Readers are becoming increasingly willing to buy information on the web if it enhances their lives, he said.

I find the underlined portion of the statement very interesting, particularly in light of this article.

Here we find the crux of the matter: "The economics of the online news business will not support the infrastructure or newsroom that the printed paper supports."

This is very interesting.  Web-based news reporting cannot support itself.  But it goes on: "We estimate that the NYT currently spends about $200 million a year on its newsroom and generates about $150 million of online revenue."

This coupled with continuous losses on the print side (maybe $12 million a year) are what's driving all of this.  Right now I can access the NYT without restriction - or at least so it seems.

So let's compare this to a less venerable, perhaps down-right evil publication, the Wall Street Journal.  Over at PaidContent.org I found some comments from Rupert Murdoch, the new owner.  Though a bit dated (from 2008) they tell us a lot:

"Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of D conference, and Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS), is speaking in the last keynote of the day today, at his conference. When asked by Walt about the future of newspapers: “I just love communicating with people, whether print, TV, print, mobile and others. Print will be there for at least 20 years, and outlive me.”

On keeping WSJ/Barrons as subscription: “When I saw how much money they were making, I changed my mind on it. People can pay a lot more than we are charging, from $50 a year to $150 million…We have 2000 great journalists….if we can’t fashion something great out of it, then we have something wrong,” he said, elaborating on the premium product that WSJ can build on."

These guys seem to have no problems making money, even with 2,000 journalists.  The NYT, at around the same time, has only about 1,330 journalists working in its news room.

So is print dying or is the NYT just an example of a grossly mismanaged media company?

The real question, I think, is has print tied itself to an unpopular editorial model - one that's losing ground against a more popular one - as well as, in a case like the NY Times, a bad business model.

I think that's the real question.

Let's think about books for a minute - in particular school books.  I've been looking at this article at wired.com for the last couple of days.  This talks about a all-digital text book video-game like text book that the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, named after the naturalist and founder, plans to give away.  Now whether or not you agree with E. O. Wilson is another matter but the idea that they can raise $10 million dollars and create a free digital science book is interesting.

My grandchildren are not so interested in sitting down to read physical books - and I don't see how they are different than most these days.  At 7 and 9 they are taught at a cyberschool.  This is a complete on-line school.  No paper, no books.  They've been in this school all along and I don't see how they would go back to paper books.

I imagine that this E. O. Wilson book will be aimed at this model of education.

The growth of cyber schools is amazing (from a 2005 article).  The recent anecdotal evidence I have from my daughter whose children are in there particular school is that the school is growing rapidly.

Students in colleges already all have laptops - cyber grade schools are all computerized - so its really hard for me to see how print will make an inroad.

The Digital Nirvana comments I think are out of touch on both accounts...
 

Adobe Converts Flash to HTML5

In this video...



While only a demo at least its a step in the right direction...

Learn

This link is to a transcript of Apple's call with investors last week.

Scroll down a bit an read the comments by Steve Jobs - they're too long to post fully here.

Once you've read this you will see why Apple is #1 right now.  Jobs knows what's going on across the board.  He understands both the market and technologies and why his products work.

Compare that, say, with the BP CEO Tony Hayward who resigned over the gulf leak.  He had no knowledge of the details of the details - before or after.  On the other hand, I bet those involved with the delay of the iPhone 4 white case are personally known to Jobs - and the results of their activities appear in his in-box minute to minute.

But its not just that.  Look at his depth of knowledge about the technology in his products and why its there.  Even for iPad for which no "white case" type disasters have occurred.

One mistake management of American companies makes is having to much distance between the CEO and the workers and their products.

To borrow an BMism (and to pun on THINK) American CEO's need to

Learn

Music Reinvented...

I wrote here yesterday about the RIAA and copyright issues.  While I may not agree with the RIAA and making everyone a copyright criminal I think that the music industry in general is working on some new ideas for replacing the old model of music distribution.

The most interesting one is the evolutionary progression of the "Rock Band" series of video games.

This started out in 2005 with the release of Guitar Hero.  Basically there was a plastic guitar-like controller with four plastic buttons on the neck and a little bar where you would normally strum the guitar.  The idea of the game was that as a song played little icons would slide into view on the screen telling you when to strum or press buttons on the neck - presumable in sequence and time with the song.  The closer you got to doing exactly what the sliding icons told you to do the better your score.

I have a friend who in my estimation is one of the best acoustic players I've seen - particularly in terms of accuracy and timing.  I was over at his house one day a few years back.  He had the game and said "check this out".  So we fooled around with the game for a couple of hours.  I didn't do well because I had never played it - surprisingly, neither did he.  This has stuck with me over the years...

I've also been watching how this whole genera of games has been changing the "Steal. Mix. MP3." music model pioneered by the iPod.  Like advertising sales at the big newspapers music sales in traditional venues are dropping at a double digit percentage rate.  However, video games continue to show growth.

What's interesting here is that music, through its association with video games, has found a whole new paid distribution model to compete with "Steal. Mix. MP3."

Heavy hitters like the Beatles and Bon Jovi have been signing up to have their music distributed via this model.

PS/3 sales have been increasing and Rock Band has helped contribute to that increase.

But the video game developers have not rested on their laurels, either.  Since the initial 5-button plastic guitar controller was first released there has been a steady development effort to make the "Rock Band" experience even more realistic.

Now, most of you at one point in your lives were probably subjected to music lessons.  Usually in grade school.  Like me you probably hated it.  On the other hand, as the controllers for these new games become more realistic the game becomes a venue to have little Junior spend hours playing.

You may object saying that its just a game and has little to do with actual music.

In the past you'd be right.  But "Rock Band 3" moves the playing experience to a whole new level - bringing in real or nearly real instruments.  Drums, keyboards, and even stringed guitars with amplifiers are becoming part of these games.  Guitars with built in MIDI controllers to drive synthesizers have been around for years.  This fusion with video games will make the cost of this type of instrument drop as the sales volumes for the games increase.

So not only is the video game market driving music sales, its now also pushing the integration of musical instruments into an electronic format.

So is there a corresponding increase in musical knowledge that goes with all this?  Or are we just creating and ever more elaborate version of air guitar or musical masturbation?

Sadly, it would seem that all of this is more the later.

Rock Band and its friends can teach you a number of things about music.  Rhythm in particular seems to be the biggest element learned.  But "learning rhythm" not quite the same as actually learning to, for example, drum.

The biggest problem is that the games are an abstraction of the music playing process.  Its very unlikely that anyone will quickly learn to play guitar like, say David Gilmore, from Rock Band.  The reason is that what makes him so good goes far beyond plucking a given string at the right time.  There's string bending, sustain, flexing the neck, picking style, timing with the rest of the band, and much, much more that your not going to learn from the game.

Which takes me back to my friend not doing well on the game.  He's a musician - not a video gamer.  He plays the instrument based on sound, not visual cues.  Can he become better at the game - of course.  But I think that's why he lost interest ultimately (now he plays Hockey online) - its just not like a real musical experience.

Its also important to realize that, even in Pro mode, the game is not going to give you any sort of realistic real-time feed back in a musical sense.  Playing with real musicians is daunting if you have not done it before.  They don't play like a game for the most part - its much more dynamic.

A player like David Gilmore doesn't just play his instrument.  He also listens to whatever else is going on around him so that his timing relative to the other sounds is correct.  This is probably my biggest dislike with the game (as well as my personal experience with it).  You need to play by ear, not by visual cue.

After you've play a number of years, for example, you can anticipate the motion and sound another player will make.  It becomes almost like telepathy.  You literally "feel" what the other players are doing as they do it.

(So to the developers out there of "Rock Band" - add a no-visuals mode that teaches listening skills - a training mode to teach listening to pitch - create a mode where its more important to have each controller played in sync with the others.)

Rock Band is creating an entirely new model for music distribution - a much better one than the RIAA suing people who share music online.

Is this all a good idea?  Will little Junior learn to be Neil Pert by playing Rock Band.

No.

Will this stimulate interest in music and playing instruments, expose little Junior to music in a way that tedious and boring grade school music lessons will not?

Absolutely.

Are you a Copyright Criminal?

Many of you are no doubt familiar with LimeWire - a file sharing site.

It was shut down today.  The site now displays this message:  "This is an official notice that LimeWire is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. Downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal."

There is a story over at Wired related to this as well providing a little more background.

The action is the result of the RIAA (Recording Industry of America) suing over copyright infringement and should not really be a surprise to anyone.  Allegedly millions of people illegally shared songs on this service over many years.

Many of you reading this probably thinks "Oh, my kid does that" or thinks "who cares, its just big business after the little guy and its better to shut down LimeWire than the RIAA suing me or someone I know".

Well, here's my take.

The notion of copying something for your own use has been around quite a while - probably since the time that writing first appeared.  Copies of documents like religious scriptures abound in the world and, in fact, many of the books and historical records we have today would not exist without the manual "copying" people did in the ancient past.

In the ancient world, at least, the idea of copies was to "get the word out".  There were libraries, such as the library at Alexandria, Egypt, where you could find books - but the only way to "make a copy" was by hand.  This is how many classical works were passed through the dark ages.

Copying in the dark ages was a time consuming business.  Vellum was often used with hand made inks and writing utensils.  The details are incredible.

Some time in the 1500's the idea of intellectual property emerges.  This is the basis for today's copyright notion that the RIAA is suing under.  Its first used when royalty "granted" rights to something to someone.  The first legal use of the words "intellectual property" in the US occurs in the 1840's in a patent case.

For me personally, though, the "intellectual property" concept takes shape starting in grade school.  For most as old as I am the old "mimeographed worksheet" was a staple of the grade school class room.  You will recall the nasty, smelly, purple ink process that yielded the dreaded "math worksheet".  For the rich there was the process of xerography which allowed one to dispense with the mess and smell.  This was far more expensive than the clunky mimeograph machine which most small businesses and schools could afford.

Personally, though, these devices were not available to me in grade school for book reports and so on - so I relied on the method used for millennium: hand copying.

By the time I reached high school in the early 1970's, however, xerography had become accessible - at least in the local  libraries - where I could go to work on homework or personal projects.  This made it easy to locate a reference or article, copy it for a buck, and take it home to peruse at your leisure.

Similarly, you might have a cassette tape copy of a friends' vinyl LP to listen to while doing said projects - usually made by hand.

During this time we were all protect by the "Fair Use" clause of the Copyright law.  Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship (from Wikipedia).

In the intervening years between then and today, however, things changed.

Schools realized that making xerox copies for students, or getting students to make xerox copies, was far cheaper than buying a text book.  So you might be required to read an article for a class in which case you were provided a copy or you made a copy of it yourself.

As this processes expanded you ended up with businesses like this.  The Copyright Clearance Center's sole purpose is to license you the right to copy something for use in the scenarios I described.  Lawyers discovered that copyrights and ownership rights were being violated and created a business model to effectively clamp down on the process.   The RIAA tactics were pioneered by the CCC-type businesses.  The idea is to get all the large players like schools and universities, to go along, and sit back and collect the royalties.

But where does this take us...?

Certainly much of the Internet is made up of links.  Links to images like the one at the beginning of this article.  Links to product images, links to pictures, links to stories, blogs, text, product data sheets, etc.  Virtually everything you see on web pages is linked in.  Who own these images, the text describing the book you want to buy, the picture of the reviewer, the review he wrote, etc.?

I foresee that the next issue will effectively be a "link tax".  Its already started in France where Google lost the right to index books without compensating the copyright owners.  Google claimed that doing this was "fair use" but the French think otherwise.  There have been other suits against Google as well - who owns the little image that comes up when do a search?  Is that fair use? Who will pay?

I also don't like that technological advances that allow people to easily and unknowingly violate the law don't share in the responsibility we people do.  For example, in the early iPod days Apple's "don't steal music" was particularly disingenuous.  After all, what was the point of "Mix. Rip. Burn."?

My wife and I argue on this last point - she rightly points out that its the person committing the crime.  While I agree I think that companies advertising and promoting "criminal" activities like "Rip. Mix. Burn" should make them share in the blame as well.

(You can bet it won't be Google.)

The copyright law is old - its been around for centuries - and its not keeping up with the modern digital age.  In the world of physical print its easy to track things - as with a library.  But the notion of "Fair Use" ended with the invention of xerography in 1942 and its subsequent commercialization in the 1950's.

Ultimately the "cost" of using content on the Internet will fall on you and I - so hold onto your wallet.

The Politics of Mailing

About fifteen years ago, when I was part owner of the print/mail/fulfillment company I learned a few things about politics. My partner and I had started this company in September of 1994 with nothing and did about $400K worth of business by year end. Our sales increased each year there after until I left in 1998.

During that time we had a full mail shop and print facility. We handled inserting, printing, mailing, all of the usual stuff. I was mostly involved with the software and financial management so I did not spend a lot of time in the mail room.

However, I did virtually all of the graphic design. This meant that I would be involved in the creation of many of the pieces that we mailed.

One fall after we had been in business a while I was in the mail room. My partner had a few hods full of mail. Each hod had a big red tag on it. This was unusual so I asked him about it.

"Oh," he said, "these are political mailings."

"Really?" I said. We had never, to my knowledge, done any of those and I was interested in what the red tag was for and what the difference, if any, between a political mailing and a non-political mailing was. So I asked.

"The red tag is so that the Post Office knows the mail should be rushed through. That way people will get the mailing before the election." Even I knew that the USPS had six weeks to get first class mail somewhere. Not that it ever took that long but they had the option, as it were.

That made sense to me. I could see the value of the red tag.

Then he said "One more thing."

"What's that?" I replied.

"I have a check here for this mailing." He handed me a check for the cost of mailing from whomever the candidate's action committee was.

"Up front payment?" I asked.

"Yup," he replied, "you can't trust these bastards to pay after an election."

I thought about this for a minute.  My partner and I did not always see eye-to-eye on things but he'd been in the business a lot longer than me and knew the ropes.

"Okay" I said.  I took the check up the accounting office.  Had the billing department create a bill and turned the whole mess in to close out the bill and deposit the funds.

Sometime later on we had some graphic art work to be done for a political piece.  Usually we received sample pieces, perhaps an example piece from a prior year, new text, new logos, and so forth.  It was one of my jobs to take that material and create the masters for print.  If the job was complex we had an outside print vendor that would take care of it.

This piece was basically just text and logos.  I put together a B/W mock up with the new elements and took it over to my partner for review.  He handled a lot of the customer interaction and the political accounts were his.  I handed him the piece.

"Oh," he said, "Where's the union bug?"

"Union bug?"

"Yeah, this," he pointed to a small graphic at the bottom of the page on the original.  "And the recycled paper logo," he continued, "that's missing too."

I knew what that was.  "Any special paper for this job then?" I asked.

"Nope, just ____" which was the standard "cheap" paper we used for low-end work.

I went back to my office and scanned in the union bug from the previous piece.  Then I whipped up an recycled paper logo as best I could and made the rest of the changes to the piece.

I brought it back and handed it to my partner.  He looked it over and said "good, I'll get this approved."

"Do they care that we're not a union shop?" I asked somewhat tentatively.

"Oh no, they're only looking for the best price."

"Okay", I said.

A few days later the piece was in the shop, happily sitting in its red-tagged hods, proudly displaying its union and recycling logos, waiting to go to the Post Office.  The check paying for the mailing was laying on top of the USPS paperwork.

My lesson in politics was complete...

On The Edge...

Another video from last weekend... (that's me in the back on keys).

I did the audio recording...

The Cost of Replacement...

When I first started in computers in the mid-1970's the state of the art disk storage system for small computers was the DEC RK05 (pictured top left over a DEC PDP-11/70) or something like it.  The drive was removable and stored about 2.5Mb of data.

The list price was around $7,900.00 USD in 1970's dollars - something like $30,000.00 USD in 2010 dollars.

By 1991 you could buy a 200 Mb disk drive for about $700.00.  At this time you could install multiple operating systems (Windows, SCO Unix) on that disk and still have plenty of spare space for work activity.

I bought a drive like that, made by Seagate, in order to launch my first business.  It would cost about $1,088.00 dollars today.

A few months ago I bought a backup 1Tb drive at the local big-box office store for $100.00 USD.

In the last couple of days I came across a few articles on Apple computer related to DVDs and disk drives.   The first on Apple and DVDs: link.  Apple doesn't like DVDs any more, nor does it like Java.  So, rather than support them, it simply relegates them to history and moves on. 

Similarly Apple on the Air Book and the SSD (Solid State Disk): link.

From the link:  During the conference call, marking Seagate's first quarter of fiscal 2011, Seagate chief executive Steve Luczo was asked about whether SSD will replace hard drives in laptops.

"So, do I think that's where mainstream notebook computing is going, if that's what your question is? No, I don't." sas Luczo.

Well, of course not.  Why would I, as president of a company that makes complicated, tiny, hard to manufacture electo-mechanical devices, think that these would be replaced by a small circuit board with a couple of gold contact pins?  Presumably he's not that dumb and realizes that the days of electro-mechanical devices are going the way of the dinosaur.

(Now I am sure that there will always be some application for hard drives, just like for DVDs and other things, but not in the same way as today.)

Right now the extra cost for a SSD on a MacBook Pro is about $1,300 USD for a .5Tb SSD and $200 for 128 Gb SSD.  This will drop, and quickly.  It took decades for the disk drive to reach .5Tb.  SSD will blow past this in terms of significant additional cost in probably 18 months.

Next is Netflix: link.  These guys a few years ago were a DVD rental company with side business streaming movies.  Today they are a movie streaming business that rents DVDs on the side.

So what's my point with all this?

Well, on the one hand the cost of replacement.  Replacing anything technological with a newer item always costs about the same and gets you significantly more capability.  SSD, like the cost of flat TV's that I have written about before, will drop in price quickly.  Coupled with a phaseout of DVDs I would venture to guess that in two years or so "netbooks" and many laptops, particularly on the lower end, will have no moving parts (save the hinges and keys).

The only thing preventing the keys from disappearing is ergonomic - its not efficient to type on a tablet - particularly if its not horizontal.

On the other hand, what happens when you reach the end of the technological road?  Say DVDs in the coming years, hard drives or "traditional print"?

Well that's a bit different.  What I see there is that devices or technologies don't simply vanish.  Instead they become, at least temporarily, so low cost that they can move into other areas.

What I mean by this is say I have a large plant making DVD drives.  If Apple stops buying them today I will have a lot of spare capacity.  Rather than simply close the doors and walk away I will find something else to put the DVDs into - typically at a lower cost than say Apple was paying - but still enough to make money.

This is where print is today, at least in my view.  We've been squeezing cost out for decades.  iPads and notebooks are taking away from print in the form of eBooks and so forth. 

Print becomes "unhinged" from its traditional role and there is a buildup of spare capacity.

I think this is why you see "digital packaging" and things like it.

These are ways for the existing print infrastructure to be expressed outside their traditional roles.

Sadly, in 2010 the timelines for all this change are much shorter than say in 1970.  After all it took probably a decade for disk drive prices to drop significantly.

But that just means we have to be smarter about picking the future path.

Breath on My Shoulder

This video was recorded yesterday.

It's the first live performance of "Breath on my Shoulder."

I talked about some of the technical issues when writing this song way back in August, 2010 in the post "A Little Off Topic..."



Bill "Scotty" Grill - Acoustic Guitar/Vocals
Jimmy Mac - Guitar
Carl O - Bass
Tim Orban - Percussion
Todd Kueny - EWI 4000/Sax

Making this video documented here.

And Adobe Blinks...

New HTML5 video player from Adobe discussed here at Wired.

Adobe's own announcement is here.

Google is pushing WebM as a video format for HTML5.

From the Wired article:

"With its new player, Adobe is responding to their developers’ wishes for solutions that play well on the open web. It comes on the heels of last week’s release from Adobe, which lets artists using Illustrator export their drawings as HTML5 Canvas, and its earlier pack of HTML5 tools for Dreamweaver.


HTML5 video adoption among browsers has gone tremendously so far — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera all support native video, and baked-in support is coming to Internet Explorer 9 next year. But it’s still a bit of a mess, with different browsers supporting different formats. So developers posting HTML5 video still need to encode their files in at least two of the three major formats — the widely-used H.264, the newer WebM or the older Ogg Theora — to guarantee all HTML5 capable browsers will be able to see their videos."

The Death of Imagination...

For the last 50 or so years I have lived in a household that received a copy of National Geographic each month.

How it started I cannot say for sure.  I did eventually find out that my grandmother gave subscriptions as a Christmas gift.  Later, when she passed away, I took up the mantle and have given gift subscriptions to family, employees, and others as gifts.  I have done so for probably for the last 25 or so years.

As far back as 1963 I remember the excitement each month when a new issue would arrive.  I was probably in second grade or so so the text was pretty much beyond my ability - but the images - well, that was another story.

I grew up in rural farm land on a one mile square block.  Most everyone I knew lived on a farm and, as a kid, I often rode my bike to my friend's house to work.  As for entertainment - there wasn't much.  We had a B/W television and a radio.  Fortunately (or not) we lived about half way between Chicago and Milwaukee and could get maybe 5-6 TV channels - mostly duplicates - but not always.

Nothing much changed from day to day or year to year in those days - rural life progressed slowly.  Big cities, exciting events, travel, all this, was a world away - except when the National Geographic arrived.

I distinctly remember to this day a copy from that time and its cover.  It had a mushroom-shaped underwater habitat created by Jacques Cousteau and his diving team.  Though I couldn't make out the text I could follow the pictures and some of the captions.  They fascinated me.  Mysterious devices and animals, strange French foods at their dining table - all things which I had not contact with and had never seen before.

Other issues arrived with stories on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions, archeology, and other deep sea diving adventures: the Alvin uncovering Greek ship wrecks, the bathyscaphe Trieste, and many others like the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism (image above). There were many issues on caves and spelunking, bats, underground rivers and diving.

The most important element in all of this to me as I reflect is that I had to use my imagination to fill in what I could not read or understand.   Save for the odd Jacques Cousteau TV special or Walter Cronkite covering a space mission there was not video or audio to fill in the gaps - only my imagination.

Only one of my seven grandchildren one has been bitten by the National Geographic bug.  The rest watch TV, videos, or the computer I suppose as most children do.

He brought his copy over to the house a few weeks ago.  He's four.  "Pa pa, look at this..." he says pointing to some insect or other interesting thing on one of the pages.  My daughter tells me he loves receiving a new copy and that he makes his parents go through each page and talk about what's there.  Sure, he watches TV, videos, cartoons like the rest, but with this one that spark of interest burn bright.

So why am I boring you with this sad reflection on childhood past?

It's relevant to print.  Print, particularly things like a National Geographic, offers a static view for a child.  Its not a video, it doesn't fill in all the gaps, it doesn't tell you the story so you don't have to think.  You can lay with in on the floor and study it at your own pace.  You can take it to bed and peer at it in the moonlight when you're supposed to be sleeping. 

Its a silent friend that doesn't wake up mom, dad or your little brother.

As print dwindles away in our culture we replace it with something which we think is better and more exciting - video, laptops, iPads and audio.  But its not.  Instead we are using this rob a generation of their imaginations.

How do we do this?  By filling up our children's time so they don't have to think on their own.  As a child I gravitated to these magazines because I was bored.  I learned to find excitement and interest in their pages on my own and at my own pace.

Today we think about print as an industry.  An industry threatened with obsolescence. How do we make our living without out it, and all the rest.  This is wrong.

Instead we need to focus on what is good about print and how we can preserve what's important about it for future generations.  Will the National Geographic my grandson loves be around as he passes into adulthood?  Almost certainly - but perhaps not in print - which will be a shame...

I found this today...

Its a small forum at the WSJ related to newspapers...

I posted about me and this blog...

This is what I said:

I have a lot to say on newspaper's and print...

I write about it here http://lwgat.blogspot.com/ every day.

(This is a shameless promo... but my topics are much more interesting than what I see here..)

I've been in the print business in one form or another for 30 years. I started working on desk top printer software drivers in 1980 and have been involved in all aspects of print (including owning a printing company).

Today I have a company called Lexigraph that provides software solutions for print. My solutions touch your life everyday - and you don't realize it.

I have written recently about how high-speed inkjets are taking over from traditional presses, how electronic media is hammering traditional print, how the corporate mouthpieces of the industry lead the masses astray with nonsense about technological solutions such as transpromo, how the "pension problems" affecting government are going to impact print and much more.

Newpaper printing is doomed: my eighty year old mother likes newspapers but my grown children don't know what they're for. My grand children can't take the time to read a book...

The only question is how the collapse will work and what, like the tiny mammals of evolution, will survive.

The Evolution Deniers...

I see a lot written in the corporate print press about how printers can offer alternative marketing services to their clients.   Complex VDP, transpromo, creative services, all manner of things electronic and new media outside the realm of ink on paper.

I think this is wrong and disingenuous.  I think it denies reality.

There were a number of print shops near me when I moved to my current home.  Some quite large - others mere holes in the wall.  Most are gone now.  Those that remain will either be highly specialized or highly localized - providing things that be aggregations of print providers cannot match - better service, quick turnaround, etc.

But its not just the fault of social media and other modern conveniences like cell phones.

Long ago the first shots where fired when office laser printers first came into wide use.  Before that virtually everything had to be typed on paper or paper forms.  When I bought my first house in the early 1980's all the forms were typed or printed on - laser printers didn't yet exist in the office.

(I know because that's what I was doing at the time - developing the first desktop laser printer drivers as I wrote here previously.  The IBM PC was still new then as well - with its Charlie Chaplin ads in print and on TV.  The Mac would not appear until even later.)

When I bought my second house in the late 1990's all the forms were laser printed - no more three-part carbon forms to sign.  Everything was produced on a laser printer in N parts - you just signed them all.

Today's social and electronic media is the second attack wave directly on print - home/office printers were the first.

Quite honestly its been coming for a long time.  The only people I know that still use print and paper for bills, correspondence, and so forth are either elderly or required to for some business purpose.

Produce life cycles are now weeks instead of years so virtually all product marketing literature is obsolete soon after its printed.  (The large print "literature and fulfillment warehouses" have all but vanished as well.)

Then there is the problem of complexity and skill.  Printers are, well, printers - not rocket scientists.   It's a skill having to do with mechanical things and how they affect the appearance of something - an art form to some extent. VDP, transpromo, and other things require expensive and complicated computer processes to get right (again as I have written about in this blog).

Certainly some printers can do this - but so can some bakers or auto mechanics - so there isn't much barrier to entering the VDP world.  There are also many dedicated web sites that make the process automatic for printing - but they are being superseded by blast email sites.  (Try $200 for 60K opt in emails and compare to a printed mailing campaign.)

New legal requirements mean that printed materials sent to customers must also exist on the web for customer support and other reasons.  So the stand-alone VDP print piece is not so simple to produce and manage over its required lifetime.

iPad and tablet computer sales are expected to reach 208 million by 2014:

"The all-in-one nature of media tablets will result in the cannibalization of other consumer electronics devices such as e-readers, gaming devices, and media players," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

The sales of this device are attacking laptop sales - something far newer than print.  The image above has the NY Times giving away content on the iPad via its App until 2011.

Given all this why the "Rah! Rah!" over VDP, transpromo, web-to-print and all the rest?

Evolution in our industry is happening before our eyes.  Print as an industrial process is never going to go away - and I can still buy buggy whips - from Amazon.com, in fact.

What would be good for small printers to read?  How to transition out of print - business opportunities, how to sell your shop, those sorts of things.

My prediction is that the next big hit will be in the platemaking area for medium/large run as inkjets take over.  Most of this will be inkjets replacing traditional printing for semi-static things - newspapers.  The cost of plates will go into the cost of ink for a while - but iPad sales will eat into even this.

We must also consider that the recognition of the print art form is all but lost.  Consumers today care almost exclusively about cost - whether a printed advertisement is well made in the print sense is almost completely irrelevant.  (Proof reading is following the same arc.)  No one really cares how "well" something is printed.

Censorship...

I've noticed some interesting censorship issues related to this blog.

Censorship: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." - from Wikipedia.

This falls to this blog because print is among the types of "other communication".

One reason is that I don't like what I see on a lot of the other print-related blogs.  There is too much mindless rah-rah, pointless discussions and too much discussion of issues, take transpromo as an example, where the real costs and issues are not properly vetted.

I think that the industry as a whole is being done a disservice by this.  Look at what happened with the hype over VDP in the early 2000's.  Industry change is constant.  What you do about it is important.

What's needed is industry leadership - not cheer-leadership.

I've also noticed there is a wide collection of sites that are very uninterested in any sort of new "blogs" that do not follow the standard line.  Forum posts disappear, comments never find their way into pages, that sort of thing.  Not just recently but over the last several years.

Unlike these other sites I keep a list of blogs, forums, and so forth that I find useful on the right side of this blog.

I have nothing to hide nor do I wish to censor anyone's free speech.

How to Captcha that Hot Ticket...

I found this story in Wired.  My rants on the value and security of print versus electronic forms of secure documents got a big boost yesterday when I found it.

It looks like a judge in New Jersey is trying to make defeating CAPTCHA a Federal Crime.  That's right - you've seen it a million times when signing up for forums, web sites, web accounts, virtually any web activity with a terms of service or something to sell.  They want to make sure you're "you" and not some bot.  But this takes things to a whole new level...

So what's the story (from Wired)...

"The case targets a ring of defendants who used various means to bypass CAPTCHA — the squiggly letters and numbers websites display to prove a visitor is human — in order to automatically purchase thousands of tickets from online vendors and resell them to premium customers....  The defendants have been charged with wire fraud and with violating the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in an elaborate scheme that allegedly used a network of bots and other deceptive means to bypass CAPTCHA and grab more than 1 million tickets for concerts and sporting events. They made more than $25 million in profits from the resale of the tickets between 2002 and 2009."

Basically these guys wrote programs that got around the idea that you had to be a human to solve a CAPTCHA display on ticket web sites.  How they did that is interesting in and of itself, but there are more important freedom issues at stake.

I certainly don't advocate fraud of any type.  Printed tickets of all forms: lottery, concert, speeding, and so on all are produced and managed on printed forms that are hard to duplicate for good reason.  Fraud has been around a long time and complex printed objects have always been a good way to keep it in check.  Not that it always succeeds, but in general "Joe Average" doesn't cross the line to create fake concert tickets and so forth.

(Though this was and is an issue as home laser and inkjet printers become more sophisticated.  Much of this is address today through embossing, foil and other stamps, embedded strips, steganography, and so forth.)

The defendants in this case bought the actual tickets in questions - well, actually they got customers to give them credit card information and when the time came their customers bought the tickets - no credit card fraud is alleged.

The issue is how they bought them.  

They wrote programs to log into places like TicketMaster, create fake ID's on the site (this is where the CAPTCHA defeat comes in) and supplied valid credit cards (with the owner's permission) to buy the tickets.

The rub is that the "Terms of Service" (from TicketMaster) on these sites says "you" must not do a lot of things - among them not "hack" the site and you must be, well, er, you:

"By using or attempting to use the Site, you certify that (i) you are a resident of the United States and are at least 13 years of age or, if under the age of 13, you have the consent of your parent or guardian (over the age of 18) to use the Site, or (ii) you are not a resident of the United States and are at least 18 years of age or, if under the age of 18, you have the consent of your parent or guardian (over the age of 18) to use the Site. If you do not meet these requirements or, if for any reason, you do not agree with all of the terms and conditions contained in these Terms, please discontinue using the Site immediately."

So what if I'm a programmed software robot and I click the "I agree" tab for this?  

The issue is that these sites used CAPTCHA to determine you were legitimate users of the site and the defendants found a way around it.

(How they did this show how remarkably stupid and simple-minded the CAPTCHA people were (at least I hope "were" and not "are").  Each of the squiggly letter blocks you see like this:

(I had a squiggly image here but - goood thing - it disappeared after a couple of hours.)

Turns out that the "which dintcari" is an image with a consistent URL.  That's right - if you see "PghWE5 iYeOP" it turned out that the squiggly image was always the same image file - across all of CAPTCHA's customer base.  


So the defendants wrote programs to go around the internet and collect CAPTCHA challenges and their respective image URLs.  They solved the CAPTCHAs and matched those with the image URLs.  Their robot simply looked at the CAPTCHA URL, checked its database to see if it was a known one, and, if it was, put in the right letters.


Now, no one thinks that "getting around" a CAPTCHA, except perhaps this judge, should be a Federal Crime and there is significant legal precedence for thinking that way.  Basically this line of thought says that "terms of use" constitute a civil contract and if you violate that problem you have a civil legal problem, not a criminal one.


And this is the problem.


If this case should be decided against the defendants than potentially anytime you "violate terms of service" you could be considered to have committed a Federal Crime (18 Section U.S.C 1030).


Read it for yourself - it won't be hard for a prosecutor to convict anyone of at least one of these items.


Now do I think these defendants are guilty of fraud?  Yes.  


Do I think they committed Federal Computer crimes?  Yes - according to the statutes. 


Do I think the statutes apply in this case? No.


And here's why.


Addressing forged documents in real-world situations has gone on for centuries.  The most effective solution would have been for the ticket sites to reject the tickets they thought were acquired in an invalid manner at the venues.


Word would have travelled fast that buying a ticket from WiseGuy was a mistake and they would have gone out of business.


Instead we have a judge making anything that violates "terms of service", and I am sure everyone here reads all of those terms in every detail, a Federal Crime.


Again - print solves the problem.  Add some data onto the tickets sold electronically that indicate they are involved in an improper scheme and reject them at the point of entry.  If "dad and mom" have to take little Jr. home from the gate of that Miley Cirus concert because their tickets get rejected for "terms of service" a lesson will be learned.


The ramifications of this case will be heard far and wide - not only will you get in trouble for whatever you were doing that violated terms of service in the first place - copying a song, sneaking onto a porn site, spying on your spouse, whatever - but now you could be the target of a criminal investigation as well - and at the Federal level.

Regular Tuesday Night Gig...

A Pension for Printing...

The NY Times, in an editorial no less, supporting the notion that public sector jobs and corresponding pension obligations are a problem:

"nationally, state and local workers earn on average $14 more per hour in wages and benefits than their private sector counterparts. A city like Buffalo has as many public workers as it did in 1950, even though it has lost half its population."

The problem here is that much of this "obligation" is in the future - paying workers 90% of their salary for the rest of their lives after they retire at age 50.  This could mean some will receive these benefits for longer than they actually worked.
 
Unfortunately there isn't going to be enough population to support this payment structure.

Wisely the NY Times has decided that a growing state pension system like this is a problem - though you might question their timing or reasons...

I wonder if the reason is their own billion dollar debt?

That's right - billion with a "b" dollar debt - and revenue of $2.4 billion.  I wonder if all of their pension obligations are fully realized in that public number.

Now, the newspaper business took a huge hit in 2008/2009 - ad revenue's dropping by 30% or more.

My business was hurt by this - my good friends at another large national newspaper simply stopped paying on their obligations.  (They had an annual support contract which we allowed them to make payments on over the course of the year.  In 2008 they just stopped one day - sorry, we have no revenue - we know we owe the money but we cannot pay.)

How about that from a $1.3 billion dollar enterprise.  We're four (that's 4) decimal places smaller in terms of revenue compared to these guys - and we have to carry their freight...

Interestingly, calling up American Express or the power company and making the same claims won't work for me.  Not that I wish it did or that I even would try.

Its the principle.

Politically in the US its hard to see how things will change going into 2011 - companies are expending cash only to make themselves more efficient.  People and companies are afraid to commit to large capital expansions until the economy improves.  Various eminent tax and non-business obligations (like new health care laws) make the future cloudy.

Businesses with large pension obligations, particularly underfunded pension obligations, are hurting bad.  Carrying that kind of load can be difficult, particularly when your ad revenue drops 25% per year.

So, at least according to the NY Times, the long, wild debt party bus is starting to run out of gas.  Sadly, my old friend print has been in the back seat all along with all her friends whooping it up the loudest - right there with her old friends from the newspaper business.


Pensioners of these companies take note of my experience and where the party bus is - your turn is coming. 

Where will a company like the NY Times get the revenue it needs to support its retirees?

What will it do if it falls short?

Its kind of like the postal service.  No one in the union twenty years ago really thought that the party bus would ever run out of gas - after all the economy, the need for postal service and printing, will just go on forever, right?  But it has run out of gas and there doesn't seem to be a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

With the NY Times coming out against the public pension infrastructure it certainly seems like there are winds of change blowing.  Perhaps they see the writing on their own wall - perhaps not.

I wish I had a pension for printing....  er, on second thought, maybe not.

Simply Remarkable...

Every once and a while its good to find someone so good at his craft that you literally feel humbled.

Henrik Sundholm

Portfolio.

Deviant Art.

Flickr.

"For What its Worth - In Print...

As the current mortgage crisis unfolds its very interesting to see the friction between modern electronic technology and our old friend print burn up the country.

"Print?"  you say.  What does print have to do with the new mortgage crisis?

A lot.

At least here in the northeastern US much of real estate is bound up in paper - paper with printing.  Physical mortgage documents, deeds, tax liens, all of these are legally required to be documented on paper.  There must be a physical mortgage document - signed (these days in blue ink), sealed with whatever mechanical seals the state requires, and delivered to the proper county offices.

I would be willing to bet that in my state there are still counties that have written ledgers - yes, big smelly old books in the courthouse basement with ink-ruled lines where scribes wrote down - with ink pens - information about deeds, liens, mortgages, and so on. 

No matter how its recorded if recording of a mortgage is not done or not done correctly there is a legal argument to be made that the mortgage isn't valid.  If its not valid it means that the bank or company holding the mortgage does not have "standing".

Standing means that if you default, i.e., not pay, your mortgage, the mortgage holder can foreclose on the property and take it back.

So in the real world this means that when someone takes you to court over a foreclosure the plaintiff (bank or mortgage holders) must produce these documents and show that they are true and correct.  You can't just show up and say "your honor, Mr. X has not paid his mortgage I want the property back" - you have to prove it.  If you cannot produce the mortgage that says you, the plaintiff, are the mortgage holder what will the judge do?  If the mortgagee produces documentation that says you sold the mortgage to Joe's Dinner then you will lose - you do not have standing with regard to the mortgage.

Prrinted paperwork provides a detailed trail of the entire mortgage process - who owns what, when and how they bought it, how much was paid, and so on.  As long as every i is dotted and t crossed - no problem.  That's why counties record all of this on paper: There is no question.

For hundreds of years this has been how everything worked - until about thirty or so years ago when banks and financial institutions realized that a mortgage had intrinsic value in and of itself.

So what do I mean by that?

Well, if you buy my property and I hold the mortgage, i.e., you agree to pay me some amount, say $142.86 a month, for say, 14 years, the actual paper mortgage is worth 12 x $142.86 x 14 = $24,000.00 (excluding interest and other details for the sake of example here).

Me as the mortgage holder will get me $24,000 over the next fourteen years - but what if, as the commercial on TV says, I need my money now?  Grandma gets sick, I want to go to college, etc.?

Well, I might sell the mortgage to someone who has $10,000 cash today.  That person will collect the $24,000 over twenty years less the $10,000 they paid me - or $14,000.

(This is just an example.  The point here is the type of transaction - not the specific details as we will see.)

While the buyer of the mortgage could simply pay me and walk away with his payment stream he probably won't.  The reason is what if the payer defaults, i.e., stops paying?  If the person buying the mortgage has no standing as the mortgage holder and just a contract that says they bought the mortgage from the person who sold it to him, then it may be very hard to get their money during a default.

(Joe sells Suzy a mortgage taken out by Ruby.  Ruby stops paying.  Suzy has no standing. Joe does.  So to collect in a default Joe must do it.  But Joe now hates Suzy because the has a new...  you get the idea.)

So in the ancient world of pre-1980 the transfer of the mortgage from person A to B (or from a bank to a pool of investments) requires that the proper legal paper work be filed changing the mortgage holder.

(As in our example Suzy becomes the legal mortgage holder when she buys the mortgage from Joe.  If Ruby defaults Suzy has standing and Joe is out of the picture.)

Thirty years ago financial wizards began "pooling" mortgages together into investments.  This is all very complicated but the bottom line is that investors and not banks could "own" mortgages without having to handle the details of directly buying one.

These pools of mortgages caused the 2008 financial melt down - not because of paper work, though.  In 2008 the issue was no one knew which mortgages weere in a particular pool sold to investors (specifically there was missing information about which pools might have bad mortgages) and no one knew if the insurance they took out on these mortgages pools from AIG among many was sufficient if there were too many defaults.  One could anticipate this new problem from all this, though, because if you don't know exactly which mortgages are in a pool its likely that paperwork to put them there is missing.

The problem now is that the proper legal paperwork to transfer ownership of the mortgage into the various pools of investment may not have been properly completed.   So the investors or new owners may not actually have ownership in the mortgages.

So if an investor shows up to foreclose they must have standing.  If not, the court may throw them out, and the property holder will continue to keep the property without payment.

So back to print.

All of this is not a problem in a world where transfers and deed are physical, printed documents filed away in a folder in an office and held by the original owner.  Like an old Jimmy Stewart movie the old Savings and Loan in town holds your mortgage and its written down in the dusty binder in the basement of the local courthouse.

This problem is mortgages were sold to investors in pools with the claim that the seller had the right to do so.  The question is was the proper paperwork filed legal to make it so.

Paper documents make it difficult to bypass required legal steps.  You cannot, for example, go to the county court house with a laptop and an email and "claim" you own something.  They, and the legal system, will not recognize it.  (Little old ladies won't write this down in the big binder in the basement.)

Unfortunately, it may have been the case that some of the investment mortgage pools did not have the underlying mortgage ownership properly documented.  So what was sold to investors as a pool of mortgages may not actually have ownership in the mortgages.

(Don't worry - someone still owns the mortgage - things just have to be sorted out.)

Physical possession of something like a mortgage with the proper corresponding chain of ownership is what's required for the legal system to work.  Electronic documents, IDs, and amorphous investment pools are very difficult to convert to underlying documents.

Print plays a vital role in moderating this system - it makes tracing ownership clear.  Without it out get this kind of crisis because people play fast and loose with the rules - its the modern age and print is passe.

And its not just mortgages.  Its car titles, RV titles, and all the rest.

Personally I experienced a bit of this a few years ago when I switched to a new mortgage company.  Many years previously a second mortgage with, no surprise here, CountryWide, had been paid off but the note in the county office was not satisfied.  (CountryWide did not send a minion to the county where my second mortgage was recorded and record the payoff.)  Nice, huh?
 
This threw a monkey wrench into things for a week or two while it got sorted out.

The legal system likes paper and printing.  Judges, lawyers, home owners, car owners, and so on like to know that they own something by having a piece of paper.  No hacker can wiggle their way into your house and steal your car title.

Print and paper offer a very specific kind of security that electronic IDs and databases cannot.

Last Week on the Personal Blog...

In case you missed them...


Obesity - It's What's for Dinner


Rehab? - I said "no, no, no"


Irresponsible Responsibility


Sexual Devolution


Trojan Whores - A new twist on an old tail...


Anitbiotics - Scourge on Humanity


Obesity - A nation security threat...


Zig Zag Acoustic Benefit TONIGHT!

Thanks for reading!

A little more off topic...

Summer festival footage of my band Rheme Cleo (I'm on horn)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPPHe0DkjE

The Reykiavik '09 Show!

Live at Fawn Tavern 10.23.10 - 9:30 PM

The Future of PDF

Periodically I do some searching on this topic.

The most recent results are here on the PDF Outsider blog.

It doesn't look good because I don't see any leadership emerging which means the big players, such as Google, will bastardize the standard for their own purposes.

A Horse of a Different (Off) Color

(This might be a little over the top but I think its relevant to the whole discussion of print and social media.  The title was going to be a pun on "trojan" as in span/spywhere/virus/hacker and "Whores" versus "Horse" - in fact its posted that way on the personal blog.  But this is serious business here so I made up a new title.  I originally intended it for the personal blog but after some thought I think it belongs here - especially since it illustrates just how different the old ways are from the new, modern ones.)

If your a guy like me you likely find them these Trojan Whores, er, Trojan Horses all the time, lying around silently in your inbox, for you to open the gates and roll them in.  No amount of anit-spam ever sends them away.

Now we're not talking about the traditional Trojan Whores that you might find down at the U or in the classic urban dictionary, either.  At least for me, I never saw the appeal of all those greek letters, at least outside ancient greek class (I even still have the dictionary!) No, these contain things that you may no want to see (well, you might depending on your own personal situation but in any case probably not at work, or at home, or at your mom's house... sigh)

This is new urban slang, yes, created right here before your eyes, to describe the all to common event.

The unsolicited (f)email "friend request".

That's right femail.  There, I said it.  Its a guy thing.  (In the days of snail mail guys did not often get unsolicited mail from women they didn't know.)

So I work with plenty of women and I get work-related email all the time - I even "Friend" them on Facebook.
But this is different.

How come?  Because, just like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never really know what's inside:

Is this really as it appears?  Just an innocuous friend request, maybe some band fan hoping to strike up a dialog, a faithful blog reader, somebodies kid sister, your mom' s best friend, some woman networking to find a job in order to feed here small children? 

Who knows - and that's where the rub comes in.

(Now we're not talking about the usual parade of potential Russian Bride requests, either.  In that case I imagine that you only find out what you are getting after you pay to fly them to your city...)

Just like classic a Trojan Horse this little box of goodies can have all kinds of unpleasant surprises inside.

So, like the bomb squad, you break each one of these down - bit by bit to see what makes them tick.

The first clue is whether the email reply address looks like something real from Facebook.  Real ones look like this:

noreply@facebookmail.com

See, pretty simple.

If they're fake you will usually see the femail friend request is from you (as in your own email) or maybe

ThanhBoyd99185@gmail.com

who wants me to "Reply To"

info@peggyfinnegan.com

(Peggy Finnegan is a local new caster.  I doubt she sent this... or, if she didn't it wouldn't have been from old ThanhBoyd's account).

There is often a hidden URL (Uniform Resource Location) connected to "Confirm Friend" that will jump your browser to God-knows- where - perhaps right in front of your significant other or boss.  So its best to treat this like the choice you see in the moves about whether to cut the "red or black wire to the detonator" first.

Sometimes its obvious but often it isn't.  (Unlike the fake credit card company emails with a 400 character return URL.)

And sometimes it could look like this:

<-- http://yzajygysep.exactpages.com/epekuce.html -->

If you follow this you will end up in a Canadian pharmacy selling - you guessed it - Viagra.

So, like the classic Trojan of old this horse just might in fact be something of legitimate interest.  Well, just like that package lying around the airport might by someone's forgotten lunch.

If its not a totally obvious ruse to direct me to the nearest web-based Viagra pharmacy I usually try and check them out with the following screening:

Paste the name provided into Facebook and see if the same person comes up.

This is a good test because it tells me the email is really real and not some disguised spam. 

So let's see who it is...  And, being an the old geezer that I am - always in a hurry - this one caught me.

Sure enough this is some sort of musician.  Usually these fall into the same categories as male (no pun intended) musicians.  There will be some set of MP3 songs, a band thing of one sort or another, ans so on.

So, you listen to a few songs - do you hear legitimate singing - hopefully on key?  Look like a real person?  No - this is a Facebook band thing - so you have to "Like It" as opposed to "Friend" it.

(Which is good because these are not really friends, after all.)

Seems legit?  Bingo - hit the "Like It" button and move on to the next thing...

And this is where I stepped on the rake.

(Well, I had a nice rake picture but Blogger is buggy and its busy in the background trying to lose this entire post...) 

Little hooty tooty turns out to have a whole long skreed about some sort of "nekked" activity. 

I missed that.

I wasn't looking for that.

I was busy listening to an MP3. 

I usually move off to something else while listening - no point in just sitting there staring at the screen.

Quite honestly I don't care at all what hooty tooty does "nekked" - hell, for all I know little hooty tooty is a guy.  In fact "Big House Pete - I guy I know who stops down at the Witches to play guitar now and then - has a song (BIG Parental Advisory) about this very situation.

So what does good old Facebook do when you accept someone as a"Like It"?

Why they paste up a big chunk of text from the page you supposedly "Like" - carrying - you guested it - the entire "nekked" screed.

Of course this immediately pops up on my Facebook page.

Well, we'll just say hall monitor didn't take this well.... and that its gone now.

Next time there will be a lot more checking "under the hood" as it were...

Advice for Adobe...

I was reading a blog by Thomas Calburn here regarding Adobe:

"... A person who knows you recently told me that you're shifting a number development jobs overseas and that some engineers are polishing their resumes in anticipation of the worst. ...

I hope it's not true, but regardless you need to do better with Acrobat and Reader security and you need to get a strategy that doesn't involve selling people $600+ software packages every two to three years. Those days are over."

 

I hate to tell you Thomas, but you are already too late, at least in terms of RIP development.

 

(The last big news there was the PDF Print Engine back in 2006.)

 

Many suspect that all support for OEM RIP issues comes from India or the UK today.

 

Even before 2006 support for OEM B/W RIP issues came for the UK (perhaps outsourced to Global Graphics?).

There is little left for Adobe to do in the US but squeezed profit out of every last CS sale and perhaps be acquired by Microsoft.  Flash is being pounded by Apple (though I cannot find the original comments referred to in the link at the Adobe site).  In the long run Flash won't survive the beating it will take from HTML5.

Adobe had a good run.  I was a product manager at a company called Unilogic in early 1980's.  A good friend of mine at the time did what I believe to be the world's first "PostScript" software drive for Unilogic's Scribe document production software.  (The work was done in his basement across the street from CMU.)  I remember talking to Chuck Geschke about the driver and the support for it.  They (John Warnock and Chuck) where just a "little start-up" at the time with some big ideas - we didn't take them as seriously as we might have.

This was all hush-hush at the time.  There were numerous issues as the PostScript VM was still being debugged - it ran out of VM space and spewed out debugging info everywhere.  The device was the original Apple Laser Writer.  

 

Scribe had an Interpress driver.  It drove the Xerox Dover laser printers.  The Dover was the precursor of the commercial Xerox products like the 9700.  The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox Parc (where ethernet was invented), was one of the first GUI-based computer systems.  The Alto's emitted Interpress which the Dover could print.  Later the Alto turned into the Xerox Star Office system - I guess the ultimate commercialization of the Parc technology was a failure.

I recall using one of the Dover's in early 1980's.  It was at Carnegie Mellon University.  Xerox had donated a bunch of Alto/Dover/Ethernet equipment to the university so that the students would develop familiarity with the technologies.

(I recall that some enterprising lad's had put the Coke machine in the computing lab on the ethernet so that you could see if there were still bottles in the machine before you put your money in.)

Things have come a long way in the intervening 30 years.  Things like Illustrator and PhotoShop, along with Quark, changed everything about the world of print and, ultimately, the graphics on the web.

About five years ago I recall talking to Fred Ebrahimi at Quark - I think about data-driven publishing - which I thought should be integrated into Quark.  This was around the time they were moving their development to India.  InDesign first appeared around this time and I think that they lost interest in data-driven publishing.

 

So there's a lot of precedence for a move oversees on the Adobe end - after all - why pay $50.00 USD an hour for what you can get for $5.00 USD.

At the end of the day the purpose Adobe was created for has now been accomplished.  It created the world of digital print as we know it.  It changed how software talked to digital printing devices.

 

Geschke and Warnock succeeded in their dream.

 

PostScript and PDF dominate the creative world for print production.  As a byproduct, many web-based graphic arts technologies got to come a long for the ride.

(Though as a side note PDF was created in the early 1990's but didn't rate its own RIP until 2006.  I think this attests to the fact Adobe never really got out of "PostScript" gear on the RIP side.)

 

I hadn't though about this, or even my roll in it, for many years - it only came to mind when I stumbled onto the original link and I started writing this post.

 

The sad part is that all this history will soon be forgotten - even by me.  I am sure all of the big actors from this golden age have died, moved on, or lost interest.  Today's youth don't care or know about any of this.  

 

They just use the tools left behind.