Brian Urlacher and other Chicago Bears free agent musings. Joe Schmoe Show finale. Girls season 2 finale. A little Vikings talk. A very little March Madness. Bill Simmons live stream during the tournament.
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Co-Host: Chris (http://twitter.com/LionEsquire)
Running Time: About 39 minutes
Delany insists that this is only his belief and that he has not polled his presidents, but he seems confident that if conferences began negotiating with players and schools began paying one type of player more than another, the Big Ten’s schools would not participate. “If that were to happen I think our presidents, our faculties and our boards of trustees would just opt out,” Delany said. “I don’t know what the opt-out means, whether that’s Division III or another model.”
This is insanity. Seriously. Jim Delany is saying that rather than pay football players the Big Ten could just drop out of Division 1A. There would be a massive revolt by everyone if this happened. First and foremost I see no way the university presidents would agree to this. Delany acknowledges that he hasn’t even broached this subject with them, but for some reason things they would be on board. The amount of money and publicity the schools get for football alone is too important. There are allusions to the Ivy Leagues basically doing the same thing decades ago, and while most of the schools in the Big Ten are pretty good academic institutions, they aren’t on the same level as the Ivy Leagues.
Even if the presidents were on board, there are the boosters to consider. How much money would some of these deep pocket boosters donate without the football and basketball programs? It’s easy to say that sports are not important to them, but it’s hard to believe that when so many decisions seem to be motivated by athletic success and failure. There is just no reason to believe that this would be a good move overall for these schools.
Delany has been the conference’s commissioner since 1989. For those bad at math, that’s almost 25 years. He has done plenty for the conference, but most of it monetarily driven. Look at the list: Big Ten Network, three new teams, TV contracts and instant replay. Brian from mgoblog agrees:
And this, of course, is a man who has spent the last twenty years thinking about nothing but money. He created a television network for money. He added Nebraska for money. He split Michigan and Ohio State in the vague hope of getting more money if they played twice. He added Rutgers and Maryland for money despite the fact that 11 of the 12 fanbases in the Big Ten would rather boil themselves in oil than play those teams in anything. Once he is presented with the idea he might have to share some of his money, he threatens to take the whole damn thing out of the system, into another system that will be exposed to the same legal precedent that prevents you from outrageously sharecropping athletes.
Delany has credibility, and one would think, integrity. It’s entirely possible that he would just walk away if this doesn’t go the way he wants. But it’s hard to see that happening. Even if the Big Ten said good-bye to Delany and decided to pay players, it might not work out for everyone.
The system implemented would be really important. Even if the NCAA goes down this road it wouldn’t make sense for teams have to bid against each other for players. Things would just get out of hand way too fast. The “haves” would totally crush the “have nots”. Even within a conference like the Big Ten, it’s hard to see teams like Indiana and Minnesota being able to have any chance to keep up with Michigan and Ohio St.
And fans haven’t even been factored in at this point. The outrage would be monumental. There is no way fans would except this as some sort of “badge of honor”, it would be more like a scarlet ‘A’. So Jim Delany can talk a good game, and he might stick to his guns on a personal level, but this is not a battle he is going to win.
The NCAA tournament starts this week. Some people view the first weekend of the tournament as the best weekend in sports. Others consider it to be the best four-day span of the sports year. Some will even tell you Thursday or Friday is the best day of sports for the whole year. What is universal though, is people filling out a bracket for an NCAA tournament pool. In the same way that fantasy football turn the NFL’s popularity and took it to another level, gambling on the NCAA tournament has done the same. There is something else they both share though, no one else cares about your bracket/team.
Everyone fills out a bracket these days. It’s not just for hardcore fans or degenerate gamblers. One does not even need to know very much about the current college basketball season to take a stab at things. Most of the time the person that wins is not the person that is most knowledgeable about college basketball. Because the tournament often lives up to it’s “madness” nickname, it’s almost always more about luck than skill. And nowadays the “madness” includes people giving you a blow by blow of who they picked and didn’t pick. When teams like Davidson in 2008, or Ohio University last year make runs, people love to talk about how they had them winning a round or two. When they pick Duke to win and they go down in the second round, they tell everyone about how their bracket is “busted”.
The problem is that nobody cares. In the same way that no one cares how you lost your fantasy week because Jake Locker ran a TD in on a sneak instead of handing it off to Chris Johnson. So this week, and next, keep your bracket highs/lows to yourself because even if they won’t tell you, I will, no one cares! If you win it all three weeks from now, scream it from the rooftops, but until then, keep it to yourself.
Kevin Hoctor on software pricing:
I think everyone can agree that we won’t survive long as indie developers if we can only charge one or two dollars for our apps. I don’t even think $15 is enough unless you have an enormous audience. So what do we do? How do we compete with the “race to the bottom” inspired by the App Store? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have my opinions and I’m willing to back them up with evidence through my business actions.
The topic of software pricing is still hot, and Kevin Hoctor, proprietor of No Thirst Software, has penned a great piece about his approach. Hoctor’s primary app, MoneyWell, existed before the Mac App Store and he talks about how he adjusted to the “race to the bottom” without compromising revenue. His approach is solid, and will hopefully serve as a good plan for others.
Apple does things to piss off users all the time. They take a lot of undue heat for things, but they also take a lot that is deserved. It’s clear now after 2+ years they are not going to bend on certain aspects of the Mac App Store. Trial versions are not going to happen. Upgrade pricing is not going to happen. And in reality this isn’t surprising. Apple stopped offering upgrade versions of their operating system a few years ago. They also don’t offer upgrade pricing for their other applications, or trials of any sort.
This has created an issue that is essentially fueling the “race to the bottom”. Apple is encouraging behavior that is bad for their customers. They are encouraging people to create software and abandon it because there is no way to make money off of maintaining an application after most of the initial sales have happened. It’s basically “pump and dump”. Put out an app and sell as many copies as possible, then never update it and just let it die. This isn’t a bad financial decision for Apple because they make 30% off every sale. Volume is more important than quality. They need quality over the long haul, but the short term view is, more is better.
This fact doesn’t really help fight the argument that Apple has some sort of “monopoly” on iOS apps. Remember in the ’90s when Microsoft was criticized (and punished) for having Internet Explorer pre-installed with Windows, and then subsequently preventing users from removing it? Apple is preventing other applications from even being installed. Could you imagine the outrage 15 years ago if Microsoft only allowed Microsoft software to be installed? Maybe the people that make the monopoly argument are right.
This is one of the features that Android fans like most about their ecosystem, unfortunately Android is screwed up in other ways. The fragmentation of Android versions across phones and carriers has greatly discouraged developers from investing their time and money. If Android could convince developers to get on board, and make the overall experience for them better, they could win this battle. Android’s market share is growing, and the product is improving. If they a majority of developers to put Android first, this battle will get interesting.
I don’t really fault Apple for having their own best interest first, that’s how businesses work. And ironically the investment I have made in the App Store is why I wouldn’t really consider leaving the iOS ecosystem any time soon. And while Apple continues to innovate it’s hardware, and add to it’s OS with new features, the App Store hasn’t show any innovation as a development platform. Apple’s marketshare is mostly about the apps, and Apple eventually needs to adjust accordingly so that good developers can survive, or in the end, the user’s will pay for it.
North Central College’s college basketball run. Comedy Central’s new show Nathan For You. CBS’ new show Golden Boy. The Joe Schmoe Show. A lengthy discussion about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter project.
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Co-Host: Chris (http://twitter.com/cmwilliams51)
Running Time: About 39 minutes
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Check out the other year’s in film I have covered.
If these are on, life stops
These are movies that I like and still watch if the opportunity arises.
Movies that I have not seen
Films that jumped out at me or have significance that I haven’t seen or don’t have particularly strong feelings for
One Line Description: A playboy goes through a psychological breakdown after a car accident.
Cameron Crowe directed this one with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. It’s a weird one. Cruise is in jail and tells this story to a police psycharitrist. It has some weird fantasy elements to it and was not at all what I expected. It’s one of those movies that gets you hooked to find out how it ends, but ultimately ends up being a bit of a disappointment. It’s also one of those movies that has a big following for whatever reason. Most Crowe fans mark this as the start of his down period, with the lackluster Elizabethtown coming next. If you haven’t seen it by now, you aren’t missing anything.
One Line Description:
Not to be confused with the 2010 Coen Brothers remake, this one stars John Wayne, in what turned out to be his sole Oscar win. It also includes Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper. Essentially, a girl (of an indeterminent age) hires a US Marshall (Wayne) to find the man who murdered her father. The story is OK, and it’s likely that this is just filmmaking from 1969 that leads to this one being somewhat boring. My dad, who was shocked I had never seen a John Wayne movie, was not high on this one, and it makes sense upon viewing. It surprises me that Wayne won an Oscar for this, but I assume it was because it was one of his last films and he had never won one. I am interested to watch the remake and see how it compares.
One Line Description: Two ostracized New York police detectives try to solve a real case despite their deficiencies.
I am not a big Will Ferrell fan, and since most Adam McKay movies involve him, it’s rare that I enjoy one. Step Brothers is the only exception for this, until now. This movie is funny/interesting enough to be worth the time. I am a Wahlberg fan, which helps a lot, but Michael Keaton is good as their boss, Eva Mendes is a favorite of mine, and the cameos by Derek Jeter, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson are great. There are some great one-liners, and Jeter’s role is priceless. Not the best movie I have seen, but if it was on your radar, it’s totally worthwhile.
One Line Description: A British captain battles a French warship off the coast of South American in the early 1800s.
I had seen this one a long time ago, but didn’t love it. I didn’t realize that not only was it directed by Peter Weir (Dead Poet’s Society, The Truman Show), but also nominated for a heap of Oscars (including Best Picture and Weir’s 4th nomination for Best Director). It stars Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, and not a single other person I recognized. It is an OK movie, and probably gets some credit for being the last great movie about 19th century ship battles. It has some good moments, but is a little long, and suffers from the problem of having a great climactic battle at the end and a bit of lull in between. The battle has some shortcomings too because it’s very difficult to tell who is who, especially with quick cuts. Good movie, but probably overrated. Within it’s own genre, it’s very good though.
One Line Description: A broke rather reunites with son he had as a teenager in attempt to stay out of jail.
Adam Sandler has had a bad run lately. I enjoyed Funny People (2009), but otherwise I think you have to go back to 2004’s 50 First Dates to really find a movie of his I liked. I had extremely low expectations for this Sandler/Andy Samberg movie, but after Chris said on the podcast that it was decent, I decided to watch. And it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. There were lots of great cameos (NY Jets coach Rex Ryan, Dan Patrick, Erin Andrews, Susan Surandon), plus a supporting role by Vanilla Ice. Samberg’s performance was OK, and it’s hard to say whether he can carry a movie yet. But he’s already 34, which really surprises me because he seems younger. I think he will be a solid sidekick, but I still don’t know if he can be “the guy”. Overall this movie has some highs and lows and is decidedly average.
Hippo goes to a concert. The Hangover 3 trailer. An update on Shamless, Girls and The Americans. Looking ahead to Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. The current state of rundown towns in America.
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Co-Host: Chris (http://twitter.com/cmwilliams51)
Running Time: About 35 minutes
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It seems like all you have to do is make each copy of your RSS reader read and write three files to Dropbox, one file for each item in the list above.
It seems like each reader could just read the files at startup and write out new files when it quits. Problem solved!
But not even close.
Brent Simmons is a very smart man1. His NetNewsWire RSS reader was the gold standard for many years for not only RSS readers, but Mac software in general. A couple of years ago Simmons moved on to more traditional in-house development work, but recently returned to his indie days.
As Simmons talks about, syncing in software is an incredibly challenging issue. Most common folk take software development for granted already. When things don’t “just work” they get incredibly frustrated. As a result, many multi-platform apps get bad reviews for not being able to sync. It’s become a “must have” feature especially with RSS readers.
Most RSS readers have offloaded this functionally to Google Reader, which has some unsupported APIs available to support this functionality. They are free, and like everything else Google does, designed to mine as much data as possible. But Google has hinted on more than one occasion that this functionality will not be available forever, and that people shouldn’t rely on these APIs. It sounds a lot like what Twitter has been doing over the last year in regards to people writing third party applications. In other words, “it’s cool for you to make our thing popular, but at some point we are going to take away the keys.”
If and when this happens, the RSS landscape will get very interesting. Concepts like Fever have already tried to fill this gap by creating a self-hosted alternative to Google Reader. The iPhone version of the very popular Reeder even supports this. Unfortunately their iPad and OS X versions do not, so this isn’t a real alternative for most people at this point. But Reeder developer Silvio Rizzi has at least proven that Fever is an option for third party apps, which could give it a legit shot at being the alternative for the RSS reader “backbone”. Because it does require it’s own hosting, and setup though, it’s likely that they, or someone else would have to start offering hosting for Fever as a way to bridge this gap.
Another alternative would be for people to just start using Google’s own web interface for RSS. There are many people who do already, and it’s decent, but not spectacular. They have a mobile version that works pretty well, particularly on the iPhone. It’s possible that most people would just flock to that because all of their feeds and folders would be there.
The other possibility is that this is finally the death blow to RSS. Many people have been exaggerating RSS’ death for years now already. It’s possible that this would finally be the time that something like Twitter, with or without something like Instapaper, could replace RSS. It’s possible that this could happen at some point, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.
Simmons is right about one thing though, there isn’t money in this. The way that most people use RSS, for reading websites and news, is a dying art. A few years from now it might vanish on it’s own, and that makes solving this problem futile.
I wanted a way to act on the most recent Notification Center notification with the keyboard. This is the fastest way I came up with so far.
