Actual CNN.COM Headline Today: Digital monkeys with typewriters recreate Shakespeare

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/26/tech/web/monkeys-typewriters-shakespeare/index.html

(CNN) -- It's a time-honored adage about the laws of probability: Give 1 million monkeys 1 million typewriters and they'll eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare.

Now, a software developer in Nevada is putting that saying to the test. And his digital monkeys are off to a good start.

This weekend, Jesse Anderson wrote on his blog that a computerized simulation of the theoretical simian typing pool has completed "A Lover's Complaint," a narrative poem that appeared in a book of The Bard's sonnets.

"This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced," Anderson wrote. "Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere."

Anderson's virtual monkeys began typing on August 21. Using open-source software called Hadoop, he created a huge group of "monkeys" that input random strings of gibberish. When a chunk of text matches a word used in Shakespeare's catalogue, it gets crossed off of a database of the plays and poems.

His database comes from Project Gutenberg.

So far, he said, over 5 trillion character groups have been churned out.

Based on a page updating the project's progress, several more works might be checked off the list soon. The monkeys appear to need only two more words to complete the comedy "The Tempest" and seven more to bang out "As You Like It." (There's been no explanation for why the computer monkeys seem to be lagging behind on Shakespeare's tragedies.)

"The monkeys will continue typing away until every work of Shakespeare is randomly created," Anderson wrote.

Permutations of the Infinite Monkey Theorem dates back as far as Aristotle (although he obviously didn't have a typewriter).

Anderson's inspiration came from a perhaps less likely source: "The Simpsons."

He says it harks back to a "Simpsons" scene in which Mr. Burns chains up 1,000 monkeys, giving them the task of writing a great novel and berating one of them for typing, "It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times."

Anderson's approach is, if nothing else, gentler.

"No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code," he wrote.

Blockbuster Down But Not Out Yet as Netflix Lurches to No-Where

And just when you thought the industry was done with "power moves". See the full article from www.cnn.com here

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Blockbuster was expected to launch a Netflix rival on Friday -- and it did, kind of.

"Blockbuster Movie Pass," launching October 1, bundles Dish's traditional cable TV plan with Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service. It also includes some streaming content: a library of 3,000 movies will be available for streaming to a TV, or 4,000 if you stream to computer.

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That's a small subset of the 100,000 DVDs and video games Blockbuster says it has stocked in its by-mail catalog.

The service costs $10 a month as an add-on to a Dish subscription. New customers who sign up for Dish's "America's Top 200" package for $39.99 a month -- or any more expensive service -- with a 2-year contract will receive the service for free for one year.

New subscribers who sign up for Dish's "America's Top 120" package will get Movie Pass for free for three months.

The streaming catalog includes shows from Fox, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Epix, Fox, DIY, HGTV and TBS. A more specific list of content was not immediately available.

Blockbuster has long been teasing plans to launch a streaming service to compete head-on with behemoth Netflix (NFLX), whose recent price hike has led to consumer backlash and a scaled-back subscriber forecast. Friday's move is a step in that direction, expanding Blockbuster's streaming services beyond the pay-per-rental model it currently uses.

But like Netflix, Blockbuster faces obstacles in getting monthly subscribers access to the most popular movies and TV shows. Its pay-per-rental catalog features recent releases like X-Men: First Class and Bridesmaids, priced at $3.99 for 24-hour viewing rights. Those titles aren't likely to show up in its all-you-can-watch unlimited streaming offering.

Blockbuster didn't immediately comment on what content is included in its "Movie Pass" package. The package also isn't available to non-Dish subscribers, though company executives said to "stay tuned" for later announcements on that front.

Dish Network (DISH, Fortune 500) acquired Blockbuster in April for $320 million in a bankruptcy court auction. Blockbuster's U.S. businesses filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2010, hoping to sharply reduce their nearly $1 billion debt. The company put itself up for sale in February 2011.

Blockbuster struggled for survival ever since media conglomerate Viacom (VIA) spun off the company in 2004. Its brick-and-mortar stores were bleeding cash as traditional video renting declined, and competition from Netflix and Coinstar's (CSTR) Redbox kiosks heated up.

But Blockbuster will also face high competition in the streaming space, both direct rivals like Hulu and big tech players that are eying the space, including Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).

Studios and cable providers have been careful not to let any single streaming service nab all of the valuable content. As a result of carving up the streaming video market, each service offers something a little different -- and no one can boast that they let customers watch all of their favorite shows.

Netflix Trying to BackPedal

Great article from CNN.com - http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/netflix-reaction/index.html

It has been a rough couple of months for Netflix. The company that virtually defined online movie rentals was swamped by an unprecedented wave of customer ire two months ago when it raised prices for both its DVD mailing and online streaming services.

Netflix announced this week that it's splitting itself in two and rebranding its movies-by-mail service as "Qwikster." Based on initial online responses, this latest effort didn't make things much better.

"Reed, thanks for reminding me that I should go somewhere else for my DVD rentals. It was an insult enough that you raised the price on me last month, right in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression, but now instead of a sincere apology, all we get is excuses and a flimsy new name."

That's from a customer named Jonathan Ortega and it's one of more than 16,000 comments on a blog post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explaining the latest changes. In the post, Hastings announced that the service that made Netflix famous, mailing DVDs in those iconic red wrappers, was being spun off as Qwikster, while Web streaming video will continue to be called Netflix.

Not all the posts took the same flamethrower approach as Ortega's. But even some of the more evenhanded messages raised questions.

"While I appreciate the explanation (and e-mail) and I guess I understand your reasoning for doing this, the thing I'm having the hard time about is the separation of websites," wrote a user named Tellier Killaby Booth. "I don't understand why I will now have to go to two separate websites to manage my queues. The only reason that I have both services is because half the things I watch aren't available yet on streaming."

Chris Taylor of Mashable (a CNN content partner), questioned whether the spin-off of Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."

"As any marketer will tell you, there are some truly awful times to launch a new product -- like August, when few potential customers are paying attention, or January, when they're all shopped out from the holidays," Taylor wrote. "And then there's launching your new product in the 10th paragraph of an apology for some previous poor communication, as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did late Sunday with Qwikster. ..."

Taylor, who says he has met and interviewed Hastings several times, calls him "one of the smartest and most amiable minds I've ever met." But he lays out a laundry list of problems, from the odd spelling of Qwikster to creating unnecessary confusion for customers who keep both streaming and DVD service.

The Internet wasn't unanimously down on Netflix's move, however.

Venture capitalist Mark Suster, who focuses on early stage tech companies, had a more positive take, calling Hastings' explanation "simply brilliant." (Worth noting: His company, GRP Partners, does not list Netflix as one of its investments.)

"[M]any short-termists will think it's a bad idea. Indeed, my Twitter stream tells me so," Suster wrote Monday on his blog. "I find much of the criticism so far fairly reactionary."

He argues that, by splitting off streaming from DVD delivery, Neflix can react more flexibly to the emerging streaming market while maintaining its hold on the mail-delivery market. Keeping them both under one umbrella would have made it harder to respond rapidly to changes in customer demands, he said.

As DVD customers decline in favor of streaming (and Suster says they inevitably will), Netflix may have to raise prices for DVD delivery, but could keep streaming prices the same under this model, he wrote.

"It's rare in business to see somebody like Reed Hastings tackle the massive changes happening to their businesses and deal with them before they're too late," he wrote. "Imagine if the record labels had been as bold. By making the separation, Reed can now point the Netflix business squarely at the future."

Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Out on The Network, The Google, and The Reality of Leaving a Billion Dollar Baby

San Francisco (CNN) -- The founding principles of business ethics at Facebook, according to co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, are as straightforward as the site's privacy settings system.

Many of the early developers of Facebook have moved on to work at other companies, but they operate under a specific code, Moskovitz said Monday: A great idea is a prerequisite for starting a company, businesses should be built for the long haul, and Google is not an ideal employer.

He spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

Moskovitz, who was portrayed in a few scenes in the "Social Network" movie, described the dark characterization of Facebook's founding as a creation myth, contrary to authors' depictions, courtroom testimonies and the Hollywood film. He and his crew executed "with the right ethics," and the many lawsuits were handled "in exactly the right kind of way," he said.

"When you build something really big, that stuff will happen," he said of Facebook's opponents. "It was a little scary at first."

Facebook's runaway success in 2004 was clear to the founders the day after they launched the website, Moskovitz said. No amount of money would have convinced them to sell the company, he said. But that theory had certainly been tested over the years.

Like several other high-profile Facebook founders, Moskovitz left to start his own company. It's called Asana and makes project-collaboration software for businesses. Some of the ideas for Asana were conceived when he was a manger at Facebook, he said.

Moskovitz agonized over quitting Facebook and "looked for every reason to stay," he said.

"We left Facebook because we had the idea for Asana," he said. "I hated the idea of starting my own company. I really didn't want to become an entrepreneur."

Mark Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and other Facebook elite helped romanticize the concept of starting a business, Moskovitz said. He said he regrets that consequence of his success because Silicon Valley is rewarding programmers who pitch unimaginative ideas.

The goal for many is to flip their companies to a frequent shopper like Google, which competes with Facebook in many areas.

Dave Morin, another Facebook founder who left to design a social network for more intimate groups called Path, spurned an offer from Google, Moskovitz said. There, he would have been locked into "indentured servitude" because of restrictions in his contract, said Moskovitz, who is an investor in Path and advised Morin not to accept the offer.

"All of those people (from Facebook's early days) have done great work and added a lot of impact to the world and, frankly, are financially very secure," Moskovitz said. "So the only thing they're interested in now is doing that again -- you know, adding massive impact to the world and thinking about the very long run, and trying to build companies that last and really change the world for the better."

And, of course, not working for Google.

Joe Carretta
The TNS Group
Formerly known as TigerNet Systems, Inc.
Office phone: 203.316.0112 x105
Office fax: 203.316.0118
Email: jcarretta@thetnsgroup.com<sviscardi@thetnsgroup.com>

Is Larry Page the Next Bill Gates... or Something More?

Read the full article here - http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/02/tech/web/new-bill-gates-larry-page/index.html?hpt=te_t1

When Bill Gates testified via videotape in Microsoft's antitrust trial in 1998, he was combative and defensive, as if he couldn't believe how stupid the entire procedure was.

He didn't expect the tape to be shown in court. It was, and it was a disaster. Public opinion turned -- instead of a billionaire genius who had built Microsoft into the most valuable tech company in the world, he was a condescending monopolist who didn't have time for the legal system.

Amazingly, Gates didn't see it coming. As Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen relates in his recent autobiography, the anti-Microsoft sentiment "cut Bill to the core." Gates told the media that government attorney David Boies was "really out to destroy Microsoft."

In his rational engineer's mind, Microsoft was simply a winner. It had beaten its competitors by being smarter and working harder. It seemed deeply unfair for the government to build a case based on the complaints of those competitors and undo everything that Gates had worked so hard for.

Flash forward a decade.

Google is the new Microsoft. It dominates its industry so completely that a few slight tweaks to its search engine can throw other companies into turmoil by burying them in search results. It's using the incredible cash generated by that business to expand in a million different directions at once, from online video to social networking to mobile phones.

The man running Google, co-founder Larry Page, has a lot in common with Gates.

Like Gates, Page is often described in otherworldly terms, a near-genius with autistic tendencies like counting the seconds out loud while you're explaining something too slowly to him. Like Gates, he has run his own company for his entire adult life and has had uninterrupted success. Like Gates, he has an engineer's soul and is obsessive about cutting waste -- one of his first acts after taking over as CEO in April was to send an all-hands e-mail describing how to run meetings more efficiently.

Like Gates, he is hugely ambitious -- he once suggested that Google hire a million engineers and told early investors that he saw Google as a $100 billion company. That's $100 billion in annual revenue, not just stock value. (It's about one-third of the way there.)

And like Gates, Page may have a blind spot about the intersection of business and the Beltway. For instance, when Google paid $3.2 billion to buy display ad firm DoubleClick in 2007, it got a search-engine marketing firm called Performics as part of the deal. Obviously, Google would have to let Performics go -- federal regulators would never let the dominant search company own a search marketing company.

Except Page wanted to keep it, just to see how it worked. (Google sold Performics to advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe in 2008.)

Back then, Page had a tempering force in Eric Schmidt, who was the company's CEO and was originally brought in by its investors to provide "adult supervision."

But since Page reclaimed the CEO title, the brakes are off. In his first five months, Page has reorganized the company to his liking, cut a bunch of marginal projects like Google Health and mobile app maker Slide, launched a social network to compete with Facebook and bid $12.5 billion to buy Motorola's mobile phone business.

Now, antitrust investigators are circling Google -- just like they did with Microsoft. Europe has already launched a formal investigation, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is taking a close look as well.

As Google keeps expanding with big, bold moves, Page will find himself thrust into the spotlight like he's never been before. For Google's sake, here's hoping he handles it with more grace than Gates.

Joe Carretta
The TNS Group
Formerly known as TigerNet Systems, Inc.
Office phone: 203.316.0112 x105
Office fax: 203.316.0118
Email: jcarretta@thetnsgroup.com<sviscardi@thetnsgroup.com>