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>

Angie's List to go Public

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Angie's List, a site where members can hire and review local contractors for auto or home services, filed Thursday to raise up to $75 million in an initial public offering.

Angie's List was founded in 1995, and at the ripe age of 16 the company is much older than its fellow Internet companies who have recently filed for IPOs -- including Groupon, LinkedIn and Pandora. It has amassed around 2.2 million reviews on its website.

But like most of its younger IPO-ing counterparts, Angie's List is not profitable. In 2010, the company reported a $27.2 million net loss on sales of $59 million.

For the first six months of 2011, Angie's List lost $25.8 million on revenue of $38.6 million.

Angie's List has two revenue streams. When the site launches in a new area, it offers free memberships to attract new users and reviews. After about two years, the new market is converted to paid memberships, where readers have to pay to access reviews. An Angie's List representative said rates vary by market, but subscriptions cost an average of $6 per month.

The site is now in 170 paid membership markets in the U.S., and as of June 30 it had more than 820,000 paying members.

Angie's List also lets service providers who are highly rated by its members advertise discounts and other promotions on the site. As of June 30, more than 192,000 of the 761,000 service providers reviewed on Angie's List were eligible to advertise.

Only 10% of the eligible service providers were advertising as of June 30, but that business makes up most of Angie's List's revenue. In 2010, service providers paid $33.9 million and members paid $25.1 million in fees.

Busy 2011 for tech IPOs: This year has been chock-full of Internet IPOs -- many from companies that have yet to turn a profit.

This month daily-deals site Groupon updated its IPO filing to change an accounting metric, which drew closer attention to its history of steep losses.

Professional networking site LinkedIn's (LNKD) shares more than doubled in its May IPO, even though the company turned only slight profits in 2010 and 2006, and has otherwise has been in the red every year since its 2003 inception. The stock is still trading well above its IPO price.

Pandora (P) shares also fared well, even though the unprofitable company had warned investors that it expected to continue losing money "through at least fiscal 2012."

But on Thursday, Pandora reported that it earned 2 cents per share last quarter on a non-GAAP basis, excluding stock-based compensation expenses. Using traditional accounting, Pandora lost $1.8 million for the quarter on sales of $67 million.

Joe Carretta

The End of an Era

Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs resigned today as chief executive officer from Apple. His place at the top of the company will be taken by Tim Cook, previously Apple's chief operating officer.

The Steve Jobs era

Some notable moments for Jobs and his companies over the years.

1976
Co-founds Apple with Steve Wozniak.

1984
Apple introduces the Mac.

1985
CEO John Sculley engineers Jobs' ouster from Apple.

1985
Founds Next Computer (later becomes Next Software).

1986
Buys computer graphics division of LucasFilm, to be renamed Pixar.

1996
Returns to Apple as adviser when Apple buys Next Software

1997
Named interim CEO of Apple.

2001
Apple introduces iTunes software and the iPod; the iTunes store follows in 2003.

2006
Disney buys Pixar; Jobs becomes largest shareholder.

2007
Apple introduces the iPhone.

2009
Takes 6-month leave of absence for medical reasons.

2010
Apple introduces the iPad.

January 2011
Takes medical leave of absence.

August 2011
Resigns as CEO, becomes chairman. Tim Cook becomes CEO.

Jobs has been dogged by a string of health problems in recent years that forced him to take periodic leaves of absence from the company. Jobs announced in January that he was taking an indefinite medical leave from Apple--his third in recent years--and handed over day-to-day responsibility to Cook. He told his employees in January, "I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can."

In January 2009, Jobs said that he was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was impeding his body's ability to absorb certain proteins. In April of that year, Jobs underwent liver transplant surgery and returned to work by early July. In August 2004, Jobs underwent successful surgery to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer, which sidelined him until September of that year.

In a separate note to Apple's board members and the Apple community today, Jobs said that he was no longer up to the job of CEO.

"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come," Jobs said.

Jobs concluded by saying that "Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it," and that he looks forward to contributing as Apple's chairman of the board, director, and as an Apple employee if the board allows it.

Cook, 50, joined Apple in 1998 and was promoted to COO in 2004. He has long been Jobs' right-hand executive, heading up shareholders meetings and earnings calls with Wall Street investors, and acting as a figurehead at product introductions.

The Jobs era

One of the most legendary businessmen in American history, Jobs turned three separate industries on their head in the 35 or so years he has been involved in the technology industry.

Personal computing was largely invented with the launch of the Apple II in 1977. Legal digital-music recordings were brought into the mainstream with the iPod and iTunes in the early 2000s, and mobile phones were never the same after the 2007 debut of the iPhone. Jobs played an instrumental role in the development of all three, and managed to find time to transform the art of computer-generated movie-making on the side.

The release of the iPad in 2010, a touch-screen tablet computer his competitors flocked to reproduce, could be considered the capstone of his career as a technologist. A conceptual hybrid of a touch-screen iPod and a slate computer, the 10-inch mobile device was Jobs' vision for a more personal computing device.

bs is considered brilliant yet brash. He values elegance in design yet is almost never seen in public wearing anything but a black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and a few days' worth of stubble. A master salesman who considers himself an artist at heart, Jobs inspires both reverence and fear in those who work for him and against him, and is adored by an army of loyal Apple customers.

Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and moved out of the city five years later to the Santa Clara Valley, later to be known as Silicon Valley. He grew up in Mountain View and Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters are located.

He attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., for a year but dropped out, although he sat in on some classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. After a brief stint at Atari working on video games, he spent time backpacking around India, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and developing an interest in Buddhism, all of which would shape his work at Apple.

Back in California, Jobs' friend Steve Wozniak was learning the skills that would change both their lives. When Jobs discovered that Wozniak had been assembling relatively (for the time) small computers, he struck a partnership, and Apple Computer was founded in 1976 in the usual Silicon Valley fashion: setting up shop in the home of one of the founder's parents.

Wozniak handled the technical end, creating the Apple I, while Jobs ran sales and distribution. The company sold a few hundred of the Apple I, but found much greater success with the Apple II, which put the company on the map and is largely credited as having proven that regular people wanted computers.

It also made Jobs and Wozniak rich. Apple went public in 1980, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the first tech industry celebrities, earning a reputation for brilliance, arrogance, and the sheer force of his will and persuasion, often jokingly referred to as his "reality-distortion field."

The debut of the Macintosh in 1984 left no doubt that Apple was a serious player in the computer industry, but Jobs only had a little more than a year left at the company he founded when the Mac was released in January 1984.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20096895-248/steve-jobs-steps-down-from-apple/#ixzz1W3y3NL00