Format wars

Informative article about the current state of the next-gen DVD format war.

Me, I'd go with a hybrid player. But it's a good point that it may all be a moot point... Perhaps the high-def-video-download-from-the-Internet future is already here?

Anyway, I'm shocked that apparently most blue-ray DVD titles don't use the new MPEG-4 encoding. It has four times the resolution for the same bandwidth. After Apple included the encoding in Quicktime, real-time broacasts suddenly became a pleasure to watch instead of a pain.

It seems that a key thing to developing new formats is to do it fast enough, which means dispense with all the infighting. And of course to make the right decisions. For example in the nineties they made a new format for 35mm film which would dispense with the perforation. Many of use were delighted: now we could get a bigger film image with the same size film and camera!
And it was delayed and delayed. When APS film finally appeared in mid-nineties, the damn thing had a smaller image than 35mm! And to finish it off, digital cameras were starting to appear, so, you know...

I'm always puzzled when big companies make a big investment in less quality. Remember "Kodak Disc" cameras? They took pictures on a small disk of film, and the negative was so unbelievably tiny that Kodak had to develop the "T-max" film specifically for the format, and the quality was still abysmal. I mean, we're talking big grain even on 10cm x 15cm prints! (4x6 inches). Who in Kodak thought this was a winning format? Even the handy 110 format disappeared after a while, and that negative, small as it was, was much larger than the "Disc" negative. It seems that the public do care about quality in the end, even though the differences take a while to penetrate.

About writing

I dislike reading grammar books or articles like this "Dangerous words" list about style when writing on the web. Because they keep telling me how I'm wrong. Don't do this, don't do that... Very distasteful to anybody with an ego. On the other hands this one has some good points.

On the third hand the writer could learn a bit from his own course: to use the title "dangerous words" is misleading at worst and imprecise at best: hardly any of them are "dangerous" in any way, merely poor style.

Induhviduals quotes

From the Dilbert newsletter:

INDUHVIDUAL QUOTES

Thanks to the observant readers of the Dilbert Newsletter, here are more True Quotes from the people who put the duh in Induhvidual:

"Do you think I've been sitting here twiddling my arse?"

"At no time do I ever condone you making changes to improve things in the office."

"Snakes on a Plane - what's that about?"

"Go jump off a lake."

"He's not the sharpest canister in the ocean."

"Keep a stiff upper chin."

"The squeaky wheel gets the spoke."

"I can lead you to horsewater, but I can't make you drink."

"He'd give you the arm off his back."

Announcement in store: "We have a customer by the balls in toys needing assistance." (It repeats.)

"You play ball with me, and I'll scratch yours."

"It's half of one, six dozen of another..."

"We do not have a smoking cow at this point."

"Is there 264 days in the year? Or is it 265?"

"My daughter is as smart as a tack."

"I've got a higher IQ than your little pinky finger."

"If Dad were here right now, he'd be rolling over in his grave."

"Well, it may be the wrong tool for the job, but it is the right tool for the business."

"It's our golden goose. We better figure out how to make her purr."

Google Desktop for the Mac

Google Desktop for the Mac is now available.
I have hopes that this will finally be the really usable search tool for my Mac. Much as I love most of what Apple makes, the Spotlight search feature in Mac OS X is not in that category. It sucks molten death through a lead straw.

Update: OK, in the two hours I've had Google Desktop installed, my machine has crashed twice.
It could be a conflict with another of my utilities or apps, of course.
And I'm hoping it only happened because GD was busy building the basic index, so I'm giving it a few more chances. It seems very useful.

Update: Strange, GD indexed over 400,000 files in the first few hours... but now it seems each file takes several minutes to be indexed. I thought at first it had just run into a couple of very big files, but it keeps being like this for hours now. Also the HD is not running amok like it did the first few hours of indexing. Is something wrong?

Update yet hours later: OK, it's done now.
However my computer still seems much slower, even though it's not indexing old files anymore, only new mails and web pages. I'll have to keep an eye on this. A marked slow-down is too high a price for convenient search.
Update: I have uninstalled it. Slowed down the machine too much. Quelle fromage.
---
Computers are weird.
I'm now fazing out AppleWorks. Not so much because it is pretty much an amateur app and outdated, though both are true, but because it is using often over 13% of the processor power... while sitting in the background without anything to do or even any document open! How crazy is this? It's a word processor, not a utility. I'd consider that a poorly written app.
I'll replace it with Nisus Writer Express, a very nice app.

3D viewing

This post has somehow turned into a discussion of 3D viewing of different sorts.

Happy Easter

"Support nude culture"

"Support nude culture", says these two brave young Estonian women.

Rockaby Baby

Humor is a very interesting thing. Sometimes something can be sublime comedy just by the way something is said or done. Great example, this song from Marx Brothers' Big Store. Funny, intense, weird, creative.
(The last line is "shoot the talcum to me, Malcolm.")

And here's another good music/humor combo. (From A Night at The Opera.)
TTL exclaimed:
"Love the kids' reactions! :-)
Also, check out how he does harmonics on the harp towards the end of his (harp) performance at 4:47."

I am not sure what harmonics is, in music. Different from a chord?

Quoth Michael Burton ...
There's something oddly very exciting about that singer's deadpan performance -- it's funny, but it's more than just funny. There's a kind of emotional tension that really turns the whole thing up a couple notches.

In his later years, Groucho complained that he couldn't insult anybody anymore. It wasn't that he didn't try, but he was so famous for his funny insults that he could say ANYTHING, and people would laugh and feel flattered that they'd been insulted by the great Groucho Marx.

I've read a lot about the Marx Brothers, and I don't think anyone has ever said an unkind word about Harpo. Many people describe him as almost a saint. He and his wife adopted four children.

Eolake said...
I agree, she is very special.
---
I recommend Groucho's autobiography, it is interesting, funny, and it puts the "good old days" into perspective. An actor/performer in the early 20th had about as much social status as a gypsy, and often about as much morals.

DRM-free songs at iTunes!

EMI and Apple yesterday announced the removal of DRM from
all EMI content on iTunes Music Store. Also bitrate bumped
up to 256K on DRM-free tracks.

As you may be aware, Digital Rights Management is the controversial technology, meant to halt piracy, which stops a user from copying the content he has bought to whatever devices he likes. Like Jobs and many others I believe that DRM creates many more problems than it solves, and this is a big step forward to solving this.

There's a Q&A transcript with Steve Jobs here.

... O, what an excellent strategy from Apple to let the user be able to select to buy only DRM-free songs if he likes. If many users do that (and I think they might) then the other big labels will follow suit very quickly.

Featured comment:

ttl said...
Microsoft innovates!

From Computerworld:

The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.

eolake said...
No, it can't be true! Microsoft is *married* to DRM!
... Of course if the masters are going another way now, the running dogs have to follow...

ttl said...
I know. Microsoft Vista is designed to have the most elaborate DRM architecture known to man. In fact, it is the first operating system to have DRM facilities inside the kernel.

In contrast, Unix die-hards maintain that not even file locking belongs in the kernel. It should be done in a user level process. Mention DRM to a Unix geek and he will piss in his pants from laughter. :-)

And rightly so. Building copyright protection technology into an operating system is an idea so distasteful to me...

Even if you don't believe that protectionism is the problem of the copyright owner and that "information should be free", then just on a technical level... there's lots of evidence that Vista is way slower and more complex for no good reason except DRM.

iTunes and Extreme Engineering

Is iTunes music store also really, really slow for you? Like when you make a search it takes ten to thirty seconds? (Laurie says his is fast, but mine is this slow over several different machines and connections.)

If you are in the US (or have a US friend who will make you use his/her credit card) you can get movies and TV shows. (That service is a bit slow coming for Eu, huh?) This is attractive to me since I don't have TV, it uses too much time. But I like to cherry pick the most interesting shows to watch whenever I want.

Example: the show Extreme Engineering, especially the "science fiction" episodes like the one about a possible transatlantic tunnel or a big pyramid city in Tokyo Bay. Very kewl.

Paul sez:
"I don't have a TV, but a friend convinced me to buy a portable DVD player last week. I can borrow DVD's for free from the library, and I even bought the player on sale. Entertainment is remarkably cheap these days."

It really is! And in a few years, sites like YouTube will have millions of hours of high-resolution content all for free. Entertainment, education, you name it.

Peter Steele

"I think for the most part it really doesn't matter how good an album is; I think it really comes down to musical climate. I'm sure if Sgt. Pepper or Highway to Hell or Stained Class or Paranoid came out today, it would not even chart, simply because people like this "Rap and Roll" shit, which I hate. It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap."
- Peter Steele, Type O Negative

The above is from an interview conducted by my gal pal Gail Worley. (Who interviewed me once.)

BTW, here is another opinion on rap by the very funny Dylan Moran. I watched this whole show ("Monster") yesterday, and I was in stitches.

Michael Burton urges:
"When I was young and listening to the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix or something, the old folks would sometimes say, "I don't know how you can listen to that stuff. It's not music, it's just noise!" Now I'm old, and when I hear young people listening to rap, I think, "I don't know how you can listen to that stuff. It's not music, it's just noise!"

Personally, I don't get it. But I don't think you can revolutionize popular culture with "bad poetry executed by people that can't sing."

When I was young and old people dismissed my music, I just wished they would just listen to it -- then they'd understand that it was more than "noise." Now I'm old. I don't really want to listen enough to give rap a chance to change my mind -- Sturgeon's Law applies to music, too. But I can't dismiss the whole genre simply because I have a closed mind.

I still feel free to recommend other other types of music, or to complain about songs that glorify violence or denigrate people or about music played too loud or too late at night. But for the most part, I say, "You're young! Have fun! Enjoy your life, and don't worry what the old folks think!"

Good points. I notice that when rap is on a boom box amongst teenagers hanging out it makes more sense.
Also I know some lovely rap songs, but funny enough they are all by non-rap bands. Blondie's "Rapture" for example.

Ruby Beach, Washington

Here's a nice picture from my friend Jim in Seattle.
Ruby Beach.