Category: history

viral media

confessions of a pixel pusher history internet media

Advertising Age is raving about Dove’s “Evolution”. Their headline reads “Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot”. Now that’s what some people want to hear. And it leaves reason behind. Jumping head over heals into the current media internet bubble bath.
The Dove campaign is great. How often is there an ad for a cosmetic product that I want to show to my daughter? It certainly works on the internet. Because of it’s content. Certain content will work well on the internet. But let’s face it, if something works really well it will get killed by it’s own success: Today you can find a video of mentos + coke on Google Video. It is prominently featured on the google Blog.
Dove is great since it’s decent and sells soap. Are you feeling having a Diet-Coke or Mentos after watching the latest and lamest sticky liquid orgy? Certainly not. Actually with todays video dropping Mentos into big soda bottles becomes officially lame. The Meme has suffocated itself under it’s own weight.

Update:
Cnet however sings a different song. I wonder how many kids run around now with the video cameras to do the ‘next big thing’.

John Walker

history

for my last post I googled around for ‘calculation slide’. And so I found [again] the website of John Walker. He started AutoDesk. The companies second product “AutoCAD” became rather successful. Among other things that I plan to read, I found his anagram creator and learned -after tweaking the dictionary- that my name could be rearranged into draw neck areas or ransacked ware.

calculator watch

history politics technology

According to wikipedia it was the first World War that brought the wrist watch into wide use. Only sixty years later people tought that it would be a brilliant idea to have a calculator in your wrist watch. As brilliant as having a PDA or a camera in your cell phone I suppose.

Before the were pocket calculators there were slide rules. I did like them. Thinking about it, I should get one. Or even better: create one with megabytes, megabit etc scales. Having the common technologies like USB2 etc marked. OK, neat, but obsolete in about a year. Still, it would be fun to wip out a slide scale in a meeting when asked how long xyz would take. Actually I am pretty convinced now that I want a slide scale. Good thing my dad tought me how to use one.

In 1962 the DoD came up with a slide scale to compute the impact of nuclear bombs. Somehow I could see Kennedy operating one of these after a brief introduction. Now imagine your job would be to teach George W. Bush to operate and use this device.
The scary part about this is, that both people have the power to push the same button. People then were fast to say that Mr B. had so many great advisors. Those that gave him that darn good intelligence.

tape deck

history media

When I was a teenager I worked during the school vacations in order to afford a stereo system. One that was loud and sounded decent. Those came in modules back in the day. It took me a couple of years to make the system complete. I started with an amplifier, speakers and a tape deck.

Basically I wanted to steal music. But those terms were not around back in the day. All I knew was that Albums would cost 20 DM when a pack of Cigarettes ‘only’ cost 3. Both we could not afford. So we rolled our own and taped records. I borrowed my parents record player and my friends albums to get to the music that I liked. That was more than twenty five years ago, and the record industry obviously survived me stealing their music. But they could have noticed a trend a long time ago. They decided not to. They thought their business is to sell physical artifacts that happen to make sounds in the right equipment. First Vinyl then Compact Disc and finally Super CD / Audio DVD. It seems pretty obvious that the record industry got stuck on some model that became irrelevant.

Napster came along at the same time those super high tech next generation audio formats were introduced. Surprisingly people cared about music not about the latest amount of quality that those industry suggestions had to offer.

the paradox of choice

economy history politics

of course I had to watch another TED video while I was at Google Video. Since it’s such a long way there.

Barry Schwartz talks about choice

I agree with him that the choice is by no means linear to happyness. But I dissagree on his remedy. It’s not a decrease of choice that would be the ideal solution. It’s the management of it. People are not in a situation to make decent and educated descissions. Like mine how to spell certain words for instance. But when people are looking into the options and only choose what makes sense, then all the rubbish will disappear. If you buy crap, or equally worse, let your friends buy crap then you inititate the production of more of it. If you only choose things that are good, then you will steer things in the right direction. The choices will follow.

There are so many junk things around us, since people can survive their wrong choices. So they keep making bad ones.

And finally:
Dan Gilbert about happiness and choice

for the next president

Apple history politics

Can we please make sure that the next President and Administration at least have some basic understanding of something like this?

Please imagine GW Bush looking at a website like the one above. How long could he look at it? How would he describe what he saw to somebody else?

This is the guy supposed to run stuff for 300 Million people in all the things where there needs to be somebody running things. Like war and peace and the financial future of the government.

It seems that America has issues with interlect and clarity, as some links might illustrate:

A democrat activist site has an analytical look a CNNs front page in 2000 and 2006.

The GOP is doing the old Terror trick. They were in power for five years after 9/11. Spent billions on war, yet were unable to get OBL. That’s why you NEED TO VOTE for THEM. Amazing that there seems to be an audience going for that.

Politics, always have been messy and partizan. Let’s switch to technology. There never have been any Mac Viruses. I know of a couple of hundret Apple users, or know the people that are responsible for them. The users are a very mixed crowd. Nobody had ever a Virus or malware issue. You get spam email on a Mac too, your google search results are at times full of spam, but that’s where the malware drama ends for you. It is as simple and as clear cut as that.
Still people write articles like this. There are no factual obvious blunders in this. Except that this blurry mixed bag of facts, statements and quotes seem to hover around this bogus theory of market share. This article exists so that people that benefit from it can point to it and say “Look, Mac’s have viruses too”.

If there is an obvious outbreak of stupidity it causes sometimes a clear response.

But generally it seems to cheap and easy to generate messages and ‘news’ that everybody does it. And most people have an agenda to push. The average american is surrounded by communication that is all meant to pull him in one direction or another. People simply give up on having an opinion that is based on facts. They just swim in a pile of soundbytes and pick whatever seems approiate in the current moment. That’s probably why politicians get away with all the crap that they are coming up with.

It was not always like that: In the age of reason there was an attempt to know things. There were discussions, and a quest to find the best solution based on as much objective findings as people would get a handle on. I am sure there were snake oil merchants back in the day as well. I want to believe though, that it was clear and simple that these people were peddling there goods and had no part on a serious discussions about serious matters. OK, maybe I have a slitghly idealized perspective on a world in that the American Constitution has been created.

about those one point six billion

google history internet

the youTube founders came up with a ‘video’ for the occasion

“Two Kings came together” ?? wtf!

Honestly, I would rather not be in their shoes. Good for them that they cashed in like they did.
But not being a dork like they are: priceless.

It reminds of the “King of the World”.
Somehow the gluttening reference to royality is a sure way to make you disappear.

Lucas and the future as he sees it.

history media

Variety quoting George Lucas on the future of movies. Or rather the non existence of that concept. I think he has a point or two and misses on others. But it is worth mentioning since Mr Lucas spend some time on making films.

confessions of a dangerous mind

history media

Watched Confessions of a dangerous Mind. Part of my catching up program. I need to fill up a couple of years of movie history. DVD’s are how people will judge a movie. It’s too bad if the movie falls technically apart on the media that it will be remembered from. There are lots of little gem’s in this show. It is very sad that the DI of the 40s flash back scenes falls entirely apart in it’s DVD rendering. Very likely much more a technical than a creative problem. It may even have looked interesting on film. The DVD however revealed a sole posterize orgy of 3 colors in those crucial scenes. A bit more care during post could have gone a long way here. This is especially sad since the attention to detail is so amazing in the rest of the movie. And it would have been pretty easy to avoid a mistake that takes you out of the movie for no good reason before it really gets started. Maybe Disney will go back to the original negative for the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD Version. Yeah, right.
If they can find it.

limits: disk size and imagination

history linux technology

Some days things have the feel of a ‘techno groundhog day’. Once again I set up a computer. Once again it has a considerable sized disk system. It used to be that 30Megabyte (no typo) Winchester disk. Today it’s that 8TB raid. And the problem remains the same: The tools choke on the size. I forget what it was twenty years ago. It was not as easy as it should have been. And that did not change. To cut to chase of the technical knowledge that might be helpful now and will certainly be laughing stock in the future (30MB to big: hahaha):
Getting a 3ware 9550… with 16x500GB drives is a good idea. Fits in one nice case and in a Raid 50 config you end up with 6.3TB usable capacity. Historically it needs to run Fedora Core 4. Which is happy to find the array after the installer has been launched with linux dd and a proper floppy drive (!!) has been inserted with the 9550 drivers. The next mistake one can make (and I sure did) is to let the installer automatically partition the drive it found. Knowing that big disk systems can be trouble to start the OS from I already had seperated a 80GB boot partition in the 3ware bios. The Installer went along, formatted the whole thing and did it’s install. Which take some 6 hours I would guess.
Only problem was, that the poor thing could not boot from what it had made. The automatic partition manager was utterly confusde by the size of drives it found, but didn’t let that stop it from trying and failing hours later anyway.
Manual partition of the 80GB boot drive got me over that part. Having an OS to boot: priceless.
The data partition only started working after using parted and a crucial ‘mklabel gpt’. Only then it would accept the size of the partition correctly. Otherwise it was silently reducing it, and then would fail to mount after a reboot.

Sofar the gory technical details.

The bigger problem is:

Disks have become bigger. Ever since computers are around. Everybody knows this, is exposed to this, and benefits from it. The big question is, how can you write a software that deals with the nuts of bolts of disk systems and not be freaking prepared for that? Of course that 30MB harddrive I dealt with 20 years ago would have been a bit overwelmed to run a partition scheme that would be ready to hold 6 Terrabytes. First question is: Would it be really? Sometime people are scared of wasting 3% but waste the future of something. This side of the equation can be argued with.

There can not be ANY execuse for the way systems fail on bigger hard drive: Numbers roll over, systems report -1600% free space. Shit like this is unacceptable. Tremendously stupid. If you code like that, then you should not code. Period.
Disks will be bigger tomorrow. Deal with it. At least create an error message along the lines of “Can not create partition bigger than 2TB” etc. Fail gracefully. You might have not the money to buy enough disks to test it, but you CAN put in checks for these limits. Nobody will slip in an extra 10% ‘integer boost’ to help your code out. The limits are what they are today. Shame on the authors of the tools for the lack of imagination. If physical harddrives can catch their code only after a few years like they do I am actually surprised that y2k did so little damage …