Category: history

tv is not dead

confessions of a pixel pusher history internet

says Mark Cuban

Of course he is right. I do dissagree with the focus on the last mile. Bandwidth between one and 5 Megabit a second is actually good enough for lots of uses. The real problem will be the backbones. Right now everybody and his dog tries to get a big user base. Subsrcibers rarely change services. The more highspeed client Telco and Co rake in the better they think. Performance and price are two main criteria in choosing an internet provider.

Since Cuban kicks predictions around here are mine:

I think that most Telco’s oversold their inventory. Maybe not by todays surfing habbits. But these are radically changing. A thing called “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” will cause serious troubles. Your average Internet ISP CEO might not have a concept of it yet. He probably still mumbles ‘google google google’ every minute or so in a failing attempt to get what made these people so sucessfull. If the ISPs see it coming or not: “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” is the dragon that will burst into their board room and will bite a head or two off.

Right now a very very small minority of people subsrcibes to these media enclosure feed. Since 95% of all users do not use their internet connection 99% of the time you can seriously oversell your available back bone bandwidth. Imagine you are an airline and for whatever reason only one out of hundret passengers that bought tickets show up. You probably will reduce your prices in order to get more clients. Same happened to the ISPs.
“RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” changes that once you load videos that way. It has been around for almost two years. Tools were cumbersome but they get better. If they should become mainstream then there is simply not enough bandwidth to make people happy. The problem is that the internet will become slower. Since an ISP has to throttle it’s clients. Right now they can afford to be as fast as possible, since almost everybody only uses his bandwidth for surfing html pages and the occasional jpg or video file. It has been said that a third of internet traffic is BitTorrent. Now go on the street and ask people that you see

A. if the use the internet
B. if they use BitTorrent

Most people will say yes on ‘A’ and on ‘B’ you get a blank stare. Bittorrent is still very geekish. So is “RSS 2.0 with
media enclosures”. It is not likely to stay that way.

We will look at 2006 and sigh. Saying “Remember when you could get a FIOS with flatrate”
Almost like: “Remember when you would go to America and traded Manhattan for a couple of pearl necklaces”

worse is better

confessions of a pixel pusher history technology

It used to be to that I spend Sunday mornings with the paper. If you don’t go to church on Sundays, then you have this amazing time that you can read just for your own joy. These days it’s the internet. Of course. But I follow different stories on a Sunday morning. Today is was Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel, via Math for programmers via BlogsNow background info on this important essay from seventeen years ago. It probably is so important that I should pretend that I woul have just ‘reread’ it. But, no: Never had heard of it before. Much like a really good movie that you see for the first time after it has been out for 20 years and that you picked up via DVD it makes you feel good since there might be countless other gems out there. Burried in all that history, waiting for to come back to light much like diamonds emerge from the soil in heavy rain. The “test of time”. Or it can make you sad, since you lived without this piece for 20 years. Might have gotten hundreds of references and jokes not all or only half way. Digressing entirely here I am considering to show my seven year old son the original Star Wars movie, even though I think he is WAY to young for that. But there are so many references in the culture around him that I feel he should see it, only that he can decipher all those references. Finally the fact that an important piece went on noticed for me for so long could also have a vastly depressing aspect: How many other items are lingering out there and I never came accross them. And, at least that is a fact, I spent the last seventeens years rambling about everything, including software creation, without being able to put into a context to “Worse is Better”. Now that I have had it my coffenated head for half an hour I am almost tempted to reference to it as “WIB”.

The essay might also only intresting to me, since I was writing in Lisp seventeen years ago and switched to Unix/C. I have to correct this, since I wrote my first code for legal money in AutoLisp under AutoCAD Version 2.18. Lisp was not my choice, C was. Very much so.

Of course now we can read things like

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

or


The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

with a historical perspective. 1995 and it turned out that Mr Gabriel thought to be worse would be pushed from 90% of all CPUs by something that is even worse than worse: Windows 95. Ironically Windows 95 could also be seen as Version 1.0 of a virus (real ones here) API disguised as an ‘operating system’.

… and then a fast forward to the world of software development in 2006. “totally”

the story of the movie Tron

confessions of a pixel pusher google history media

Looks like an interest article about Tron.
Just that I have no time to read it right now.

tron on youtube

tron on google video

I let you decide what is more relevant and more interesting.

nine trillion???

history politics

nine million million US dollars
That’s more than thousand US$ for every person on the planet. Billions of them make less than that in a year.

Bush and Iraq

history politics

The Prez says:

"As more capable Iraqi police and soldiers come on line, they will assume responsibility for more territory with the goal of having the Iraqis control more territory than the coalition by the end of 2006,"

Let me guess: it probably will be mostly the vast deserts of iraq that will make up those non US controlled area of “territory”.

“Mission Accomplished” it said on the aircraft carrier where he held the premature victory speach. More than 90% of US soldiers think they are in Iraq because of 9/11. Whatever happened to those change in alert states that we saw before the last election? It has been awfully quiet: Have the terrorists all been caught? Probably because they got tortured so well. At least nothing has changed in the area of Weapons of Mass Destuction: Iraq never had them, and North Korea still has. Which is -what a surprise- pretty much what their respective rulers have been saying all along. Oh, one thing changed during the last three years: The supply of cheap heroine has never been better. Thanks to the worlds number one producer: Afghanistan. The Taliban are unbelievable idiots, but they did a much better job in the war on drugs than the current regime. Ah politics, it all makes so much sense.

Rumsfeld and his interpretations

history politics

Donald –Iraq is just like post war Germany– Rumsfeld now says that it is the media that is making this all up.

smart trash

daily life history technology

Not sure when this will happen, but I am pretty sure it will. Unless mankind abondons culture and civilistation for whatever reason.

When the trash can will be picked up it’s contents will be read via the RFID tags that every product will have. Now that makes for ample opportunity. The trash collectors can recycle, locate misplaced things for you and can sell your complete consumption profile to everybody who could benefit from it. From here it is pretty easy to figure out if you should change your diet or drink less. If your trash and credit card records don’t line up then that could mean allot of things.

A garbage truck costs tens of thousands of dollars, the technology needed to implement this will be only a few hundred once RFID tags are every where.

I’d say we better get the NSA back in check before they can wrap their -granted limited- imagination around these possibilies.

IBM about the PC in 1981

history media

qt snippet

ps3 in September? better be, but probably wont

history Sony technology

PlayStation ‘HUB’ and a September Launch of PS3 in Japan and the US are been rumored here

Of course XBox Live needs competitions. Not sure what Sony can pull of till September. But it is indeed crucial. Like the whole thing. I think the PS3 release date is the one dimension of the watershed decission that is due this year: If they release in September or earlier and if PS3 as well as the online service are comparable to what’s out there right now then Sony might have a chance to survive. The quality of PS3 and online service are the other dimension.
Since nobody has seen anything yet, it can only be speculated upon.
But the fact that Sony has shown nothing since last years E3, and those images were clearly not from a real PS3 point in the direction that the PS3 will not be as great as Sony tried to make everybody believe last year.

If Sony had any images or release date then they would need to put this out right now in order disturb the momentum of the competing technologies: Every day people buy XBox 360s. These people will buy games for that machine, and not for the PS3. Decent hype around the PS3 could stop the ongoing proliferation of the 360 somewhat.

A friend of a friend said that there will be final devkits in June. If that would be true then a September launch is impossible. And that in turn mean that Sony is done. Toast. Over with. You probably can still buy a Flatpanel TV in 5 fives with those four letters on. But chances are that it’s actually from some chinese company that picked up the brand.

denmark

history

Poor danish people. They are really among the nicer europeans.

Really: ever since the Vikings not much bad things came out of Denmark.

I wonder how many people burning embassies now could find Denmark on a map?
Probably about the same percentage then that of americans finding iraq on a map.

It really is the same problem: Stupid people and mental short cuts.