Category: history

Sony’s clock is ticking

confessions of a pixel pusher history marketing media Sony technology

Sony makes amazing technology. Their professional Broadcast division did a great job with the HDCAM SR. Only the name was a gigantic mistake: Much like a Porsche competitor would call it’s car a ‘Yugo RS’.

Branding for the “bravia” seems to be working ok as well.

But: There is no Playstation-3. And there will be none that you can buy this year.
Blueray sounds like Betamax.

Sony was always bigger and more important than the other consumer electronics companies in Japan.
It will have been this size difference that led to their demise: They are not what IBM was to computers in the 70s
or Apple is to the mp3 player market. Still they are big enough to think that they can push their own formats
alone: Betamax, Minidisc, MemoryStick, iLink (only the name was different), and now blueray.

Sony leaned out of the window last year with the Playstation-3 Presentation. They would need to deliver
this year. And I am taking bets that they can not.

Sad really: I loved those Trinitron TVs in the 80s. Nothing came only close.

pointless

Apple history internet OSX

but nice

in a land far far away

history politics

I am just read through the state of the union address from the current President.
He says:


In September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.

Many people would want to believe that this would be Iraq. If somebody would ask to name the country,
he would not say it would be Iraq, since there is no link between 9/11 and Iraq. None.
But there is still some hard core supporters the the administration does not want to confuse. At some
point there were 70% that believed that Iraq was behind 9/11. By now it’s probably less.

So which country would he mean then? Maybe Afghanistan where the Taliban ruled in 2001. Those idiots where stupid enough to let Osama Bin Laden into the country after he got kicked out of Sudan.

Interestingly enough this is still not the right answer. Saudi Arabia is where most of the 9/11 hijakers came from. It has never had an election. The King is ruling the country in absolute monarchy. They chop your hand of as punishment. But they deliver oil, lots of it. So democracy will spread elsewhere first according to the Bush plan.

one artist less on the planet

art history

I thought he had died already

2.5 billions

Apple history

So many billions lately. In the Wall Street Journal from this weekend you can read page 16 an interesting story about Steve Jobs. No, not about the iPod or how brilliant he is.

In March his 10 Million Apple shares vest. That would be 800 Million by today’s price.

What’s there not to like?

Well, according to the WSJ, Steve sold shares in 2003. Lot’s of them. When the stock price was on it’s lowest point in five years. He lost 2.5 Billion by doing that.

six years later

confessions of a pixel pusher history internet

Afer six years I updated the method software site. It is interesting how times have changed. Back in the day I put allot of efforts into navigation and menus. There was allot of content.

It all is gone. The world is full with plugins. Now I believe that you can sell software easier if you cut to the chase. All that thoughtfull navigation and documenation seemed not to help it seems. I still have to answer emails about details when people want the software.

So in case you happen to have an image integration system from the Autodesk Advanced Media Devision aka Discreet aka Discreet Logic flying around in your backyard: Now you can purchase software much quicker.

Sponsored is the whole update by the nice person that leaves his Wifi open so that T-Mobile can shove it.
Or maybe it’s my local Starbucks itself is providing this: They certainly would make their 30 US$ a month for the DSL
back on extra lattes that they can sell since Wifi is free and not stupid in the store.

FireWire – the epilog

Apple communication confessions of a pixel pusher history media technology

Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.

FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.

miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.

When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.

There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.

Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.

When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.

The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.

Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.

I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.

cinema commericals

confessions of a pixel pusher history media

In this recent ars technica article the author writes that cinema commercials grossed 315 Million US in 2003. Which would make it the 3rd biggest movie of that year. Right between Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean. Sounds big, of course. But when you sum up the ten biggest movies then you get close to 2 Billion. It’s fair to say that movie theatres ruin everybodies experience for less a fraction of their income.

Let me say that I made good money with cinema commericals: Software that I wrote for a “Solitaire” Film Recorder provided plenty of content for the european cinema market in the nineties. Mostly commmericals. A cinema commercial can actually a decent piece of entertainment. It’s just that most of them are not. The worst is always when a quick edited TV commercial gets pushed into the cinema. Mostly out of media buy consideration: “Let’s get that cinema demographic”. This afterthought shows: The content is not meant to be seen on the ‘big screen’ and that causes troubles that will ruin everybodies experience. You can not sell things when the whole presentation looks like junk.

The overall ‘junkification’ of the cinema experience will cost the more and more viewers. Which is a shame.
A decent cinema can provide amazing images and sound. I still prefer to see a movie in a decent Theatre.
Just that they are hard to find these days.

cringley is an idiot

google history internet

or maybe I am one.
Last November Robert X Cringley writes about a google project.
He claims that Google is planning to put 5,000 opteron CPUs and 2.5 Petabytes in a 20 or 40 foot container.

Back in November the story got attention, and now it bubbles back up again in the context of the “Google PC Walmart CES” buzzword cluster.

I wondered if the “Cringleytainer” would actually be feasible:

Those pieces would barely fit in a 40 foot container. Forget about air flowing around. Maybe it’s all water cooled?

Which leads to the ultimate flaw in Cringley’s concept:
5,000 CPUs @ 90 W and 30,000 disks @ 15 W would use 0.9 Megawatt. Let’s add 0.1 Megawatts for boards and powers supplies. Of course this would assume a couple of technology breakthroughs.
Ignoring the laws of thermo dynamics we have to add the same power to cool the thing: 2 Megawatts.

Googling around I found this power source for the Cringleytainer. Guestimating optistically again it would use a gallon of diesel every minute.

Of course Mr Cringley is not an idiot. Not more or less than anybody else. I am only certain that I am one,
since I had to spend so much time with me.

What strikes me is that such a story can float around without anybody doing the basic math. Or maybe people did and got ignored. It’s much more ‘news worthy’ to toss around crazy ideas involving google.

If I should be bored in mid March then I will try to inject the urban myth of a planned Apple Google merger into the world.

billions.

history internet

Awfully big number. A Thousand Million.

six point five: people on the planet

US dollars:

one: budget for the rebranding from AT&T to at&t. Ok, they change their font twoo.

two point five: budget for the rebranding from “Intel inside” to “leap ahead”

five point seven: what yahoo.com paid for broadcast.com. Never heard of it? That’s about right.
Nothing really came out of it for Yahoo. broacast.com’s last earnings: they lost 2.7 million dollars.
they paid with stock. Overvalued you might think: sure, but yhoo is back to 80% of the levels of those days.

hundret twenty two: what all google stock is worth today.

hundret billion neurons are having trouble making sense out of this.