Rocketboom ‘sans congdon’. The first show. 24 hours late.
Let’s see what develops. Interesting how the new host looks similarishly like the old one. The proof will be in the pudding of the next episodes. Amanda better gets some episodes on their own going real soon. That way we will be able to tell wether it was Andrew or her that made Rocketboom worth watching in the last 18 months.
Rocketbooms audience has spiked recently. Dirty laundry is great PR. Nothing better than a little scandal.
HD-DVD launched. Bluray launched.
People don’t care. Of course there are reviews in the more tech geek media.
But apart from that there is not much movement.
As expected people don’t care.
There was a format war before this one. Audio CDs with their 44,100 Hz 16 bit sampling rate were not state of the art as far as technical ability around the turn of the century. So Philips and Sony came up with the Super Audio CD that quickly went into a format war with the similarly feature yet incompatible DVD Audio.
That was 1999. There are probably around 631 audio geeks who can get really excited about these formats and their differences. The rest of us is happy with compressed mp3s that indeed can sound horrible.
The current HD DVD format flavors do present a bigger quality jump than the CD / next gen format had to show. Most peoples eyes are better educated than their ears.
In order to watch next gen material there is a very considerable investment needed. You need a HDMI capable screen with enough resolution and the right image processing ingredients. And an expensive player.
Roughly between 3000 and 6000 US$ worth of equipement.
I remember that we paid 450 US$ for our DVD player three months after it came to market. There were 18 titles available, but the quality jump from VHS was stunning. VHS was considerably bad compared to live TV. DVD was noticable better. And there was decent sound too. And the things needed no rewind. And there were multiple audio tracks with commentary and an OK navigation system. And the disks seem to last longer than tape. And they used up less space.
Sure in the beginning many Studios were betting on the other format. Divx, not to be confused with Divx , was an attempt to get people used to the fact that they can not own anything that Hollywood creates. A failed attempt, but not the last one.
HD-DVD vs. Bluray
The score seems to be zero zero.
Companies like AT&T and others that move the bits around on parts of the internet and to clients want more money. They realize that companies like Google or Apple/iTunes make a bug or two on the internet. Now they want in on that action. Since it runs on their wires they think they have a valid angle. Which is highly ridiculous. They get paid what they asked for. Providing internet bandwidth was good business. But now they want to be able to charge more for those ‘precious bits’. Like Apple iTunes. Apple could afford it. The download cost is only a small fraction of the 99 cents they get per song. Same with google ads. However, the precedence is ugly. And, worst of all: Nobody stopped big and old and stupid companies like AT&T to provide services like search or music downloads. Except that they are old and stupid companies. Being big didn’t help either. The outrageous aspect is that AT&T feel that they have a birthright on the value inside of the bits they transfer. That is ridiculous. I don’t think that this would need regulation and legislation. Ideally people would understand what’s going on and tell the big telco’s that they don’t get it. If they try to extort google and Co then those companies should expose this. After all: Think of the internet, and think either google or AT&T has to go away. If you think that we would need AT&T to push a couple of bits around then you have been fooled by their brainwash. There are lots of providers and ample net capacity. The real value is in search. And that drives those old telcos crazy.
It looks as if Kevin Smith will release a directors commentary for his upcoming Clerks II movie on iTunes. The story floats around on the internet. People point ot a Times interview with him. Of course this is a great idea. It makes allot of sense. Specially for an audience like his. I did watch most of video podcasts that he had running along the production of the sequel. They vary, some are nice, others are not. He ran through his crew and asked people like the loader, script supervisor etc. what exactly they would do on a movie set. I am surprised that these posts never got any big traction on the internet. I only watched the Singer/King Kong episode from similar King Kong and Superman projects. I wonder is “Snakes on a Plane” needs one. Probably not. That movie got made by those four words. Four words can get a movie into your head. No podcasts needed.
The device is pretty much clear in everybodies head. A bigger iPod with a big screen that plays clips. There are non Apple ones on the market, but why does it take Apple so long to come up with one?
One plausible explaination is that they don’t have to. As long their market share remains unchallenged it is better for the bottom line to hold the next Version back. The longer you wait with a high tech device the more time you have to get the system right. Write the proper software for it. And prices are declining on all components. A video player will have allot of hardware in it that is still in the beginning of it’s life cycle. Hightech component prices pretty much follow the same curve: They are very expensive in the beginning of their life cycle and then get much cheaper. The longer Apple waits the more profits will be left for them.
While using the iBook G4 for all things the MacBook Pro sits there, downloading stuff and doing other things that don’t need my attention. Annoying: that whinning noise. Disabling the 2nd CPU with ‘chud’ helps, but when the thing goes to sleep it does forget it. Another observation is that when the screen goes dark the noise goes away as well. Try setting the brightness to low and it stops.
As an extension to the ‘old people can’t hear high frequencies meme’ I think that the MacBook Pro does have this annoyance since Jobs simply can not hear it. His ears are not as sharp as his mind people say. That’s why the iPod is so loud, and that’s why is claiming that he replaced his fancy rich-man-stereo set with that thing called ‘HiFi’.
coding, tetris, nicotine and lots of other things:
I would need to find out how long it would take to code a couple of things. They happen to be running on a Mac and they would be dealing with moving images. Quicktime comes to mind. It is an OK player. Sure VLC is more flexible for some formats, but everybody has a Quicktime player on a Mac. SideNote: Why is apple so stupid to charge money for they pro Version of Quicktime? Can’t make revenue that would make up for the general annoyance that comes with it. And you don’t become a standard for charging for features like copy paste. Anyhow.
Quicktime development is a whole different nightmare. There are around 2,500 functions. Countless API options. Countless related technologies, and not a single introduction that would make any sense, or compile for that matter. Of course, it’s all there. And ‘all’ is quet literally. Examples that crash XCode. Examples that only run on OS9. Introductions of codes with code snippets where it takes allot of guessing, which era this was valid in.
Most open software projects have much better online documentation than Apple’s Quicktime. It’s a mess. A mess with a messy history. Once things work they might be great. It also probably great if you work for Apple have access at the internal communication paths. But for a 3rd party developer it’s hard to get into this. Specially if the API would be a smart part of you have actually to do.
I will NOT make a living by coding around the Quicktime API in the next years. It’s just a small part of what I have to do.
OpenGL for instance is also just a small part of what I do. But I have no problems there: I get the code, the documentation, and can drag this knowledge along in the projects that I do. Same with databases. But Quicktime is a horrible beast to get started with.
Almost as bad as ‘AppleScript’. But I rather not start writing about that.
nice idea
Ignore the title cards, and don’t expect anything from the end.
E3 is on tomorrow. Just enough time to surrender some prophecies to the google bot:
Sony really really needs to show some impressive PlayStation-3 now.
I’d say that Sony the company has a future if they show working devices in a form factor that will ship.
But they wont.
One level down we get to see how good of a smoke screen they can show. Most importantly will be the details on the game titles: Coding for the 7+1+1 CPU architecture of the PS3 might be horrible. Just how horrible it is one might can deduct from the quality of the demos, and if there are surprise moves and shifts. This year’s E3 will be the first where the Gaming industry has to wrangle growth slowdown issues. Much like any other media industry the battle for human time has reached the section that seemed invinicible for the last decade: The digital lifestyle leaves not even enough time for games. And time is money.
Sony’s 75th birthday, what will it be like?