future predictions

Sony


the Yankee group predicts 44% market share for the PS3 in 2011
I would bet money on this not to be true. I think that Microsoft will sell more than 27 Million Xbox 360s and Sony will never sell more than ten Million PS3s. Ever. Come back here and comment as much as you like once they should do. Those ‘experts’ at the Yankee group see Sony push 30 million units. Amazing.

But what do you do if you have an ailing consultancy? You publish controversial statements.
And you hope that nobody finds your past prediction attempts.

microsoft: 4.7GB is enough

technology

Microsoft says it will not use the HD DVD add on for games

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 comes with a DVD drive. As an add on there will be a HD DVD drive. This will only be used for movies, not for game content.

Microsoft says that the 4.7GB that a standard DVD offers is enough for games. HD DVD would be 15GB.

More is better. Up to a point. Any Sony-Fanboy will be eager to point out that this Microsoft move is simply sour grapes. After all, will Bluray not feature huge amounts of data. Correct. However, all games I did see on the PS3 dev units looked nice. But none of them showed an amount of detail and scene fariation that would not fit on a 4.7GB disk.

bluray and hd-dvd

Sony technology

There are two high definition DVD formats. Bluray and HD DVD. Of course you knew that. Both formats have been released. There are players. There are movies. And, nobody cares. I don’t see any discussions or reviews online. It’s one big yawn. Bluray fanboys will point to the upcoming PS3 release. That being the Ace up the sleeve of the format. Interestingly enough, PS3 fanboys ‘predict’ that it will be the Bluray format that will help selling the console. A 500 US$ Bluray player disguised as a gaming console might be a cheap Bluray player, if others cost a 1K. But in the consumers mind they have to compete with the 40 US$ DVD player that plays an awfully huge library of movies. Upscaling DVD players cost just a few hundred dollars.

The quality of these next generation formats is certainly superior to DVD. The current discs however have been partially made from sub par telecine masters I have been told. That aside, people don’t understand nor care about quality all that much.

Those two new formats have a better picture than traditional DVD. In order to see it you have to be equiped with a HD set.

Let’s have a look at the last format change. DVD replaced VHS tape. And it was better in the following ways:

  • Image quality. Much more resolution. VHS was dreadful.
  • Audio quality. They called that CD quality. VHS was dreadful.
  • Sourround audio. Five speakers in your living room. No possible before with anything.
  • non touch mechanism. VHS is an analog tape. Tape is tricky as it is. Tape and head wear and environmental impact like dust. Analog tape degrades. Every time you use it
  • multi angle. yes, is a feature. Nobody used it. Almost nobody.
  • multiple audio tracks. Directors commentary or alternative language tracks. Both add great value.
  • menu system. Helps with branding and use.
  • non linear. Jump to any location is almost instantly. Together with the menu system
  • no rewind. Sounds like a stupid thing. Now that you don’t have to rewind anymore. Was major annoyance withVHS and big deal for DVD
  • smaller and known form factor. “just like audio CD”
  • region code and copy protection. Good for the studios. They thought.
  • computer use. I have used a data tape based on S-VHS. Was 75,000 US$.

With DVD there was a format war too. The other one backed by Circuit City and Dreamworks folder almost instantly. It’s “feature” was that the movies were much cheaper, but would expire with in 48 hours. After that they wanted to charge consumers for every view. Greed. Make sure you hide it well, or you will fail like that.

DVD vs. VHS is a pretty substantial list. After a few years it was a done deal.
Bluray and HD-DVD will never build any momentum. They will fail like Super CD or UMD or Minidisc have failed.

reason

history internet technology

Boeing had a system for internet on a plane. Now they shut it down. I used it allot on board of transatlantic Lufthansa flights. It worked great. About the only time when I did not mind to pay (around 25 US$) for wifi.

Nobody really knew about this system. None of the US carriers picked it up, and Lufthansa did not do a good job to communicate that you could have internet over the Atlantic.

I wonder what will happen to this. I hope that google buys it. They can afford it. And it would be great PR.
Wifi to they sky!

Both democracy and capitalism work great. As long people make decissions based on reason. If you buy the best product you push efficiency into the system. Same with democracy. The world grew more complex. And I wonder if people kept up with that. Looking at the habbits of the average AOL user I have some serious doubts about that.
Of course there is no alternative to the current system. Still it is worth pointing out, that the current implementation is broken. More than it used to be: The average skill set and education level is declining. Everywhere. In the 80s I made an apprenticementship to become a Maschinenschlosser in Germany. In three and a half years you work and learn basically how to build machines. This was the kind of job most of the male population did aspire to. It’s demands however where non trivial. You not only learned how to build machines, but also knew backgrounds why they were designed in a certain way. If you got a drawing with an error you were able to go back to the construction people and come up with a better solution together. The percentage of people being able to work on this level has declined in the last years. When the housing bubble ‘makes’ you twice as much money as forty hours of labor, why should you try to improve your skills?
When things get made in China for penny’s why should you learn how to make something? Opening boxes and putting things on shelfs, that’s a skillset in demand.

politics

politics

simple yet true

branding synergy

aol user data

internet

I decided to host the AOL user data
It is a pretty scary view inside of the mindset of people that think they are alone with their computers.
About 2.1GB that need to be processed, so it might take a while.

open

communication history linux M$ media technology

Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.

The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.

Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.

Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.

From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.

One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.

And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.

Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.

Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.

The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.

melting math

media

the BBC writes about greenland

Reading it, you would think that Greenlands Ice is about to be gone.

Only using numbers from this article (6.5 meters rise of sea level if ice melts completely, 0.5 millimeters rise a year) it will take 13,000 years till Greenlands ice cap is gone.

I am not saying that global warming is not real. I am just surprised how somebody can write an article that contradicts itself in such simple ways.

return path exim4

linux technology

I moved Method Software to a new server. Licenses always could be generated automatically and sent by email.
It was seven years ago that I did set up the original host. Things have changed. So nothing worked. Thanks to all that spam it is a bit trickier to set up a mail server in the internet in 2006 than it was 1999.

First thing to get right is to have reverse DNS set up right. Otherwise you get something like:


SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host actual.name.removed.com [1.2.3.4]: 5actual.name.removed.com You Must have reverse DNS setup in order to relay mail.

In other words: The ip address you are sending from must resolve to something. With

whois ip-address

you should get a domain. This is something that your hosting provider can set up for you. They have the authority over the IP range that they gave you one from. Took only an hour with my hosting provider. Another sign that they are decent.

Even after this fix the return-path was set to something stupid like ‘www-data@hostname-I-gave-the-machine’
I took a bit of googling and a couple of pointless detours to /etc/hosts and dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config before I found this blog entry that pointed to /etc/email-addresses which indeed did the trick.

its agency viral day

internet marketing

it seems