Anil Dash gives a couple of bullet points how the reign of the iPod could be ended. 80% of them are valid and will work. Which is better than what happend so far: 5% worked, and that was coincidence.
If Creative, Sony, Phillips and all other still suck in a year from now then they can not say they didn’t know what to do:
Somebody told them.
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.
Macintouch did an extensive laptop durability study
Since my PowerBook6,7 is working mostly fine I think I will not replace it with an early IBook. Easier on the money, it’s not to slow, and hell, if I see the new ones I probably want to have one anyway. This talk is still cheap right now.
Tomorrow we will drive 40 miles to the next city to do some offline shopping. Who cares? I know, nobody. But these little chores give you an interesting glimpse on the state of things. In Germany shops can’t just be open when they like to be. As crazy as it sounds there is a Ladenschlusszeiten gesetz where more than 3000 words define when stores can be open or closed in Germany. It used to be simple that stores would close at 6:30 pm. Which was real helpful when I was young: It got me out of bed to return some empty beer bottles and get new ones. Sometimes I missed it. That was a long time ago, and there was a revision of the law. Of course it is still regulated, but not really simple when stores are open and when they are not. After all this is Germany: if you want to consume then you have to obey some rules. There need to be rules. Germans love their rules.
Back to the shopping trip: The biggest department store in Germany is called Karstadt. Think Sears blended with Macy’s. They usually occupy a big chunk of the inner city. My wife googles
karstadt bremen oeffnungszeiten
Which should do the trick: karstadt is a very very rare name, only being used for the store. Bremen happens to be the city that the store is in. And oeffnungszeiten is german for “shop hours”. The results are complete spam. 100%.
Not one page in the right direction.
Karstadt has a website. But they seem to prefer to pay google money to be listed in the search results. Not a single result is from their own site.
The only question that remaings: Who is more broken, ‘google.de’ or ‘Karstadt’ .
Probably both.
google.de is as messed up as Apple Germany. They always have been a total pain to deal with.
I think they manage to tell their US motherships that it’s Germany’s fault that they have no success. Easier than actually getting something done here.
What might be the next google at the ‘big daddy data center’ does show the same amount of spam and junk.
Different junk, but the actual website of Germany’s biggest department store is equally missing.
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.
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.
If you buy a brand new windows machine then there are ten steps to keep it safe. Well, as brand new as those tips appear to be, even if you do so, you can get your Windows PC infected simply by visiting a website.
one of the many articles disscussing the matter
If you are so unlucky and use a Windows PC then you could have been infected by clicking on that lick. Of course the link above is legit. But do you trust me? How many links do you click on?
I have written this again and again: I use no firewall, I use no virus protection, I am in the internet 16 hours a day and leave my computer on 24/7. I jump on every wifi that I can find if I need to. I visit all sorts of websites. Really everything. My cookie list reads really disgusting, that’s for sure. Various reasons, not really what you think. Point being that I behave extremely ‘dangerous’ and never had a single problem. No spyware, no virus, nothing. My computer runs what I want. No a single bit more. Always have been.
I am not particularly lucky nor smart. It’s just that I don’t run Windows.
It’s one of these things that make you shake your head if you look at it in clear daylight: You can even buy ‘virus protection software’ for OS X. People are so used to think that Computers need some extra protection that they miss the point that the whole switch will get you out of the mess that grew around Microsoft Windows.
The other day somebody told me that it was funny to watch me becoming such a Mac zealot. I think it’s more a passion for the alternative, that is less fucked up. Apple sucks in many ways: I am writing this, with a Microsoft mouse attached to my PowerBook6,7 since the trackpad goes stale till the next reboot. I have open bugs with their ‘pro’ division, and they didn’t come up with a solution. At all. But getting a new computer and having to go through ten steps to make it somewhat secure? Clearly I have an easier life. Imagine you buy a car and then have to go and get brakes and seat belts and a lock for it from somewhere else.
With real ones it does not even matter if they are true or not.
I could ramble how products are mere substitutes for game. How shopping might be like hunting.
What the current Pirate Bay looks like. More than 800K registered users. One rack that makes the RIAA and MPAA cringe.
