calculator watch

history politics technology

According to wikipedia it was the first World War that brought the wrist watch into wide use. Only sixty years later people tought that it would be a brilliant idea to have a calculator in your wrist watch. As brilliant as having a PDA or a camera in your cell phone I suppose.

Before the were pocket calculators there were slide rules. I did like them. Thinking about it, I should get one. Or even better: create one with megabytes, megabit etc scales. Having the common technologies like USB2 etc marked. OK, neat, but obsolete in about a year. Still, it would be fun to wip out a slide scale in a meeting when asked how long xyz would take. Actually I am pretty convinced now that I want a slide scale. Good thing my dad tought me how to use one.

In 1962 the DoD came up with a slide scale to compute the impact of nuclear bombs. Somehow I could see Kennedy operating one of these after a brief introduction. Now imagine your job would be to teach George W. Bush to operate and use this device.
The scary part about this is, that both people have the power to push the same button. People then were fast to say that Mr B. had so many great advisors. Those that gave him that darn good intelligence.

apple

Apple art

it’s the little things that matter. Apple recipe is so simple: Just make things better. As much as you can. And don’t stop there. Jobs could say for years “Our products look from the back better than the other guys from the front”. Yet nobody really started to compete with Apple in the design league. Sony was good in the 80s and early ninetees. Right now there isn’t much industrial design that would be worth mentioning. Despite the fact that Apple makes a killing, vastly based on design. Go figure.

tape deck

history media

When I was a teenager I worked during the school vacations in order to afford a stereo system. One that was loud and sounded decent. Those came in modules back in the day. It took me a couple of years to make the system complete. I started with an amplifier, speakers and a tape deck.

Basically I wanted to steal music. But those terms were not around back in the day. All I knew was that Albums would cost 20 DM when a pack of Cigarettes ‘only’ cost 3. Both we could not afford. So we rolled our own and taped records. I borrowed my parents record player and my friends albums to get to the music that I liked. That was more than twenty five years ago, and the record industry obviously survived me stealing their music. But they could have noticed a trend a long time ago. They decided not to. They thought their business is to sell physical artifacts that happen to make sounds in the right equipment. First Vinyl then Compact Disc and finally Super CD / Audio DVD. It seems pretty obvious that the record industry got stuck on some model that became irrelevant.

Napster came along at the same time those super high tech next generation audio formats were introduced. Surprisingly people cared about music not about the latest amount of quality that those industry suggestions had to offer.

misc links

misc

stupid title yet worth revisting.

scrable score record

youtube and copyright

google internet media

the slate sheds some interesting light on Copyright and why youTube might be in less trouble than everybody claimed.

fxguide podcast

confessions of a pixel pusher media technology

The nice people at fxguide were brave enough to record my incoherent ramblings and put them up as a podcast. Luckily Angus Wall and Jeff Heuser were in the same podcast. They added sense and reason and made it so worth listening to.

run – obama – run

politics

The Republicans assured that the US had the worst possible start into the century. Unfortunately people like Kerry and Kennedy are not exactly inspiring. But now Barack Obama considers to run . Perfect. I only heard him speak once. But he can talk. The next thing I could wish for is a campaign that would cut through all that mess. If only 5% of the people wake up and become active for what they care for that would already be enough to get some leadership back in the Whitehouse.

“stay the course”

politics

Bush claiming he never has ‘been stay the course’

The only question is why such a person was able run the largest power on this planet for eight years.

Seriously.

men in power

politics


"What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women - I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all - we all envy him!"

Vladimir Puttin about the President of Israel. According to the BBC

That men can talk pretty outragous bulshit is not really news. What does bother me is the attitude of Putin (According Ze Frank ‘Putin’ is the approiate word for a baby fart) and alikes that run around and try to represent moral values. While they actually are just as bad as your common average guy.

the cost to run things

confessions of a pixel pusher economy technology

Surprisingly little attention goes into the fact that most computer installation run 24/7 and use power that needs to be bought. Electricity bills are often perceived like taxes or any other act of god: An expense needed in order to do business. As long the competition get’s hit as well, what’s there to think about?

Well.

The ‘digital negative’ of the movie we just finished was 140 Terrabytes. That got me thinking: what if we would have tried to keep it all online. The installation of those disks would have used 8,750 Watts. Double that for cooling and you would have spent 16,863 US dollar to keep all those spindles spinning for a year. (at 11 cents a KW/h).

That does matter in my book. Since I can never remember anything I thought I would try to come up with a approximation of cost per 1000 Watts. It looks as if realities don’t get bent too much when assuming 80 US$ per 1KW per month, or 1000 US$ per year. Double that if you have to cool the room the machines live in. Which is always the case. The variables here are the efficiency on the cooling and the actual price not being 11cents. Actuall and nominal Wattage might also differ. But close numbers are better than no numbers, or numbers that are so complex to calculate that they never be taken into account.