Category Archives: Business

Outages and response times

Cam ponders web hosting SLAs and wonders what’s reasonable. For his hosting, they guarantee 99.99% uptime, which works out to 52 minutes per year. (His outage was about 9 hours, or about ten years’ worth).

Bad stuff happens. We all know that. Even if it’s the most reliable setup ever. But there’s some major factors in determining what’s acceptable:

Frequency — If it’s happening too regularly, then there’s a reliability problem. They need better hardware, better software, whatever it is, needs to be fixed. Cam reckons it’s the second time in a few months.

Response — Obviously, you want a quick response, and a quick (and reliable) solution. There’s also sorts of monitoring tools out there these days. Typically anything like a full outage should be known about within minutes. A reputable web host will have substitute hardware ready to switch-on and go just as soon as that nice recent backup is restored.

Communications — Any third party like this has to keep the customer informed. There’s no excuse for not doing so. SMS alarms, emails, phone calls, whatever. (I wrote about alarms recently for my work blog.)

BTW, Cam’s also having troubles with his iPod… or more accurately, Apple’s 90 day warranty on replacement units.

I reckon he’s jinxed, myself.

Piracy Is Good?

Mark Pesce delivered a presentation, “Piracy Is Good?“, on May 6th, 2005 at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. In it, he asserted that bittorrents exhibit demand-driven bandwidth supply, and are thus a better utilization of bandwidth than terrestial television broadcasting. Which is an apples and oranges comparison. But that’s where the title came from.

He then goes on to note that viewers are shunning broadcast television in preference for web-acquired content. He attributes this to the advertising, as I have done in the past. He asserts that Watermarks – or bugs – in visual entertainment are going to become more ubiquitous, inserted as advertising at production time (so, instead of the Channel9 logo in the righthand bottom corner, you’ll see… Nike). I predict someone will become annoyed enough to invent a watermark remover. Oh look, they already have.

So Mark Pesce is wrong. The advertising is going to have to be more subtle and harder to remove. But initially it’s going to be less subtle – animated, say – to annoy the simple-minded watermark removal programs.

Technology will march on, and auto-adapting watermark removers will be developed, and then you’re looking at product placement. I wonder how that will work with sci-fi programs? “Worf, take us to warp factor nine. We have to get to Chase Manhatten Bank to do a funds transfer; I prefer their friendly service and forward-looking technology.” Perhaps we’re looking at the death of sci fi? And historical dramas? And documentaries aren’t looking too hot either. Neighbours should be fine. Perhaps merchandising will be how shows make their production budget.

An observer has noted that the order of release of content is becoming arranged by profitability – so you’ll see more TV shows released on DVD, then broadcast when sales drop off. The world’s gone all topsy-turvy.

Economics of Digital Cameras

I was reading a backissue of Money magazine where Paul Clitheroe made a remarkably insightful analysis of film vs digital cameras (Money, June 2005, pg 20 am I better off With a digital or film camera?).

One thing he noted is that acquiring a digital camera turns you into a shutterbug; I would suggest spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a camera has that effect, but the zero-cost of each individual photo certainly does help. He notes that in bangs-per-buck, film beats digital – and he’s right. Not only are digital cameras more expensive to acquire for the features you get, but (at the time of the article) processing costs were higher too. Couple that with the poorer image resolution you get from digital images (super high-end digital cameras are only now approaching the image resolution of $20 compact cameras) and you would have to be nuts to go digital.

Unless you don’t actually process your images. As a general rule, I don’t. In the last eleven months I’ve taken… let’s see… 10,327 images (I was wondering what would happen to the camera when it rolled over 10K images, because the manual hints that you might have to re-format your media; turns out that’s not the case). Recently Cathy and I took advantage of a Harvey Norman promotion and trebbled the number of images we’d printed, to a total of 200. We might have spent $50 on printing all up. That would have bough 240 frames of analogue film in processing costs, but we only printed out the winners. If the full 10K images had been processed we may have spent $2000 on processing. That’s a bunch of money. I suspect I would have husbanded my shots more if I’d spent the same amount of money on a film camera. In fact, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would have spent that much money on a film camera. Something about perceived value differences. Anyways, the camera has been fun, and I think given the thrashing it’s been getting, I’ve been getting value for money from it. Which I’m a little surprised by, because it was a lot of money.

For me, the big advantage of digital is that I can learn to be a better photographer at no marginal cost. And Paul says that at National Geographic, photographers average 350 rolls of film (almost 12600 frames) per story, with an average of 10 published. So, if I was a professional grade photographer using professional equipment, one in twenty of the photos I’ve printed would be magazine quality.

Matrix displays bite arse

Sure, CRT displays are bulky, consume piles of power and are heavy. But they can change resolution without a loss of … resolution.

See, High Definition TV runs at 1920 x 1080 – which, incidentally, a vanishingly small number of TV sets run at (ignore advertising about sets being HD-ready – all it means is the TV will understand a HD signal and happily convert it down to it’s native resolution). But converting a raster image from it’s native resolution down involves a loss of information; worse yet, if that resolution isn’t an integer multiple of source resolution, the downconversion algorithm has to make some judgement calls about which new pixel to push the old pixel’s information – so you can have some odd looking images, like horizonal or diagonal lines going… funny. Colour transitions can become forced too with a visible loss of colour depth. Converting up can also be a little strange, with some pixels odd colours (making the image look blurry) or straight lines becoming jagged. Given that signals might also appear in 704 × 480 (Standard Defintion) or 1280 × 720 (a high quality high definition signal not broadcast in Oztralia), aspect ratios on the pixels involved mean you need a native resolution not likely to be obtained for many years to get clean conversion between the resolutions.

CRTs don’t give a rat’s arse about conversion algorithms, and happily change the number of lines they throw on the screen in response to the number they’re given. The only difficulty you might encounter is the shadow mask or aperture grille.

LCD and Plasma display screens – generally TV monitors, and LCD projectors (and for that matter, any other matrix-based projection technology) have a failure mode that analogue CRT displays don’t exhibit:

Dead pixels.

Stuck on or stuck off, dead pixels are a one way street. You don’t see that kind of failure in CRTs. And I’m not aware of any TV manufacturers who guarantee their product against this particularly annoying failure. No-one is told about it at purchase time, but I’m predicting in three to five years time there’s going to be an uproar about it.

Anyone bought a new matrix TV lately? Happy about it?

Friday quickies

What if Microsoft was marketing the iPod? (Article about the origins of the video here.)

In case you’ve been living in a virtual cave, VMWare’s basic VMServer product is now free.

Google is beta trialling GMail from your own domain, primarily aimed at organisations to start with. (via Patrick)

Found an old quote of mine:
To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things – essentials like “Help!” or “Hello” – I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook. (Quoted here, originally posted here.)

CityLink eTags to be used for a reverse-toll

There’s a proposal to have Melbournians use their CityLink eTags for a reverse-toll on public transport by a economist-type guy from Melbourne Uni. I can just see homeless guys making a living by taking sackfuls of eTags around the city on trams while their owners are at work, to make the day’s commute in to work and back again net-free.

It’s an attempt to address the free rider problem of vehicular road use; he’s also proposed that the charging should be demand driven – so road tolls are higher in peak hour, and might be free in the middle of the night. But we have a crude version of this proposed roaduse charge already – it’s called fuel excise. Cars idling in traffic jams keep burning petrol, and thus their owners paying tax, as an added bonus, SUVs/4WDs burn a whole lot more of it. If you want to hike the charges up, I’m all in favour of, say, tripling the excise on fuel. That should make public transport more attractive – especially as there won’t be homeless guys with sacks!

A buncha quick stuff

EFF highlights an Australian House Standing Committee report on the US DMCA, and whether or not it should be adopted wholesale by Australia under the Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile there’s an open letter to the OFLC about the banning in Australia of the grafitti video game Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. (Mind you, Metacritic only gives it a 73/100 on XBox; 70 on PS2).

OPML 2.0 is out. Let’s hope it doesn’t break OPML 1 like RSS 2 broke RSS 0.9?

The Age on the retro games boom.

Pah, this sucks. After 64 years in Swanston Street, the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne has moved out to the boondocks of LaTrobe Street near Queen Street.

Copyright, shmopyright

Lots of information on Australian copyright law, sorted into handy fact sheets.