Is the disposable diaper the industrial equivalent of the Intergrated circuit?
Modern nappies can hold two cups of fluid without wetting the wearer. And they’re both thinner and more effective than the original nappies – because doing so made manufacturing, distribution and stocking cheaper.
Myself, I think that they quality and reliability of disposables is astonishing for what they’re expected to do.
“On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore” tells the oft-missed-by-the-geek-historians story of Commodore. The web site has some free chapters, including one describing the creation of the Commodore 64:
If you’ve ever wondered why the C64 has the same case as the VIC-20, it’s because we didn’t have any time to tool anything up. We just put it in a VIC-20 case and spray painted it. Everything about the Commodore 64 is the way it is because of just an unbelievably tight time constraint on the product.
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.
There’s a Popular Science article on scientific studies that have confirmed the obvious, including:
But, on the flipside, they’ve disproved some widely held beliefs too. Such as kids liking Santa.
Visit the website of the guy who needs 2M hits in order to win himself a menage a trois.
A TV salesman is advocating the government buys a set top boxes for each analogue TV in Australia. He says it’s the best way to save the government money, because it’s costing AUD$50m/year to dual broadcast. And in financial terms, he’s right. Perhaps banning the sale of analogue sets might also hurry things along a little. $150m is his estimate for the government to bail itself out of dual-broadcasting.
But digital signals bite arse; SDTV has the same resolution as analogue, with the upside of no ghosting and the downsides of a loss of colour-depth plus dropouts affecting the audio and video streams. If you’re not getting ghosting on your current analogue signal (or it’s not annoying you), SDTV is a step down. HDTV is a massive improvement in raw data resolution, but no TVs are capable of displaying a raw 1920 x 1080 (the 1280 x 720 signal is academic, because it isn’t broadcast in Australia; and the signal is 1080i, there isn’t enough bandwidth allocated for 1080p) picture.
I don’t remember the step from Black and White TV to colour, but I know that colour sets were happily picking up the B&W signal before the changeover, and B&W sets kept working after the changeover. That would be bi-directional compatability. Same gig with FM radio when it went stereo – bi-directional compatability, because the stereo signal was on a seperate carrier encoded as the difference to the mono signal – cunning. Digital and analogue are co-existing quite happily at the moment, because the signals are being duplicated and transmitted (has anyone noticed the digital signal lags the analogue signal by about a second?), and apparently it costs a pretty penny to keep the dual broadcast going – probably in equipment maintenance costs (I don’t think the electricity is costing $1m / week).
So what do you actually get for your dollars in converting? If you step up to HDTV (no native resolution sets, remember) you get native widescreen capability rather than letterboxing, plus 5.1 sound rather than poxy stereo. Because of the compression, for a given set of bandwidth, you can have more video streams (approximately four SD can fit in the bandwidth of a single HD broadcast). Bitrates and compression can both be played with to improve the signal’s reliability and quality. And channels don’t bump into each other like they do in the analogue world (which is why the stations are on such widely seperated bands). But look at pay TV – like Bruce said, 57 channels and nothing on. Are you fixated by what’s currently available on broadcast TV? Will more channels increase the amount of TV you want to watch?
What was the point in this whole process anyway? What’s wrong with the PAL signal, and why did we rush in and select digital TV formats? Why didn’t the Australian government emulate the Irish government and just sit on it’s hands for a decade, waiting to see what happened in the US, Japan, Europe and China, and then evaluate the technical aspects of the winning systems? Why encourage the public to run around spending $10,000 a TV on technologies that are prone to disappointing failure (pixel death)? Any why are we shipping so much cash offshore to pay for the damn things?
We should have delayed going down the Digital TV road until it became attractive.
Ah, so I’m not the only one: SMH’s Alexa Moses reaches for the Undo button in real life.
Sometimes I’ll be wandering around the house looking for something, wishing there was a real life grep.
Not to mention seeing something up-close and thinking to myself “Wow, this image (eg from my eyeballs) is really high-resolution!”
You may not have heard of Neil Raine… sadly neither did I until today. He died on Wednesday in a hang-gliding accident in Spain. His role in the geek world? He was a contributor to RISCOS, the operating system of the Acorn Archimedes range, the first consumer computer to use a RISC processor, way back in the late 80s.
He also contributed a number of games that BBC users might recall, including Hopper, Planetoid and one of my personal favourites, Magic Mushrooms, a platform game that allowed you to design your own levels.
Neil may not have been rich or famous, but geeks like him make an untold contribution to the world of computing. Here’s to you, Neil.
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?
Richard Neville says his spoof johnhowardpm.org web site has been shut down on the orders of the government, with Melbourne IT and Yahoo Hosting cowering to the demand.
Unfortunately it’s not in the Google or archive.org caches, but you can see it in a PDF. But on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like there was justification for shutting it down.
Update Monday 7am. Peter has found a comment from a John Dalton on Margo Kingston’s site showing a way of viewing the site — it’s only Melbourne IT that cowered; Yahoo still has it up, but you can’t see it without doing hacky things to your DNS. John suggested changing your proxies, which makes every other site not work. A better way is editing your Hosts file. On Windows, this is in somewhere like c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add a line:
216.39.58.74 www.johnhowardpm.org
And you’re set.
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash becomes real: SecondLife provides a virtual world, “land” you can lease, an economy, and tools to build things.
Not to mention the Origami/Ultra mobile computer thingy sounds like the perfect platform for the Primer in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Get thee to a bookshop, philistine.
I’ve discovered that though Way Of The Rodent started publishing Jeff Minter’s auto-biographical history of Llamasoft, there’s actually more on the Llamasoft web site.
I’d thought I was good at Space Invaders until I met Chico. He was so good at Space Invaders that he could play it forever – it was no longer a challenge to him at all. So if he played the game at all he’d set himself some task that us mere mortals simply could not even begin to comprehend. Shooting all the Invaders was too simple. He’d time his shots so precisely that he could shoot individual Invaders out of the flock to eventually form his initials from the remaining attackers.