In September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.
Many people would want to believe that this would be Iraq. If somebody would ask to name the country,
he would not say it would be Iraq, since there is no link between 9/11 and Iraq. None.
But there is still some hard core supporters the the administration does not want to confuse. At some
point there were 70% that believed that Iraq was behind 9/11. By now it’s probably less.
So which country would he mean then? Maybe Afghanistan where the Taliban ruled in 2001. Those idiots where stupid enough to let Osama Bin Laden into the country after he got kicked out of Sudan.
Interestingly enough this is still not the right answer. Saudi Arabia is where most of the 9/11 hijakers came from. It has never had an election. The King is ruling the country in absolute monarchy. They chop your hand of as punishment. But they deliver oil, lots of it. So democracy will spread elsewhere first according to the Bush plan.
When messing with virtual mail boxes stored in mysql for postfix make sure to append a / for the directory described in the postfix.mailbox.maildir column. If you don’t do that, then you can accept mail at the virtual user / domain but it will not be stored in the maildir format. Which will cause courier-imap to complain.
I had a suse enterprise (yeah right) machine freak out a display all the time. It really really wanted a super high resolution. Even in the boot (F2) text mode. Not sure if that is the default or just a mis install. The remedy is easy once you know what to tweak. In /grub/conf/menu.lst the default line had a screen entry like vga=0×31a
Once I changed that to vga=0×317 the whole thing looks much nice.
I followed the whole google china thing and was not upset that much. I did expect google to behave like this.
But a press release like this in a blog is just too much. That’s calling everybody to drink the cool-aid. Some people will do.
I will not. Google is a big and greedy corporation. They make billions right now. They could have afforded the high route, and they choose deliberate not too. Instead they come up with a phony press release. All those smart people they hired in the last years will not leave. Their stock options will keep them. But this marks the time when google stopped being cool. I think that google is evil.
Google censors it’s results in China. Lately I have been googling allot for a current project. Installing things on linux machines means that you have to have access to all those how-to’s boards forums. Allot of linux technology exists in China and everywhere in the third world. How about calling the next redhat release not ‘tettnang’ but rather ‘democracy’. Or sprinkle those ‘bad words’ in your source code. Everybody who will filter would cut himself of a significant amount of information. The chinese boom is fueled by technological information available so freely. By merging ‘bad terms’ into the things they need to read you essentially break filtering. No matter how eagerly google will comply: Either you censor and loose lots of information for your business or you give up on the censor stuff and deal with the realities of history. Their choice really.
Right now the chinese have the cake (free information on technology) and eat it too (cencorship)
The headline reads that there will be a 5th TV network. “That’s odd” me thought, after all wasn’t TV mass media. Wasn’t mass media the part of our surroundings that would give up attention space to the onlsaught to personal communication?
Reading into this release it turns out that UPN and “The WB” will be merged into a new TV channel. So yes, there is one less. It all makes sense. Funny how they spin the story though.
So many billions lately. In the Wall Street Journal from this weekend you can read page 16 an interesting story about Steve Jobs. No, not about the iPod or how brilliant he is.
In March his 10 Million Apple shares vest. That would be 800 Million by today’s price.
What’s there not to like?
Well, according to the WSJ, Steve sold shares in 2003. Lot’s of them. When the stock price was on it’s lowest point in five years. He lost 2.5 Billion by doing that.
The last one I had never heard of. The “Advanced Access Content System” is a brainchild of everybody who is involved in either one of the upcoming HD disk systems.
DVD came with DSS copy protection. Since 1999 it has been hacked. DVD was a success for everybody involved. Despite the fact that it’s copy protection wasn’t working.
The job of the AACS is to make sure that this will not happen again. The digital connector for both Blue-Ray and HD-DVD are HDMI which is more or less DVI with added copy protrection via HDCP. Yes: 4 letter acronyms spell TRBL.
Since there are no actual devices yet to hack the xxxx institutions still live in the the phantasy world that their content will be save and their maginot-like system will work this time. For the first time.
But then there is the ‘analog hole’. They feel they need to close that one real fast.
According to this press article the solution will be that all players will down sample their analog output to 960×540. That’s a quarter of the original 1920×1080 resolution. Many existing HD displays don’t have digitally-kosher-drm-compliant HDMI inputs yet. That’s what you get for being an early adopter: your image will be downsized and then upconverted in the display again. Yes this probably much like a normal DVD at that point. But since you are an early adopter you gonna buy a HD DVD AND Blu-Ray player anyway. Right? Hey, come back here. Early adopter: your friends in the industry need you now more than ever …
The real tragedy is, that this crippling will not cure the issue. There will be hacks for HDCP. And pirated content never cares about quality in the first place. People will continue to ‘get’ a pirated movie. Maybe those four letter institutions should have a look at their enemies first before they punish the people that pay their bills (again). Pirated content exists because it is easy to access and/or cheaper. NOT because it features more pixels or samples. Most of the time it does not.
So our friends at the AACS just made the whole thing more complex, added a little bit to the price of the every player and made probably lots of people with non HDCP screens pretty unhappy. For zero gains. Brilliant!
The BBC has an widely discussed article about google out. It does not contain any real news, and it’s tone is missing the point.
But they write that Google’s ad revenue was one point five billion US$ in the quarter ending in September. According to Wikipedia has 5,000 employees. Let’s stick with that number here even though they might have hired a couple hundred more people in the meantime. Probably smart ones.
Those numbers come down to the simple fact that google makes 100,000 US$ in earnings per month and employee. That feels profitable to me.
Their cause is lost though.
The internet is not an aqueduct.
It’s the content that matters.
TCP/IP is so commodizied that it will always be cheap.
Worst case somebody comes up with a hack to mesh wifis together. [kidding]
Afer six years I updated the method software site. It is interesting how times have changed. Back in the day I put allot of efforts into navigation and menus. There was allot of content.
It all is gone. The world is full with plugins. Now I believe that you can sell software easier if you cut to the chase. All that thoughtfull navigation and documenation seemed not to help it seems. I still have to answer emails about details when people want the software.
So in case you happen to have an image integration system from the Autodesk Advanced Media Devision aka Discreet aka Discreet Logic flying around in your backyard: Now you can purchase software much quicker.
Sponsored is the whole update by the nice person that leaves his Wifi open so that T-Mobile can shove it.
Or maybe it’s my local Starbucks itself is providing this: They certainly would make their 30 US$ a month for the DSL
back on extra lattes that they can sell since Wifi is free and not stupid in the store.
You an apply the Broken Windows Theory at spam blogs as well. There was always ample opportunity for spammers in blogs. Now they are in, and they make revenue. So they enhance their spam blogs to stay in the game. Here two splogs out of a current campaign:
Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.
FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.
miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.
When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.
There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.
Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.
When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.
The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.
Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.
I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.
iTunes does a good job in keeping my hard drive full with nice audio and video.
It’s easy and wide spread.
It still had glitches though:
Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts
contains those files. No matter if video or audio.
When you delete a podcast then files are not deleted at times.
I just found some old things that should have gone.
The current playback within iTunes is very lame. There seems to be no
easy way or preference to let quicktime handle these files.
But it’s better than nothing. It’s somewhat tragic that there was not
nothing before Apples move into this market. Many Applications worked
much better with RSS and media enclosures. But they failed to gain enough
momentum.
ok, provokative title. Let’s rephrase: google tolerates spam.
Blogger is owned by google. It runs the biggest blog service on it’s blogspot domain.
It appears to be very simple to create hundrets of thousands of ‘weblogs’ like this:
http://p85.blogspot.com/
Created solely for spam purposes. So called ’splogs’. You set up a robot and there is nothing in the blogger software that stops you from adding all the blogs you like.
This is not new. Google / Blogger / Blogspot knows about it. They did nothing against it in the last years.
It should be relatively easy to make sure that there is a human in front of the computer if a new weblog is created at blogspot.com. Simplecaptchas are very common today.
There are two possible explainations why this did not happen yet:
- blogspot engineering is amazing incapable
or
- there is no real rush to get rid of splogs on googles side.
It might make sense:
You have to forget the “don’t be evil” and “organize the worlds information and make it easily accessible” google dogma’s for a second though. Google knows one thing very very well: how to run a scalable service. They have the lowest cost per stored bit due to their own file system technology. It uses commodity hardware and adds failover management brilliantly. It does cost google not much to host millions of splogs.
But wouldn’t million of false blogs pose a danger to the result-quality of a search engine?
Exactly.
Google knows from which ip address a blog get’s maintained. Nobody else does. They have the actual blog data readily available for further parsing. I doubt that the googlebot comes through the front door to blogspot. The bandwidth alone that you could be saved by crawling blogsport internally should make up for the ‘exception’ that this would mean to the googlebot operations. I don’t know these things. It’s a guess.
Every search engine has to have spam combat tools these days. Google is one of the most useful search engines and in the US they have an ok handle on search engine spam. Isn’t it funny that they don’t use their insider knowledge and acess together with their anti-spam tools to simple turn off splogs on blogspot?
Last October there was somebody that scraped famous blogers sites and reposted that content splogs. That got some attention, and stopped. But splogs did not.
Blogspot hosts lots of splogs. But also lots of legit and very powerful weblogs. Nobody can really afford to ignore the biggest weblog service. Yahoo, Msn and even my little BlogsNow have to crawl blogspot in order to find out what is going on. Google can skip the skip, all others have to deal with it.
There is also a third theory that is the most plausible:
splogs don’t matter to search engines. They have to crawl billions of pages anyway. Who cares about a couple of million spam blogs here and there. That’s probably what it is: The aircraft carrier keeps on going regardless if there are 50% more roaches in the kitchen or not.
It’s a gorgeous clear day here in LA. Sunday. No traffic. Just great. At 3pm work is done and get I a bite to eat.
I dragged my laptop with me. Hoping that I could get some non-internet work done. Of course there is wifi
here. From somebody. How am I supposed to kick the internet addiction if it is everywhere I go?
Just added ten more Terrabytes to the Xsan. When republishing the volume via afp on a OS X 10.4 server box I had to:
sharing -a /path/to/volume
serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp
Things that are not obvious in this:
The path in the sharing command can not end in a slash. But the shell WILL add it if you let it finish it.
The stop / start is needed. sharing -l will show the new volume but clients can not mount it.
Another neat trick that I learned today is that you have to slice an Xraid into 2 LUNs in order to overcome an internal 2 Terrabyte limit of the Storenext *cough* Apple Xsan software. That alone gave us an unexpected 2.7TB boost.
It got implemented alright, although not appropiately: I am not sure about that the frozen car in the middle for instance).
Imagine for a few seconds what Frank Budgen would have done with this spot.
I like that they did a 120 again. Of course by now it’s the trend:
cog, hate, bravia: they all use the new format at least in the time dimension.
Aside-1: Nobody really used the freedom of aspect ratio yet. It always takes years for people to understand and use change.
Aside-2: I hope that they get it and make decent cinema commercials out of these overlong web edits. All of them would work great. Did the Bravia have a cinema media buy?
Then they have ‘viral’ intentions. And that’s usually when things fall down. Sony thought they needed to put things into a zip file for Bravia. Lame. W+K has an IP address and a flash player for the movie. YouTube and google also use this player.
It is a shame that Apple messed up and was unable to put quicktime in this place. Now we have to live with the wrong flat color and weird resizing artefacts. And with the fact that its’ tricky to download.
Google video:
I thought they would not get it all. It gets slowly better. Of course nobody will ever buy any contentfrom them. I think that Apple and Google are in for a surprise: there is no 2 dollar clip market.
Maybe G&A think that if you can make billions with ringtones that you might be able to monetize something a bit more meaningful like clips. I am not an expert on the ringtones thing, but isn’t it that it’s somewhat tricky to get free ringtones? The default costs money. Clips are different. There is ample free content.
Which is where google video starts to become better. I like that you can copy paste links:
THAT is something that W+K should have done for their “Viral”.
It’s easy and it respects the laws and dynamics of the internet.
Maybe next time. Or in five years. Ideas take time.
update2:
There is also an iTunes video cast Version with a 3 part “making of”. Maybe that campaign has more depth than was initially visible from that one link I found everywhere.
update3: it work’s
digg, del.icio.us the whole nine yards. I am sure boingboing will follow. They are late these days.
He paid 0.6 Billion for the site. Then he started altering content secretly. At least thats what the article says. If that is true and should continue, then I am very very curious how long it would take for a competitor to come up with a different site.
Yes, there is the ‘power of default’, and how many kids do really care about this kind of cheating from Murdochs side? Interesting question. It will show much of “Web 2.0″ will be left once the big money interests are done with it.
the chain of events;
1. Some service is what people want and becomes huge
2. Somebody arrives in a Learjet and drops billions
variation MySpace:
3. Corpogreed kicks in, and the the very asset that they bought for all that money evaporates
my desired outcome:
4. People show this kind of behaviour the finger. They go somewhere else, and the person
in (2.) bought a really expensive domain name. Like “broadcast.com”
We will see.
The article ends with the mentioning that Murdoch gave Jeremy Philips 1 Billion US$ for future acquisitions. He is 31 and head of News Corp internet strategy or something. Bubble Bubble Bubble.
Firefox 1.5: nothing works better than with the 1.0 I had on my Mac. Nothing I would notice.
But things are less stable.
And suddenly pdf files only wanted to open with the ‘default’ Acrobat reader after a Firefox download.
Normal OS X associations were fine, nothing in the Firefox preference pane, nothing in the about:config
I downloaded the Rc Default Apps system extension and it did not have anything set to Adobe Acrapobat. FINALLY installing a program from 2003 called Misfox did the trick. There I found the connecting in question. Changing it, and then launching firefox again did indeed fixed it. Convoluted, too convoluted, if you ask me.
CES breaks loose in Las Vegas, and a big and involuntarily sigh of relief escapes me:
“Finally some content for the internet”
Video! Great, from Google; Music from the lovely M&M combo via ‘Urage’.
It got kind of boring out here on the net. All those TV episodes
and music files to pay for is what was missing. Now I realize.
And if you have a Windows PC, then you can have not only Microsoft
and anybody in Russia with an IQ above 87 on your machine. No,
also Google can be part of the party on your hard drive now:
With the aptly named GooglePack comes GoogleUpdate which will
provide you update versions of anything that they think might be good
for you.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.