Andreas Wacker

It’s sysadmin day

what they could do to remind you of that

if they are any good.

california consumes allot of power

assuming a population of 36 Million inhabitants it comes down to 1253 Watts for every person right now.

Mircrosoft and Nortel want to do things together

Billion dollar companies flow and merge, yet, the winner is already the tiny little Asterisk. I never used it, but I can imagine how it runs circles around those dinosaurs. If you get your phones hooked up the Microsoft-Nortel way you can easily pay a thousand times more for less features compared to Asterisk. What get’s me excited about Asterisk is, that, since it is open source, you can add your own features if you would care to do so.
Having coded interfaces for Nortel systems I can not wait for them to go out of business. It’s beyond horrible.

somebody thinks

Well, since it does not cost that much for Apple to try this, I doubt that it is a failure.

The press however will make a big ‘bruhar’ around this. They just love those simple “take one big thing, and add another big thing” stories. They always look like these sure winners. Like the extension of the cinematic experience by the sense of smell.

Or the combination of cellphone and gaming console

youTube numbers

Personalized consumer technolgy, reflected in their names: iPod, mySpace and YouTube. Nintendo’s decission to rename their upcoming “revolution console” into “Wii” might not be so ridicolous after all.

the ninth ward

A short documentary directed by Matt Wisdom (the only person I know in New Orleans)

Rocketboom ’sans congdon’. The first show. 24 hours late.
Let’s see what develops. Interesting how the new host looks similarishly like the old one. The proof will be in the pudding of the next episodes. Amanda better gets some episodes on their own going real soon. That way we will be able to tell wether it was Andrew or her that made Rocketboom worth watching in the last 18 months.

Rocketbooms audience has spiked recently. Dirty laundry is great PR. Nothing better than a little scandal.

“In the future everybody can be Hugh Hefner for fifteen minutes”

hundred US$ get you more than 2000 bookmarks in a few days.

Interesting. Too bad that these kind of stunts only work for the first time. Ask those five hundred “one million dollar home page” clones that poped up and dissapeared.

HD-DVD launched. Bluray launched.
People don’t care. Of course there are reviews in the more tech geek media.
But apart from that there is not much movement.

As expected people don’t care.
There was a format war before this one. Audio CDs with their 44,100 Hz 16 bit sampling rate were not state of the art as far as technical ability around the turn of the century. So Philips and Sony came up with the Super Audio CD that quickly went into a format war with the similarly feature yet incompatible DVD Audio.

That was 1999. There are probably around 631 audio geeks who can get really excited about these formats and their differences. The rest of us is happy with compressed mp3s that indeed can sound horrible.

The current HD DVD format flavors do present a bigger quality jump than the CD / next gen format had to show. Most peoples eyes are better educated than their ears.
In order to watch next gen material there is a very considerable investment needed. You need a HDMI capable screen with enough resolution and the right image processing ingredients. And an expensive player.

Roughly between 3000 and 6000 US$ worth of equipement.
I remember that we paid 450 US$ for our DVD player three months after it came to market. There were 18 titles available, but the quality jump from VHS was stunning. VHS was considerably bad compared to live TV. DVD was noticable better. And there was decent sound too. And the things needed no rewind. And there were multiple audio tracks with commentary and an OK navigation system. And the disks seem to last longer than tape. And they used up less space.
Sure in the beginning many Studios were betting on the other format. Divx, not to be confused with Divx , was an attempt to get people used to the fact that they can not own anything that Hollywood creates. A failed attempt, but not the last one.

HD-DVD vs. Bluray
The score seems to be zero zero.

Chris Anderson writes about the end of the hit era
His Book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” that this article is adapted from will be available 7/11.

http://www.google.com/ncr

is the URL you want to use in order to teach google NOT to show you the localized Version that they throw at you based on your IP. I had removed all my google cookies and was faced with the devastating fact that I rank at #15 or so for my own name on the german gogole version.

Just got a quote. As a pdf. Which is a great start. Everybody should send quotes as PDFs, not as word documents. That one should be pretty obvious, but sadly it is not. I tell people by now that I will not be able to read their Microsoft Word Documents. They often don’t even know what they have sent. They think that Word Documents are the only way to store text on a computer.

The second issue with attachments is much easier to fix since it happens on a logical level: Name the document so that it makes sense on the hard drive of the receiving end! Don’t send me something called ‘quote.pdf’. Or ‘wacker.pdf’. That might be interesting for you, but not where the document will be used and found: On my drive.
Do yourself a favor and call it: “source.function.date.dpf”. “Function” being “quote” or “invoice” or “memo”. Source is you, so that I know where this came from. And then date. Date I would always express as year-month-day. With leading zero on month and day. This will be recognises as the same date on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific and it sorts files nicely by, gasp, date in any text listing.

But PDF instead of Microsoft Word is really the most step forward into attachment sanity.

they think can take a stroll on the dark side

Idiots. How often can you sell your virginity? Now Apple has marched into the ‘phone home’ camp. And for what benefit? Idiots.

Companies like AT&T and others that move the bits around on parts of the internet and to clients want more money. They realize that companies like Google or Apple/iTunes make a bug or two on the internet. Now they want in on that action. Since it runs on their wires they think they have a valid angle. Which is highly ridiculous. They get paid what they asked for. Providing internet bandwidth was good business. But now they want to be able to charge more for those ‘precious bits’. Like Apple iTunes. Apple could afford it. The download cost is only a small fraction of the 99 cents they get per song. Same with google ads. However, the precedence is ugly. And, worst of all: Nobody stopped big and old and stupid companies like AT&T to provide services like search or music downloads. Except that they are old and stupid companies. Being big didn’t help either. The outrageous aspect is that AT&T feel that they have a birthright on the value inside of the bits they transfer. That is ridiculous. I don’t think that this would need regulation and legislation. Ideally people would understand what’s going on and tell the big telco’s that they don’t get it. If they try to extort google and Co then those companies should expose this. After all: Think of the internet, and think either google or AT&T has to go away. If you think that we would need AT&T to push a couple of bits around then you have been fooled by their brainwash. There are lots of providers and ample net capacity. The real value is in search. And that drives those old telcos crazy.

this kind of moron gets elected

freaking clueless. OK. So be it. But then they start to meddle with the very things they have no freaking clue about. That is plain dangerous. I guess they might understand as little about the internet than they do about the other things they pass legislation on. Bunch of jokers. Since the people are asleep they get to decide what happens next. Good luck!