17 years ago Germany got reunited. Yet, CNN did not get around to reflect this change on the maps they use for their weather. Actually, that map was acurate before 1990. What kind of computers that can deal with map images did people have back then? I would guess you would have actually real trouble to find a file from back then.
No wonder some people have strange ideas about Europe:
Sony supports Divx on their PS3
When DVD came out there was a format war as well. Between what we know as DVD and something also called Divx. Not related to the format that Sony now supports. Or maybe just related in that they represent the opposite corners of the media/business spectrum: The old Divx was a system that would only play discs after they had been enabled via the phone (it’s that old). You would buy cheaper movies (around 5-8 US) and could watch them for 48 hours after the purchase. After that you would need to pay if you like to watch them again. Studois like Dreamworks held out of for years betting on this format. It folded. But it was a reality. Hard to believe these days.
According to Sony’s CEO the format war between HD-DVD and Bluray got into a stalemate. Great thing for a format to go with this concept into the shopping season. Some big shopping mall sold HD-DVD players for 100 US$. If there would be HD-DVD and Bluray players for a 100$ each then the format war would be over. Peaceful coexistense. Not the margins that the hardware vendors had hoped for. But the luckier ones of them, if not most, make flat screen panels anyway. Those run well above one thousand dollars. And each HD-DVD and bluray playe would be an argument for a 1920×1080 panel. If those companies would be able to explain this to their clients.
Having two players may sound annoying, but most people have heaps of devices around their TVs anyway: Game consoles, Set Top Boxes, Tivo & Co, DVD players, VHS deck, another two devices might not matter. Of course all this crap looks pretty hideous once piled up. And then there is the remote control debacle. And connecting the stuff is an interesting challenge.
Americans spend more than a billion hours a day in front of their entertainment centers. And -boy- do they spend money on hard- and software. Yet, the average ‘media temple’ they pay service to each day is not much more than pile of crap.
So what about PS3 and the new-Divx? Hm. I have no idea. All I know is that the PS2 will outsell the PS3 this Christmas again, and I doubt that will change next year.
Since a while I am using Callwave. And I must say that I am very very happy with it. It’s really great to get your voicemails transcribed as an email. I am amazed how far voice to text technology has gotten so far. It’s sometimes humorous. But more importantly, it’s usually possible to ‘get’ the general direction of the voice mail. I know who called, what it was about, and the phone numbers people leave have been without any errors so far. Which is really really helpful.
I also like to have one list of incoming messages. It makes staying on top of things much easier and less stressful. Which is allowing me to spend time with actually doing things instead of reacting to it and managing my message stack and todo lists.
Somebody should sponsor 1 z-year. It’s probably less than car makers spend on crafts services of their commercial shoots in any given week.
No joke.
Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.
All good ideas are simple. Like this one. You create a page or a site. Right there. Just write some text, maybe or maybe not add formating. And that’s that. Very nicely done. Now go and play with Jottit.
I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.
Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.
A nice list of visualsation approaches. Starts boring with known contenders but then had some nice and interesting and new to me links.
Naomi Wolf writes about Porn and the influence it has on people’s view of sexuality. While I think that some of her conclusions are a bit simplifying her essays is truly an exception. Compared to the booming multi billion dollar porn industry there is virtually no public discurse about the matter. Many views and discussions get stuck and some moral questions that originate in a world that seized to exist a very long time ago. Arguments that first were heard in the 70s, and that made sense then, can still be heard when the matter gets attention. Which is similar misplaced as if Pfizer would try to use 500 year old alchemists notes to create medication. The world, specificially the world of media consumption, and precisly the ubiquitousness of porn have changed. Changed in matters that are breath taking. Much of the problems in the middle east for instance originate from the clash of the availability of the entire internet with the moral framework from a couple of hundred years ago. Porn, like it or not, is a reality of the media landscape. It grew radically while nobody was looking. It’s high time that we pay attention and figure out how society can exist with it.
The nice people at Brand New School released their New Balance spot “Zip” online. They are a great company to work with. Very creative and still hands down and respectful to the matter. It was a pleasure to work on this job. A truly amazing team! Not sure why they wrote something about me in their copy for the spot: Everybody else deserves the praise that I got there.
youTube player on iPhone
This was the 12th icon, missing so far.
While on wifi through connect via local internet connection the iPhone might be a cute little viewer. Much like the Sony PSP was back in the day: 480 x 272 is the resolution on Sony’s device, while it is 480 x 320 on the iPhone. Somewhat tragic, that the actual hardware path (internet->wifi->device) was already available on the PSP. Two year head start. Wasted. Well, they sold 10 million PSPs in the US.
The real innovation would have been GPS. I think that devices should be fucking aware where they are. I would like the next MacBook Pro have EVDO
built in. Including GPS support. I am sure there are ample applications one could think of, once devices are location aware. It takes only 2 floats to store this precisly. Without any compression applied it would take a mere 10GB to store my location since I was born. One record for each second that I was alive.
From what I read (cursory) the tchech artist Roman Tyc replaced the usual live landscape images to been at this time of day with this recording. This seems to be a rare case that the local german paper reported such mixed / pseudo news before BlogsNow. Usually it’s the other round.
Roman Tyc did replace some traffic signs in April in Praque
I don’t agee with all its points. But it has been a while since there was a ‘Barry says’ like piece.
via strangemaps via BlogsNow (of course)
Some days I like the internet. Does it not only have sites for strange maps but also for the history of the button
and -I am sure- all sorts of other ones.
It’s been 50 years since Mao said “Let 100 flowers blossom”.
Of course there are all sorts of flowers.
Somehow there is this long history of really small screens. And most of them were failures. OK, Sony became known by shipping a load of portable TVs via one of the first 747s to NYC. But apart from that, the watchman wasn’t really that sucessful. Neither was the iPod with video capabilities. There are actually much better devices in terms of screen size or price. But none of them really caught on. I think the problem is, that there is no real content and need for such a device. It’s technical feasibility seems to lure people into thinking otherwise. But how often do you find yourself wishing to watch a couple of quare inch screen? When? As much as the original walkman concept of having a mobile music source with headphones was a hit the mobile visual pendant is a miss. It’s not flying. And I honestly doubt that the iPhone will change that. Nothing will. How many of your chat sessions are video chats? Exactly. Yet, the picture-phone had the same feasibility driven shadow life for a while. Lateral progress I would call these things: Something is a hit. And then people just extend the concept to the side. Cinemas add first sound and then color. Both times it’s been well perceived. Smelling is another sense! Just that it did not work. Walkman -> Watchman. Same deal. Ears are happy with a walkman on, let’s feed the eyes now. It’s probably easy to pitch. Stupid board member can ’see’ this simple lateral extensions. As Homer Simpson said “They have the internet on computers now”
morphing had been around for a while.
All of these images as well. Still needed youTube to get this out:
I am not a fan of this implementation. The idea itself is great. A bit more understand of art history would have been helpful. The track I can mute, the jumps in time and obvious omissions are harder to fade out. Maybe this time the rip-off in a commercial (bank, insurance, dove soap?) will be better than the you-tube-inspiration?
Sometimes there is a refreshing new view in acts of crime. Since the usual rules don’t apply, people get to be innovative. Or at least a bit out of the ordinary.
I hope that the people at Autonet Mobile were so smart to just put an EVDO card into a box and share it with via wifi. If they do it as simple as that, then they could be up to something. If it works as simple as it could in this design, and if they do a halfway decent job in marketing etc then they could be huge: They don’t care about content. No expensive birds. Just a quick little hardware hack. Sprint and Verizon will try to get their own boxes out, once they get it. Why they didn’t offer this in the first place? Well, croporate stupidity and ignorance has no limits I guess.
If you ever should grow tired of movies as a concept then this might bring you back within a couple of minutes:
I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.
images of fast food: ads vs.reality
I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.
Want fries with that?
So I kicked BlogsNow back into existence. There will be a twist to it in a couple of weeks.
Here the things I found so far:
writing seems to be the thing today:
and this:
McLuhan anybody?
Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.
update 5/17/07:
techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.
couldn’t find a quicktime 
Interestingly enough rocketboom seems still to be sourcing vilodex.
The Lester Bookbinder Reel seems to be a vilodex exclusive right now. While googling around for other works of his I came accross these two videos. One is by him,
the other one: I don’t know.
A friend send me a link to this blog
I like it allot. I like that this is a concept that uses what exists and makes something unprecedented out of it. A digital SLR, a blog, a person with a sense for fashion. Add to that the world around and you have something that is truly inspiring. I like the absence of cynical comment in those pictures. At least that’s how I read them. People are depicted as an inspiration. Not in the Borat kind of way. It’s the other end of the scale actually. Same World. Same everyday people. It made me very happy to learn about this link and project. Now I have to surpress the urge to replace the 10d with a 5d and start twexus-2. Which would be shot on raw, stored on drives and printed on the 24″ wide hp.
Nigel Dick wrote in 2004 about Music Videos. It’s an interesting read. He does write in the present tense. Although it feels very much that he describes the scene of the 80s and 90s.
I don’t watch TV. Don’t have a set. Scott had pointed me to the ‘eyeTV hybrid’ USB adapter from Elgato. Finally I got around to get one for around 150 US$. Recently I also had extended the screen real estate of the MacBook Pro via an Acer AL2216W. Not an amazing monitory, but 1680×1050 for 250 US$ is a great value. So for 400 US$ and change I have now the ability to watch TV. HD or SD, analog or digital.Which is not bad at all. In this configuration NTSC resolution commercials fall on their nose inside of a HD broadcast: I am watching Red Sox vs. Yankees in 720p right now. I will never understand Baseball. But the picture looks great. An alternative would be some icehockey game in 1080i. Which does not fit the screen. And with interlacing that is kind of a problem. I don’t understand how anybody could consider an interlaced format: It was made for Glas Tubes, and glas tubes for TV are on their way out. And especially for HD there haven’t been many around in consumers homes. There are ways to deinterlace etc, but that’s a hack. Any hack will degrade the image. More or less.
Mike Curtis did a great job in writing a point by point list of todays announcement
Here my comments to these Announcements from Apple:
It is nice that all that has been shown is actual product. I am sure that Discreet will tease us this afternoon with ‘technology demos’ that actually look exciting. But their track record of making products out these bits is mixed, to say the least.
Apple did go close to the line -if not over it- in a couple of ways themselves: The new multi resolution / multi frame rate timeline in FCP is amazing. Nothing short of that. It needs computing and gfx power. It would have been nice to mention how much of it you actually use.
The Soundtrack pro demo used Zodiac footage. Which is nice. What was not nice was that they converted the footage all wrong. I never saw the pictures of that movie being that ugly. It’s a soundtrack, not a color or fcp demo, but still. Apple can not use their own tools it seems.
Motion 3 looks amazing. It has tracking and a 3D environment. Bullet point featurewise Final Cut Studio2 is up to par with Flame in the year 2000 it seems. Not bad. Motion did always demo extremely sexy, but it’s uptake in the real world has been limited. Maybe Motion 3 can change that. Apple did a typical Apple by claiming that they now have solved 3D tracking and made it easy to use and just work. That remains to be seen. The demo track was actually kind of pointless. Some Text hovering around in space, nicely far way from the object to be tracked. This would have been a good day for Apple with the real product they had to show for, I do not understand why they had to exaggerate certain things so needlessly.
The quality of the content usedof the demos was actually, well, dismal. On Zodiac they did the dpx conversions wrong, and the other material was really really bad.
I think that Apple should detach their applications from the content section. Have one DVD for all applications!
Then if people like to have demo presets, footage etc, they can
go into the ‘content manager’ (I dreamt that up, it does not exist). Ideally this one would be able to load and manage all those sound loops (god! they even were proud of those free 150 tracks that you get with Soundtrack Pro) Motion Presets (those are as hiddeous as you average default gif collection on the web) etc etc. Either from 27 Data DVDs that apple can provide or that people can / will copy. Or content from a website. Were people can share their loops, clips, fx you name it.
The upside would be that the application install would go fast (like it does for shake) and would not put all that bloat on the disk. And the people that like to have these collections they
can get even more by subscribing to those for instance. Everybody would be much happier.
Compressor 3 looks interesting. It can do lots of nice things by now. Final Cut Server is a product where there is huge need.
Now you would think that they interact with each other. Actually
Compressor3 should be just a function of the media management tool. You would think. Well, apple thinks differently right now. The Compressor3 demo did not mention Final Cut Server3 once. Apple might need to do a bit more integration there. I am not holding my breath in term of “Server”. But then again the Red camera might as well exist tomorrow, and a year ago I said that there would be no way that it would.
Maybe there would be more DVD been sold when they would not be such a pain to be opened. Between those layers of plastic and the stupid mandatory copyright notice and some random preview, menu stuff it takes up to 3 minutes to get to what I want: Watch the thing. Time not well spend.
LA Times about 300, Zodiac Movie critics and audiences.