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The Albinan Army

history media


It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?

I don’t think so.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes about the future of Netflx according to The Hollywood Reporter

Netflix streaming right now feels indeed like the early Napster: All this content for that kind of price? Amazing. As long the Starz deal runs Netflix will gain momentum.
They will be installed on lots of screens & devices. Maybe they will be able to pay more for content than all the other balkanized wanna be streamers together.

We will see. And watch. And it will be interesting.

bing is better

internet

I found the first case where Bing is the better search engine. Which is good, since that means that there will be competition in search. The case where I found bing results to be relevant is a specific one. It is about an ongoing / developing story. Google is really fast with getting new pages into the index. But their ranking does not show them on the first page. (Ever since they added preview the ability to see 100 results has gone away, sadly). The term in question is ‘SORBS’. If you search for this in twitter you get a good glimpse about what is going on right now. SORBS is a blacklist that is broken. Since November 29th. And they are unable to fix it . Basically since it is a hack written by one person in perl. GFI bought them last year for around 0.5 Million. But that didn’t result in any improvement. So as a searcher you are most likely looking for the current state of SORBS. Bing does a good job in that it links to this comprehensive writeup about the SORBS debacle. Google however does not show this yet on the first page. Only 6 links that are not from SORBS itself are on that page. Not many people click through to the next page.

I should rephrase the title in saying “bings first page is better than googles first page”. Right now.

5 Beekman

history

Looking at the picture of 5 Beekman Street I am wondering why there are no equally stunning buildings going up right now. In theory there should be multitudes of money, technology and ideas around compared to the 1880s. Yet, all we seem to be able to accomplish is to find a gem like this and restore it.

lots of HD TVs – very few showing HD

daily life technology

Nielsen numbers suggest that about one third of HD TV sets actually display HD. I wonder how many sets are still set to the store default mode: It is set as bright and vibrant as possible to make the units “look good”. But it kills the picture.

It is a tragedy: Back in the day of analog TVs it was allot of work and engineering needed to get that electron beam create a pretty and truthful picture. Today it would be easy. The whole pipeline is digital. A majority of households could enjoy unprecedented image quality. LCD and Plasma panels are impressively stable and predictable. But -no surprise there- people don’t care enough. Neither do the makers of the sets.

In a better world the sets could inform viewers about the input resolution. They could ship with a little set up tutorial (all acted out, and understandable) playing from a couple MB of memory somewhere in the set. The store mode would mention that it is active during power up. Remote controls would make sense. A Bluray player would come with a demo / promo / set up Disc that shows how wonderful the format can be. What you can do with it, and why Samsung,Sony,LG,insert-maker-name-here is awesome.

google, bing, maps, military.

free of any reason internet

People trust those pixels a bit to much: Nicaragua / Costa Rica Border

“go green”

marketing

Dear provider: yes, I will ‘go green’ and sign up for email invoices the moment you stop sending me solicitations to get more stuff form you by the pound.

the right interface

Apple technology


While holding the Home button, press and release the Lock Sleep/Wake button. Your screen will flash letting you know that the screen shot was taken.

I had no idea that it was that easy to take a screen shot on the iPhone. The way this works is just perfect. It is easy to remember since it references the ‘you push the button we do the rest’ habit of taking a picture. It works and gives proper feedback. Sometimes Apple gets it right. Sometimes they manage to get beyond the thinking of engineering and make things really work. Technology companies get often stuck on the technology level. Nice to see when it gets transcended occasionally.

what do you do after you invented gmail …

communication internet technology

… and a couple of other things? Whatever it is that Paul Buchheit is doing today, luckily blogging is among it. Specially since he seems to think about what he writes.

It’s the technology, stupid

economy history technology

I like this graph. It is a wonderful example how a theory can be conveyed.

I have trouble following the underlying assumptions though. Plotting the potential output as a straight line going up is a nice illusion. Last time I checked things don’t automatically get better. Thanks to entropy the opposite is true. It takes a certain effort to maintain the status quo and even more energy is needed to improve matters. The past certainly saw advancements in GDP. Over and over again. But assuming that this will therefor continue is equally foolish as to predict the future reign of the Pharaohs in Egypt just because they did so in the last thousands of years.

The Dow is climbing, but unemployment does not decline. It might be that a conventional analysis is under estimating the impact of structural changes that happened in the last two decades. A tempting simplification of what is going on could look like this: Progress in computers and communication technology is creating huge values without creating the jobs as it was usual in previous eras. Facebook employs one engineer per 1.2 Million users.

Quantum leaps in efficiency ( workers vs output ) did happen before. But never as radical and rapid as seems now to be the case. Since this is unprecedented nobody has the faintest idea what this actually means.

For a couple of years the housing bubble masked the effects of this technological revolution on the job market. But eventually we will have to cope with the fact that nobody needs to file TPS reports any longer. That’s done by some computer somewhere.

Fourteen miles of empty shelves

interdubs

INTERDUBS crossed the 1.5 Million file mark yesterday. Big numbers are hard to imagine. Simplifying matters a bit one can assume that each file at least replaces one DVD. If one would put those 1.5 million DVDs side by side on a shelf then it would be 14 miles long. It was a while back that I walked that distance. But I still remember vividly that it took a while.

Not using those DVDs saved 500 metric tons of CO2 as well.

sources:
INTERDUBS file counter

DVD case dimensions

DVD and CO2 emissions