sony: you are toast

media Sony technology

Just saw an unoppened PS3 go for 560 US$. It was the 20GB model that retails for 499 US$. Sixty one dollars for having spend the night in front of a video game store? Not so good in my book. The prices @ ebay for PS3 have been coming down over the last weeks. Which is not a good sign for Sony. If hardcore games would want this machine badly, the prices would be higher. Now if the geeks don’t want it that bad, how about the general public? The plan was that the PS3 would push bluray ahead of HD-DVD. Now it looks as if Bluray has to save the face of the PS3. It’s a cheap player compared to other next gen DVD options. But compared to standard def players it still is expensive: 230 US dollars get you a decent player that will make all you existing movies look really good.

Speaking of: I started buying DVDs. Opportunistically: There are so many movies I have not seen, might want to see again. If the DVD is cheap enough then I just pick it up. After a few weeks of this strategy I ended up with lots of DVDs sitting in my room. IF there is time to watch something there is something to look at. And I like it, that I know I can easily go back to what I have seen. The quality could be better here or there. But it is not worth the money to go back and spend all that money: I get a ps3 from ebay, then a screen that is worth using and I have spent 1500 US$. Then I buy all the movies there are and have 30 mediocre to ok movies for 2,000 US$. When I buy DVDs cheaply and watch them on my laptop I could have 250 movies to watch for the same amount of money. HD is not NOT worth ten times the money. Not even twice. With the Oppo player you actually get an amazing picture out of a standard DVD. Out of most of them. It’s impossible to beat. People will realize this, sooner or later.

how to mount DVD under fedora core

linux


mkdir /mnt/dvd
mount /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd

The simple things that I do every couple of weeks I keep forgetting.
(added slash, thanks Bernard!)

pearl harbor day

history politics

It’s Pearl Harbor Day. There should be a national 9/11 holiday. Instead of a pointless war against a country that had nothing to do with it. Bush, that man got stellar approval ratings when he promised cowboy like to ‘smoke them out’. Well, he failed, if you simplify the issue as the administration actually did for a while: OBL is still at large.

would you like to save this password?

Apple

When going to a website with a password both firefox and safari ask if they should save the password.
Which is an ok thing to do. But who thought that it would be a good idea to ask this BEFORE you know that it was the right password. Ideally the browser would ask you after the page has been loaded. Then you know if it worked or not. Sure, that is a little bit more work for the coder. But that extra day of coding would be well spent. After all, that’s what we are doing all day: Getting those odditiies out of your computer uses. Allot of work, but it seperates crap from things that you would like to use tomorrow as well.

Panavision as seen by the LA Times

confessions of a pixel pusher media technology

Panavision in an Article of the LA Times

According the LA Times Panavision does well. They are planning to make twenty more Genesis this years. Sounds like allot, but their own subsidary “Plus-8” has added that many of the competing Viper cameras to their rental inventory last September.

looks like I will go to Macworld

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

Just forty days left to overcome the fear to speak in front of crowds.

HD for Indies did a roundup of articles around Zodiac.

ps3

Sony

For the longest time I wrote that the PS3 would be doomed. Then, apparently unimpressed, it shipped anyway. There they were the stories about long lines at the stores. People getting thousands of dollars for the console on eBay. Just this very moment a PS3 sold for 820 + 55 shipping on ebay. Unoppened. Of course. Retail is 599. EA hints that 200K PS3s have been shipped. Ebay is pretty brutal. Demand and supply. EA also claimed that around 20,000 PS3 have gone through the eBay mill. Nintendo managed to make and sell 600,000 Wii consoles in the first eight days of availability. They are aiming at 4 Million by the end of the year. That’s what Sony aimed for. Years ago. Now they settle for an eight of that.
These are the people saying that ‘next gen’ would not start before they said so.

In other words: The Wii won. It outsold the PS3 3 to 1 by now. It gets good reviews. People like it. The PS3 had allot of hype. Now and it exists, and way to many people shrug their shoulders. Having 45% markup on a product that have 200,000 of and wanted to sell twenty times more? Not realistic. If there would be 4,000,000 eager PS3 buyers (for 600 US$) then the ebay price would be way higher than it is now.

the hissing zeppelin

economy history misc

house prices

3.9 Million houses for sale. Average price at 221,000 US$. That makes for 0.861 Trillion dollars worth of real estate waiting to be moved.
Sizable, even if you compare it the US federal budget

(I)M

communication media technology

Today AOL must have pushed some new code or spammers have their way at the only service that AOL has to offer that people use. IM stands for Instant Messenger. Today it’s not so instant anymore. Hitting enter and watching the little cloud that is showing me typing for another 4 seconds is just plain lame.

Tricky thing for AOL: They provide the service for millions of people. And nobody knows it is them. Only time they make news is when things break.

os x server is junk!

Apple linux marketing

People see the shiny rack mountable Apple Servers. And then they make the mistake to buy them. Don’t! They are way to expensive. But the worst is, that they are impossible to administrate: It’s pretty much all different. And then when you spent hours and hours to go through the documentation you just have to realize that what you need is simply not there.

I wanted to change the default umask for a user that creates files on the afp server. Too bad. Not possible.

Using mac laptops since years I get to appreciate that the computer is not getting into the way when I want to do things.
Linux is a bit different, you have to google a bit for what you want to do. But 80% of it is pretty damn easy. OS X is just plain obscure. It really is a waste of time. Nobody should be believe that you actually got a unix box when you buy OS X server. What you get is some perverted BSD box that no sane sysadmin would like to deal with it. Phew.

Just try to use a device under OS X (server or not) if you have any doubts.