January 2007 Archives
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January 31, 2007
Magical Thinking
The New York Times had a recent article about the processes behind magical thinking and how it's similar to religious belief systems. It's not talking about magic so much as it's talking about superstitions and various acts that they call "rituals" but that are usually performed by people who don't believe in such things. Yet, somehow, they still do these things...
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.
These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling. [link - may require free registration]
They go on to talk about a test where the results were rigged but people were asked to give the equivalent of "luck" and at the end, most people actually stated that they did feel the had some impact on the outcome. They also talk about the little rituals like wearing the same pair of socks for a game or doing things the same way as that of a winning game. It's not entirely unlike how many people have good luck charms, or lucky numbers, or other such trinkets and beliefs. When asked, most people would easily say that they don't really believe "magic" or other paranormal effect is taking place. Yet they'll gladly still do these things.
The main things that the article left out, though, was the power of the placebo effect. From Wikipedia:
The term placebo effect (as distinct from the more correct term placebo response) was introduced by T. C. Graves in 1920 "because it is the subject that has the subject-centred response. It is not the administered substance that generates the observed effect." [link]
In this context, the administered substance is the "magic" of the ritual or action. The effect of placebos is debated among many, be the observance is common enough that it is believed that a strong enough will for a body to do something can cause that effect. For example, if you are told you are taking a very strong headache medication that has been shown to clear up headaches within an hour but you're really given a placebo, in many cases the headache may go away because the recipient believed it would which helped the body alleviate whatever stresses were causing the headache to begin with.
Also from the Wikipedia entry above:
Sometimes known as non-specific effects or subject-expectancy effects, a so-called placebo effect occurs when a patient's symptoms are altered in some way (i.e., alleviated or exacerbated) by an otherwise inert treatment, due to the individual expecting or believing that it will work. Some people consider this to be a remarkable aspect of human physiology; others consider it to be an illusion arising from the way medical experiments are conducted.
This belief is exactly the same as the belief in the effect of a ritual or trinket. That is, if a runner truly believes that they will do better wearing sockets their significant others kisses (uh, while they're clean) then they may very well do better because the placebo effect causes physiological changes that help them focus better, be more relaxed, and reduce anxiety. All of these changes, in fact, are true physical changes but are caused by the will of the person triggered by the strong belief in the trinket.
This is, of course, an example where the person could have also just had a strong enough will to relax themselves without the trigger and otherwise cause the changes normally. This won't work in cases of random acts and affecting their outcome. For one, they aren't an outcome within an individuals body and for two, the person truly doesn't have any control over them.
So, my own belief is that if someone does truly believe that doing a certain thing or carrying a certain thing can help them perform a task better then, for them, it probably will. If you try to explain logically why that's not possible and they truly believe you, you may very well ruin it for them since it will introduce doubt and nervousness the next time they try it. On the other hand, if you support them in this belief because of the reasons I've given, you will help support their own belief and possibly make it that much stronger of a trigger. You can do this even if you don't believe it yourself although you might become a believer when you see it work with them.
January 30, 2007
Honda Accord Hybrid
No blog entries about my now somewhat new car after over 3 months? Hrm, something must be wrong with me! ;)
I've been commuting with the car full time and have also used it on a number of 160 mile round trips between Santa Cruz and Concord over the holidays. Since it's a hybrid, I'll jump right to the fuel economy: on my commute, I can get 30-32mpg depending on how carefully I drive and what the weather is like. With the cold weather, it's dipped a bit under 30 but 32 wasn't a problem back in October. On the longer trips, I was easily seeing 38mpg or so over the distance if I kept my speed to 65mph and didn't run in to traffic.
In my opinion, this is good fuel economy for a heavy mid-sized sedan with a 250 hp V6 engine under the hood. Compared to the Jeep's 180ish hp V6 and 18mpg on the same commute, it's a huge improvement in fuel economy. It's no where near as quick as the Miata, of course, but it gets up to speed nicely and also beats out the Miata's 18-19mpg on the same commute.
It should be noted that the Honda Accord Hybrid (HAH, as it's called in forums) isn't designed around fuel economy but rather around decent power without sacrificing the standard economy of the weaker four cylinder version. As both Honda and Toyota sales people were quick to say when I said these were the two cars I was comparing, "There is no comparison." That's not entirely true since they're both mid-sized family sedans, but they do have different feature sets when it comes to economy.
The car is quite smooth and comfortable to drive, which still having relatively firm suspension for cornering. The interior noise is surprisingly quiet, although there is plenty of throaty V6 growl from the rear twin exhaust pipes when flooring the car and letting the RPMs get high.
The amenities are pretty standard and can be found easily. It's interesting to note the 8 cup holders, though, with plenty of storage pockets. These come in handy even with just two of us in the car. A soft light when the headlights are on illuminates the center console just enough to not be lost in the dark. The center storage area is two level with a wire pass through to the top level for phone use and a power port in the bottom area. There's another power port next to the big pocket below the radio.
The seats are heated, of course, and the climate controls have a dual zone thermostat with fully automatic settings. For instance, I can set the temperature to 72 degrees and it'll control the fan speed and temperature of the air that comes out. It also can determine when it needs to run the front defroster (probably a function of internal versus external temperature, or something). The rear and side mirror defrosters are separate controls. These controls are all very intuitive. For instance, if a passenger wants to be warmer, they just rotate the knob near them and the dual control automatically engages.
Overall, I've been enjoying the car and the comforts it provides. It's not quite as fuel efficient on my commute as I would like, but it's better than most non-hybrids (the commute is over the Santa Cruz mountains so there are no flat areas to really just cruise) and is likely about the same as the Toyota Camry Hybrid, which does better in the city. It also provides ample power for merging. It is, of course, just an Accord, though. I do also feel good, though, in supporting the efforts to make fuel economy better across all types of cars through the improvement of technology.
There's more to talk about with this car, but I'll save that for more posts... ;)
January 29, 2007
iPod Prob
My 8GB iPod Mini has had a few, shall we say, glitches. While I love it, today I was alittle annoyed when it froze halfway through a podcast. I had just hit play again and it shifts halfway to the play screen with the album art on it and freezes. So the screen has half the playlist and half the album art. It says its playing but nothing is happening no matter what I press.
I try to power on and off. Nothing happens.
I try to connect it to the computer with the sync cable. Nothing happens.
I look for a little reset button somewhere. Doesn't exist.
I cannot take the battery out... soooooooo....
I don't want to use my one free Apple tec support phone call. Not after this past weekend and the Quicktime Pro fiasco.
Luckily, I found a reference to little known iPod reset button sequence and it worked for me:
Turn the Hold switch on
Turn the Hold switch off
Press and hold the Menu and Center for 10 seconds until the iPod restarts
If it worked, you'll see the Apple logo
I don't know what iPods this will work on, but it worked for my new Mini. It certainly saved me having to wait for the battery to die and recharge and hopefully make the problem fix itself.
How Did I Miss Amazon EC2?
Amazon's EC2 (for Ephemeral Content Creation? no. Echo Cho Cho? no. Electronic Comedy Central? no! try Elastic Compute Cloud on for size) is a virtual computing environment that is to virtualization that S3 (Simple Storage Service) is to, uh, (this comparison is breaking down fast) dynamically adjustable RAID arrays.
Too many parenthesis to follow? Basically, for ten US cents and hour, you can load up a virtual computer image with an Amazon Web Service API that can have whatever installed on it that you want. The virtual system is equivalent to a 1.7GHz machine with 1.75GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk all sitting on a fat 250Mbps net connection (that bursts to a full Gigabit). You store your virtual machine image within the S3 storage system.
Amazon charges for the S3 storage (a separate account from EC2), for the time the virtual computer is on, and for the bandwidth that the virtual computer uses that leaves the EC2/S3 system (they don't say about bandwidth to/from SQS). Pricing is currently pretty simple. For each virtual computer you have running, you pay the ten cents an hour, then you pay twenty cents a gigabyte for bandwidth, fifteen cents for each gigabyte of storage used per month. There really aren't any limits to any of these three items. So, you could run your machine for 15 minutes each month or you could run dozens of machines continuously. (They do ask that you contact them if you will be trying to use more than 20 virtual machines.)
Effectively, what they're providing is not only the ability to provision and configure your own dedicated servers on a relatively high bandwidth connection but the ability to do so via scripts, too. A high end system could have a watchdog monitoring server performance and bring up new servers as they are needed then take them down when resources become available. This could near-perfectly optimize costs.
This could also be used as a test bed for setting up grid servers and other forms of distributed computing devices and servers. With testing costing only 80 cents for a typical 8 hour work day, that's not bad at all. This can also be enabled cheaply. A single virtual machine image can be used for multiple instances of the virtual machine. So if you make a test environment for your application that can fit in a gigabyte, then you could have as many individual, dedicated servers as you wanted available when you wanted for only fifteen cents a month plus the server time. That's cheap, in my opinion!
If you run a service that only needs to be available for weekdays (or weekends) you could also have it shut off during the other times to reduce costs. Or if you have a seasonal application or service that only needs to run, say, in October, you could set it up and have it only available during October with only the storage fees to have it ready for the next October (although you could store the image offline until the next year, if you chose to).
Now, speaking of costs, if you just wanted to run a basic dedicated web server, is it actually cost effective with Amazon EC2? I'll compare to a system I have with 1&1 a known system over at The Planet, and running (probably against ToS) a server on a DSL or Cable connection.
The 1&1 system is a 3Ghz P4-HT system with 2GB of RAM, 120GB of storage (with an addition 120GB of offline backup) and 1500GB of transfer. All of this runs $119 plus 49 cents a gigabyte for overage. It also includes static IP addresses. The machine has a 100Mbps connection to the external world. This machine also comes with Plesk, a firewall, control panel, serial access, some various bits of software.
A lower end system over at The Planet includes a 2.0GHz Celeron with 512MB of RAM, 80GB of storage, 750GB of transfer, and a 10Mbps ethernet card. This all costs $69 per month and also still includes some IP addresses. I can't find a specific number for overage costs of bandwidth, but going for 3000GB per month to 3500GB per month on a more expensive server costs an additional $125 per month. This corresponds to 25 cents per gigabyte.
Both of these systems provide dedicated, true hardware. You can run whatever you want on them, including virtualization software to create as many other virtual machines as you want (and the hardware can handle). On the first system, though, it has more RAM and probably a faster processor that compared to an EC2 system. The second system is likely slower and less capable and definitely has a slower connection to the real world. Both of these systems are a good comparison because neither are high end and both are relatively affordable. The respective companies can usually get one online within a couple of days after you contact them. Both of these options are also self-managed.
Now for the fun part... if we assume that a processor is a processor and not worry about the comparative speed of these systems and not worry about the comparative speed of their physical hard disks, we can make a comparison assuming full use of each system.
An Amazon EC2 system that used 1500GB of transfer and 120GB of persistent disk space while being operational 24/7 would cost $73 for the compute time plus $300 for the transfer and another $18 for the storage. This is a total of $391, which is clearly more expensive than the 1&1 option, yet it does have advantages that I'll get to in a moment.
The other system on Amazon EC2 would cost the same $73 for the compute time please $150 for half the transfer and $12 for two thirds of the storage, bringing the cost down to $235, which is still much more expensive than either system, though you get a lot more RAM with the EC2 system.
Now, here's the thing, though: You wouldn't want to run either hardware system with a full disk. Nor are either of these systems likely to keep up with their allotted transfer. In my case, on the 1&1 system, I only use about 50GB of the storage and maybe 150GB of the transfer. In this scenario, the cost would be down to $110, which is ever so slightly cheaper. Yet if the transfer was down one month, the cost would go down. And if I cleaned up cruft on the disk, the cost would go down. This brings both benefit (keeping a tight system would be cheaper) and risk (increase in traffic costs more initially). Now, your base costs is $73, which is slightly more than the cheapest The Planet system and plenty more than a shared host. You are charged for uptime, not average load.
However, a bigger benefit is easier scaling and provisioning: you can do it yourself. And you are not tied to physical hardware limitations, so you can use more storage as you need to with S3. Software upgrades would be made easier, too, since you can bring a second system up to upgrade and test before bringing the first system down.
Now, after some thinking and looking around, there are two large concerns with Amazon EC2. The first is that the virtual machine's disk is not persistent. If you want persistent data, you have to either store it in Amazon S3 directly or frequently copy data files to Amazon S3 (which isn't quite as simple as scp). The other problem is lack of a physical IP address. This can be solved with some of the dynamic DNS hosts that are around for other reasons.
Now, I said I would compare to a self run machine. Your initial setup will cost more, since you'll have to buy the hardware. You might find a good, low end Dell server for $400 or so. You'll have to figure out how to handle the IP address issue if you don't have a static IP, much like the Amazon EC2. But that's it, right? Because you already have your net connection, there are no further charges, right? Think again. Here in CA, after our basic electric usage, we end up paying about 33 cents for every KWh used. A small 300 watt system will end up running that same 10 cents an hour that Amazon EC2 charges, bringing back the base $73. And your users won't like your slow 600Kbps uplink connection to them. Nor will your provider be happy about you hosting a server, since it's usually against the Terms of Service for home connections. And what if you hosted it on your gaming system with it's nice 1 kilowatt power supply? That'll cost you a cool $330 a month around here (although your heating bill may drop, your AC bill will go up during the summer).
None of these options provide one the experimental flexibility of Amazon EC2, though: You can't try them out for a few hours and at a few bucks cost. Most of them require annual commitments. The ability for just a little money to play with your own farm of a dozen servers is also amazing. If you've already got scripts that can break data up easily across processes and even machines via network shares, then you can quite easily bring up a number of machines, distribute the data to them, process the data easily on 20 machines, copy the results back down from each, and shut the machines down. Even with network speeds, this could be much faster than running the same processing on a single machine.
I think, for me and right now, the biggest single problem is that it's a limited beta and they aren't letting new people in right now. Darn... I was hoping to play with it a little this weekend. One possible use for me right now would be to clone my current server in to an AMI, use the AMI to test upgrading of the OS, and then either do the upgrade again or transfer back to the physical server I'm on. But, alas, that's not gonna happen right now...
January 28, 2007
Apple QuickTime Pro Registration Key Update
So, I got an email back from Apple about an hour ago. This is their response:
Dear Shane,
Thank you for your recent order.
Although your purchase attempt was successful, a QuickTime Registration Code was not generated.
A credit in the amount of $29.99 is being credited to your account and should appear on your statement within five business days. Please contact your credit card company if you have questions about when the credit will be posted.
To receive a QuickTime Pro registration code, please re-order the code by going to
<http://www.apple.com/quicktime/buy> and click the link for your operating system.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
Kind Regards,
The Apple Store
Thanks for your help, Mr. The Apple Store. Mr. Store was nice enough to give me my money back within 5 days and let me buy again. Normally, someone would probably want to wait for the refund to make sure it actually happens before they do the purchase again. I assume that the credit is actually $29.99 plus tax, too. Did Mr. Store say it was? No.
And what's with the impersonal response? Normal support systems include who helped you out for tracking purposes and so it feels like a human is helping you. This actually looks like a form response, which makes me think this problem isn't unusual.
What I don't understand is why they couldn't just create a key and post it to my Apple store account. It seems like that would have been easier. Well, I guess I'm off to order again and see if a key gets generated the second time around.
January 27, 2007
Monster Matches
| Your Monster Profile |
 You Feast On: Hot Dogs You Lurk Around In: The Ocean You Especially Like to Torment: Hippies |
Well. The Hippie part is right....but I'm not a huge fan of hot dogs... maybe the little fingers of children?
Done & Dusted: Age of Empires III Campaign
So I just finished the AOE3 campaign. It only took me about a year. Luckily, I have the War Chiefs expansion to look forward to now, and it's already installed and updated.
The Black family storyline was actually not too bad, for a real time war game. I'm a girl gamer. I don't like things whaling on me too much while I build my little towns and fortify. When the bad guys come and burn everything I've built so nicely down, I get annoyed and don't wanna play anymore. Thus it takes me a year to finish a game... Well, really it took be about a month of casual gaming since I have only really been playing since Thanksgiving when we got the new computer monitor.
So you can guess, I set the difficulty to Easy. Even *I* was able to get through the whole game without too much trouble here. About halfway through, I considered adjusting the difficulty but didn't after one particularly annoying part where I had a really hard time snatching the caravans away from the bad dudes. They kept changing back to the enemy side and I had a hard time winning in the time period. I had to restart once there. After that, I paid more attention to what the goals and objectives of the mission were. I even would avoid doing the primary goals long enough to enjoy completing the secondary ones. Still, I like my towns organized and fortified, even when the AI doesn't have too many random bad dudes wandering around.
The Black family narrators had a decent story, although the antagonists never really... resolved into a concrete thing. The final battle was, sadly, no harder than the prior battles, and I felt a little let down at the end.
I don't feel like the little guys running around on my side were that distinct. My tactics mostly involved very simple things like:
(1) Artillery demolish buildings well but keep them away from foot soldiers and cavalry
(2) Cavalry are good against foot soldiers
(3) Don't send cavalry against guys with long sticks
(4) Make lots of expendable indians with blowguns and little canoes
(5) Avoid the giant canons unless they belong to you, then spend all your time blowing shit up
(6) Big boats sink slower and hit other things harder, target land-based units with them and then sail away
(7) Build lots of tower gun things. Outpost things.
I didn't use the hero's special abilities much. I did learn to monitor my resources and how to tweak things better to keep them all high enough. I was always meticulous about where I planted my towns on a map. The resources and map layouts were fantastic and well balanced. The superb graphics and variety of terrains made it very fun to play 1-player.
I would say that my favorite part of the game is the variety of upgrades and buildings and types of people you can have, to make the game interesting strategy-wise. The campaign was interesting because there were a variety of goals, from building a solid fort and defending, to chasing down bad guys and freeing prisoners, to protecting miners as they demolish bridges, and finally, knowing when to flee to safety.
If I could change one thing about the game... hmm. It's easy to say make it longer, or more complex... but let's just pick a mechanic. I would make you able to zoom in and out just a little bit more. Especially out. I often found myself scrolling around on my giant 30" monitor and still I wasn't far enough out to select the army I wanted to make march.
Still, I really enjoyed this game and I am not much of a computer gamer. This is the second game in the last 5ish years that I have played all the way through (the other being Sid Meier's Pirates!).
MovableType Upgrade Process Getting Easier
[3:10pm] I don't know how much this is just me trusting the system more or if it's actually getting easier. This time around, I upgraded three sites from MT 3.2 and one site from MT 3.33 to 3.34. All I had to do was download the tar ball to the server, and as each user copy the files over the MT tree. For the MT 3.2 ones, I had to login and go through the upgrade script. That took about 3 seconds each to finish (not counting finding the passwords and logging in).
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how well this works. I've yet to have any compatibility issues, even though most of the sites have multiple (virtual) blogs on them that have been around since 1.x or 2.x days. I haven't had to touch the config files nor have the upgrades broken anything. Sure, I don't always get the latest and greatest features because I use custom templates, but certain things like better spam filtering will happen regardless.
Now I'm off to see if this "FastCGI" stuff is worth the trouble, if it's any trouble to begin with.
-- Some Time Passes --
[5:20pm] Alright, so getting FastCGI working is a real PITA. I think it's working now, though, but I've left the standard scripts around, too, so they'll work properly for anything pointing at them still. I don't know if it's any faster, though. And eventually I'll have to apply it to all of the blogs, if it holds up on mine. In the end, it probably wasn't worth the trouble, though.
[6:52pm] I've reverted away from FastCGI. Uploads weren't working. Not sure I'll worry about switching back, either, but we'll see.
Apple QuickTime Pro Registration Woes
So, as is usual when we need to use QuickTime Pro, a recent update of iTunes has forced an upgrade of QuickTime to a version where our Pro registration key is no longer valid. So, we had to buy it again today. The order went through fine. I got the order confirmation. QuickTime appears in the downloadable software list. However, there is no registration key to be found. And I tried with both IE7 and Firefox 2.0, hoping that maybe it was a browser bug. And I tried on three machines and kept checking my email. Last time the code was instant.
So, we called Apple, which is pretty easy at 800-MY-APPLE. After following the menus twice, there is no order support for QuickTime Pro. It just points you at the website, which doesn't give me the information I need. The Customer Service section also has links to the same place that doesn't actually show the registration code.
What gives?!
I had to fill out a web form that said, nicely, that they'd get back to me within 24 hours. 24 hours?! The weekend will be almost gone by then!
Argh!
I've got a rotten apple taste in my mouth now...
January 26, 2007
Norway says iTunes Illegal
Apple was dealt a blow in Europe yesterday when Norway's powerful consumer ombudsman ruled that its iTunes online music store was illegal because it did not allow downloaded songs to be played on rival technology companies' devices. [link]
I have two differing opinions about this. The first is that Apple should be able to do what they want with their devices and selling proprietary media for them is perfectly fine. The second is that a consumer who buys a license to content should be able to play it wherever they want and have a license for the content on any system and should only have to pay for distribution and packaging costs on other systems.
My first opinion is definitely the less popular one. The point here, though, is that this is really no different than Nintendo selling games that only work on their Gameboy or DS system. For example, if Norway had said Nintendo can't sell DS games because consumers aren't allowed to play them on whatever portable gaming system they have, such as a Sony PSP, everyone would have immediately laughed and thought of it as so ludicrous that it must have been a joke.
Essentially, what I'm saying is that a proprietary digital format shouldn't necessarily be treated any differently than a proprietary physical format. After all, proprietary formats have been used for years to help make copying more difficult and costly while enabling features that weren't available with off-the-shelf formats to improve the consumer experience. (If Sony had used standard DVD format for the PSP, the portable part would be a bit of a misnomer.)
Also, don't forget that for 99 cents all you are getting is a license to play the content in iTunes and in iPods. You also get a license to burn it to CDs, which is a bonus, in my opinion. It seems to me that a company can charge what it wants for whatever it wants to sell and the market will decide if the value is appropriate. And with 2 billion tracks downloaded (and sold?), the market seems to have said that it's OK.
On the other side, I'd like to see a system where I can buy a license to content, say the Lord of the Rings extended edition trilogy, and then have the ability to get that content on all formats for just the basic cost of the format distribution and packaging. So, for example, if I bought the set on DVD I could later get it on HD-DVD for a much cheaper price since I already own a license to the content. Then, too, I could get a download for the Xbox 360, a video file for iTunes, and so on.
Sure, there would have to be some reliable method of proving that I own the license before I acquire the content in another format without also acquiring a second license. In other words, I want to be able to apply my current license to get a discount on the content via a new medium. (Partly this is because we have a ton of DVDs that I want on HD-DVD, but I really don't want to pay for them a second time -- and I can't be the only one... imagine people that got stuff on VHS, then DVD, and are now looking and buy the same content for a third time.)
This could be stated as the industry support fair use. That is, you buy a license for the content and can either put it on any format you want or pay for someone else to put it on any format you want without paying for the license multiple times.
This also still takes in to account the fact that digital distribution is not free (bandwidth costs money) and production is not free (processor cycles to re-encode, time to make DVD (or HD-DVD, or Blu-ray) menus, etc. They could still charge for all of that.
For example, say a current hit movie title had a license fee of $15 (it's new, remember? The license fee might only be 50 cents in three years.). So, you buy the license for $15. Then you want the content on HD-DVD, Xbox 360 HD, and DVD for your portable DVD player. So, say, the cost of pressing the HD-DVD is $2 and the incremental cost of the HD-DVD production and distribution is another $8 (menus, packaging, marketing, etc.) This brings the cost to $25, which is what current HD-DVDs cost. However, since you already own the license you only spend $10 for yours. On the Xbox 360, the re-encoding costs maybe a buck and the marketing costs maybe another couple of bucks, so you'd be able to get it for $3, or about half the price of a current 24 hour rental. Again, this would be because you already own the license and are just paying for the cost of creating the file and the bandwidth. Had you just purchased it outright, it would have been $18, a little pricey compared to a full iTunes video, but also full HD -- and remember, it's still new and hot. DVD is the same thing as HD-DVD, but it's such a well known system the costs will be cheaper, so maybe you'll end up spending $3 for that. Now, what's happened is instead of spending $18 for the new DVD because you didn't want to shell out $25 for the HD-DVD that wouldn't work on your vacation and never buying the movie again, you've spent $31 on the movie to get it in 3 different and useful formats (well, sorta -- you don't really need both the XBox 360 and HD-DVD versions). You are happier because you didn't have to spend over $50 for all of that and the studios are happier because you did spend more than you might have.
This probably isn't practical in the current market, but I think the idea is something to think about. It also negates the whole Norway thing since in this model Apple would only be charging for distribution and encoding and a bit for pass-through marketing costs from the labels. Then again, not every country has a fair-use clause in their legal system.
It also comes down to the value of a proprietary format compared to the contents being distributed within that format and whether or not that's independent from the medium of the format (digital, physical, etc.).
Other opinions are welcome, assuming comments are working. ;)
January 25, 2007
Comparing HD and TV Resolutions
There is a page floating around the net currently that appears to do a good job of comparing a 480p display to a 720p display (it's here, for reference). At first glance, it's great. You mouse over and see the 720p while mousing away and seeing the 480p. There's a very clear difference between the two. The 720p view has much more detail than the 480p view.
Then I realized something. This comparison is somewhat flawed. What it's actually comparing is 720p to a 480p screen that's being scaled to 720p with an unknown algorithm from paint.net. So really, it's comparing how a 480p picture would look on a 720p screen when scaled with that algorithm.
I also got to thinking about this with respect to our TV. Our TV is a 40" 1080p LCD screen. That means, by definition, anything being displayed on it is being scaled to 1080p since you can't change the fact that it has 1920x1080 pixels on the screen. When it's drawing a native 1920x1080 image, all is pixel perfect. But when it's drawing a 1280x720 image full screen, this is actually a 720p image being scaled to 1080p even if the info says that it's 720p (the source is 720p and the screen mode is 720p, but the screen still has 1080p pixels being used).
The same is true when it's drawing any of the other resolutions, such as 480i, 480p, and 1080i. In the 480x cases, there are black bars on the side so the aspect ratio is kept correct so it's not actually lighting up all of the 1920 pixels across the screen. However, since we know the aspect ratio is 4:3, we also then know that in the 480 modes what we're really looking at is 480x scaled to 1080p at 1440x1080 rather than the widescreen 1920x1080.
When the TV is doing the scaling, like it does with a component input, it uses it's algorithm to figure out how to draw and smooth the pixels on to the screen. With VGA input, though, at 1920x1080, the source of the video must do the scaling (in my case, either a computer or the XBox 360).
What this means is that when I compare the quality of a 480i digital channel to a 1080i or 720p HD channel it's all being compared with the TVs scaling to 1080p. This is not necessarily how these channels would look on a 720p or 480i screen as our TV has more pixels.
The same goes for the comparison of 480p to 720p where the comparison images are both 720p, but one has been scaled and scaled rather well, at that. For a different comparison, you could do a non-smoothing scale that would basically similar 480p with larger pixels in the same size as a 720p screen, or put gaps simulating the same size pixels but with a greater pitch. Either of these methods would try to simulate a a different number of pixels being used while normalizing to the viewers screen.
Anyway, just some random thoughts on the topic... in the end, we decided on a TV that scaled better than most but not quite as well as the $1k more expensive Sony Bravia Pro series. The point being that the quality of the scaling on an HD TV is quite important these days. A good scaler can actually produce really good images. Our TV has a good scaler, but the XBox 360 has a much better one.
January 23, 2007
Getting Television for Free
Ever since we learned we could receive some over-the-air stations in high-quality digital format, we've been learning a lot more about modern television. For one, receiving TV in digital format over-the-air is free yet you get static-free channels that are often better quality than cable or satellite because they have more bandwidth available to them. For us, this means we get NBC, CBS, FOX, and The CW and we would be able to get PBS if we had an antenna. The analog versions of all of these channels (although there is no analog broadcast of The CW) are bad enough to not want to watch. The digital versions, though, are 1080i (NBC, CBS) or 720p (FOX) with the exception of PBS and The CW (480i) that are still crystal clear, though.
Ok, so I've written about all of that before. What's new? Well, as it turns out, every major television network is now providing full episodes online, for free. Now why didn't we discover this before we even knew we had broadcast TV available? Well, TV ads are, sadly, a form of news. I'd heard about innertube a while back, which is CBSs name for their online videos. But when it first came out it was like the "special features" of a DVD and not only was it not interesting if you couldn't watch the latest episodes, you'd actually want to avoid it to not get spoilers.
But then we saw a brief mention of full episodes online and went to look. Sure enough, all of the CSI shows and many other shows were online in full episode format. And all for free. This includes such shows as Numb3rs, NCIS, Jericho, CSI (3 of them), and Survivor.
This got me curious about the other channels, of course. In particular, I wanted to check out ABC since we don't get it over-the-air. Sure enough, all of their popular shows are online. This includes Lost, which we're now caught up on since they had season-to-date episodes. We've also started to watch some Ugly Betty, which is apparently good enough to win two awards last Monday night at the Golden Globes. We're disappointed, though, that they don't have all of this season's Grey's Anatomy episodes online.
Last week we rented the season catch-up disk of Heroes, which plays on NBC. This disk was disappointing since it was listed as a bit over an hour long. The Heroes catch-up part was only about 10 minutes long and didn't really even get in to the store. The other hour was the pilot episode of The Black Donnelly's. Even more disappointing, though, is that we found out that NBC has the complete season-to-date available for watching online and yes, for free. NBC calls this "NBC Rewind" so you can catch up on shows. Want to watch Scrubs? Grease? Studio 60? The Apprentice? Friday Night Lights? You can. They're all there. And, of course, for free.
Over at The CW website we could catch up on our Veronica Mars, but they don't have a few of the early episodes of the season. They do have full episodes, of course, of many of the shows including Veronica Mars, Beauty and the Geek, Supernatural, and many more.
In fact, Fox seems to be the only network I've checked that doesn't have full episodes online yet. They do have plenty of clips, of course, but like I mentioned, those are usually no good unless you've seen the shows. Well, PBS doesn't seem to, either, but that doesn't really come as a surprise.
Why are full episodes good for the networks? Well, it's quite easy, actually. Even though they are free for the viewers, there are often ads either within the video or on the web pages. So they make more money. That's good and that also allows us viewers to show support even if we can't watch TV directly (as compared to a torrent download or something). They are also providing a service for people without a Tivo or ReplayTV to be able to watch missed episodes. This is good for people that are out of town or even watching a competing show on another network. For those shows with the full season online, it allows someone to come in even in the middle of a season after friends have recommended it. For example, we can watch all of Heroes online now and then start watching it over-the-air in full HD.
Quality wise, it'll be a long time before the online shows can match the over-the-air broadcasts since ATSC has nearly a full 20 Mbps of bandwidth to it and most folks in the US top out at around 8 Mbps or so on their net connections. The experience varies quite a lot, too, and usually isn't TV ready.
On ABC, the shows play inside a small video window inside the browser. For the best experience, I set our 1920x1080 TV to 800x600, standard aspect, and have the video playing inside that where it's still widescreen. This gives about 25" out of 40" to the video. That's not terrible, but it's not great, either. When we start watching the other networks, I'm sure we'll have to figure out their best settings, too. In all likelihood, for those shows that we really want to watch, we'll catch up online and then watch them over-the-air in full HD where it's full screen, good quality, and largely skip free.
The networks' own players may end up largely competing with download services such as iTunes and XBox Live where you can already get episodes each for $2-3. Some of these are in full HD, which is great, but some are in even lower quality or designed for a portable screen. Sure, both of these great download service have slightly different target audience from full episodes on the web and each other, but there are sure to be other people out there who will opt for a free, legal solution where one exists.
January 20, 2007
My iPhone Thoughts
OK, so there are probably a million other people that have written their own blog posts thoughts on the Apple iPhone (or maybe just the Apple Phone). However, some folks have expressed interest in knowing if I will switch carriers to get it. The short answer: Ahahahaa!
Why?
Well, at least not this version. I didn't get a first generation iPod, either. Back then, the iPod was an inferior product at a high price. Now it's a superior product at a low price. This holds true with the current generation of the iPhone, in my opinion.
First, though, don't get me wrong. The iPhone is an excellent piece of hardware. If it can be sold without a Cingular (at&t) plan and used as a WiFi browser pad it'll give the Nokia internet tables a run for the money all while still have an 8GB iPod nano in there somewhere that also happens to support video; something the nano doesn't do yet. The UI looks great, too. And all of this is in a form factor that is not much bigger than a Motorola GSM SLVR (it's about the same height and thickness, but a little wider).
So why, then, don't I like it?
First, there is no way to dial it by feel. That's just the nature of being a touch screen. Yeah, I know, you've heard it before. You fanfolks all say "Phooie! It has voice recognition!" (Does it? I missed that on the feature list...) I say that's nice and all. So does just about every phone. Yet, somehow, most people don't seem to use it. I do, but only to call two numbers and only when using my Bluetooth headset. For all other cases, I dial the number directly on the keypad (that's one thing I like about the LG VX9800 -- the normal candybar style use with keypad). I also tend to use the keypad to navigate voicemail systems, phone trees, etc. I can do this by feel without removing the phone from my ear. Good luck with that on the iPhone.
Second, the keypad (since there isn't one) will be terrible for games. On pretty much any phone with a funky keypad, games are out of the question. Maybe not all games, but many games rely on a normal keypad layout. If the phone is too expensive to port to, then some game developers won't bother. However, it would appear this is a moot point on with the iPhone.
The iPhone doesn't appear to support applications, or platforms like Java and Flash. The reasons for this are downright silly: Steve Jobs said: "You don't want your phone to be an open platform...You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." When has that ever happens from a J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE, or BREW application? Never. Do you know why? On controlled systems, carriers don't let just any application on their network. They are fully tested -- sometimes by third parties and the carrier (such as BREW). This is a lame excuse, especially for a $600 phone. Every free to $50 phone out there allows application downloads and games -- and many can be user loaded or purchased from anywhere. It's one thing to be a closed platform but it's completely different to not allow anything on your platform.
My guess, though, is that Apple will make available applications for the iPhone much like they did with the 5G and 5.5G iPods -- long after launch and via iTunes only. This will make it a more closed platform than even BREW, but not shut out completely from the developer community. But that may just be wishful thinking since they would be silly to not do that. Since there is a claim of no SDK being available, maybe this won't happen at all.
That's still not the end of my list. The phone supports WiFi, which is brilliant. This allows them to show off this amazingly fast browser when on a WiFiG network. It won't be so fast while taking the subway to work. At best, you'll get sluggish EDGE speeds (very slow compared to 1x-EVDO, I'm told). There's a good chance that higher speed cellular networks will be added in a future version, if this version sells well enough.
The phone is going on a GSM network -- but is the SIM card accessible? Cingular (at&t) may be the largest carrier in the US, but it's only in the 60million sub range, which is probably not much more than a quarter of the cellular subscribers in the US. That's a lot of people to cut out of the picture since, in reality, most people won't switch carriers for it. Especially if they are currently in contracts. If it was out now and I did want to switch, my overall cost would probably be $800, not to mention getting a slower and more expensive data plan with the voice plan.
What will they do in Europe? What will they do about new laws that don't allow for specific codes to lock a compatible phone of a competing network? When is the 2G version coming out for Verizon (and Sprint) with a slide out keyboard, EVDO Rev A, and MediaFlo?
Here is a nice little video that shows some things from a news reporter. I don't know if it's the video itself, but there are a couple of places where the animation seems to stutter.
Some people have listed lack of GPS as a problem. Thing is, being a US based phone, it has to have GPS for functioning E911. So if it doesn't have it accessible to the mapping application, then it was a specific decision by Apple to not allow that. It seems silly, though, considering phone GPS is much better than regular GPS (it works inside and has the advantage of the towers basically allowing it to be differential GPS).
One thing is certain, though. I'm looking forward to the next revision of iPods. Widescreen? Check. WiFi? Maybe. Browser and Widgets? Maybe. Touch screen? Check.
January 4, 2007
More on HD-DVD and the XBox 360
Over this last weekend we got a chance to play a few HD-DVDs (via Netflix, of course). This time, however, we got to play them at full 1080p. The result was quite amazing, actually.
I don't think the quality was quite what we were expecting. It really made a big difference, and was quite noticeably better than 720p. Unfortunately, it has made us want all of the good movies on HD-DVD now.
We watched Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings over the weekend on regular DVD. We really did want to be watching them in full HD-DVD. That's not to say that they didn't look good. It was still the best at-home experience with watching them we've had.
It wasn't from lack of trying, though. Output at 1080p from the XBox 360 looks great using both component cables and a VGA (DB-25) cable. It does look a bit better with the component cables and those cables also have the optical out from the XBox 360, so that makes a huge difference in choice. On the other side, using component cables with a DVD means the output from the XBox 360 is only 480p so the LCD panel has to scale up to 1920x1080 for full screen playback. This looks only OK. It looks much better when using the VGA cable because then the XBox 360 has to do the scaling to 1920x1080 -- and it does a better job of it (the results are smoother rather than the slightly pixelated look at 480p -- you don't get any new detail, of course).
I haven't used any of the special features of HD-DVD yet. I've heard that you can do things like change the color of a car in the entire movie of Tokyo Drift. This sounds like fun, to an extent. When DVD first came out and we started buying them, we often watched the special features and occasionally watched movies with commentary. Lately, though, we haven't done any of that. Instead we've just, well, you know, watched the movies. (There are rare occasions where we watch some of the mini-features -- you know, those shorts normal people see on the guide channel or between movies on the pay channels?)
We do have a rather large library of DVD movies that we don't plan on replacing. However, I'm trying to stick to no DVD buying, especially now since we've chosen a format, even if the battle is just beginning. HD-DVD? Blueray? Downloads? Who knows? (Although I would lean towards physical ownership of the medium the bits are on that are being licensed.) Regardless, DVD is the past.
January 2, 2007
An "Unfortunate" Discovery
The title might be a bit misleading. First, it's not a terrible thing (implied by the quotes around unfortunate). Second, it's not really a discovery as I basically expected the results although I certainly didn't expect the scope of the results.
When we moved to our current location (6-7 years ago) we had cable for a few months before we cancelled it. We've done Netflix since then to cover movies and TV shows. Occasionally, we've plugged in an antenna. However, we barely get KSBW-8 and nothing else.
About an hour ago, I tried again. This time, the results were a bit different. Channel 8 still barely comes in, but 8-1 (KSBW NBC) comes in perfectly and 8-2 has weather on all the time. That's not the end of it, either. 35-1 (KCBA FOX) also comes in pretty well, although not perfectly. KION-DT CBS (46-1) and The CW (46-2) also come in nicely.
The HD channels look great! They are all either 1080i or 720p. These are 8-1, 35-1, and 46-1. The secondary channels are still 480i (8-2, 46-2) but are digital so they still look pretty good, although the pixelation is more apparent. In fact, pixelation is much more pronounced on all of the digital channels than you'll see with HD-DVD or even a DVD (the entire channel gets about 20 Mbps where a DVD gets 10 Mbps, but only has to handle a single SDTV video stream). Still, though, it's much better than analog while it's coming in. And it seems to be able to lock on even in fairly weak areas (meaning it probably has some built-in error correction). The analog sides of all of these channels are un-watchable (IMO, especially coming from DVD, HD-DVD, and other media such as XBox 360 downloads or high resolution video podcasts).
The content of the channels is still in question, of course. It's actually strange to think about waiting for something to come on or missing the start of something because I set down a few minutes too late. Sure, a ReplayTV or Tivo can solve all of that, but they've got limited memory and either guess at what you want to record or you have to remember to tell them. With Netflix, we can watch what we want when we want, with commercials professionally edited out. This comes at no cost over a normal Netflix subscription, so it's basically free. The downside? The TV shows are still on regular DVD and not HD-DVD so technically the broadcast is better -- if it was in HD to begin with.
This whole digital HD TV thing is intriguing, though. With lots of channels (5 is a lot, right? :p) it's almost like basic cable (without all those shopping channels you never watch) but completely free (aside from needing an ATSC tuner and having to sit through ads). Now the predicament: do we keep the antenna plugged in and wire it in nicely, or do we get rid of it again and stay with just basic Netflix service?
January 1, 2007
Happy New Year
Here ends a nice 4 day weekend (for me) and begins a nice, new year. Laurie and I had some great time to ourselves to watch movies and play boardgames. I had hoped to make one last post before 2006 was over but, obviously, I was unable to.
Christmas was full of family cheer. As with Thanksgiving, the was the first Christmas dinner actually hosted at our house. All went well. Shortly after we had a quiet party for folks that couldn't get out of town. This had some fun casual games, the third run of our chocolate fountain, and generally some good warmth and holiday visiting.
New Year's came and we realized we hadn't put the champagne (an almond flavored California champagne) in the freezer to chill some. It was quite yummy, but still had the champagne flavor to it, so we refrained from emptying the whole bottle right before bed.
Have a safe and happy 2007!
About Me - 2007 Edition
My name is Shane Conder. As the URL implies, my amateur radio call sign is KF6NVR. I don't do a whole lot with ham radios any more, mostly because of time and partly because the commerical world is really outpacing the amateur world these days.
I'm married to the wonderful Lauren Darcey. With her I've had many pleasant and wonderful experiences that have made my life much better. Laurie is still running her own company, Mamlambo, Inc.. We've enjoyed each others company for many years now among a broad diversity of hobbies we share, including traveling, road tripping, hiking, photography, and watching movies among many other things.
We live in a townhouse with our two bunnies (Bit & Nibble) and some fish.
I work at a company called Rocket Mobile where we specialized in writing MMS software for BREW handsets. I've been with the company for over 5 years; most recently it was acquired by Buongiorno.
I've been a gadget freak since before I can remember.
I have a BS in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This is by no means complete. My interests are both diverse and very dynamic. Someone who reads all of my blog entries on all of my sites still won't get some of my interests correctly. Hey, after all, this is all public -- I'm not going to give every detail away!
You can get a list of other links to some of my other content locations at the main URL for this website. Feel free to contact me. My email address is: 
Feel free to email me there, but I can't guarantee a response. Another good way to contact me is to post a comment.
Note:
I went to edit the original About Me post, but I realized that I should actually just post a new one and link to it, instead. That way, there is some history kept, too. Sad, too, the typos I saw in the original one. ;) This one is dated exactly three years after the first one, but the weren't written exactly three years apart (although only off by a few days).
