A Barcamp event is being held in Boston on May 17th-18th, it looks interesting, I may well attend on one of the days:
What: BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees,
for attendees.
There is no registration fee, but you don’t just attend a BarCamp –
you can participate in discussions, demo your projects, or join into
other cooperative events.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software,
startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking,
robotics,mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software,
programming languages, and the future of technology.
Who: You, if you’re a geek or somewhat geeky. Pre-registration is
highly recommended.
When: May 17/18, 2008 starting each day at 9 AM or whenever you
want to arrive.
Where: Matignon High School, 1 Matignon Rd., Cambridge, MA. The
school is a short 10 minute walk from either the Davis Sq. or Alewife
stations on the MBTA Red Line. Parking is available on site.
Details: For more information go to http://barcampboston.org.
Previously on this blog I described some issues I had with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card upgrade from Apple.
In short I ordered two cards thinking that I could use both in my MacPro, but one of the cards died on me and Apple support told me that they do not support putting two of those cards on a MacPro.
The dead card is now on its way back to Apple for a refund, and I put the two NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video cards I pulled from the machine back in the machine (now running with three cards, one for each display.)
I did a little more research on Apple’s web site and a dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card configuration should be supported. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card draws 110W and the MacPro supports up to 300W of power for video cards (presumably from the PCIe bus itself and via the motherboard jumper.)
Bob Cringely has a good article on IT Consultants, specifically what makes good consultants and bad consultants.
I was an IT consultant for 10 years, from 1993-2003, my clients ran the gamut from small startup to large multi-national corporation, and the contracts ran from short two week stints to much longer multi-year contracts.
This paragraph in his post really resonated with me:
The best consultant I ever knew was Christine Comaford-Lynch, who is now an author and a VC and no longer does IT consulting at all. A key part of her success was her requirements gathering process. She turned it into a very effective collaboration effort involving the key people who would use the software. The requirements would be tight, the project would be highly focused, and there would be little or no scope creep. When it came time to implement the project her project managers didn’t have to be Attila’s — there was cooperation and enthusiasm. The training and start up of the application was quicker and easier. There were few surprises that needed to be fixed.
Over time I learned that the key to a successful consulting job was setting and managing expectations, explaining to the client exactly what they were going to get, and making it clear where one’s expertise ran out. Clients really appreciates that last point, I had developed a very specific set of skills and would focus on those. While it does mean that money is left on the table, but it means that you don’t set yourself up for failure.
For some reason I am starting to get a lot of comment spam from my blog, it started a few days ago and I am not sure why because usually I get no comment spam.
A few days ago the news that Apple had briefly overtaken Wal-Mart to became the number one music seller in the US came out on a number of Apple related weblogs (Ars, AppleInsider).
The AppleInsider post has a table which shows this. It aggregates all music sales, I would have liked to see online and store bought music split up which would have given us a better pictures of what the online sales split is.
But two figures that are really interesting to me.
The first is the percentage of music that is sold online today, 29.1% according to the table. Recently I saw that the music industry is about a $10bn business which means that close to $3bn is being spent on online music. And that is just going to go up.
The other is where Amazon stood in the rankings. Amazon differentiates itself from Apple in two ways, one is that it sells CDs and the other is that their music is all DRM-free (whereas the music on Apple’s iTunes is mostly not DRM-free). I would have expected Amazon to be doing better given the ruckus over DRM. One possible conclusion is that DRM matters less to consumers than convenience (having bought music on both iTunes and Amazon, I find the former to be more convenience than the latter but that is a personal preference).
This post by Jason Calacanis on “How to save money running a startup” has been making the rounds and drawing a lot of criticism as well as some praise.
My feeling is that he has it mostly right, and some of the points really resonated with me. If you are going to build a startup, you should read his tips, and have a good reason if you choose to ignore any of them.
I sometimes wonder if we will even look back on the last 50 years of TV watching as the “bad ol’ days of TV watching” where shows we on at certain times and we were limited in what we could watch and where we could watch.
I also wonder what the next 50 years will bring?
It seems a small part of the world came to its senses while I was away, namely the HD war finally being over with Blu-Ray coming out on top.
This is, of course, “a good thing”. Nothing beats competing standards to constrain and confuse the market. Ultimately consumers want simplicity and convenience. With this over everybody wins, and I am sure that Toshiba can carve out a good piece of the Blu-Ray player business.
I suspect that this shift on their part was due to the realization that in the long-term the real threat to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is online distribution and that a protracted format war would only have sped up the consumer’s shift to that as a means of delivery at the expense of shiny discs.
The Economist has an interesting article about the current state of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, and makes an interesting case that this is not the battle to watch.They suggest that the real battle is going to be over how the content is delivered.
They suggest that thumb drives may be an option, and that faster networks are another option:
One candidate is the thumb drive, the non-volatile memory stick you plug into a computer’s USB port. Their storage capacity has soared over the past few years from megabytes to gigabytes. Industry insiders expect that, within a few years, a 32-gigabyte USB drive capable of holding as much as a Blu-ray disc will cost about the same as the latter does today. And it will be more portable, more rugged, easier to play and recordable to boot.
But before Moore’s Law can work its inexorable magic, the telephone companies will start pushing their own alternative. Over the past few years, firms such as Verizon and AT&T have been laying fat optical pipes over the “last mile” from their local telephone stations to people’s homes. In what they call a “triple play”, they aim to bundle television and broadband internet access along with telephone services in order to slow the inroads being made in their own business by the cable-television providers.
That’s only half of it. Verizon’s FiOS (fibre-optic service) can deliver raw data at speeds up to 50 megabits per second. That’s twice the as much as needed to deliver the video quality of a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc. AT&T’s U-verse isn’t far behind.
Both see high-definition video as the key to beating the cable providers, which can’t match the phone companies’ ability to provide massive bandwidth to individual households. The cable industry’s new DOCSIS 3.0 technology can transmit data at a whopping 160 megabits per second, but the bandwidth has to be shared by all the households on the same cable loop. As a result, few cable subscribers can get more than five or six megabits per second—nowhere near enough to pump high-definition video into the home.
My money is on faster networks, why send physical media when you can send bits, then again sending a Blu-ray/HD DVD
