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
I would not have thought that the Economist would be looking at and testing various Linux distributions but they do in this article.
The aim of the article is to come up with a Linux distribution that could be used by schoolchildren on hand-me-down computer gear (at least 2-3 years old).
They test the usual suspect and interestingly come down in favor of gOS.
I have to admit that I like Ubuntu on the desktop and CentOS on the server, but I am currently downloading the gOS live disc to try out.
After reading this:
As the major studios continue to battle over Blu-ray and HD DVD, the competing standards for high-definition DVDs, it’s always worth considering whether both camps are ultimately doomed – leapfrogged by straight-to-the-home digital downloads of high definition movies.
by Brad Stone reporting from CES, I have to wonder if is not right. All the hell-and-fury that is the DVD format war could seem pretty moot when we look back on this a few years hence.
Personally I have not upgraded my DVD player, and I am not likely to do so even if the DVD format war is over, or cheap dual-format players come on the market (by cheap I mean under $300).
I came across this article on Forbes on how the army is adopting macs to diversify its platform mix to protect itself.
This is probably the most telling quote:
The Army’s push to use Macs to help protect its computing corps got its start in August 2005, when General Steve Boutelle, the Army’s chief information officer, gave a speech calling for more diversity in the Army’s computer vendors. He argued the approach would both increase competition among military contractors and strengthen its IT defenses.
Along with this one:
Wallington, a division chief in the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That’s because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military’s computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.
Standardizing on a single platform does make sense from an administration point of view, if all your machines are running the same operating system, it makes sense that your administration costs would be less than if they were running multiple operating systems.
The flip side of this is that once a chink has been found in the operating system you are using, all your machines are vulnerable. Think of this in biological terms, if all life on earth was vulnerable to the same diseases, then it would easy for any single disease to become extremely dangerous. On the other hand with diversity, no single disease can wipe out all life on earth.
The same goes with your computers, if they running a mix of operating systems, then only part of your computers are vulnerable to any single threat.
Ok, so this is somewhat simplistic, but you get the point. I once attended a very good presentation by Danny Hillis on the subject.
Dig deeper into the biological analogy and you will run into the work of Werner Vogels who, before becoming CTO at Amazon, spent a lot of time looking at what computing could learn from biology.
I recently discovered Olivia Judson’s column entitled “The Wild Side” on the NY Times site.
The column ran in June 2008, and went into hiatus until recently. Back then she was posting one article a day, and now she is posting at a much saner pace. Her back articles are a must-read if you are interested in evolution.
AOL has decided to end development on Netscape Navigator.
Netscape Navigator was the second browser I used (I used Mosaic before that). For a while it had a commanding lead on the market but once Internet Explorer was released, it just lost ground steadily.
Netscape Navigator became pretty much irrelevant more than a few years ago, and should have been killed off then.
That being said, we should not forget its contribution to the web in general.
I just updated my blogroll and my podcasts, new stuff added, old stuff dropped.
I have become quite frustrated with WordPress and Safari 3.0 of late. Specifically with the editing of posts.
When editing a post (which has already been posted), doing edits in the ‘Visual’ window and saving them will wreck the post, switching from ‘Visual’ to ‘Code’ in the editing window completely wrecks the layout of the posts. Even cleaning up the layout of the post in the ‘Code’ window does nothing. The post is just one long sentence.
Very, very frustrating…
