Seven Generational Ruminations

It's tricky reviewing a service I haven't used, but this article at The Register does examine this new service well enough to give me an idea of what it's about. Joost is a new service for delivering video over the Internet in a way different than has been tried in the past.

Almost exactly ten years ago I began a job at VXtreme, one of the early pioneers in sending video over the Internet. In the summer of 1997 Microsoft bought VXtreme and turned their product into Windows Media Player. This and the other existing video delivery methods like Real, and Quicktime, and the Flash video services like YouTube, all represent an old model of delivering video. It involves a central server or server farm that holds the video as data files. With the right client software someone running a web browser can access that video content and play it on their computer. The client software makes a TCP/IP connection to that server farm and streams the video over the Internet from the central server farm. Hence this causes a lot of Internet traffic to these central server farms, and to host a massive online video event requires an excessive amount of bandwidth connecting to that server farm.

I recently bought a Mac Mini to try installing in my living room. It's an experiment to see what having a powerful multimedia device can mean when it's taken away from the office desktop and you try to put it in the living area. It's an interesting experiment and I'll be posting some observations about it later. However I'm finding this CNET NEWS article interesting: Apple, Microsoft have designs on your living room

It discusses product announcements from both Apple and Microsoft last week concerning new devices and services for delivering entertainment to the living room. For years there's been this promise of digitized entertainment products offering us instant access to vast reams of movies or whatnot from the convenience of our living room. Convergence is the buzzword and it's riding a wave of increasingly powerful computer devices where you can embed in a small box computing power that once took rooms full of equipment. This gives the devices around us more flexibility.

One of the trickiest things to recognize about working in digital art is whether you are working in the color you see on the screen. Ideally all computer monitors would work the same way, displaying the same color given the same signals from the computer. In the real world monitors vary slightly in how they reproduce the colors. This means that you may think you're working with a nice shade of pink or whatnot, while the color that's actually going into the image you're painting is much redder than you think.

General Motors has launched what is probably an ill-advised marketing website. At chevyapprentice.com/ they have a contest in which you can make a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Tahoe. The best commercial wins something.

However, what's happening is a bunch of people making activist type commercials.

Rather than something extolling the SUV, they're instead talking about global warming, destroyed environment and, in one case, a memorial from one brother to another who was sent to Iraq to fight for oil.

Earlier I wrote about plans by BellSouth and other ISP's to discriminatorially throttle 3rd party Internet traffic. The BellSouth CEO was quoted saying, essientially, those other companies (such as Google) need to pay to use their lines. And that if those 3rd parties did not pay up, they'd throttle however much of their lines those 3rd parties can use.

The other day I was at Target looking for clothes, and wandered by the video section. This one rack had "The Wedding Crashers (unrated edition)", some unrated edition of some other movie, plus Toy Story 2. Well something in my mind clicked and I started wondering what an "unrated" version of Toy Story 2 would be like. What kind of toys would appear in the unrated version? And what would Cowgirl Jessie, the old prospector, etc, all be doing? And we might learn why the main character's name is Woody...

Well ....

Is the DVD "dead"? That's what this article suggests: DVD is dead, but what's coming next?. But, wait, if DVD is dead then why are the stores so full of DVD's? Well, weren't the stores at one time or another full of vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes or VHS/Beta tapes? Yes, they were. What happened to all of them?

I started using Mac's a few years ago as an anti-vote against the evils of Microsoft. As a longtime professional geek, it seemed that OS X as "Unix with a pretty face" with high quality web and multimedia applications was the perfect system for me. Especially as they offered zero virus problems (spyware hadn't been unleashed yet, but Mac OS X also has none of them either) and zero hassles with strange quirky incompatibilities.

So far it's been fine but for one thing. Apple's focus has moved squarely to the iPod market.

In my previous posting I talked about how listening to podcasts does not require owning an iPod. All you need is software that receives podcasts, such as iTunes. It's a kind of incorrect name to call it a podcast, don't you think? Anyway, I started to discuss how to find and subscribe to podcasts, and then realized it would be better to cover that in a separate posting.

Last night I was listening to some Chris Pirillo podcasts and something he said several times really grated on me. The idea is that the only way to listen to a podcast is by using an iPod. But, that's not required, and my proof is that I'm not using an iPod to listen to podcasts.