Monthly Archives: October 2005

Apropos Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court…

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… this from Martin Kettle, writing in yesterday’s Guardian:

Back in the dawn of American constitutional history, Alexander Hamilton set out the reasons why it was important to have the Senate act as a check on presidential nominations of this kind. The Senate, he wrote, needs to make a president “both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same state to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

Earlier in the week, Bush was asked: “Of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the supreme court?”. The president answered “Yes”.

The new Betamax problem

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This morning’s Observer column.

History repeats itself, said Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Step forward the consumer electronics industry. In the late 1970s, two incompatible video recording systems emerged: Betamax, from Sony; and VHS, from JVC. The battle between them became one of the canonical case studies in the curriculums of business schools, illustrating the victory of marketing over technology, a moral deeply comforting to sales executives and those who teach marketing.

Although the Betamax format was technically superior, VHS won the battle for the hearts and pockets of consumers. It is thus seen as a cautionary tale for smart-ass engineers who think technical sweetness is all that matters.

As ever, reality is slightly more complicated than marketing myth….

Quote of the day

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If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Google’s true corporate mission was to organize the world’s wealth, not its information.

John Paczkowski, writing in Good Morning, Silicon Valley about the news that Google’s income increased seven fold over the last year.

Forget that air guitar…

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… and get one of these.

It’s a Yamaha EZ AG. Each fret has six illuminated microswitches which, when depressed, simulates the sound of a string being pressed at that location. If you want to learn, then the device will ‘play’ a desired riff, lighting up the relevant switches/frets as it goes. Quentin and I found it when buying audio kit at Digital Village. I left him in charge of it while I went to pay. As I was signing the credit card chit, what should I hear but the opening bars of Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, played expertly.

Someone (Gordon Brown?) should give one of these to Tony Blair when he steps down from Number 10. After all, he used to be an air guitarist before he took up politics. A snip at £149.99!

HP panics over Blu-Ray

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Bill Gates’ recent assertion that Sony’s Blu-ray DVD standard is “anti-consumer” and “won’t work well on PCs”… has apparently put The Fear into Hewlett Packard. At a meeting of the Blu-ray Disc Association Wednesday afternoon, HP, which has shipped a Wintel PC or two in its time, delivered a pointed ultimatum: Include two technologies supported in HD DVD or we will consider switching allegiances. The first of HP’s requested features, “mandatory managed copy,” allows users to copy high-definition movies for use on home networks. The second, iHD, supports PC-friendly interactivity and is slated to be implemented in Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. HP was “shocked” when Microsoft and Intel announced support for HD DVD, and hopes the addition of these features will lead to a compromise between the rival groups and hopefully a unified standard. “We’re still supporting Blu-ray, but we’re very serious that we want these technologies,” said Maureen Weber, general manager of personal storage in HP’s personal-systems group. “If in the end, they’re supported in one and then not the other; we’ll have to make a choice.”

Coincidentally, HP’s appeal came on the very same day that Forrester predicted Blu-ray will win the DVD format war. “After a long and tedious run-up to the launch, it is now clear to Forrester that the Sony-led Blu-ray format will win,” Ted Schadler, a Forrester analyst, said in a report. “But unless the HD DVD group abandons the field, it will be another two years before consumers are confident enough of the winner to think about buying a new-format DVD player.”

David Pogue likes the video iPod

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See here for his enthusiastic review.

The biggest surprise: watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears; the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most people’s TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen that’s across the room.

Many people — including Apple’s chief, Steve Jobs — have predicted that video on the iPod would never be as popular as music. One crucial reason is that watching requires your full attention. You can’t do something else simultaneously, like driving or working.

In practice, these predictions turn out to be absolutely accurate. (I established this fact through scientific hands-on testing. Unintentionally absorbed in an episode of “Lost” while walking through Grand Central Terminal, I marched directly into a steel support girder.)

Why Microsoft isn’t supporting the Sony DVD format

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Well, well. Here’s an interesting interview in The Daily Princetonian with Bill Gates. The bit that grabbed me is this:

Q: There has been a lot of debate about the next generation Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies in recent weeks. It seems more and more companies are backing the Blu-ray standard. The current debate seems to harken back to the Betamax vs. VHS format war in the 1970s and 80s, where Betamax was ostensibly the superior technology yet it did not gain wide acceptance. Why is Microsoft not backing Blu-ray today — a technology that many consider to be superior?

Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

    It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.

    For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.

At first sight, this looks encouraging. At last, a major computer technology company is standing up to the copyright thugs. The only problem is that the same Bill Gates has ceded veto rights to Hollywood studios over some features of the forthcoming Vista (aka Longhorn) release of Windows. Not much evidence of concern for consumers there. So either Redmond’s right hand knoweth not what its left hand doeth; or Mr Gates speaks with forked tongue.

Update: Cian Ginty of Gamestoaster.com writes:

Possibly overlooked by many people, Microsoft’s main reasons for not supporting the format may be because Sony is to use Blue-ray in their rival PS3 games console, which is to launch within a year after MS’s Xbox 360 console which should be out for Christmas.

Quagmire news

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From today’s New York Times…

Mr. Bush’s own way of talking about the future, in Iraq and beyond, has undergone a subtle but significant change in recent weeks. In several speeches, he has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” While he still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions. It is a very different tone than administration officials sounded in the heady days after Saddam Hussein’s fall, and then his capture.

After an extensive debate inside the White House, Mr. Bush has begun directly rebutting the arguments laid out in manifestos and missives from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden’s top aide. He did so again on Saturday, quoting from one of Mr. Zawahiri’s purported letters – one whose authenticity is still the subject of some question – which predicted that the Iraq war would end as Vietnam had, and that, in Mr. Bush’s words, “America can be made to run again.”

The president argued anew that the terrorist leader was “gravely mistaken.””There’s always the question of whether we give these guys more credibility by directly addressing their arguments,” one of Mr. Bush’s most senior aides said recently. “But the president was concerned that we hadn’t described Iraq to the American people for what it is – a struggle of ideologies that isn’t going to end with one election, or one constitution, or even a string of elections.”

Sound familiar? Check out Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, a sobering account of how the US got sucked into an unwinnable war in Vietnam.