vaguelyaware.com

seriously rockin’ this hair?

what year is it?

[update] he may be clueless (or way ahead of his time) on coif couture but his politics are sound. too bad most politics are decided on who is the best looking candidate.

As Toshiba, the major backer of the HD DVD format, lowers its prices (50%) on players to attract more buyers the question again arises about which high definition format will reign supreme. I’m going to answer this question for everyone debating it.

The answer is, who cares?

High speed broadband is nearly everywhere, where it isn’t people probably don’t care much about high def DVDs anyway. With the introduction of downloadable, rentable, high def movies straight to your tv, no one will care to shuffle through discs to watch their movies. Especially when those discs offer more content restrictions than their less expensive downloadable counterparts. I can watch the same movie without using gas to get to the store, or energy in the production, packaging or distribution of the disc, and I can watch it on my TV, iPod, computer or phone. I haven’t seen any bluray phones yet, that will be Sony’s next Xbox killer (sarcasm… I hope).

A friend of mine, Larry, proposed that the reason Microsoft backed HD-DVD with their Xbox was to purposely support the loser because they want downloadable content to win, and go though their Xbox media store or whatever its called. They don’t want set top DVD players to be the future, they want software based players to be the future, because they utilize MS software.

I don’t know MS’ reasons for their selection, maybe they aren’t as crafty as we are crediting them for, but either way. I do suspect Apple is, and it appears they see the high def DVD format is as irrelevant as I am suggesting.

The internet is the new media distribution format, the rest is just a waste of R&D money.

I just got finished reading this article, its rather interesting, and most thought provoking are the comments. Although most web comments are reserved for inane tripe, and there was plenty of that, there was some some value to be found.

I agreed with the assertion that Americans have a relatively high expectation of living standards. As one commenter pointed out, even people considered poor have a roof over their head, a 2000 calorie diet (however terrible it may be), cell phone, internet access, designer clothing, etc. Hardly a rough life in comparison to other countries.

The Democratic party has recently raised issues with health care and higher education. The fact is that some people cannot afford these things, and some people don’t WANT to afford them. I know we have all seen people with flashy cars with big fancy wheels and expensive stereos with the latest cell phones that have no health insurance. They have their own priorities. These insurance systems seem to perpetuate the high costs of health care, as the doctors know they patient won’t care how much it costs as long as their copay is under $50. That way they can set the precedence for a $150k operation that takes a few hours. To tax the whole country for gov’t provided health care would put the same frustrating burden on tax-payers the rest of the taxes have. Some people are healthy, careful people that will never use these services, or simply choose not to use the likely poorly run gov’t facilities. Why should they end up paying for services they don’t use?

The commenters also hit upon a very important point, part of the problem here is motivation. They criticize a “Darwinist economics” policy, yet fail to express why that is a bad policy. Evolution is the actual process of improving society, motivation to get yourself something to eat is what keeps you alive. If the dems just hand out the food they skimmed from motivated people, all you end up with is a group of people that question why they work hard when it gets handed out for “free” anyway, thereby driving down the collective motivation of society. Let’s look at it from the evolution perspective, everyone has heard of the issue of animals raised in zoos, given food, care, and protection all their lives only to be turned loose in the wild and live about 15 minutes. Yes, I know I’m exaggerating, but the point is that a darwinist economic policy promotes innovation, production, investing, risk taking and hard work. If you don’t you end up hungry. Yes, we are human, and being so a human may be called upon to help another human. That should be left up to private enterprise and citizens, not only does it offer PR, it also takes the burden off the gov’t. It also goes back to a core psychological value, reciprocity. The principal is that if someone does something nice for you, that you return the favor, its expected, and its no wonder that people get tired of handing out money to people that don’t appreciate it, there is no reciprocity. Then again, with a gov’t handout, there really isn’t much of an opportunity to do something in return. But if another person or company does something for you, its much easier to return the favor, in a way you are capable of. And lastly I’m going to throw in the very inhuman portion of the Darwinist economics: the people that lack so much motivation that they don’t want to work to earn their place in society, there are LOTS of opportunities for lazy jobs in this country - are those the kinds of people we want to be helping and nurturing anyway?

A while back a wrote a rather long post about the Sirius/XM merger that I never ended up posting. Mostly because I needed to proof read it for errors, regardless, the merger still has not been either approved or denied, and well, it still bugs me that this is matter it so difficult for legislators and I would like to talk about what it means for investors and consumers.

First off I would like to say how critical this merger is for the satellite radio industry. If the merger does NOT go through, Sirius and XM will collapse in a matter of years. Why? Of course I have to have reason to say that, as all indications suggest they will be in the black in a few months, but they will still have to pay their loans off once they are cash flow positive. They will also have to deal with the fact that their satellites are not cheap to maintain and do not have an infinite lifetime, they in fact have a very finite lifetime. Most satellite operators plan for their spacecrafts to last no longer than 10 years. Well thats a few years away, and they could potentially gain even more subscribers especially with all the automaker alliances. While entirely possible, there are some new players in the sector that SatRad will need to contend with, and yes, I am treating this whole industry as a sector, radio. I don’t care if its terrestrial, free, internet streaming or time-shifted, its all audio entertainment. Current SatRad competitors: MP3 players (read:iPod), traditional terrestrial radio, thats right, no one cares about CDs anymore. New players: HD terrestrial Radio, streaming internet radio. You may say that streaming radio to your car isn’t quite here yet, but it is, Pandora already has clients for many Sprint phones and as Sprint and Clearwire are rolling out their 802.16 WiMax products the likelihood that a WiMax modem will find itself strapped in to every new car in America is not so far from a possibility.

Why this concerns SatRad: Sirius is only $12.95/mo which is a good price in my opinion. But if you were to add traffic data its up to about $18/mo still a good price. You are still stuck listening to what their DJs play. Now consider the possibility of Sprint doing something smart with their WiMax: one account with one modem costs $40/mo, too much for your car, but what if they allow you to get multiple modems for a bit less for each device, say $20/mo for each additional. Now your car can have lots of data for not much more money. Additionally the data goes both ways, meaning you can listen to whatever you want, streaming to your car with functional pause, next track etc. Add time-shifting for uninterrupted service even through dead spots. Why this is good for Sprint: allowing more modems at a lower price means people will get modems even for devices they don’t use much. If I could have my laptop get wireless internet for $20/mo, I would, even though my phone has internet, and I have WiFi everywhere I go. Sprint will only need to make sure that people don’t end up having 6 modems on their accounts rented out to friends to avoid the primary premium.

Market left wide open: The car computer hardware. See my next post, an idea I would like to explore.

The bottom line is that people like control of their music, but they also like new music. Wireless data connections will push both of those items to your car, bike, hush puppies, wherever you go, along with many other services you may want. Locational information, traffic data, even album art, we know how much Steve loves album art. Might be time Apple stepped up and offered a subscription based Pandora service going right to your devices.

Sirius needs this merger, and it should be approved for many reasons, mostly because monopolies refer to need based items, nobody requires you to listen to Howard Stern on your way to work.

Originally written in March of 2007. Not going to proof-read.

If anyone glances at a Wall Street Journal at least once a week they will have seen this, the two only players in the satellite radio industry have struck a deal to merge into one large company, the only barrier now is the FCC. One problem being the obvious antitrust laws, but the FCC also added a law specific to the satellite industry requiring that the only two broadcasting licenses not be owned by the same entity. Well thanks FCC, although you seem to be over-stepping your bounds there by trying to regulate issues already passed on to other branches of the government, it at least seems it is coming from a good place by offering the consumer more competition which usually causes benefits the consumer. We all know if the governments worked like that our taxes would be far less than half of what they are now. But thats a discussion for another day.

My main complaint is of former AG John Ashcroft’s letter regarding the matter. In the letter he compares the satellite radio industry to the satellite tv industry and opposes the merger based on precedence. What Ashcroft seems to ignore is that the two business although they both have satellite in their name are working with a much different playing field.

Lets look at the differences: TV broadcasters all distribute the same content. This reduces the bidding wars the companies have to provide their subscribers with exclusive content which they pay dearly for.

Other competing sectors: This one is well covered by the Siri/XM guys, there are terrestrial radios, online radio stations, CD players, and the juggernaut, iPod. iPod has already alienated a majority of terrestrial radio due to its easy updating and lack of commercials. This is the only advantage to satellite radio right now, and the reason these guys are pushing for exclusive content.

Costs: We all know profits are maximized with more customers, right now the SatTV companies have many more customers (DirecTV now at 16M subscribers, Dish @ 13M, Siri & XM @ 6M each) to spread their costs over because they have been around far longer. The reason the SatTV companies were able to blossom is because of the lack of cable or terrestrial signal availability in rural areas. The SatTV fixed that issue and people were willing to pay a premium for the technology, which was needed to allow the companies to operate. About the time that the SatTV companies covered their startup costs and have enough customers to operate with positive cash-flow the cable companies started rolling out more cable which means now SatTV companies have to start competing with the competition, but they still don’t have the huge bidding contests for content like SatRadio.

Technology: Satellites cost a lot of money to launch and operate. The last figure I heard was about 100M per year for its usable life (approx 10yrs). Even though SatRadio does not need many satellites to provide service (they use much less bandwidth than SatTV), they have to deal with possible down-time due to unexpected problems, read: they need backup satelittes. XM also has to work with the problem of having LEO sats, which means they have an elliptical orbit where the spacecraft is unusable for a portion of its orbit. Siri uses a GSS orbit that remains fixed so will need fewer spacecrafts, XM seems to be joining that system with its new crafts. Unfortunately using this system, they are extremely limited in their coverage area, usually limited to the CONUS.

Advertisements: The TV industry and terrestrial radio is driven by having the most appealing show so the broadcaster can demand more money for the ads broadcasted during the show, unfortunately the majority of the content on the SatRadios is free of commercials and does not adhere to these practices, so the only way to attract more money is more customers, and the only way to do that is to get people away from their iPods. A difficult task to take on.

The differences go on and on far beyond what is here, the only real similarity is that both industries use satellites to broadcast their content, the rest is completely different .

Regardless how ignorant Ashcroft is of these differences he is right on one account, a single company discourages competitive behavior. The critics are also right, both companies have poor business models and are stupid to pay so much for content just to one-up each other. Where all the critics are wrong is if this particular instance of an anti-competitive-sounding-merger is a negative step for consumers. A Siri/XM merger may have a monopoly on a specific sector of radio broadcasting, but they surely do not have a monopoly on mobile music. If they push costs too high consumers will go elsewhere, they have plenty of options. This is an instance of people getting paranoid of anti-competitive mergers. Apple has sold well over 88M iPods, there are thousands of radio stations in this country, and it is quite easy to pop a CD into that car CD player.

[Update] As I post this nearly a year later, I just want to add: why is the national broadcasting association so adamantly fighting the merger if they don’t compete?

i was reading a review of leopard, just to figure out if everyone else thought Apple released this way too soon like i did, the review i read asserted that leopard was the dirtiest release yet, but also most worthwhile. i guess i would agree. i would prefer to have it rather than wait even longer, even if i have to dual boot, which i incidentally did so i can go back to my working copy of tiger (two hard drives).

first of all, i can’t sync my .mac. WHAT THE FU**? the MOST useful feature of a mac is the .mac syncing where all your settings preferences bookmarks mail rules etc (screw commas) follow you around to all of your computers. and most of the time, it works fine.

now when i try to sync my keychain (the only non-working part) it is asking me for my password on my other computer (old tiger installation). thats fine, but what isn’t fine is that it won’t take the password. no matter what i do. it refuses to work. even resetting the data fails with the same problem. okay whatever, i manually imported my keychain for now. im hoping they fix it soon. im hoping they know about it.

more annoying is the problem with my iphone. wth?!!!

For purposes of indexing “The iPhone “****” cannot be synced. You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.”

also annoying is how all the apps seems much faster, but the UI all seems more sluggish.

i LOVE the new print dialog. yes, there are some really really cool features. i just wish the most valuable features worked better. and that apple published known issues so people could rest assured they were working on it, not stew about how they are going to get this piece of crap working again.

[UPDATE]: This iPhone issue was caused by some errant permissions remaining from my old installation. Apparently if I were to migrate rather than clean install Leopard my iPhoto library might have been copied and had the proper privileges set on it rather than just being copied. That action resulted in the following:

Basically i needed to reset permissions on my iPhoto Library. Please note, the Disk Utility repair permissions action did NOT fix this. Needs to be done manually.

Just got Leopard installed on my machines, the first annoyance was that the .Mac syncing did not seem to work well, needed the password to my old keychain in order to merge with my ‘new’ mac. Okay thats fine, but it wouldn’t take the password, even thought it was certainly correctly typed in. Whatever. Still fighting with that.

The new downloads stack will be nice, but would also be nice to empty it quickly and easily, without having to click it open the folder select all and drag to the trash. Okay so not that much work but I wrote a little Automater action to take care of it for you. Feel free to put a new icon that makes more sense to you, I stole it from some app online named compost. Mostly because it was quick to find and made more sense than the default icon.

Here is a link to the file empty-stack.zip To use just unzip the file into your downloads stack. If you rename it, it will delete itself.

A google for “iphone calculator bug” will yield a few bugs, but it looks like most of the found bugs have been fixed at this point. And this one a bit less obvious than a truncation or rounding due to display capacity. This is on the current version of the iPhone firmware : 1.1.1

What is 49,999,999.99+.008?? 49,999,999.9980 Right?

Ask your iPhone: Where 49,999,999.99+.008 = 5

This problem exists with any number where the iPhone’s screen capacity for numbers is fully used, for instance: 4999.999999+.0000008 = 5

It seems the calculator does not use sufficient significant figures in calculations.

Not a serious problem since most people don’t need to work with large decimals, and if they do they can just take the TI-89 out of their other pocket.

My point in all this is that there needs to be more stuff to do on the iPhone, because if I’m sitting in class looking for calculator errors it is obviously a boring device (when I don’t need directions, to talk to someone, or to find out where I am supposed to be with the calendar).

i saw this neat little app on gizmodo today. Allows nearly full control of iTunes via your iPhone. which is really cool if you have it streamed around your house via AirPort Express & AirTunes. First impressions are good, i would like to see a function that allows you to play a track next in the party shuffle playlist.