Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • social search skepticism

    Last summer, there was a dust-up between several high-profile “web 2.0” personalities that made for interesting reading. It started with Robert Scoble, who created a three-part video essay provacatively titled “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years“. Scoble is obsessed with the idea that search engine optimization (SEO) is poisoning the well of search and that adding the “social” element will magically improve relevance. Dave Winer had a fairly succinct rebuttal, Danny Sullivan took issue with Scoble’s explicit equating of SEO with spam, and Rand Fishkin steps through Scoble’s arguments and fact-checks it to oblivion.

    Overall, I came away from the fracas convinced that social networking is not some magic bullet and the problems of “how do I find information” and “who do I want to interact with” to be wholly separate ones. I like a walled garden for my identity-driven personal and professional interactions, but I also want to wander in the wild when need be. It’s the same reason I am skeptical of “personalized search” services like Google’s own “Web History” initiative. It’s not the privacy issues that worry me, but rather the imposed limitation on what my search results are based on what my search results were in the past. Why should I assume that for a given search, the most relevant results will necessarily be related to the searches I previously made? Presumably I search for something based on a need for new information I do not currently possess.

    The same argument applies to “social search” initiatives like Delver, recently praised by RWW as “more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using ‘normal’ search engine.” Why is a filter derived from my social graph any guarantee of more relevance to my query?

    If anything, the onus on the user is to craft a better query; to that end Google offers an advanced set of search operators that provide tremendous power and flexibility. Overall, every search is unique, and no amount of personalization or social networking is going to change that fact. If anything, the right approach is to allow a search to stimulate new searches; ie ask new questions rather than spoonfeed me old answers.

  • HD-DVD RIP

    Engadget Japan live-blogged the official announcement by Toshiba president Nishida-san that Toshiba is discontinuing HD-DVD and ceding the format war to Blu-ray. Some interesgting tidbits from the Q&A following the announcement:

    Q: Any plans to adopt Blu-ray?
    A: No plans at all, not at this moment.

    Q: How many HD DVD players and recorders, exactly, did you sell?
    A: 600,000 players in the US — 300,000 of which were Xbox 360 HD DVD drives. 100,000 units were sold in Europe. And about 10,000 players and 20,000 recorders in Japan. So about 730,000 units worldwide.

    Nishida-san did say that Toshiba would stockpile HD-DVD media and sell them online for use by owners of HD-DVD recorders. Also, Toshiba will “continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives.”

    The full press release with more details is available here.

    I’e still got my eye on the Toshiba HD players at Amazon. I’m tempted to buy the 1080i player (HD-A3) right now for $117. Or should I wait until the price on the 1080p one (HD-A30) starts to drop? Any thoughts?

  • one year left

    and then your old analog TVs are done. Just a friendly reminder.

  • acknowledging the inevitable

    Well, I was wrong. Even if this news is denied by Toshiba, the mere fact of it getting leaked will only accelerate the inevitable:

    While denying that a decision on the fate of HD DVD has been made, a Toshiba marketing exec left the door wide open. “Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players,” Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, told The Hollywood Reporter.

    At current price points—HD DVD players are available for as little as $119—Toshiba has to be taking a substantial loss on each player sold. If there was a realistic prospect that those loss-leader sales would result in a large installed base for future movie sales and resultant royalties, those losses would be eagerly embraced. That’s an all-but-impossible scenario at this point, however.

    It’s time to concede that Blu-ray will win the format war. The economics of selling the players cheap no longer make sense.

    Still, that puts me in a quandary. Given that I (and literally everyone else who watches TV) will be in the market for an HDTV soon, do I now have to budget an additional $400 for a blu-ray player? I wonder if buying a HD-DVD player still makes sense – you can pick one up at fire-sale prices and they are outstanding upscalers for your existing old-fashioned DVD library. In fact, I might not bother with a dedicated Blu-ray player ever, since the Playstation 3 is actually more future-proof and feature rich than any standalone. In fact, bundling the BD player with the PS3 in hindsight turns out to have been genius, not just for winning the format war, but also for another more subtle reason:

    While HD DVD may have done a better job of future-proofing their players, the immaturity of the Blu-ray spec hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle. At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market. Still, this means that roughly 15 percent of the early adopters are going to be frozen out of the latest and greatest Blu-ray features with BD-Live. That’s bad news for current owners of stand-alone players, but with the price of the PlayStation 3 now down to $399.99 and the format wars shaping up nicely in Blu-ray’s favor, the system may actually be less expensive and more powerful than the latest-generation standalone players.

    This is quite the odd turn of events: it was assumed when the PS3 launched that the gaming system would be the Trojan horse that brought Blu-ray into the homes of the mass market. Now? The inexpensive and future-proofed Blu-ray functions of the PS3, matched with the high-quality upscaling the system brings to normal DVDs, may be the Trojan horse bringing gaming to home theater enthusiasts.

    Game, set, match to Sony. But if there are still HD-DVD players available for sale when I’m ready to go HD, I think that’s a better value proposition for DVD playback.

    (UPDATE: Steven beat me to the punch)

    UPDATE 2: confirmed, Toshiba is getting out:

    TOKYO (Reuters) – Toshiba Corp (6502.T: Quote, Profile, Research) is planning to give up on its HD DVD format for high-definition video, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research), a company source said on Saturday.

    Japanese public broadcaster NHK had earlier reported that Toshiba would suffer losses in the tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) as it scrapped production of HD DVD players and recorders and took other steps to exit the business.

    The company source told Reuters that Toshiba was in the final stages of planning to exit the HD DVD business and that an official decision would be made soon.

    It’s time to keep an eye on the price for the Toshiba HD-A30. It’s currently at $149, about $30 more expensive than the lowest-cost unit (HD-A3), but it’s 1080p instead of 1080i and comes with two HD-DVD movies included. Plus of course there’s the usual get 5 discs free offer. I’m going to wait to see if te price drops further but that’s not a bad deal at all.

  • hydrazine, huh?

    As I mentioned to Steven in comments to the previous post about the pending satellite shoot-em-up, I don’t buy the argument that the hydrazine in the fuel tanks is a real threat. The Cassini-Huygens probe carried plutonium aboard as a fuel source and I recall the crazies all worried it would somehow contaminate the earth if it crashed or failed on liftoff; why would hydrazine be such a big deal? A satellite coming uncontrolled down from space has only 30% chance of hitting land to begin with, and the actual populated areas of Earth where you might conceivably land on someone (ie, dense urban areas, not suburbs, farmland, desert, jungle, etc) are an even smaller target. The risk has to be infinitesimal.

    So i am not surprised at all to see that there might be an ulterior motive – to show the Chinese we can.

  • wordpress folksonomy progress

    The experiment of adding Scott’s WP_Folksonomy plugin to my blog has been a success so far. My blog, haibane.info, is by no means a giant traffic draw but it does have enough that the userbase has been adding some tags of their own. I have at least one user (Scott himself?) who reliably adds tags to most posts, and there have been others drive-by tagging as well. It’s encouraging to see however that there was a thread at the WordPress support forum asking about folksonomy; I directed them to the plugin asap. Now, a search for the term “folksonomy” will lead people to the same tool, and thus the seeds are sown for more people to use it. Let’s hope hat many more blogs, preferably far larger than mine, embrace and adopt folksonomy this year.

  • The Drake Equation

    XKCD pays homage to the Drake Equation, with their characteristic style:

    It should be noted though that the new term Bs is redundant with L. That’s really the only parameter for which there is essentially no way to formulate any reasonable estimate. When I learned about the Drake Equation in college, we basically came to see that the Drake Equation was uttterly dominated by the assumption for L, even if fl, fi, and fc were all assumed to be 1. It’s a sobering thought that time, not space, is our greatest barrier to finding someone else Out There.

  • ultimate comic book teamup

    forget about Spiderman & Wolverine or Batman & Superman, folks.

    The TickThe Crimson Chin

  • totally awesome!

    The US military is going to blast a failing spy satellite out of the sky using sea-based missiles launched from a Navy cruiser. No, not Michael Bay’s next movie plot; this is actually real.

    Question for the US Intelligence Agencies: if the thing is so sensitive and loaded with secrets that you have to try and shoot it down rather than let it fall into Russian/Chinese hands, why didn’t you just put a self-destruct on it? Duh.

  • the mask of Batman

    I’d mused earlier that Clark Kent, not Superman, is the more interesting character (and unfortunately, the various incarnations of Superman on the movie screen have seen fit to ignore my opinion).

    Kevin D agreed with me, but made an offhand comment that the dynamic is inverted for Bruce Wayne/Batman. I have to disagree. Bruce Wayne as the mask, rather than Batman, makes the character much more shallow. The genius of the Batman movie reboot with Christian Bale was that they made Wayne the focus, with Batman being a mere persona, just another tool in his arsenal (a psychological one).

    I am more interested in Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent as characters than in Superman and Batman. A Wayne/Kent story would be ideal. A Batman/Superman story would be 2-dimensional and dull. Both these men are more alike than the differences in their costumed personas indicate.

    I’ve no doubt this has been explored in the comics at some point but frankly these characters are more interesting to me on a screen than on a page.