the politics of failure have failed!

Anyone who thinks that U.S. foreign policy will change with McCain as president isn't paying attention...

I would rate stories drumming up fear about the U.S.'s plans to invade Iran nothing but far left-wing media creativity, if McCain wasn't seeking the support of people like Rod Parsley and John Hagee. Parsley has been called by McCain himself as a "spiritual adviser." Parsley has made very startling statements, such as suggesting that it is America's "divine purpose" to destroy Islam, and that "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore." Apparently we are supposed to start a nuclear war in Iran, end the world, and let God sort it out. How much of this is political pandering to the christian evangelical vote, and how much of it represents McCain's own beliefs? The fact of the matter is that whether or not McCain believes we need to bring on the apocalypse, he should certainly not be associating himself with lunatics like this.

As an aside: when did it become necessary for republicans to pander to the christian right? I would suggest that it is because most members of the christian right also happen to be conservatives, but maybe we should ask what, inherently, makes the christian right "conservative?" There is nothing conservative about the christian right's policies these days. Fiscally, they are supporting a military conflict of questionable merit that spends billions every week. Also, what about the christian right's old adage of keeping government out of religion? I guess that goes right out the window when one realizes government power can be used to promote one's religion. Frankly I find the whole situation confusing and frightening.

Off the topic of Iran, but still on the topic of McCain's questionable taste in advisers, we have John Hagee, who has made similarly idiotic public statements. Apparently New Orleans was destroyed not because of some engineering gaffe or outrageously violent weather brought on by climate change, but because New Orleans housed a level of sin which is "offensive to God." He, like many anti-catholic protestants over the years, has also referred to the Catholic Church as "The Great Whore." There's a good collection of his thoughts here. Think what you will about any religion, but should someone who is vying for the presidency actively court the opinion of a guy like this?

I will say that in an election campaign, the person vying for the presidency can't possibly know everything about everyone with whom he associates, and I can certainly envision scenarios where someone would have to bump elbows with some relative unsavories in order to secure a section of the vote (anything to win, right?) But for crying out loud, there is no way that a person vying for the highest political office in the most powerful country on the planet should make the mistake of associating himself, even for the briefest of moments, with people like this. It doesn't make sense unless, at least on some level, there is agreement among them.

Just wanted to point out a great post on Cirque du Poulet regarding a great article in The Star pointing out some of the absurdities of the Iraq war. Get on over there and have a look.

Quantum? I don't even know him!

These days it is of course very common to purchase all forms AV entertainment using the Internet, but it is increasingly common to use it as the actual infrastructure for the delivery of said content. The use of Internet as infrastructure for delivery of AV content is allowing it to compete directly with the traditional physical delivery infrastructure, and I think it's a really interesting situation. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm focusing on non-interactive content, specifically: high definition movies.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about high definition content, its delivery, format and media standard. On the physical side, we have blu-ray emerging as the de facto standard for what currently passes as "high definition" content. (I don't like using that term because it is so very arbitrary--what will we call "high definition" content in five years? Standard definition? Old crusty definition? It's silly.) As far as current state-of-the-home-theater tech goes, Blu-ray is a pretty good standard: it has the capacity to house quite a bit of minimally compressed high-resolution video and audio, and the bandwidth to adequately deliver said content to a playback system. There is valid criticism about the completeness of the Blu-ray (roving) standard vs. its rival, HD-DVD, but the fact is HD-DVD couldn't compete with Blu-ray's superior technology, and this is likely the key advantage that won the format war. (The format war discussion, however, is for another day.) So, the question in the context of this discussion is: can a data delivery infrastructure compete with a physical media format? In my opinion, the short answer is yes, but not yet (at least for the foreseeable future.)

There are three major hurdles to get over before widespread adoption of content-as-data will be accepted. Firstly, Internet infrastructure (for the purposes of this discussion I'm only talking about North America) is grossly underpowered for this task. The Internet backbone is capable of handling quite a bit of bandwidth, but the home distribution layer is not even close to where it needs to be in order to make convenient delivery of massive amounts of data a reality. Let's work with some numbers. Comparing apples to apples, let's see the differences in obtaining content via Internet or via Blu-ray by way of brick and mortar establishments:

Our fictional friend Larry has a Blu-ray player and a broadband internet connection which averages about 3Megabits/second download speed (a solid and very typical broadband speed). A Blu-ray disk can contain up to 50Gigabytes (thats 400Gigabits) of data. How long would it take to download that much data over a 3Mb/sec internet connection? 37 hours, and that's assuming that Larry's internet connection speed never drops below 3Mb/sec, which is very unlikely. Now, let's assume Larry is lucky enough to have a connection like Verizon's FIOS, which has a 10Mb/sec download speed. Things speed up to 14 hours, again assuming no drops in speed. How many of you plan what movie to watch 37 or even 14 hours in advance? Now, combine this knowledge with the fact that a majority of Americans are still without even basic broadband internet access, and you can see that the combination of inconvenience with lack of delivery infrastructure makes it unlikely in the near future that downloaded content will be able to compete with physical media. How do delivery mechanisms like Apple's iTV and Microsoft's XboxLive service get around this problem now? By compressing the hell out of content and offering it at a lower native resolution, both of which diminish the quality of the delivered product. In short, these services do not offer a product that can compete directly with the current state-of-the-industry. Now, what about Larry's Blu-ray player? Well, he can likely be at any number of establishments that offer Blu-ray discs in a matter of minutes. A more accurate comparison might be made with purchasing movies via an online retailer like Amazon.com, which would require similar wait periods for a movie. However, online retailers like Amazon represent but a fraction of total sales of media--most likely because of this very challenge.

Secondly, there is a cultural hurdle in the way of the digital distribution services: people still like to see and feel the thing they are buying. There are many of us who are comfortable with the idea of housing an entire collection of movies, music, videogames, etc. as arrangements of 1's and 0's on some type of data storage technology, but there are many more of us who have yet to adopt such familiarity with technology. This particular issue will only be resolved over time as digital storage becomes more commonplace. It's not a problem per se, but rather a cultural shift.

Lastly there are security and licensing questions that continue to cause problems for the AV industry. Copy protection on a disc can be cracked, the content copied and distributed universally; indeed this is happening now. What remains to be seen is the fallout from offering very high quality content (i.e. content virtually indistinguishable from the original master) exclusively over the internet. It could be argued that illegal tampering of IP is a fringe activity these days (I'm sure many in the industry would argue that point), but what will happen once we have an internet infrastructure capable of delivering this data in a matter of minutes rather than days? Whether it be more or less secure, one thing is certain: until it can be proven unequivocally that a studio's content is secure, there will be resistance to a new form of infrastructure from those who will make these decisions. Quantum computing might solve this problem once and for all, making it against the laws of physics to copy data protected by a quantum state, but we aren't quite there yet. Also, what about licensing? If I buy a movie online today, will I be able to queue it up at a moment's notice 10 years from now and be able to watch it at my leisure without renewing a license?

So, in an ideal world we would flip on our TV's, order whatever content we wanted, have it delivered to us in a matter of minutes, then stored permanently on some redundant storage medium in either the great server rack in the sky or in a smaller-scale version of the same in our own homes. The savings in fuel consumption alone justifies this (think of how much fuel is used to bring a disc of whatever type into your home!). Then there is all the detritus of packaging..."stuff" that is inherently wasteful and useless. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when this is a reality. Unfortunately, I don't see the brick and mortar establishment going away for quite some time.

we need a win

Played the 2nd-place team in our division tonight, and lost 5-4. Very frustrating, considering we were leading 4-3 halfway through the 3rd and tied with 13 seconds to go. Letting in a goal with that much time on the clock is no fun for a goalie, even if we did have to kill two consecutive (very dumb) penalties. Still, there were silver linings. We are not playing well this season, and it shows with our (I think) 6-12 record. Thus far we've been manhandled by the upper half of the division, so to play one of the top teams that close is encouraging.

I rate my performance tonight a solid 'B.' I've played better, but not much. I made some nice saves: a breakaway, a two-on-one, and a one-timer from right in front of the crease come to mind. I also had fairly solid positioning as I made a couple of saves with screens set; during each I never saw the puck until it hit my pad. My butterfly was solid, and after sharpening my skates my butterfly slide was working well again. The glove was working pretty well too. The only goal I really want back is the last one, but that's to be expected as it was the game-winner.

Another interesting note: I can usually tell how well I played by how the other team greets me in the post-game handshake line. If they give me a crooked nod, say "good game" through a crooked smile, and a hard slap on my blocker, I know I was doing my job well. Tonight was one of those nights, and these inexplicably welcome moments of camaraderie are always encouraging and fortifying in a way.

Get a Load of the Nerd?

I'm geeking out...

What is it exactly about the PS3 that brings out the ire in people? Maybe this isn't the world's most pressing problem at the moment, but indulge me for a bit...

when the PS3 was first released, there was almost universal criticism over its price. $600 is a lot of money for a console, but why didn't anyone consider the Xbox360 too expensive? When I bought the 360 in early '06, the base console was $350. Then I had to add a hard drive for, I believe, over $100, and a wireless network peripheral for $100. The total price of that 360 system was just about the same as a PS3, and the PS3 included all of those features as well as a high-definition movie player and HDMI interface. If I wanted to add a high-definition movie player to the 360, I would have to spend another $180, bringing the total price of a competitive 360* $130 higher than a PS3. Of course, since its inception the price for a top-of-the-line PS3 has dropped to $500. So, what gives with the hard line about the PS3's price?

There seemed to be a viral mudslinging campaign almost from day one with the PS3; indeed to this day when I speak with my contemporaries on the subject of console gaming, the PS3 is held in about as much esteem as the proverbial red-headed step child. The original collective negativity has been very effective, it seems, at steering potential consumers away from the console. Although the PS3 has eaten into the 360's market share over the past 6 months or so, it has done that mostly by dominating markets outside of North America (namely Europe and Japan**).

There are, of course, valid criticisms of anything, and certainly the PS3 is not immune: early in its life there wasn't much to recommend it in terms of software. There were a few shiny titles, but for the most part, gaming was second fiddle on the PS3 for almost a full year after its release.

However, that time is now past. There are several high quality games available for the PS3. I would argue as many as there are for the 360 (high quality titles mind you), but that is of course subjective. With the playing field leveling out in terms of games, what's wrong with the PS3? What indeed! Considering:

1. the PS3 has a blu-ray player, and will shortly be the first blu-ray player on the market to support BD-live profile 2.0 features.

2. the PS3 is a PC. It runs Yellow Dog Linux. $500 gets you a games console, a high-end blu-ray player and a very capable computer. That's not just cheap, it's the first time anything like this has ever been produced at anything close to the price.

3. any SATA harddrive can be used in the PS3. Don't like the included 80GB drive? Buy your own 250GB version for $50 and install it yourself.

4. the PS3 is much quieter than the 360.

5. The PS3 doesn't die.

Why do I choose to evangelise the PS3? It's not corporate ideology, if that's what you're thinking: Microsoft and Sony are both about even when it comes to the whole "big faceless corporation" thing. I just appreciate well-designed technology, and frankly the PS3 is a marvel.

*to be fair, the PS3 still had the advantage of an HDMI interface, something not available until later in '07 for the 360, as well as a larger hard-drive: 60GB to 20GB.
**I'm not including the Wii in this discussion. Yes, I know it far outsells both the 360 and the PS3.

The Great Polarizer

What is it about facial hair that has people all up in a twist? It seems everyone needs to have a comment about it. Maybe it's because I've never had facial hair and so upon gazing at my newly bearded visage, people are particularly surprised? Perhaps most people have nothing to say to me, and so latch on to the one easy target of conversation? Perhaps, but I'm of the opinion that it is a bit more than that.

Ponderings about the need to comment aside, I also find it interesting that, unless most people are just being kind, the near universal opinion of my new scruffiness is positive...outside of work. At work, although some do proclaim an affinity to the beard, it is usually a cautious statement, as if the commenter is being watched. Others in the office seem to be downright dumbfounded as to why I would ever consider doing this in the first place. "Don't you know that we don't that here in 'merica?"

My own opinion is typically subdued: I neither have great affection for it nor do I dislike it. It is simply another variation of my outward appearance. There are elements of it that I like, just as there are elements of it that I dislike (e.g. patchiness in certain areas).

Anyway, I find the office/non-office dynamic to be interesting.

censored by the BOT

turns out if one uses too many links in a post, blogger's spam-bot brigade comes down on you like kleenex at a snot party...one human test and two days later, everything is right as rain.

pure hilarity!

cumbo etymology

This for anyone wondering about the title or the picture behind it:

This tower as it stands today was built around the 19th century and derives its name from the ‘Cumbo’ family which used to reside in it.

It turns out the Cumbo name comes from Malta, or at least that's where we originally made our bones. All the most famous Cumbos are from there...excepting the most recent iterations, of course. You can read more about it here if you are so inclined, although this is certainly the most interesting part:

One version says that in 1526, Marianna was engulfed in last-minute preparations to betroth Toni, a young member of the powerful Manduca family. While she was at the Tower, the corsairs of the Barbary Coast, helped by a former slave in the service of the Cumbo family, broke into Marianna’s residence and carried her off into captivity. Toni, her husband-to-be found out that his beloved was taken to Tripoli. Thus, posing as a wool merchant, he went to that city to rescue her. This he managed to do, but due to her vicissitudes in slavery, his dear Marianna died soon after she reached Malta, mourned by the whole population.

...and of course, the "Irish" part of the name is because I'm half Irish, from the Gannon family.