Orlowski trolls again

In his latest rambling, shambling semi-coherent collection of innuendo, semi-sourced smears and out of context quotes with no attempt at fact-checking or giving anyone the chance to reply, Orlowski says:

"What sort of people go to these?" he asks, rhetorically. The panel on Political Blogging doesn't even include a Political Blogger. We can help answer that one: andsometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. (Taken at the $500 a head BloggerCon conference).

Now that is a picture with me in the middle. Admittedly Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Nesson are there too, but what is he trying to say? That we use laptops in public?

He even repeats his widely debunked Googlewashing hogwash.

Fortunately we don't need to worry about him giving space for responses - you can read the rebuttals here.

RSS Winterfest - I'm speaking

I'm speaking at RSS Winterfest this morning, with Anil Dash and others on 'RSS 2.0 and Atom'

Tune in

Categorising blogs

Why I Write - George Orwell :

There are four great motives for writing:
1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

Seems like one way to categorize blogs.

Technorati beta test

Dave Sifry just announced what I've been working on with him: We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a Volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in.

Head on over to http://beta.technorati.com and try it out.

Or recursively see who has linked to it at the beta Technorati beta cosmos

Alienaid: Iowa Caucases

I think these were explained by Lewis Carroll:

What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'

`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'

Media Heresy: Compression is becoming redundant

Yesterday, Ross sent Bambi Francisco to talk to me, and she asked an interesting question: "Is there a Moore's Law for compression?" My answer didn't all make it into her article, so here is an expanded version for my 'media heresies' series.

"Is there a Moore's Law for compression?"
In the sense of compression getting uniformly better over time? No.
Compression has different constraints - it is primarily based around fooling human perception systems by sending less information. Compression generally has two phases - a lossy phase where the data is transformed into a less accurate version by exploiting limitations of human vision or hearing, and a lossless phase where redundancy is squeezed out mathematically (this phase is like using .zip).

With more computing power, more elaborate transformations can be done in the first phase, and more complex mathematical compression can take place in the second phase, and still give the computer enough time to achieve a useful frame rate, but overall compression standards do not improve at anything like Moore's Law speed.

I'd say video compression is maybe 2-4 times as efficient (in quality per bit) than it was in 1990 or so when MPEG was standardised, despite computing power and storage having improved a thousandfold since then.

However, what does happen is that the Moore's Law effects on computing power, and the Moore's Law cubed effect on storage capacity mean that compression becomes less relevant over time.

You can now buy an off-the shelf computer that can edit uncompressed High Definition TV for under 10% of the cost of an HD tapedeck.

Consider that the iPod has gone from 5GB to 40GB in under 18 months - a factor of 8. The MP3 compression iTunes uses is about 8:1, so that means you could fill the new iPod with uncompressed audio and store as much as you did in the old one. Apply that rate of doubling another few times and think about pocket TiVos. Farfetched? I'm not so sure - Computer users have been watching DVDs on laptops for a while now; hand-held DVD players are being bought for children in the backseat and people who travel. According to my friends at Best Buy, they sold out all the portable DVD players they had this Christmas - they had hit a sensible price point.

The deeper point is a trend based one. If storage continues to improve in capacity per dollar at 3 times the rate of computing power, compression becomes wholly redundant - the CPU running the bit-manipulation is the bottleneck. The HD editing computers work this way - they have DMA (direct memory access) hardware in the disk interface and the screen interface, and the computer's job is to get out of the way.

The other reason compression is a bad idea in the long run is precisely because of its success in removing redundancy. If you have uncompressed audio or video, a single bit error will likely go un-noticed. If you are unlucky and it is the high bit of a sample, you will get a transient click in the sound, or a brightly coloured dot in the wrong place in video, but it will soon pass and be covered by a correct bit.
If you have a single bit error in a compressed stream it will make the rest of the frame, or possibly many frames, corrupt. In the worst case it can destroy the rest of the file from then onwards.
For archival content this kind of fragility is not what you want.

RIAA's fake cops harrass based on racial stereotypes

LA weekly story:

'A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature,' Langley said. 'Today he�s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he�s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he�s something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture�s worth a thousand words.'

Langley is Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit.