Issue 21:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
What do you get when you mix Back to the Future II, a naive twelve-year-old and a format war? You get one of the more disappointing experiences of my childhood, (and it’s not even that bad so I should probably just shut up.) What happened was I had been loaned BttFII, which I had been told was a really cool movie, (”Hoverboards?!! Are you serious?!!”), and was really excited about getting home to watch it. (By the way, I grew up in Taiwan and things like new movies and American TV shows were sometimes hard to come by.) To my dismay, the tape did not even fit in our VCR Recorder, (I technically shouldn’t make this Borat reference because we had a lame VCP Player.) I was a casualty of the Betamax/VHS war and I was not happy. I think I eventually tracked down a Betamax player from a neighbor, but there was still something wrong with the tape because I don’t remember actually getting to watch BttFII until years later.
You would think that we would learn from the past and not let another format war like Betamax vs. VHS spill out into the consumer world. Unfortunately, this is just what is happening with the two formats, (HD-DVD and Blu-ray), fighting to replace standard DVDs. DVDs store from 4.7 to 8.5 gigabytes of data, which translates to about two and a half hours of standard definition video, (the sort of video we’ve all been watching for the last 20 years.) The new formats can hold a lot more data, which opens the door for movie studios to release much higher quality versions of their movies. High-definition (HD), TV’s will eventually become the norm and we will need a supply of actual HD video to watch on them. These new DVD formats offer one way to get high definition video delivered to your living room. Other methods include HD broadcast feeds through the airwaves, HD cable and satellite, and HD downloads to devices like the XBox 360, (more on this later).
A word about HD video. One assumption that is made when talking about these next generation DVDs is that you will have an HDTV to watch them on. If you don’t, then they don’t really make much sense. Regular non-HD TV’s, (aka Standard Definition TVs or SDTVs), go up to 480i, which means there are 480 lines of detail in the video image from the top of the screen to the bottom. The i stands for “interlaced,” which means that the screen only shows every other line and then quickly switches out to show the other set of lines. It happens so fast that we don’t really notice that we’re only seeing half the detail at a time. So SDTV’s use 480i. HDTV’s come in several flavors: 480p, (which is also called Enhanced TV or EDTV), 720p, 1080i and 1080p. The p stands for “progressive” which means that all the lines of detail are displayed simultaneously, (as opposed to interlaced, where they are constantly traded out.) The result is a clearer picture. 720 and 1080 mean that there are that many lines of image detail from the top of the screen to the bottom. Most computer monitors these days run at a resolution of at least 1280×1024. The second number, 1024, is referring to the same thing as the 1080 in HDTVs, so your computer monitor is in effect high def, (and this should be pretty obvious – computer monitors are much clearer than SDTVs… that’s why we work in front of monitors and not televisions.)
So what are the differences between these competing formats? The main differences that I’ve seen are in the amount of data they hold and the price of the players.
Blu-ray
- Blu-ray holds 25-50 gigabytes of data which is good for about 5 to 9 hours of HD video.
- In theory, blu-ray discs eventually could hold up to 100-200 gigabytes, or a lot of hours of HD video.
- 7.1 surround sound.
- Blu-ray movies currently cost from $25-$35 (btw… does anyone else think $35 for any version [HD or not] of Click is too much?)
- Blu-ray players are currently really expensive: $1000 for a Samsung Blu-ray player at Best Buy.
- Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a Blu-ray drive and plays Blu-ray movies. Eventually you will be able to buy one for $600. As of press time, though, (which was the PS3 launch date), pretty much the only way to get one is to drop over $2000 for one on Ebay!
HD-DVD
- HD-DVDs hold 15-30 gigabytes of data or 4 to 8 hours of video, (from what I’ve read, the video on Blu-ray disc will be higher quality than HD-DVD… that’s why Blu-ray holds fewer hours of video relative to HD-DVD.)
- According to the official HD-DVD website they have a theoretical limit of 60 gigabytes.
- Like Blu-ray, they can handle 7.1 surround sound.
- HD-DVD movies currently cost from $25-35.
- HD-DVD players cost less. Best Buy is selling one for under $500.
- Microsoft will have an HD-DVD add-on for their Xbox 360. It will cost around $300.
So what does all that mean to me?
It really sucks that the industry is letting this format war be decided by the consumers. People will have to choose one and hope that their format wins. It’s also possible that both formats will survive. (This happened with writable DVDs: there are two formats: DVD+R and DVD-R and eventually hardware manufacturers just supported both.) However, the two next gen DVD formats are different enough that building machines that could play both would be challenging and expensive.
If I had to guess which one would win, I’d have to lean towards Blu-ray. Blu-ray players cost more, but there’s one built into the PS3, (as opposed to the $300 HD-DVD add-on for the 360.) Sony is really struggling to get these systems out, but eventually there will be millions of them in households and this will go a long way towards solidifying Blu-ray’s hold on the market.
If I had to make a recommendation, I’d say “Don’t get either.” You’ll really be kicking yourself if you buy a $500+ device and then have nothing to play on it in a year. Just keep watching your regular DVDs for a year or two.
Finally, as if two options weren’t enough, there will soon be a third way to get HD video. Microsoft recently announced that they will offer HD video downloads to Xbox 360s. This is kind of cool because it’s good quality video delivered to a device that is already in your living room. From what I’ve read, the HD movies they rent, (I don’t think they plan on selling downloads yet), will be about 6 gigabytes each which will really tear through the 360’s meager 20 gigabyte hard-drive. Hopefully Microsoft will soon announce larger, (100 gig+), drives, which would make this HD download service a little more appealing.
Issue 19:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
Do you find yourself going to the same five or ten websites every day, multiple times a day? Over the last few years the lists of sites I frequent grew to over fifty and keeping up with them was becoming a daunting and not so enjoyable task. I was suffering from information overload and it was really starting to ruin my whole web-surfing experience. I had even started to consider taking some pretty drastic steps, like leaving my computer off all evening at home just so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. What I needed was a tool to help manage and deliver all the content of my favorite websites. This is exactly what RSS feeds and feed readers do, and depending on the reader, they can do a really good job.
Any website that gets new content posted regularly and is database driven, (the content is stored in a database instead of just HTML files), probably has an RSS feed. (RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication). An RSS feed is a file that describes the last twenty or so articles or posts, (the number of which is specified by the website creator). The descriptions contain at least the headline or title of the post and either part or all of the contents of the post. A feed reader is an application or website that manages a list of feeds you “subscribe” to and puts the contents of the RSS feed on the screen in a useful way. I prefer the web-based feed readers because you can access your list of feeds, (and what posts you have read or not read) on any computer, instead of just the one that your feed reader application is installed on. With some application feed readers there are ways to sync your read/unread lists between multiple computers, but this seems kind of unnecessary when the web-based feed readers work really well.
On a regular basis your RSS feed reader checks if there is any new content on each website you frequent. If it finds a new post or article, it adds it to your “unread” list. When you log in to your reader, all the unread articles show up in one place. This makes it simple to keep up with a lot of websites. One of the coolest things about feed readers is that you can save up all your reading for a convenient time such as the weekend or evenings. I usually come home from work and sift through all the day’s news and articles in about 30 minutes.
I have used several feed readers over the last year or so. The best one is actually one of the newest ones. Google’s Reader is really easy to use and allows you to quickly skim through headlines (I only actually read about 30% of the articles that get posted each day).
Here’s a screenshot of Google Reader. On the left are some of the feeds I subscribe to with the number of unread items in parenthesis. On the right is the list of unread items. You can add feeds by clicking the Add Subscription link and just typing the URL of the website or blog you want to subscribe to. Google Reader goes out and determines the link to the actual RSS feed file for you.
When you click on an item, it opens, revealing the contents of that post. This article is from one of my favorite blogs, Boing Boing.
The current Google Reader is actually their second attempt at building a feed reader. The first one had some design issues and started feeling really clunky if you were trying to keep up with more than a few feeds. Google’s redesigned Reader is actually just a blatant rip-off of another web-based feed reader, Bloglines. Bloglines was one of the first web-based feed readers and it is pretty good. Google’s new interface is just a little easier to use and I like the way it doesn’t mark items as read until I actually click on them. Bloglines automatically marks all items as read when you click on a feed or group of feeds which can lead to some time-consuming mistakes, (accidentally click the “All Items” link and you’ll have marked everything as read, even if you don’t have time to actually sit down and read all the items.)
Reading the Internet through a feed reader has a few drawbacks. For example, all the articles look exactly the same. All the design and colors of the original site are lost. For me this isn’t a big deal, but YMMV. If you want to read the article on the original site you can do so easily by just clicking the headline link. Also, sometimes an article’s images do not show up in Google Reader.
The other big drawback with feed readers is that you don’t get to see comments left on posts. Some blog engines offer RRS feeds for the comments of each post, but trying to keep up with comment feeds for each post of a blog seems pretty unwieldy to me. If I’m really interested in a certain post, I usually just click through to the original website to see if there are any interesting comments.
While feed readers are probably not for everyone, I think everyone should at least give them a shot. Just subscribe to a few of your favorite websites or blogs, (assuming they have RSS feeds), in Google Reader and see what you think.
Issue 18:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
As consumers we have found ourselves in a strange place when it comes to technology and content. Up until a little while ago, the limits placed on technology were “natural,” meaning engineers could create as cool or tricked-out a device as they wanted and the only limitation was their creativity and/or skills. Lately, though, a rather troubling trend has emerged. The people that create the content that is played by these devices have started exerting control over the design specifications of the devices themselves. DVD players must be approved by, I think, the FCC and the FCC will only approve players that include certain anti-piracy solutions. These solutions prohibit most of what we as consumers have grown to understand as fair-use, (ex: the ability to make a backup of a DVD so that the original doesn’t get scratched).
A good question to ask yourself is: “Whose interests are being served?” When Tivo makes the new version of their DVR, are they really trying to build the ultimate recording device for their consumers? Or are they caving to the demands of backbone-less content providers? For me, the ultimate TiVo would include the following features:
- The ability to quickly and easily move my recorded video onto a device such as an iPod Video or some other video playing device. (Note: this would require that Apple made the iPod more flexible than it currently is… again the technology industry is catering to the content providers instead of the consumers)
- The ability to quickly and easily move my recorded video onto a computer in my house to do things like edit out commericials, (assuming the ultimate-TiVo didn’t do this for me already)
- Maybe a built-in DVD burner to burn shows or movies to DVD
- WiFi enabled, (to easily move files to and from a computer or other wifi-enabled device)
- Support for high def video
- No DRM (Digital Rights Management)
Nothing in this list would be crazy difficult to implement. Ten engineers with a decent chunk of money could probably spit out a prototype of this device in a few weeks. A 13-year-old hacker dude could make his computer do most of what I’m talking about in one afternoon with software that is either free or relatively cheap. With a tiny bit of marketing, these would sell like frickin’ hotcakes too.
The main reason we as consumers don’t have and will probably never get this wonderful machine is DRM. The content providers are terrified of piracy and in their eyes DRM is part of the solution. I think DRM is a terrible solution. It gives the content providers a gross amount of control over what we as consumers do with the content we buy. I’ve already written a whole article about how much I hate DRM, (to read it, go here), so I won’t go on about this too much longer. But to support some of the stuff in this article, here is a list of my main beefs with DRM:
- DRM breaks fair-use. If I buy music or a movie, I should be able to play it or convert it so that it will play on any device.
- DRM doesn’t work. Thanks to the so-called “analog hole” as long as we are still allowed actually to experience the content, (listen to it, view it, etc.), there’s a way to copy it, (recording it off the sound card, using a camera to record the video off the screen.)
- DRM is not needed. Every single drm’ed song or TV show that is available for sale online is also available DRM-free on some sort of p2p pirating website. It is not like putting DRM in a song will keep it from ever leaking out onto the web. Piracy has always been an issue and will always be an issue but there are ways to make a profit selling content without DRM. Not many have tried this, but eMusic is an example of a company that has Just Said No to DRM and is still doing incredibly well.
For consumers, buying from a legitimate online store is more convenient than searching for a pirated copy of the item they want. If I had to choose between A) searching for 15 minutes for a song and then downloading it from an unknown source at potentially slow speeds, and B) logging into a legitimate online store and pay a dollar or so to download the same file quickly, I’d choose option B every time… IF there was no DRM on the file. I wish more companies would follow on the path that eMusic has bravely blazed.
What I am asking for here is nothing short of complete interoperability between all the devices in my house, where applicable. To get this, digital content needs to be stored in open, non-proprietary formats. This would require a change in the mindset of all content providers. Start selling your content in open, non-DRM formats. If this happens, the people who make the technology that plays your content will be free to pull out all the stops and create some kick-ass hardware, hardware like the hypothetical Tivo described above. iTunes and eMusic have gone a long way towards proving that people are willing to pay money to have access to commercial free music, TV and movies. Imagine a future where you could download a TV show from iTunes for a dollar or two in HD with 5.1 surround sound and be assured that it would play on any TV or video-playing device in your house. Until the content providers get over their infatuation with DRM this sort of exciting technological future is basically impossible.
Issue 17:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
About a year ago I read an article in Wired Magazine that really intrigued me. The story was about this old guy in Hawaii who had a plan to power the world with cold water from the bottom of the sea. The man’s name is John Pino Craven. He’s not just an old thinker… he’s got some interesting creds to back up his seemingly hair-brained idea: a PhD in ocean engineering, a law degree, and he was once the chief scientist for the US Navy’s Special Projects Office. The technique he uses is called ocean thermal energy conversion, (OTEC), and it’s actually not a new idea. (The first OTEC plant was built in 1930.) Craven’s implementations of OTEC have been some of the most successful and the ways he uses the by-products of OTEC are pretty unique.
OTEC works by bringing deep ocean water that is just a few degrees above freezing up to the surface. Once it is pumped up you can use the temperature differential between it and substances at sea level to generate electricity. Historically, this process has been incredibly inefficient, (something like 1 to 3% overall efficiency.) In recent years, though, new approaches have led to more efficient power generation. Even with the inefficiencies, cold ocean water is a renewable resource, which means that huge amounts of cold water can be pumped up, generating large amounts of energy. In the 90’s a group was able to produce 50,000 watts of power from OTEC during an experiment. But this dream of clean, renewable energy still has its nightmare elements. OTEC plants have been short-lived due to the expense, (dropping a mile-long pipe into the ocean), and the poor efficiency of the process.
Craven’s facility in Hawaii, (the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii), currently uses OTEC for a multitude of purposes. They have generators to test power generation, but Craven also uses the cold water to cool the facility’s buildings, generate fresh water, improve the growth of plants in the facility’s gardens and to mend his body.
I guess I should explain a few of those. As the cold water warms up, condensation forms on the tubes the water runs through. They collect and bottle this water for drinking. Regarding the plants… they run the cold water pipes through the ground below their facility’s gardens. This cools the soil and Craven claims this speeds up his plants’ growth. According to the Wired article, it seems to be working. Craven’s facility sits on hard, dry lava rock and yet he’s been able to plant a vineyard and flower garden. And if that isn’t spooky enough for you, consider the fact that Craven has also developed a system of applying cold water to certain points on his body and claims to have healed his arthritis.
Even with its limited success so far, the potential for using OTEC for power seem pretty huge. Craven believes there is enough energy in the oceans to supply “1,000 times the world’s need.” That’s encouraging. I’d find it kind of amusing if OPEC’s replacement actually was just one letter different.
As a side note… Craven’s personal website is pretty interesting and a bit strange. It’s full of poetry, political writings and Psalms. Though I guess for a visionary of Craven’s caliber, this is probably pretty standard stuff.
Issue 15:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
“By Walt Disney’s Frozen Head!* What is this cryogenics you speak of?”
It’s one of my favorite concepts in science of both the fictional and non-fictional sort. A quick and dirty definition of cryogenics would be the study of extremely cold temperatures. A field related to cryogenics is cryonics, which I’ll say is the use of technology and science to bring life forms down to extremely low temperatures, therein stopping decomposition and prolonging their life. One application of cryogenics is to use it to suspend human life during long space flights. This is used, for example, in the Alien movies where their much-slower-than-the-speed-of-light ships take months or years to reach their destinations.
Cryonics is still a relatively new science. It’s currently illegal to cryogenically freeze a human while they are still alive, so nearly all research is done on animals. There are about 140 humans stored in cryogenics labs around the country.
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is from Aliens, where Ripley is revived from “hypersleep,” (cryogenic sleep in the Alien universe), and discovers that she has been under for decades longer than expected. She hoped to be picked up soon after her ship made it to space shipping lanes, six weeks away. Instead, she floated silently through space for nearly sixty years. The world she knew and the life she had is gone.
In this way, cryonics, even in current fledgling form, is a sort of one-way time travel. I often think about what life will be like fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand years from now. In theory, (in my imagination at least), I could tomorrow pay $200,000 to a shady cryonics lab in a former eastern bloc country to freeze me for a specified number of years, say 250. Doing this when you’re basically a corpse is one thing, but doing this when you’re a living, breathing being is a pretty massive show of faith in humanity. It’s saying for example that you believe that in a hundred years there will still be humans there to check in on your frozen ass every now and then and that the electrical outlet your freezer is plugged into will be getting uninterrupted power the entire time you’re in there.
Vanilla Sky is another great movie that uses cryonics, (though in retrospect I wish that it starred someone other than Tom Cruise). I’ve already partially spoiled this movie for those that haven’t seen it, so I’ll just finish the job by saying that David, (Cruise), puts himself into cryonic sleep after a terrible car accident and then, in his subconscious, has to decide whether he wants to remain asleep, or take a chance by waking up to an unknown future. It’s a really cool movie and deals with the concept that even in a frozen state, our minds might keep going, dreaming strange or beautiful dreams for decades while our bodies lay motionless. That’s kind of a frightening thought.
What would it be like to awaken 300 years from now? Everything would be so foreign. Over the decades and centuries of your sleep, many others would have probably put themselves in cryogenic sleep. Would there be a new batch of people, (I’ll call them “Frosties”), unfreezing each day? I picture it happening like this: You’re a Frostie with some deadly illness, terrible injury or just a curious time-traveler. Your thawing day arrives and they warm you up and quickly cure or heal you with their Medical Tricorders or whatever it is we use 300 years from now. As part of your freezing service, they supply you with clothes of that day and enough money to get your feet on the ground. They might even supply a “Friend from the Future” – someone to tag along with you the first month or so, helping you adjust to society in the year 2307. Eventually though, you would be left to fend for yourself and I think the culture shock would be daunting to say the least.
From our perspective today, the thought of waking up in the future seems pretty cool, but how do we know we’d even be welcome? Would there be some sort of temporal prejudice against Frosties? Would there be movements to stop reviving them? I imagine historians would love Frosties… living specimens from humanity’s past. Would there be wars waged between historians and the anti-Frosties? The Great Cryonics War of 2429: An army of thawed Frosties led by the world’s leading historians battle the cultural elite of the future, who use hordes of merciless robots to fight what they consider to be blights on society. Perhaps humans of the future would ship all the freezers to Mars or some Pacific island and let the Frosties live amongst their own kind. The societies these Frosties form would probably end up being strange mashups of their original societies and times, which would basically defeat the whole purpose of freezing yourself to get a glimpse of the future.
Cryonics isn’t quite as simple as it seems on the surface. It raises so many social, ethical and practical questions that I really have to wonder if we will ever legalize freezing healthy, living humans. The thought of waking to the hypothetical dystopia of the last paragraph has pretty much convinced me that I wouldn’t want to freeze myself, even after death. Who wants to be brought back from the dead only to be scorned and hated by their descendants?
*As “cool” and strange as this would be, Disney’s head is not sitting in a freezer somewhere… it’s an urban legend.
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