The war to succeed DVDs

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Mar 112005
 

The papers are abuzz today with news of Apple fol­low­ing Dell and HP in back­ing Sony’s pro­posal for next gen­er­a­tion DVDs. Called Blu-Ray, these discs can hold as much 5 — 6 times more data than the cur­rent red laser based discs, and offer bet­ter copy­right pro­tec­tion. Every­one is spec­u­lat­ing that this might be the last nail in the HD-DVD for­mat that Toshiba is push­ing, and Blu-ray is the clear fron­trun­ner now in the bat­tle of for­mats, so maybe this just might be where Sony ends their dis­mal record in win­ning stan­dards. Apple is a one-product com­pany now — a glo­ri­fied man­u­fac­turer of a (really cool) music player, and it’s endorse­ment of the for­mat may not mean much to Blu-Ray except for some good press.

Here’s some back­ground on the DVD war of suc­ces­sion from (where else?) the Econ­o­mist.

In one cor­ner is the HD-DVD for­mat, backed by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. The details are still sketchy—the spec­i­fi­ca­tion will not be finalised until February—but HD-DVD will offer at least three times the stor­age capac­ity of DVD, while improved video-compression soft­ware will fur­ther boost capac­ity. The new for­mat has the back­ing of the DVD Forum, which means it is the “offi­cial” suc­ces­sor to the DVD for­mat. Pro­po­nents of HD-DVD claim the discs can be made cheaply using exist­ing DVD pro­duc­tion lines with very lit­tle mod­i­fi­ca­tion. The first HD-DVD devices will go on sale next year.

In the other cor­ner is Blu-ray, backed by a con­sor­tium that includes Sony, Mat­sushita, Hitachi and Philips. Blu-ray discs have around five times the capac­ity of DVDs, allow­ing each disc to store around two hours of high-definition video, or 13 hours of stan­dard video. Sony has been sell­ing Blu-ray recorders in Japan since 2003, and Mat­sushita and Sharp have both launched Blu-ray devices this year.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, there are four pos­si­ble out­comes. A clear win for one of the stan­dards; a com­pro­mise that causes an entirely new stan­dard that com­bines ele­ments of the com­pet­ing for­mats, although “Nobody wants to bend, since nei­ther side wants to give up the lucra­tive roy­al­ties it stands to make if its stan­dard pre­vails. Instead, both sides are dig­ging in for a long fight”; coex­is­tence with DVD play­ers capa­ble of play­ing both for­mats — but this is dif­fi­cult since the two for­mats are very dif­fer­ent from each other; or the mar­ket not tak­ing off at all. If I were a bet­ting kind of per­son, I would bet on a Blu-Ray win.

 Posted by Karthik at 11:31 pm

Neal Stephenson speaks

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Mar 112005
 

Neal Stephen­son, a per­sonal favorite and author of Snow Crash, Dia­mond Age, Crypto­nom­i­con, and the (slightly dis­ap­point­ing) Baroque Cycle tril­ogy that was set in the sev­en­teenth cen­tury talks about tech­nol­ogy, geeks and pol­i­tics in this free­wheel­ing inter­view with Rea­son Online.

One thing I did like about the Baroque cycle was the incred­i­ble amount of inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion it con­tained on sci­en­tists I knew lit­tle about. Stephen­son is the unques­tioned king of covert edi­fi­ca­tion — a joke here, some pun there, a lit­tle bit of explain­ing and lo! You’ve actu­ally learnt some­thing, with­out real­iz­ing it. And nowhere is this tal­ent more obvi­ous than in the Baroque Cycle. Wilkins, Hooke, Leib­niz and New­ton were all char­ac­ters in the books, and they were treated with typ­i­cal Stephen­son irrev­er­ence — mak­ing them seem almost human. Wish he wrote my sci­ence textbooks.

This excerpt is a loose sum­mary of the broad themes under­ly­ing the Baroque Cycle.

The ini­tial sur­prise was that Leib­niz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson’s Dar­win Among the Machines. When I began to read about the period, I was sur­prised by the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the Ams­ter­dam stock mar­ket and the com­plex­ity of the Lyon­naise finan­cial sys­tem. But the great­est sin­gle sur­prise for me was the wel­ter of ideas con­tained in [Robert] Hooke’s Micro­graphia. Hooke talks about an incred­i­bly wide range of top­ics in that volume.

One is how we ought to define thinking—what is intel­li­gence? He cites the way that flies are drawn to the smell of meat, which seems like intel­li­gent behav­ior. But then he cites the coun­terex­am­ple of a trap that kills an ani­mal. To a prim­i­tive per­son who didn’t know that the trap had been invented by a per­son, it might seem that the trap itself pos­sessed intel­li­gence and will. Of course, this isn’t really the case; it’s just a dumb mech­a­nism reflect­ing the intel­li­gence of him who cre­ated it. But, Hooke says, who are we to say that a fly isn’t just a more com­pli­cated mech­a­nism that is designed to fly toward the smell of meat? In which case it isn’t being intel­li­gent at all, only reflect­ing the intel­li­gence of the Creator.

The final sur­prise I’ll men­tion is that Leibniz’s sys­tem of doing physics, which is based on fun­da­men­tal units called mon­ads, has got a few things in com­mon with the mod­ern notion of com­pu­ta­tional physics, or “it from bit.” Fur­ther­more, Leibniz’s rejec­tion of the con­cept of absolute space and time, which for a long time seemed a lit­tle bit loony to peo­ple, enjoyed a revival begin­ning with Ernst Mach.

One could argue that peo­ple like Leib­niz and the oth­ers were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren’t afraid to think meta­phys­i­cally. In those days, meta­physics was still a respected dis­ci­pline and con­sid­ered as worth­while as math­e­mat­ics. It got the stuff­ing kicked out of it through much of the 20th cen­tury and became a byword for mys­ti­cal, obscu­ran­tist think­ing, but in recent decades it has been reha­bil­i­tated somewhat.

At bot­tom, any­one who asks ques­tions like “Why does the uni­verse seem to obey laws?” or “Why does math­e­mat­ics work so well in mod­el­ing the phys­i­cal uni­verse?” is engag­ing in meta­physics. Peo­ple like New­ton and Leib­niz were as well-equipped for this kind of think­ing as any­one today, and so it is inter­est­ing to read and think about their meta­physics. Seventeenth-century chem­istry may have been rudi­men­tary, and of only his­tor­i­cal inter­est today, but 17th-century phi­los­o­phy is highly devel­oped and still inter­est­ing to read.

Link through Amit Varma’s Mid­dle Stage.

 Posted by Karthik at 2:06 pm  Tagged with:

Remotographs

    Lit, Etc.  Comments Off
Mar 102005
 

Looks like Mar­garet Atwood, whose day job involves writ­ing a curi­ously intox­i­cat­ing blend of sci­ence fic­tion, fem­i­nism and mythol­ogy, invents gad­gets by night.

A remote book sign­ing machine that she has pro­to­typed is the Online Answer to Writer’s Angst , par­tic­u­larly when such angst orig­i­nates from hav­ing to sign a lot of books when on tours.

“Last time I did a tour in Britain it was pretty hor­ren­dous,” she said. “This will mean a lot less angst, incon­ve­nience, star­va­tion, sit­ting in air­ports and eat­ing out of minibars.”

Can’t blame her: Book sign­ings can tire even a pumped up Jose Canseco. I might even buy one of the machines (what­ever they end up being called) from her, if she promises not to write the instruc­tion man­ual the way she talks here.

And she insists that there will be no appre­cia­ble less­en­ing of an autograph’s authen­tic­ity, because writ­ing is already only a dis­tant cousin of thought. “The mind is the device that is think­ing out the sig­na­ture,” she said. “The hand is the exten­sion of the mind, and the pen is the exten­sion of the hand—so the pen is at two removes from the author’s mind already. This thing is just another remove.”

How pro­found! Makes you won­der how many removes blog­ging is.

 Posted by Karthik at 12:44 am  Tagged with:

Ken Lay has (desi) company

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Mar 072005
 

Straight shooter? anything butSeat­tle Times has this hor­ror story about Naveen Jain, founder and fomer CEO of Info­s­pace, which used to be the next-Microsoft a few years ago. Smooth talk­ing, schem­ing, lying Jain used pretty much every trick in the book of cre­ative account­ing and then some more to keep Info­s­pace stock up long enough for him to cash out.

It is a famil­iar story — just replace Enron/Tyco with Info­s­pace, and Den­nis Kozlowski with Naveen Jain and you get the pic­ture. High pro­file CEO hyp­ing his company’s (non-existent) prospects to the sky, usual sus­pect Henry Blod­get hood­wink­ing unsus­pect­ing investors into buy­ing the stock, every­one that knew sell­ing their stock before it tanks, and finally the aver­age Joe that bought into the com­pany left won­der­ing where his $50000 dol­lar invest­ment went.

I hope Jain goes to jail and stays there for a long time.

Some­what jar­ringly, the arti­cle has this gra­tu­itous ref­er­ence to India. “Naveen Jain grew up in a cul­ture mired in bribery and cor­rup­tion, yet in a reli­gion that deplores dis­hon­esty.” What does that have to do with this story? I haven’t seen sto­ries about Pol­ish cul­ture in sto­ries about Martha.

Any­ways, here’s a sam­ple exhibit from the hall of shame:

Jain's $13 million home

… The Jains pre­ferred some­thing dif­fer­ent and latched onto a 1.3-acre Med­ina estate called Dia­manti — Greek for dia­mond — buy­ing it for $13 mil­lion. The man­sion boasted 16,500 square feet of space and a two-story garage. The garage shared a glass wall with the house so the owner could dis­play an auto collection.

The house had a pro­fes­sional record­ing stu­dio, steam room, sauna, exer­cise room, ele­va­tor and a two-bedroom wing for a house­keeper. The pool was cov­ered with a two-story glass atrium so the Jains could swim year-round.

Link through Sepia Mutiny.

 Posted by Karthik at 10:36 pm

Razr starting to shave off Nokia’s Market share

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Mar 072005
 

Finally, Motorola is start­ing to gen­er­ate some pos­i­tive buzz. The Razr is like the coolest cell­phone ever — the iPod of cellphones.

For exam­ple, Motorola execs talk of a forth­com­ing music phone within the Razr fam­ily, Rockr, that might rec­og­nize songs being played in a club, let users down­load them to their phones and then send them home to their cable boxes and stereos. That would def­i­nitely be cool, and for Motorola, that’s the goal.

 Posted by Karthik at 3:43 pm

More hot air

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Mar 042005
 

As a fol­low up to my post about Global Warm­ing, Navin had men­tioned that he found Lomborg’s arti­cle in the Econ­o­mist inter­est­ing. I re-read it and real­ized it does make a com­pelling argu­ment. But here’s the other side of the story.

Grist has a whole series of arti­cles that rebut Bjorn Lomborg’s arti­cle and his book “The Skep­ti­cal Envi­ron­men­tal­ist.” Grist is a an envi­ron­men­tal mag­a­zine, so it is prob­a­bly skewed a lit­tle bit, but read this:

Lom­borg writes, “If we fail to con­sider how the money could oth­er­wise have been spent, we actu­ally cre­ate a soci­etal struc­ture in which fewer peo­ple sur­vive. … We are in real­ity com­mit­ting sta­tis­ti­cal mur­der.” But who is really fail­ing to con­sider how our money is spent? As Lom­borg notes, “We will never have enough money,” and there­fore, “Pri­or­i­ti­za­tion is absolutely essen­tial.” Why, then, does he weigh the envi­ron­ment only against hos­pi­tals and child­care, rather than against, say, indus­try sub­si­dies and defense spending?

Exactly. To me, this is why Lomborg’s arti­cle is decep­tive. It is not very smart to argue that Gov­ern­ments should pro­tect the envi­ron­ment at the expense of say, feed­ing peo­ple or pro­vid­ing clean water. But there are a mil­lion other things that Gov­ern­ments and indus­tries do, so why not ask them to spend at least some of it on pro­tect­ing the environment?

 Posted by Karthik at 11:12 pm

I writes what I want to

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Mar 042005
 

Non-native Eng­lish speak­ers appar­ently out­num­ber “native” speak­ers 3 to 1 now. As a con­se­quence, this arti­cle says, com­mon mis­takes like “She look very sad” might become accept­able usage.

Me thinks pro­nun­ci­a­tion com­pro­mises are ok, but not gram­mar and struc­ture changes. But then again, I just said “me thinks”, so my words don’t mean noth­ing much.

 Posted by Karthik at 5:41 pm

Maybe, just maybe…

    Life,    Lit  1 Response »
Mar 042005
 

I can get enough time this year to read all of these: Ten Best books of 2004. I am buy­ing Plot against Amer­ica this week. Maybe I can even sneak in some time for Three Men in a Boat. But first, I have to fin­ish Jonathan Strange and Mr.Norrell.

 Posted by Karthik at 4:05 pm  Tagged with:

Elephants and tigers (with red stripes)

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Mar 042005
 

Once again, an insight­ful series of arti­cles from the Econ­o­mist — this time about India and China, their pol­i­tics and their economies. What’s good and what’s bad, and who can learn what from each other.

That India is an open soci­ety and China is not is one of the most glar­ing dif­fer­ences between the two. Some peo­ple in both coun­tries are tempted to use it to explain another: that China’s econ­omy has grown much faster. This sur­vey will argue that this view is sim­plis­tic and misleading.

Some of the main rea­sons for China’s bet­ter per­for­mance have noth­ing to do with the polit­i­cal sys­tem. When China started its reforms, in 1978, it was poorer than India. Part of the gap now is due sim­ply to that ear­lier start. But also, unre­formed China seems to have done a more impres­sive job than India did in edu­cat­ing and pro­vid­ing health care for its poor. Reforms ben­e­fited from what econ­o­mists call “good human cap­i­tal”, and from a bulge in the working-age pop­u­la­tion that India itself is now experiencing.

India is often por­trayed as an ele­phant: big, lum­ber­ing and slow off the mark. Now investment-bank reports are begin­ning to talk of it as a new Asian “tiger”. If that is what it wants to be, it makes sense for it to study China: the tiger in front is Chinese.

Update: Prashant Kothari blogs about a sim­i­lar sur­vey, from Stan­dard and Poors. I am glad both these sur­veys try to address the myth that India is behind because it is a democracy.

 Posted by Karthik at 12:15 pm

Poetry and Programming

    Life, Etc.  1 Response »
Mar 032005
 

A course in object ori­ented pro­gram­ming is what’s tak­ing up most of my time these days. My pro­fes­sor came up with this lit­tle gem yes­ter­day … “Com­puter pro­grams are like poetry — they are never fin­ished, only aban­doned.”

When I was in high school, there was a guy called Deepak Tony Thomas who was in the same class as me. We weren’t close friends or any­thing, but we would hang out a lit­tle bit. His par­ents lived in Ban­ga­lore (I think) so he got to stay in a house all my him­self — unimag­in­ably cool, so we called him the Boss. He would write poetry and show us his work once in a while. Rex and I would laugh at his poems, although I secretly thought it was cool because he used com­pli­cated words, and the lines seemed to rhyme. When we got to orga­nize a cul­tural fes­ti­val at our school , we called it Blitzkrieg and the Boss got to write a four line poem on the certificates.

Why am I talk­ing about this now? Well, he seems to have tran­si­tioned from writ­ing poetry to writ­ing about pro­gram­ming. Why, they even have a pic­ture of him on the books he writes. The pro­fes­sor was right — writ­ing poetry and pro­gram­ming must be about the same.

 Posted by Karthik at 1:04 am
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