Walter Watts
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Many Mergers Get Too Murky & "Eli's Coming"
« on: 2007-09-19 18:41:51 » |
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I smell the scent of "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" in this paragraph from Dvorak's article below:
"I therefore decided to go online and find other references to 2011. I found a slew of them and, in fact, turned up books about 2011 and how 2011 is apparently some year where a new age of man begins, or some such malarkey. I think aliens invade. So what is the hidden message in Gartner's use of this mysterious year? I'm thinking the company has been taken over by New Age wack jobs."
muwahahahaha
--Walter
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PC Magazine
ARTICLE DATE: 09.12.07
Many Mergers Get Too Murky
By John C. Dvorak
Please Merge Dept.: Will youfolks at Intel and AMD please merge into one company so we do not have to forever endure the bickering that goes on between you? As much as I hate to say it, I would just as soon subject myself to monopolistic price gouging by a lone player as have to witness the never-ending back-and-forth between the two companies. The latest is the new AMD Web site that carps at the Intel antitrust activities. You can check it out at breakfree.amd.com. Now stop already.
The Google-YouTube Saga Dept.: Continuing the "never-ending" theme, it seems that various copyright holders of relatively worthless content continue to be freaked out by the existence of YouTube as well as other sites that post whatever videos people feel like posting. With hundreds of thousands of users and videos flying around, it's nearly impossible to police the scene. Meanwhile, YouTube has to attempt to do something about it. So it says it can develop some sort of pattern-recognition software that can identify the "fingerprints" of copyrighted material, assuming that the copyright owners have a fingerprint to deliver. If anything sounds like a fiasco, this has to be it. I'm certain that a single pass through any sort of video-converting software will forever alter the fingerprint, rendering the identification process useless. Oh, wait, maybe I'm not supposed to mention anything like this so the Hollywood dummies actually go on believing this sort of thing would work.
While on the subject of video-converting software, have a look at Super © from eRightSoft, available online at www.erightsoft.com. This program, which is interface challenged, has a near-infinite variety of codec, container, audio, and video variables that let you convert one format into another. It's extremely powerful and free for the taking. It can encode for just about any device you can imagine and transcode from any format you have. It is a little confusing to use, but what it can do is amazing. I use it to compress oversize files for uploading to any of the video services. I'm certain it would completely mess up any video fingerprint. Did I mention that it's free?—next: So What's With 2011? >
So what's with 2011? I was going over all the press releases from the Gartner Group market research firm and I ran into pronouncements such as "Gartner predicts instant messaging will be the de facto tool for voice, video, and text chat by the end of 2011." What kind of prediction is this with this date stamp? I didn't think much about it—except for the ridiculous lead time—until I ran into a second reference: "Gartner says Indian cellular services market to exceed US$25 billion by 2011."
I therefore decided to go online and find other references to 2011. I found a slew of them and, in fact, turned up books about 2011 and how 2011 is apparently some year where a new age of man begins, or some such malarkey. I think aliens invade. So what is the hidden message in Gartner's use of this mysterious year? I'm thinking the company has been taken over by New Age wack jobs.
I did run into some interesting Gartner blog prognostications, which did not seem to target 2011. The predictions are the typical "We don't get blogs, so here is what we think" kind of thing. According to the company, just as there is peak oil (that's the point at which maximum petroleum production is reached), we are about to encounter peak blogging, with 100 million people posting blogs. I'm not even quite sure what a blog is anymore. Whatever the case, the researchers believe that 200 million blogs have been abandoned. That seems high to me, but possible.
Oh Say Can You CMOS Dept.: For a decade or so, I've been following the debate about the eventuality that CMOS sensors will supplant CCDs. I've won hundreds of dollars by betting against CMOS. But there may finally be a light at the end of the CMOS tunnel, as I'm now seeing new indicators that CMOS is playing serious catch-up. I say this because Kodak—of all companies—released a CMOS camera. This is a signal of some sort since Kodak is one of the big CCD makers! Why would it ever use a CMOS sensor unless it's going to move from CCD manufacturing to CMOS? The kicker to the debate is the fact that the top-selling Canon D-SLR cameras have always been CMOS, and the images produced on these cameras are superb. Anyway, all bets are officially off.
Meanwhile, the world of photography now has to deal with yet another JPEG variation, this one developed by Microsoft, dubbed MS HD Photo internally, and most likely to be marketed as JPEG-XR. Microsoft says it will let the standard be adopted without royalties or any sort of scam to get money for it. Hey, maybe the company is going soft! Nah.
Copyright (c) 2007 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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