Bringing up Dalek

Did Blu-Ray kill Playstation?

What is notable about this report on video game console sales is the fact that the once dominant PlayStation brand is no longer worth a mention.

Other reports state that sales of PlayStation consoles are down 19% year on year, XBox and the mighty Wii are both growing.

It is not hard to see the reason, Sony's decision to use the PlayStation franchise as a launchpad for their Blu-Ray format is going to be seen as one of the biggest and costliest blunders in the history of technology marketing. Even though Blu-Ray has defeated HD-DVD, the cost of the battle is is already greater than the potential patent revenue before the value of the PlayStation franchise is considered.

Comcast wants to charge me $5 for not violating my privacy

I just got a letter from Comcast telling me that they want me to pay $4.95 a month for not having my telephone number listed in their directory. Something that takes absolutely zero effort on their part should not cost $60 a year. Companies should not reveal or sell the names and addresses of their customers without their permission.

Yes, I know that this is standard practice in POTS world. But this is VOIP service and until recently my Vonage alternative was working just fine. Now it is cutting out repeatedly and the cause appears to be Comcast dropping packets. In other words it does not seem to be a coincidence that the extortion demand came right after they shut out the competition.

I don't believe Net Neutrality is the solution. That is an attempt to regulate Comcast's behavior and will only work so long as there is an administration willing to regulate. As we have seen in the finance world, from time to time we get a government that would rather not bother with regulating and then pretend that nobody could have foreseen the entirely predictable consequences of not doing so.

The answer here is competition: Force the telcos to open up the local loop as has been required in Europe.

Oh and if anyone else wants to complain about this to Comcast here are their internal numbers.

So does anyone know a good residential DSL provider in the Boston area?

Limits of digital photography

Reading the constant complaints about the need for fast ISO speed on the camera forums, it is time to ask, what is the maximum useful ISO level anyway?

Well one way to decide would be to look at the light levels for the most extreme photographic condition, moonlight is 0.27 Lux.

The other two factors in the equation are film speed and lens speed. We might in theory want to take pictures at 1/8000th but this is not very likely. A more sensible limit would be 1/50th, the longest exposure for which we might take a hand held shot with a 200mm focal length lens with optical vibration reduction.

Lens speed is also somewhat arbitrary. Lets pick f/2.8.

So what ISO speed allows us to take pictures at 1/50th and f/2.8 in 0.27 lux?

Well doing the math from Wikipedia suggests that this would take ISO 174,000, or three stops higher than the top, pushed ISO speed on a Nikon D3.

In other words it should be just about possible today with a D3 at the absolute maximum ISO setting if you have an f/1.4 lens and are willing to accept a bit of noise and do some post processing.

More Nikon speculation - Global Electronic Shutter time?

Even before their new toy is launched specualtion begins on what is next.

I don't think we are going to see quite the same pace of new product launches that we have been used to in the past. What changes we do see are likely to be directed at cost and weight reduction rather than more meaningless megapixels.

But one change we could see is the replacement of the legacy mechanical shutter system with an electronic version. This has many advantages in budget models:

• Cost - the shutter is the last major mechanical component in the camera. Dispense with the shutter and the camera can be made cheaper.
  
• Video performance - the DSLR wobble is due to the way that the imaging chip is being read out. A global electronic shutter eliminates that problem.
  
• Weight - Although the shutter itself is very light, the mechanical support required adds weight and requires space which constrains other components.
  
• Cleaning - remove the shutter and you can seal the imaging chip completely with an easy to clean transparent shield.
  

The downside of an electronic shutter is that it takes up some pixel imaging space that is going to effectively reduce ISO performance somewhat. I am not sure we will see it on the pro-end cameras at first, but there are a few advantages there

• Space - the space saved means it would be possible to fit a full frame viewfinder and electronic cleaning at the same time.
  
• Electronic flash sync at all every shutter speed.
  
• Even higher shutter speeds.
  
• Noise - turn on live view and the camera becomes totally silent.
  
• Make infrared photography possible with a stock body by simply changing the sensor filter.
  

The last would be fun. There are already several folk who will modify a camera for infrared use. But it is somewhat involved and cannot be reversed easily. Making the filter user swappable would make this area much more accessible.

I doubt we will see it on a budget model. But we might see it on a pro-model.

Security experts reveal details of WPA hack - News - heise Security UK

Security experts reveal details of WPA hack - News - heise Security UK

Using the CRA to roll back executive orders

As a matter of political tactics, I think the Christian Science monitor is wrong when they opine:

And even the CRA has a downside. It must be used wisely or it may do more harm than good. For one thing, once the CRA has been used to repeal a rule, the agency cannot reintroduce a modified rule on that issue, potentially leaving legislative and enforcement gaps, de Rugy notes.

Newt Gingrich wrote the CRA and he knew what he was doing. He wanted the effect of using the CRA to be to permanently bar future reversal through future executive orders by default. If this was not the intended outcome it can be reversed through a followup bill.

So lets say that Clinton had issued an executive order protecting Yellowstone from logging, if Dole had won the GOP could then have used the CRA to reverse the order and permanently prevent a President from issuing a new one.

The CRA only requires a simple majority and cannot be filibustered. If Congress decides to use a single vote to reverse multiple rules the courts are barred from reviewing the procedure employed. There is no forum where the procedure can be disputed, ergo one vote to disqualify all the rules in one go is fully possible.

So the Republicans have no ability to oppose rule reversals under the CRA and questionable incentive to filibuster a subsequent bill to restore executive rulemaking power. On the contrary, they are more likely to be in favor than the Democrats.

If Bush issues an executive order to gut the clean air act, the Democrats use the CRA to reverse it and the clean air act is safe from future Republican presidents. If the reversal limits Obama's scope to use the clean air act proactively they use their 58+ seats to push through a new bill.

But in practice the Democrats won't use the CRA because they don't need to. Having established that the Democrats have the upper hand tactically, there is no incentive for the GOP to attempt a filibuster as the Democrats can inflict an even worse outcome from their point of view with no need for cloture.

Stupid advertising copy

Its small size will fit on top of even the most crowded desk, and it offers wireless access when connected to a Wi-Fi router (via the Gigabit Ethernet port).

Why waste desk space on a device whose entire point is that it has no user interface, no display, no keyboard? The Home Serer lives in the basement, stores data and makes no fuss. That is the point.

I bought the 500Gb version and added a couple of 1Tb drives. These days the 1Tb model is priced better and might be a better bet. Whichever one you get you need to buy at least one extra drive so that you can use the data mirroring function.

There are still some rough edges on WHS. For a start there should be a method of backing it up to an offsite location.

Dept of not supposed to say that

If you believe that the main reason for opposing universal health care is the narrow party interest of the US Republican party, it probably isn't very wise to tell people that.

Much better to keep up the agenda denial nonsense of claiming that universal health care is an important goal that would be much better achieved by waiting a year, or two, or until after re-election in 2012. Because there is nothing that voters like better than a politician who makes campaign pledges that they then abandon once in office, despite wining effective, filibuster-proof control of both houses of Congress.

The only reason to delay on health care would be if there was a division in the Democratic caucus that left them without a simple majority. Senate Democrats opposed to universal health care are not going to join a GOP filibuster. And it would not have any effect if they did. Just as the Republicans have demonstrated repeatedly, the Senate filibuster power is simply not sufficient to block a bill when the opposing party has the White House.

But what I find rather more interesting is the fact that the advice these GOP 'experts' give their own side is as bad and as misinformed as the opinion that they give the Democrats (and for that matter relied on to run the country, Michael Cannon from Cato quoting Norman Markowitz:

A “single payer” national health system – known as “socialized medicine” in the rest of the developed world – should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party…

The shear ignorance of this statement is difficult to fathom. Now admittedly Markowitz is a Marxist, but the fact that so many right wing bloggers are repeating it as sage advice is instructive. In the first place, the term 'socialized medicine' is unique to US political discourse. The rest of the developed world does not use the term at all. Before Blair's 'New Labour', the British Labour party would have proudly described the NHS as a triumph of socialism and the Tories would have tried to change the subject. But they would not use the term 'socialized medicine' any more than they would use the terms 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice' as euphemisms for pro- and anti- positions in the abortion debate.

As for the idea that religious voters abandoned the Tory party because of the NHS, that is wrong on so many levels. The British Labour party was as much a product of the non-conformist churches as the union movement. The Church of England is sometimes referred to as the Tory party at prayer but it is not a political movement like the Southern evangelical churches are, indeed it is difficult to apply the word 'movement' to the established church.

British clergy do not issue the type of political screed that has become common in some US pulpits. Issues of conscience such as abortion, the death penalty and gay rights are decided on non-party votes. To the extent that the clergy has been involved in politics it has favored the left rather than the right.

The reason for the rise of the Labour party was the decline of the Liberal party. The reason for the decline of the right in the Tory party was their discredited support for Hitler prior to the war.

The closing factual blunder in the statement is that the UK Conservative party did not go into decline after the launch of the NHS. On the contrary, it made up ground in the election following the historic 1945 Labour landslide and won the next three elections. Labour did not win two successive full terms of office for the remainder of the century. Some decline!

While it is true that the Tory party did not try very hard to roll back the NHS along with the rest of 'socialism', that was because the NHS was and is popular. It is almost universally considered to be superior to the US model. The popular demand is for more services from the NHS, not less.

When a political movement is reduced to opposing policies in case they might be successful it is time to call it finished. The Tory party recovered after the 1945 landslide because they agreed not to challenge Labour's reforms. The Tory party continued to respect the post-war consensus right up until the Thatcher government came to power in 1979.

Earth to election scanning machine cos

Why not build a scanner that registers a cross rather than a filled in oval as a vote?