Category: tech

Wired points out a new economic model heralded by the Internet – the rise in exposure and revenue from the non-mainstream blockbuster product. Thanks to the “infinite shelfspace” of online retailers like Amazon and iTunes, niche markets known as the “long tail” in distribution charts, are getting more popular and profitable than the Top 10 megahits. The 80-20 rule doesn’t apply on the Internet.

Long tail dynamics is good news for the counter culturalists – it means more choice and variety, rather than the often predicted pureeing of culture into a MTV-Walmart-McDonalds mass of blah and generica.

The Internet has always been the long tail of information. Whether its obscure sexual fetishes or dissertative dissections of sci-fi films, it’s probably in there in the form of websites, discussion boards or weblogs.

VentureBlog points out that e-retailers must understand that there’s massive opportunities in niche markets online. Take eBay, for instance. It’s all about catering to the long tail – the rare, the discontinued, the single quantity.

Jim McGee adds another facet to the phenomenon. The long tail shakes the old concepts of organizational control from its foundations, including leadership roles. “In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger,” McGee decries. “From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat.”

The third gaming juggernaut of Fall 2004, Half-Life 2 (PC), has landed. The first two are, of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2) and Halo 2 (Xbox).

My local Futureshop ordered in 200 retail copies, and all but twenty was sold out when I went in at 5pm. All the ones with the main hero, theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, on the cover were gone. Three Collector’s Edition boxes were left. I went with the regular copy with the female protagonist Alyx on the cover.

Vivendi QA issues: A nice employee was opening up all my retail box for me to check for CD rot. Sure enough, one of mine had a delaminated Disc 4. I had it replaced on the spot.

For a a game of this magnitude, there has been little talk of it on the net. Maybe GameSpy’s Daily Victim was right, you would never hear about the perfect game, because everyone would be doing nothing but playing it.

Jason Jones of Bungie Studios humbly suggested that “Halo 2 is a lot like Halo 1, only it’s Halo 1 on fire, going 130 miles per hour through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas … And, the ninjas are all on fire, too.”

Sandy of TechStuff.ca humourously muses on the Top 10 ways the Canadian version of Halo 2 differs from the US version. Nathan Walpole, Lead Animator at Bungie and a London, Ontario native has let on that the Canadians on staff have secretly hid maple leafs and other hoser easter eggs in the game’s multiplayer maps.

The funny thing is, as FPS games go the first Halo was above average, but certainly not the Best Game Since Time Began. However, it did sell 5 million copies, singlehandedly vindicated the Xbox’s existence. Halo 2 is poised to do even better – analysts expect 3.5 million copies sold by New Year’s Eve.

Some bitterness remains for PC and Mac gamers, however; when Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000, they made Halo an Xbox exclusive, only belatedly offering PC and Mac versions in 2003. Halo 2 will also be Xbox only for the forseeable future.

In any case, the videogame industry is big. Halo 2 is on a two-page spread of Entertainment Weekly. In the UK, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has, in its two days of launch, surpassed the opening weekend movie box office record as set by Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. When an M-rated gangsta’s paradise en virtuel outsells a PG-rated family flick, one has to wonder how it is possible.

To me, it’s a no brainer. A videogame is an immersive experience that can last over a hundred hours. A theatre movie is less than two hours of content and ten minutes of advertising with your feet on a sticky floor.

In the PlayStation 2: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. To call it “that game where you beat up hookers” does not do it justice. You can eat, dance, buy clothing, get a haircut, exercise, go on dates, race cars, gamble, go for a swim, OR beat up your local citizens. You can travel the miles and miles of countryside by car, van, truck, motorcycle, bicycle, plane, helicopter, boat, or even by street sweeper. The strategy guide is over 270 pages; pundits estimate over 80 hours of gameplay.

Clayton Christensen of “disruptive technology” fame had suggested that open source was a disruptive innovation posed to carve up the proprietary software landscape earlier this year, but this is the first time he put his foot down – and his target of scorn was ol’ Microsoft herself.

Repent Microsoft, and bring Linux in ye heart, or suffer the consequences, he told attendees at the Future Forward technology conference. He even suggest they buy up RIM, the Waterloo-based manufacturer of the wireless confectionary known as the Blackberry. That would mean ditching Windows CE and focus on Linux thin clients.

Ideas are good and all, but I suspect there is more than one way to skin a penguin. Microsoft has traditionally acknowledge disruptive tech and have been slowly chipping away at their respective markets, such as smartphones (via Stinger), game consoles (via Xbox), lightweight computing (via TabletPC), PDAs (via PocketPC), enterprise integration (Office System, Windows 2003).

Admittedly, they’re bleeding like crazy doing this, and do not hold dominant positions in any of these burgeoning fields. However, if there’s one thing MS is good at, it’s leaning its enormous weight against its competitors until they become absorbed or squished. Whether they need Linux to be disruptive remains to be seen.

On October 4, 1957, the first manmade satellite Sputnik was launched by the Soviet Union. According to Trekkie lore, the USS Enterprise D of Star Trek: The Next Generation was launched on October 4th, 2363.

Today, October 4, 2004, another space milestone is achieved: SpaceShipOne completes its second voyage into space, winning the Ansari X Prize.

Andrew Grieg, employee at the open source consultancy Starnix in Toronto, has made the World of IP a reality for himself and his neighbours. He offers TV, telephone and Internet services to himself and his neighbourhood; his neighbours do not pay phone bills or digital cable bills.

His setup, which he calls a “wireless sweetspot”, includes:

*Access*: 802.11a Wi-Fi access points with inline amplifiers and boosted antennae

*VoIP*

* Host: open source “Asterisk IP PBX”:http://www.asterisk.org/ running on Linux
* Clients: Tri-mode VoIP softphone running on Linux PDA
* Network: Vonage.ca

*Video over IP*

* Host: open source “MythTV PVR”:http://www.mythtv.org/ running on Linux with MPEG-4 recording and playback
* Clients: WiFi enabled PDAs and PCs
* Network: Wholesale C-band satellite dish

The moral of the story? Obviously the voice, video and even Internet carriers are in for a tough ride. However, “whole new business models will appear to take advantage of the fact that all types of communications and all types of content will be able to reach all parts of the market with almost no friction.”

Engadget reports on the new Samsung Experience electronics boutique that just opened in New York City. The peculiar thing is, you can’t buy anything on display there. They figure that any true hardware enthusiast would browse the store and head back home and buy the product online anyway.

They are even showcasing items that aren’t even available in North America, such as the miniscule MP3 players and cellphones with TV tuners that are commonplace in Korea and Japan.

The purpose of the “store” is to whet your appetite, to sell the Samsung brand. They want to show they’re as badass as Sony.

I’m surprised John Battelle hasn’t mentioned Google’s latest endeavour, Google Local geographically-based search. It’s in beta and not perfected enough to pry me away from specialized info sites like Toronto.com, but I did search for “dog bakeries” in “toronto” and found a Three Dog Bakery in town I didn’t know existed.

AskTog has possibly found the Worst Interface Ever. It’s a particular aftermarket pump you turn on that circulates fluid through the transmission of a Lexus SUV so that the gears stay lubricated if you are moving the car while the engine is off, i.e., while it is being towed. This is because if the transmission doesn’t stay wet, it can be destroyed.

Inversely, the pump must be turned off before the Lexus is to be driven, or the fluid won’t get to the the operating transmission and the transmission will go bye-bye.

So here’s the kicker – the only thing between you, a dead tranny and a $5,000 repair bill is a small switch that turns the pump on and off.

This Switch of Good and Evil, Life or Death, is hidden under the hood of the car. The switch can only be professionally installed and therefore can be in any location on the engine or in any orientation.

Ooo, but it gets even better: the switch is not labelled. You can’t tell whether it is ON or OFF just by looking at it.

AskTog has mitigated the problem by labelling the switch himself and running rigorous pre-tow and post-tow checklists, something that any normal person would naturally do if he were… say, a frickin’ astronaut flying to the frickin’ moon.

The moral of the story is as follows: “Never, ever, ever let systems-level engineers do human interaction design unless they have displayed a proven secondary talent in that area.”

Infoworld’s latest issue features the microprocessor underdog AMD in a Special Report entitled, AMD: From follower to leader.

AMD played copycat to Intel’s successful x86 chip designs for a good part of twenty years, until Intel pulled their licensing agreement with them. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise; when Intel took its ball and went home, AMD was forced to move up the value chain and innovate on its own.

Its debut original product, the Athlon, was the first to break the 1GHz speed barrier. My first AMD product was the Athlon XP, a chip that outran the Pentium 4 at two-thirds the cost. Since then, they’ve developed several unique technologies, including HyperTransport, DDR RAM, and the x86-64 bit instruction set.

It’s the last one that powers their Opteron and Athlon64 chips and winning approval in the server market. By being able to efficiently crunch both today’s 32-bit and the future’s 64-bit applications, it leaves Intel’s 64-bit only Itanium chip in the dust.

The interesting thing is how AMD managed to sneak into Intel’s “old boys club” of motherboard and OEM manufacturers:

In 1999, while AMD was suffering through one of the darkest periods in its history, the financially strapped semiconductor maker needed to get the word out about its new Pentium II-compatible processor, Athlon. So it did what any serious company would do: It enlisted the aid of PC gamers, overclockers, and build-it-yourself enthusiasts.

It reached out to selected small and startup sites that were snubbed by other hardware vendors. For many of these sites, it was AMD