Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”

What’s really annoying about these sensationalized news bites is that they’re just that – sensationalized.  It talks about energy totals, but there’s no mention about the more important factor – energy source. If even 10kWh is from solar power, than I’m willing to bet that’s better than all of ours combined!  Then there’s the density factor – Gore owns a huge estate, so how much energy is consumed per foot (or meter, for you metric types :)?  Possibly less than the avg. American?

It’s really too bad because An Inconvenient Truth’s thesis isn’t simply about reducing energy consumption.  The purpose is to bring attention to CO2’s damaging effects.  If we were all consuming twice as much energy but was all solar sourced, then we probably wouldn’t be in a climate crisis (I’m not saying we wouldn’t be having a different problem, either :).

No, I have no affiliation to Gore and his policies.  The Tennessee Center’s inconvenient truth is that they lost a potential reader.

One of the first things I do after landing on U.S. soil is ransack a newsstand.  I’m a periodical junkie, and have been known to spend as much as $80 on newspapers and magazines in a single purchase.  So as I was doing my periodic periodical catchup, I noticed a number of articles mentioning the deadweight loss that Christmas brings.  Wouldn’t have given it much thought except for the fact that it was mentioned in the obvious – such as the WSJ – to even the New Yorker.  Are we seeing a trickle effect of Al Gore’s global warning message to the fringes?  Speaking of – I just picked up An Inconvenient Truth, and how inconvenient that this DVD should be region encoded.  This is a message that should be region free!

And speaking of region free …

the Nintendo Wii is not!  Yep – Santa Clause got me a Japanese Wii this year (even delivered it to the U.S. – a house with a chimney really worked!), and after having a blast playing Wii Sports, it was time to pick up Zelda along with some US GameCube games.  But I gave Nintendo a little too much credit thinking they wouldn’t cripple the Wii with such ridiculous features as region locking.  A little pre-shopping Internet research would have saved my time and money regarding Wii-specific titles – non-Japanese Wii games are simply not recognized on a Japanese Wii.  But what about GameCube games?

There are a few mods that let all GC games regardless of originating region run on US GameCubes, and Freeloader seems to be the most popular.  Turns out that it even works on the Wii!  So I immediately ordered it online.

What a mistake.

Being an early-adopter has its costs, and this was one of them.  It turns out that when you use Freeloader on the Wii for GameCube games, it only works on the US Wii.  So US GameCube and Wii owners can play GameCube games from any part of the world, but Japanese Wii owners are left heartbroken.  Strange that Nintendo would opt to penalize their Japanese brethren again – the first time being making them buy Wii Sports, whereas US gamers received Wii Sports for free!

So let these Wii caveats be known – a Japanese Wii can only play Japanese Wii and GameCube games, and Freeloader doesn’t help.  Additionally, you’ll need a GameCube controller for GC games – apparently even the Wii Classic controller can’t be used.

Here’s hoping someone figures out a way to nix all this region locking nonsense soon, and let gamers just have fun!

The second interesting trend is in hard-disk RAID towers.  A few months ago I caved in and bought a box that would hold four 250GB 3.5″ hard drives in part to store my iTunes collection, and I’m already nearing full capacity on one of the software-RAID 1 sets (i.e., two 250GB drives being mirrored, so my collection is almost at 250GB; the second set is used for other data).  I spent considerable time researching different options for expandability, features, etc., and decided a no-frills plastic IDE-drive box was the way to go, but I may have been a bit premature in my purchase.

Since SATA drives are magnitudes faster than UltraATA, and since there are RAID boxes which can host SATA drives but connect externally via Firewire or USB, that’s the way I should have gone.  Sure the bottleneck is in the connection to the computer, but getting SATA disks would be an investment while I wait for the next Mac Mini to include an eSata connection (hint, hint!)  On the other hand, hard drive prices are dropping each week and are having trouble keeping up with the capacity increases – today I just saw a Lacie 320GB portable drive for only 30,000yen!  And what’s more, it uses only bus power!  “How does it manage that?” you ask?  Turns out there are two 160GB 2.5″ drives inside, and it’s super fast because it uses RAID 0 (striping).  If you want one of these cheap Lacie’s (here’s a product link) the special deal is at Akibakan – one of my favorite stops for all Mac goodness.

Anyways, as the post title hints at, it seems the trend to stack “off the shelf” items has permeated into the hard drive space.  First it was creating computer clusters of cheap linux boxen, then it was creating multi-core processors.  Multi-monitor setups are gaining popularity as well, and now it’s about stacking hard disks not just for storage, but speed.  As they say, the more the merrier – even fans of x-treme programming will tell you.  So what’s next? 

By the way, one of my clients needs a video-surveillance system and if there’s a place I would consider investing my money, it’s in the surveillance-camera market.  More on that in another post.

So imagine my amusement when I read from SeekingAlpha that Yahoo! Japan is encroaching further into Sony’s living room:

Yahoo Japan said it has licensed Mediabolic’s software to develop the Yahoo! Digital Home Engine, a technology that will enable consumers to access web-based content directly from televisions or stereos.

Sony continues to announce cool gadgets but with proprietary means of interconnecting – which in the past was just fine when options were sparse and technology wasn’t as intertwined in users’ daily lives.  Most people didn’t have a need to connect their one computer to their tv to their digital camera to their mobile phone.  Now there are hundreds of options a customer can consider for almost any given technology gadget – Sony should have been able to forecast this shift and focus away from box making towards service integration.  After all, at one point not all that long ago there was a large and loyal base of Sony customers.  Why not create a platform for them to communicate not just amongst themselves (which is what Grouper’s acquisition is essentially about) but with the larger as-yet-unconvinced or still-considering community?

As Sony reverts back towards its box making days, choosing to control all aspects of a products use, the competition, realizing most people need to connect a variety of brands’ products, comes in and tries to solve this problem.  And where there’s a problem to be solved, there’s often money – good money – to be made.

This got me thinking about a time when Sony had a superior hardware format succumb to the “ease-of-use” aspect of an inferior format: the classic Betamax vs. VHS. While Betamax produced higher visual quality recorded images – and is still used by many production studios – VHS won out in the consumer space in large part because of its longer recording times. Nobody wanted to fuss with replacing a tape 1/2 way into a football game; push the record button and return from dinner two hours later to have an entire show – or two – in its entirety on a single tape, no interruptions. Add the budget-conscious porno industry selecting VHS for low overhead costs and the rest, as they say, is history.

SCE fanatics will argue of course that comparing the PSP to the viPod is like comparing oranges to apples (…). The PSP has numerous features over the viPod – screen quality, wifi capability, game selection, and a standardized “USB peripherals” interface to name a few. There’s no way I would trade my PSP for a viPod. But the tedious process to get only a handful of shows onto a dinky memorystick of only 1GB max is not something I cheer about. And I don’t expect any division within Sony to be selling a reasonably priced UMD writer any time soon either. If a porn studio wanted to sell content for mobile devices do you think they will pay the extra licensing costs for UMD production for a market they’re not entirely sure of yet? Probably not, especially now that there’s a cheaper online-distribution option.

While many anticipate a PSP with a harddrive (already 3rd party produced) which would resolve one of the drawbacks the PSP has to the viPod, at the moment the competition – if you’re willing to call it that – between the two seems eerily similar to the hardware-quality vs. “ease-of-use” comparison that presented itself in Betamax vs. VHS.

Funny thing is, another space this product war will likely play itself out is the PS3 vs. XBox360 (or Nintendo Revolution, for that matter). From where I’m standing, Microsoft has a compelling online/internet strategy for their console – something seriously lacking in anything I’ve seen from SCE to date.

While I support the engineers in their effort to provide a freely accessible binary ATRAC library, I would like to clarify to the remaining parties some observations from having spent the past year working with the Open Source Software community. My explanations are kept short and concise with only a few examples; many more can be found on the internet, or by becoming involved with an open source project directly.

Timing and access are paramount

Developers love to tinker. They must be able to test, prod, and try out their hypothesis. This is part of everyone’s favorite term – INNOVATION. Immediate access to relevant information makes a developer happy. Waiting for code, patches, and documentation does not. An unrestricted and open online forum are good. Logins and passwords are not.

Why is this important for ATRAC? Because even now, it is still too difficult for a developer to obtain an ATRAC SDK. A Google search shows nothing on the first page. Independent and “small-shop” developers are *extremely* important. Let us not forget how the iPod came to be.

Developers don’t like to branch software

Splinter groups are generally disliked for core parts of major projects, even by open source developers. It creates a maintenance headache at first, and considerable confusion soon after. Sometimes a branch may happen to test a hypothesis, but usually the effort is merged (or abandoned).

Why is this important for ATRAC? Because a common concern is control – many here feel it will be impossible for Sony to control the source code once it becomes open. This thinking is the wrong approach. Open source projects pit innovation above control. But developers are (generally) smart enough to realize mis-management does not lead to innovation. If Sony does not trust the community, why should the community trust Sony? As long as an agreeable forum, format, and framework is put in place, Sony will easily have the final word on open source development of its own projects. Sony owns the factories and builds the hardware, afterall!

IM, Blogs, VoIP (Vonage vs. Skype), browser progression (Netscape – IE – Mozilla – Firefox)

The biggest connection between currently popular applications in IM, VoIP, blogs, and browsers is that they are all “free”. Free to download. Free to experiment. Free to share. No logins and registrations (beyond the obvious), no multiple incongruous versions, and plenty of (free!) online support. The VoIP service Vonage was introduced before Skype – but one service requires a registration while the other is a simple (free!) download. It is no wonder Skype is so popular now.

Why is this important for ATRAC? In an era of cheap and virtually limitless internet connections, distribution speed is paramount. The key operative business paradigm is “switching costs”. Create a big user base, and it costs more for the customer to switch to another platform. But caution: if you annoy that user base, they may find it costs less to switch than to deal with you. The exodus from IE to Firefox. The exodus from AOL to local ISPs. The iPod. Even, Gillette. In the first two cases, customers found it cheaper to switch than to handle the annoyance of the former. For the iPod, while the mp3 format was dominant, Apple understood they needed to clarify the switching cost when introducing iTMS – guaranteed sound quality, guaranteed service, guaranteed easy of use, guaranteed accessibility. ATRAC only offers one.

OS X: a 20 year old BSD core

A hardware’s life-span is finite. Software’s is virtually infinite. (Recall the Church-Turing thesis, which states that, in a technical sense, any operating system can be emulated within another.) Let us not forget the “Y2K” bug fiasco, COBOL, etc. Currently we are witnessing the appeal of Apple’s OS X, an operating system built on a core developed decades ago. Name me a piece of computing hardware developed 20 years ago which still generates lucrative buzz.

Why is this important for ATRAC? To recognize two points. 1) It may benefit Sony to release the ATRAC source code as a last resort. 2) We may not see the result for a number of years, but if and when we do, we will have the 10+ years of development experience from when ATRAC was first born, not to mention the intellectual capital and intangible assets.

So many options, so little time to hesitate

A final point. Surveying the market and considering your options is an obvious step in any process. Nobody likes to be locked in and bound to some other entity. Before the internet allowed anyone to share their resources and knowledge, big companies *seemed* to guarantee a level of consistency which out-weighed the cost of being bound to them.

Why is this important for ATRAC? There are now numerous options easily accessible and comparable. If a user does not like one option, it costs them next to nothing to try a different one. Nobody likes their time wasted. If there is any doubt a format may survive, why should a customer bother to use it over a freely available, widely adopted, publicly managed alternative?

John Markoff: What do you think of the Google experiment of giving everybody one day out of five on their own to do something creative?
Rosensweig: We give all of our employees Sunday, whether they want it or not.
Schwartz: I want to talk about the food service at Google: It’s really something.
Markoff: I think I’ve got it.

:)

Higa: We’re embarking on the beginnings of a more networked society. I hate using “information highway” it’s too hyped a metaphor — but it’s clear that information is crucial to companies who need a competitive edge. In many ways, information is bus iness these days. Competitive advantage lies now in how efficiently and fast you can organize and dissemnate the information for your businessMost competitive advantages we seee now have a database behind them. MCI’s “Friends and Family” campaign is a good example. It’s a 100% information-driven customer service. It’s an intelligent billing system, really. What’s behind it was a database and the custom applications to make it happen; it took AT&T forever to catch up while they ceded market share.

CJ: So that’s the kind of thing: maintaining a large database, getting the information on the right desks at the right time?

Higa: Yes. Packaging information in new ways, being able to analyze information — that’s your competitive advantage, that’s your productivity. Federal Express couldn’t have happened fifty years ago, because the information technology to track all that wasn’t around.

If you’re really worried about increasing your company’s productivity, you need to increase your enterprise-wide productivity, not individual productivity. Inventory management is crucial, and we’re entering the period where, if you can’t ship in 24 hours, you’re not really competitive.

I really like that last paragraph — If you’re really worried about increasing your company’s productivity, you need to increase your enterprise-wide productivity, not individual productivity. Seems so obvious, yet so lost on many even in today’s “modern” company.