Damn, it’s cold outside!

It’s cold out there – with the wind chill, it feels like 20 below zero.

When I wrote Discarded Tech a few days ago, I mentioned the virtual uselessness of floppy disks.

An Silicon.com article from today echoes this sentiment, but includes a statistic – which, if correct – is very surprising to me:

The global market for floppy disks has been in decline since the late 1990s, with 700 million estimated to have been sold last year compared with more than two billion in 1998.

— Floppy disks to disappear from PC World, Silicon.com. Jan. 30, 2007

The surprising part – to me – is that so many floppy disks were sold last year relative to the peak: 0.7 billion this year vs. 2.0 billion in 1998, a peak year.

Sure, a 50% plus decline, but my personal experience is about a 99% decline since 1998.

I don’t even use Zip disks, which – for a few years – supplanted the floppy disks.

Now it’s USB thumb drive, burn to CD or DVD disc, FTP, G-mail and so on.

I carry a floppy in my briefcase at all times (and a Zip drive and a thumb drive); haven’t had to replace it anytime recently.

Those stats sound suspect to me…

WATCHING:
Shopgirl
Anand Tucker, director

Based on a Steve Martin novella, this adaption – starring Martin, Claire Danes and Jason Schwartz – is a disaster.

Maybe it was trying to be true to the book (I haven’t read), but there were too many “What the hell….” moments, too many voice-overs by Martin to explain what was obvious, and no true explorations of the characters.

I like Martin and Danes, but I’ll never watch this again, that’s for sure.

This has the flavor of the movie Martin succeeded with – L.A. Story – but everyone stumbles badly here. (I take that back – Danes was pretty believable.)

All movies

The following is just an eclectic firing of neurons that have occurred over the past few days; nothing worth more than a sentence or two.

• Presidential elections?: We’re barely two months past the mid-term elections, and already the presidential candidates are lining up. And most of the folks running currently hold public office, but are running around the country making speeches and so on; great – our well-oiled government machine at work.
• iTunes random play isn’t: If I’m on random play and jump down to a Lou Reed song, for example, I’ll hear three or four more Reed songs over the course of the evening. I’ll hear 0-1 Reed songs on an average night.
• The web is getting boring: I’ve mentioned this before, but I still say it’s true. Even fuckedcompany.com – a must-read site during the Internet boom – is a shadow of its former self. The infrastructure is in place and Pud just publishes a few fucks a week. Whoopee….
• DRM is dumb: I understand the argument for DRM (digital rights management), I just don’t agree with the argument. I understand the argument for horses to pull horseless carriages, I just don’t agree with the argument.
• Blogs as abstracts: Back in the day of peer-reviewed science journals, abstract journals – magazines that gave the synopsis of select papers from various disciplines – served a valuable function: No one can read everything (unless an abstracter, and then it’s your only job), so these Cliff Notes of sorts help separate the wheat from the chaff, as well as point out what one may have otherwise totally missed. Blogs – and sites like Google News – serve the same purpose in many ways. While Kottke is way less interesting today than it was a year or two ago, he still has an impressive list of links – with short comments – that give one an overview of what one may have missed; what you might like/not like to read. That’s valuable. A lot of politically oriented blogs work this way, with quick comments on a MSM article, with link to full article. Powerful shit.
• WWW: You’re Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Do you ever wake up at night and shout, “Holy crap – I can’t believe I began all this!”?
• Macs are too damn expensive: I like Macs, I love (as a Linux dweeb) the BSD underpinnings (it has built-in SSH!), but the boxes are too damn expensive. To outfit a decidedly lower end Mac – the Mac Mini – in a configuration (more RAM, bigger drive) that makes sense for me, it’d be over $1200 for only a single 160M drive. Ouch. I’d love it, however.

Adobe LightRoom

I was just reviewing info on Adobe’s Lightroom (get it? – not a darkroom, but a lightroom…), the new photocentric product from the graphics powerhouse.

First impressions?

Very impressed.

Vista – Microsoft’s latest bet-the-company product, will finally be released to regular (i.e. non-business) users tonight at midnight.

I could care less, but it’d really not be worth in the effort.

Related: Vista DRM Cracked by Security Researcher (via Slashdot).

It’s going to be an interesting year for DRM makers to stay ahead of the crackers. And I don’t envy Microsoft the task of protecting this new honeypot of an OS – everyone is going to try to hose Vista.

Ah, Friday night. Throw the work week under the bus (for a night) and just enjoy.

Perhaps, just cruise the web.

But there is cat barf on the mouse, next to the keyboard, freezing a CD to the desktop.

I hate when that happens.

Yes, it’s Taylor spitting up grass.

And that’s her “Who, me?” look in the picture…

By bad news, I mean news that has no business as so-called News.

Ripped from the Web (see highlighted in yellow item):

Is this NEWS? (highlighted in yellow item)

How often the new Speaker of the House blinks?

Blinks?

Oh

My

God

Is this the Onion or a real news channel?

Apparently, neither. Ouch.

Look at the other headlines (OK, sorta weak) – but is a politician’s eye movements equal to more serious issues??

As I type, President Bush is giving the country an insight into the current state of the union.

I’m not watching. Too political, and – mainly – too painful.

We – the US – has now gots some serious problems, none of which this speech will really address.

Too many rants….

Looking around my office, I’m struck by the tech things no longer needed, as well as those that are now essential.

No longer needed:

• Floppy disks – When is the last time you needed a floppy? To build a boot disk?
• Mouse pads – Ah, all those funky mouse pads that helped users show their individuality and gave companies another useful give-away that would keep its brand in front of users. Optical mouses have made them useful as potted plant coasters, and not much else.
• AltaVista search – AltaVista was the first powerhouse search engine; even after HotBot came along and did better search, more power users leveraged AltaVista (weenie users were all about Yahoo!). Then came Google, and the world changed. AltaVista is now an Overture product.
• CRTs – Yes, the cathode-ray tubes have given way to flat screens in a big way. The flat screens weigh less, have better resolution, use less power, have a smaller footprint and have more features (landscape/portrait; speakers; inputs for more than one computer). And the cost is not crazy. What’s the downside to this trend?
• Computer books (for techies) – I have a huge collection of computer books – I used to love them. I’d use them as references. I’d get to a point in programming where I couldn’t remember/simply didn’t know how to, for example, get the length of a string in some language. I’d hit the book. Now, I hit the web. I can’t remember the last computer book I’ve purchased, but it’s been over two years, that’s for certain.
• Zip drives – For years, they ruled as the fast, simple way to move large files around in a sneaker-net way. Now, with fast connections everywhere, USB thumb drives and services like Gmail, which replaces FTP with simple e-mail, Zip drives are a thing of the past. I have a couple here at home – in computers/attached as external drive – I have not used in years.

Essential (or – at the very least – very common):

• Wireless connectivity.
• Tabbed browsing – Even Microsoft has embraced this model (after people saw Firefox and embraced same).
• Social Networking – With MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster and all the other knock-offs, it’s getting more and more difficult to find people who don’t have a page on one of these sites. Good or bad, this is the way things are today.
• iTunes – I hope this doesn’t need any explanation.
• Big, honkin’ hard drives – We store music, images from digital cameras, video and more on our drives. My first hard drive was 20 meg. My current drive is 250 gig – and in a RAID (two 250 gig drives; mirrored for redundancy).

In the future, I expect (hope!) more wires to disappear (Bluetooth/wireless chips), as well as more intelligent backup solutions (pretty much all today are not “can your mom use it?” ready).

But the most fun will be the stuff you really didn’t expect, like iTunes and flat screens. Let’s see what tomorrow brings!

Dave Winer had an interesting looking-into-the-future moment regarding GPS devices.

It mapped a route for him, one that he though odd – but GPS is still imperfect. Anyway, along the way, he had to make a turn at a convenience store.

And here was his flash:

There’s no way the GPS knew there was a convenience store there (a national brand, btw), but in five or ten years, I’m sure they will. And further, Toyota will make a deal with the chain to direct traffic by their store, as opposed to their competition. …. That could be much more valuable than advertising. It’s not about impressions, it’s about delivering customers. Literally!

— Scripting News, 1/20/2007

Somewhat frightening, yet entirely possible. Ditto for Google Maps and other such applications. It’s so obvious (now what Winer’s pointed it out) that it seems inevitable.

Sinister…