Day: April 23, 2006

Sony’s UMD Format A Failure

Wow here’s a shock — Sony has failed once again at its attempts to introduce an expensive, proprietary, DRMed media format.

Its latest failure is the Universal Media Disc, the format it forced on PSP owners for watching movies on that device.

It’s hard to see why UMD failed.

The movies were expensive — $20 to $25 per movie.

The PSP couldn’t be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.

The movies were DRMed as only Sony could do.

Gee, what wasn’t to love about the UMD format?

Sony is in an odd position with the PSP. The PSP is a very cool device burdened by the fact that it is sold by a completely clueless company.

So after the PSP was initially released, a large community of modders quickly emerged providing tools to do all sorts of cool things with the hardware. Sony’s reaction, of course, has been to release several updates to make it increasingly difficult and/or impossible to use the PSP for anything which Sony hasn’t explicitly authorized.

The nominal explanation for locking down the device is the fear of software piracy, but hackers figured out how to crack the encryption on game UMDs about five months after the device was released.

As with most copy protection schemes, pirates are able to find ways around the copy protection, while consumers are left with an intentionally crippled device.

200GB Notebook Drives — About Time

The other day I was discussing storage issues with some people and someone asked how many gigabytes are in a petabyte. The correct answer — not enough.

Unfortunately, barring any significant breakthroughs we are still a long way from the day when a petabyte of storage is economical (i.e., when I can afford it for my home machine). Thankfully, though, storage makers keep plugging away.

For example, Fujitsu recently announced that it will begin shipping 200gb 2.5″ SATA drives in the third quarter of 2006. This drive will utilize the perpendicular recording technique that can be used to store more data in the same amount of space as compared to traditional methods.

Meanwhile, the cost of buying a terabyte of space continues to decline. Today you can pick up a couple 500gb HDs for as little as $540, putting a 5tb array of HDs at significantly less than $3,000.

Washington City Paper’s Takedown of Crystal Meth Hype

Washington City Paper’s Ryan Grim just went to town on the Washington Post in the one of the best articles I’ve read on the nonsensical hype over crystal meth.

One possible explanation for the flat national rate of meth use and the lack of a serious local problem could be that the drug is not very addictive. A recent federal survey showed that of the 12 million people who had used meth in their lifetime, only 1 in 10 had used it in the past year. Only 1 in 25 had used it in the past 30 days.

Despite the evidence, health officials are also pushing for legislation that would restrict the sale of cold medications that contain pseudoephedrine, one of the ingredients used to manufacture meth. Virginia, like many states across the country, limits such sales, but Maryland and the District do not.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think the efforts to limit over-the-counter sales of products with pseudoephedrine are simply stupid, but they’re also more than a little amusing.

Consider something like cocaine, which is derived from cocoa leaf that are grown and processed outside of the United States. Yet the fact that cocaine is produced and processed entirely outside of the United States hasn’t exactly lead to a dearth of cocaine.

Yet, apparently, something magical is going to happen with crystal meth such that the second you limit over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine, the supply of the drug is just going to dry right up. You know, because it would be impossible for people to smuggle pseudoephedrine into the United States, or simply switch to producing crystal meth in Canada or Mexico and smuggling the finished product in.

Nah, that would never happen.

E-Mail As Best Collaboration Tool

Death-of-email articles, like Business Week’s E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago, always leave me scratching my head (especially ones like that which includes fans of intrusive IM apps — like people aren’t interrupted enough on an average day). Typically, email’s purported replacements come down to two separate product groups: a) blogs, wikis, and other tools that are very useful and could conceivably be used entirely for collaboration instead of e-mail, and b) dedicated collaboration tools that aim to create a “virtual space” where team members collaborate, share files, etc.

Central Desktop, which sells one of these “virtual space” applications, published a widely referenced post outlining some of the reasons that e-mail, with all of its faults, is still the preferred method of collaboration at most organizations. It is universal, easy to understand even by technophobes, searchable, etc., etc. Commenters add some other reasons, to which I would add that e-mail is very robust. A lot of software I use, web servers, application servers, etc., go down, get hacked, have bugs. I think I can count the number of times I haven’t been able to access my mail server over the past 5 years on one hand. On the other hand, getting some of these virtual space applications up and running and stable with multiple users can be a real pain in the ass.

The weird thing is that after the more than 2,000 word post at Central Desktop, the lesson the company seems to have taken away is that they need to make their collaboration tool incorporate some of the features that e-mail has. That seems like a silly approach — why re-invent the wheel?

Instead, companies should build collaboration tools that are e-mail centric. I use three different collaboration applications, and all of them are essentially add-ons to e-mail. They have web interfaces and in some cases some slick AJAX mojo, but 95% of the time I interact with them through e-mail.

These applications essentially augment e-mail, adding services that store, track, automatically generate, modify, etc., messages and files related to projects.

It’s amazing how useful such an application can be. Everyone already understands e-mail, so there’s no huge learning curve to get the basic interaction down. E-mail clients are universal, so you don’t have to worry that maybe the previous point release of the Mac OS isn’t compatible with the virtual space application.

E-mail just works. Which of course means everybody and their brother has to be trying to find a way to replace it.