Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’m going to write it now so that later I can say “see, I told you so” to an invisible friend… The Playstation 3 and Blu-Ray DVD are doomed to economic failure.

Why? I present as evidence the PSP & UMD, the Mini-Disk, and of course Betamax.

The Sony Betamax debacle has been debated many many times. I won’t repeat it here.

The Mini-Disk is one of many of Sony’s attempts at producing a proprietary media format whose benefits are purely technical (normal folks can’t tell the difference). Even today, when the format should be well into post maturity, a blank mini-disk is $8-10 for 1GB of storage. Compared to a DVD with 4.7GB of storage and retailing for $0.50 each, that’s just ridiculous. The mini-disk never took off because Sony controlled it soup-to-nuts, and kept the prices higher than competing technologies.

The PSP and UMD will soon be in the technological ash-heap of history. Evidently, Target is no longer selling UMD movies after virtually no one cared to buy them. Again, over priced, proprietary format. And the PSP is an over-priced console, compared to the other offerings, especially from Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, the PSP is technically better, more powerful, etc, than anything Nintendo has put out, but as a $100 price premium for a hand-held gaming system, its hard to justify the extra cash.

Finally the PS3 and Blu-Ray. There are literally hundreds of surveys that indicate that the PS3 is going to be too expensive, and $100 over the Xbox360’s premium version. Why the price difference? New Blu-Ray technology (oh yeah and other stuff). So, Sony is trying to stuff a piece of brand new (i.e. nearly 0 demand) technology into a game system, probably to drive “synergies”. Gamers will get hooked into blu-ray; movie watchers may get a PS3 as an inexpensive (in comparison) blu-ray player. Unfortunately, the price is too high for the PS3, the technical differences don’t really matter (see VHS vs. BetaMax, Mini-Disk vs. world), and the blu-ray format may as well be another UMD–just about as proprietary with Sony being the biggest corporate chearleader.

So here is my prediction: by the end of 2007, the PS3 will be in third place in next-generation console marketshare, and sales of Blu-ray movies will be less than half of HD-DVD.

There, I said it.

(no spoilers)
Maybe its just me, but did every action sequence in PotCDMC feel like it was created just to be a video game level? I mean, how long could a water wheel stay vertical with three men jumping in and out of it as it rolls down miles of rugged terrain? And every scene with the kracken just reminded me of a sequence in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for PS2 where you have to cut off the tentacles of the beast in the lake. And, of course the kraken will be one of the boss’ in the video game. And what about the deft nature of moving the squid/octopus tentacles of Davy Jones to get the key?

If I could see the video game potential of just about every scene, it makes me think that they designed it with that in mind. I can’t really say as I blame them, given the huge cross-over market, but it sure did take away from the movie’s interest when I kept thinking “X X Triangle”.

Tonight was my first “meeting” at FreeGeek Columbus. I knew this was a place I could love when one of the guys asks Scott: “Did you bring the 54G?” I loved that the “Linksys WRT” was implied–that the level of knowledge shared between them was that high. Yeah, 54G indeed.

My first task was to help Scott get a couple of old Dell servers (forgot the model number) stuffed into an old rack and booted up. No rails, only one of the triple power supplies plugged in, and monitor, keyboard, mouse and KVM switch sitting on top of the top server.

After that was done, I helped get a new video card installed and configured on one of the PCs that they were building. As I worked on that, I wondered “I work on computers all day. Why would I want to do this kind of thing in my free time.” Then it hit me: the subtitle for Free Geek could be “Computers without Committees”. At least it could be for the volunteers–there we were just getting stuff done, no committees or change control process to evaluate if it was the right thing to do.

So, I guess I’m now an official Free Geek Columbus member. I’m even writing this post from my freshly installed Kubuntu. Hopefully my enthusiasm will last longer than it did for the Personal MBA….

We just got back from vacation, and I’m very happy with my home network setup. “But wait” you may ask, “if you were on vacation, what does your home network have to do with it?”

Well, here’s my setup: I have a WRT54G Linksys router, which as been upgraded to the DD-WRT firmware (highly recommended! best one I’ve tried so far). I enabled VPN and configured a user (don’t make it anything you use ANYWHERE else on the internet!!)
Since I don’t have a fixed IP address from my ISP, I also setup and account with DynDNS.org and put the information in the router setup DDNS tab (this isn’t documented on the DD-WRT Wiki, but it is very easy in the menu screens).

Next, I configured the Windows XP VPN client on my laptop.

• Open Network connections.
• Click Create a new connection
• Choose Connect to the network at my workplace
• Choose Virtual Private Network connection
• Give it a name (I called it Home Network)
• Give it the hostname that you used during the DynDNS.org account setup.
• Click Finish.
• The first time you connect it will prompt you for the user name and password. Use the one that you created for VPN above.

Now, where ever I am, if I have an Internet connection, I can get to my home network resources. For me, that includes a Linksys NSLU2, with an 80GB USB hard drive.

So, while we were on vacation, I connected to my home network and copied my vacation photos from the camera to the laptop to the NSLU2 attached harddrive. This way, I always had two copies of the photos (typically one on the laptop, one on the NSLU2).

One other oddity that I didn’t expect–for some reason while I was connected to the home network VPN, I didn’t automatically get DNS server settings. I had to manually specify DNS servers in the VPN connection properties on the laptop to match what I was getting from my ISP on the router. If I did that, I could then securely browse the Internet through an open Wifi connection, and I could do it while I was uploading files to the NSLU2.