The Daily Grind

Warning – annoying ‘yes-dammit-I-bleedin’-am-logged-in’ Media Guardian links ahead:

Floated at the Oxford Media Convention last week, an idea sort-of from OFCOM to found a new media-focussed ‘Public Sector Publisher‘ funded via the license fee. Vital statistics include a mooted 2012 launch, circa £300m annual budget, and tentative support from culture secretary Tessa Jowell. There are some interesting comments in the Organ Grinder, notably about Andrew Chitty of Illumina Digital and from Andrew Lilley of Magic Lantern, who’ve apparently put one version of the proposal together for Ofcom Chief Exec. Ed Richards.

Interesting stuff, but frustratingly – and I guess inevitably – short on detail. This is exactly the sort of thing for which I’m hoping SciCast (caution: unfinished prototype site) will provide a practical example, and I’m itching to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in. Not just on the practicalities of SciCast itself, but on questions like:

• Would projects like this be easier or harder if there was a pre-existing delivery system? Is platform flexibility more or less important than existing infrastructure? (current guess: it depends who you are. Blech.)
• How important is the asymmetry with broadcast, where additional viewers cost nothing to serve, vs. offering up web media, with all the scaling issues that entails? (current guess: if you’ve found a way of making dosh, deal with it – but with pure education projects that sort of economics isn’t valid. Discuss, 20 marks.)
• How do you measure ‘value for money’? Value to whom? (current guess: ah, the £300m question. SciCast is getting lots of people excited, but so far few of them have any money. The same could have been said about Johnny Ball.)
• Video costs scale downwards to a few hundred quid a minute, but below that you’re into seriously diminishing economies. How do you keep cost-per-viewer down, without exploiting people and/or building an unsustainable industry. (current guess: Hah! Got you! It’s a trick question: you can’t.)

It’s going to be an interesting year, not least as I find out if I have a contribution to make, or merely think I do. Scary and exciting.

I wrote a little about the production problems of high-definition a while ago; now the New York Times has done the commendably obvious story and talked to porn industry insiders about the problems they’re seeing. Sure enough, they’re resorting to clever post-production techniques to smooth skin. You have to register to read the article, but it’s worth it for the name ‘Stormy Daniels,’ which is clearly ‘name of first pet and mother’s maiden name’ or somesuch.

Anyway, there are reports that the ‘DRM in the cables’ HDCP-enabled HDMI schemes are (a.) completely baffling to anyone who isn’t forced to chant marketing pap every day at early-morning acronym school, and (b.) consequently likely to degrade high-def content played back on, for example, a Vista-based PC. This leads to the hilariously paradoxical situation where legitimate Hollywood-generated movies can look worse than cheap-and-cheerful home-made HDV. Like – er – porn, I guess.

One theory doing the rounds is that Microsoft is bending to the wishes of the movie industry in full knowledge that the whole edifice is fatally flawed, and that the utter collapse of the high-def DVD market will bring them to their senses. I don’t buy that (can you say ‘antitrust suit’?), but it’s an amusing possibility.

(Be sure to read Peter Gutmann’s article that restarted all this, by the way. It’s technical, opinionated, and refreshingly blunt. It’s also worth a read of Microsoft’s riposte to Gutmann, if only to marvel at them firstly not deigning to link to it directly, but also to wonder how things can be so messy that 1900 words are needed to explain the situation. Also, skim the comments there and tell me people support Microsoft and the media industry in this.)

[update, Tuesday 23rd: Gutmann responds to Microsoft’s response. Of particular note: he’s yet to receive word of anyone successfully playing HD content, on a PC, in HD. HDCP isn’t there yet. Also: The Inquirer’s take, Article with an interesting real-world example (scroll down: additional process sucking 10-20% CPU when playing mp3 files); Engadget article about the sort of HDCP-stripping DVI box that, if revoked, could suck loads of legitimate hardware with it. This is a mess. Likely not as much of a mess as people fear, but – put it this way: if you’re pissed off at not being able to suck songs off your iPod, this is going to be even more frustrating.]

…shave. No, really. I can heartily second the endorsement of the creams of Geo F Trumper and Taylor of Old Bond Street, both now on Jermyn Street round the back of Piccadilly. It’s high time I visited again.

Let me get this right… the government controversially gave the police powers to hack into computer systems to secure evidence in the course of investigations, on the authority of a senior officer. And now the police have used those powers to hack into… Number 10’s systems?

Though you have to wonder: if the Met can hack into government systems, why can’t… er… pretty much anybody else? Also: do we take it that Number 10 doesn’t routinely encrypt files, or that the Met can…

…Blimey. Get the popcorn, this is interesting.

For broadly irrelevant reasons, I’ve been feeling a bit fed up this weekend: a condition which has had all the expected consequences. That is to say, I’ve bought a large amount of extremely good food, and a bunch of Takeshi Kitano films from a wonderful independent DVD shop.

Sometimes, nights in are the best.

[for anyone who cares: Hana-bi, Kikujiro, and Zatoichi. I think this is the fourth time I’ve bought the latter – I keep giving copies away to people.]

Where was the Origami buzz at CES last week? Remember, Microsoft unveiled a new ultra-mobile tablet PC concept last year, amidst huge marketing hoohah that actually had people a bit excited for a while (unlike… er… Zzzzune). But then we saw the brick-like devices with minimal battery life and XP Tablet Edition, and we uttered a collective ‘meh!’

And yet, mere months later, the whole thing appears to have been forgotten. Which is odd, because another miniature tablet device running a modified version of a desktop OS also wasn’t at CES last week, and that appears to have attracted a tad more attention.

I’m just sayin’.

(Oh, apparently there was some ultra-mobile PC stuff at CES – including a glimpse of a Vista-based Origami-continuation tablet interface, which actually looks rather pretty.)

Things we don’t yet know about the iPhone:

• The processor (likely ARM of some sort, apparently – my guess of low-voltage Intel was right for Apple tv, wrong for iPhone, it seems)
• The graphics subsystem (Nvidia?)
• The type of touchscreen (Synaptics?)
• Pretty much anything else about the hardware, come to think of it.

Things iSuppli claim to have worked out, based on their analysis of the above:

• 4Gb iPhone to carry a $229.85 hardware cost, $245.83 total expense, 49.3% margin.
• 8Gb iPhone to carry a $264.85 hardware cost, $280.83 total expense, 46.9% margin.
• a ‘high degree of confidence’ in their conclusions, though:
• …they’re preliminary ‘until we perform an actual physical teardown and analysis’ (code for: ‘find out what’s inside the thing’)

Things one might conclude about iSuppli:

• They have no idea what ‘5 significant figures’ means.
• They think ‘high degree of confidence’ means ‘we reckon that’s about right. Look, we added it up on the back of a fag packet, and everything.’

To be fair – and as their own article rather than the truncated press release points out – they’ve done lots of this sort of thing before. However, I’d believe them much more if they quoted “~$245±15%”, or whatever. But if they said that, all we’d be able to take from their analysis would be that Apple’s possibly going to make roughly the same margin on iPhone as they do on their other hardware. Which… isn’t particularly surprising. Nor interesting.

Damien’s picked up the blogging again, telling us not-quite-enough about his exploits behind the scenes of basically every film that’s being made in Europe. Or so it seems. But come on, man, we more more!

Nicked from Boing Boing, but still: logic goats? Genius! What a pity there isn’t a NAND-goat, though. Tsk.

I’m fine, thanks for asking – just been rather busy. Oh, well, actually, I did go away – a glorious weekend in Wicklow, of which more anon – but mostly I’ve simply been busy. Scope is somewhat improbably staging a comedy gig tonight, which has been a bit of a challenge to set up, and we’re still reeling a little from the whole ‘Vegas’ insanity.

Speaking of which – forget 1080p TVs, the hit of the show sounds like it was the radio-control dragonfly. Which completely out-does the otherwise fabulous PicooZ helicopter, as mentioned here a short while ago. Damn, and I just got one of those for Christmas, and everything.

But while I’m here: does anyone have any recommendations for group calendaring systems? Hosted, self-hosting, running on an internal server, whatever – are there any systems out there that actually work? All suggestions welcome.