Angus Thinks…

Observant readers may notice a slight change to the malcolmhardie.com website (if you came in from there). The fonts for the titles have been resized and the stupid red boxes have been removed. Hopefully it all looks more visually cohesive. Titles now reduce in size as they become less important for instance.

I’m still intending to switch the whole lot to xml/xslt/php, but I’ve deferred deployment for a while until some other things are out of the way. The new version is up and running on the test server but I think it needs a bit more work before it can be released.

According to this BBC Article there is a growing move towards tv programming on mobile phones. The key disadvantage is the amazingly high cost; one of the people interviewed paid $50 for 45 minutes. High pricing seems to be a problem as it so often is for mobile services.

It does seem like a handy thing though. I suppose Three in the uk is doing something kind of similar, but in a much more limited way, with their streaming video services. It’s even possible that if the price was not unreasonable then I might even use the service myself. Although I would probably have to upgrade my phone to do so. I don’t think anyone is going to manage to offer streaming video on a nokia 6210 🙂

I’ve been wondering today if I actually think enough to call this weblog “Angus Thinks”?

Is there a requirement to think a certain amount to be able claim that I do think and does the subject matter actually matter?

I can see I’m going to have think about this a bit more…

Well by now everybody probably knows about this, but I thought to follow up my previous post.

Apple launched the most amazingly large flat panel screens on Monday. The largest is a 30″ lcd panel.

There was also a demonstration about Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which is looking quite promising. It is promising to be a 64 bit operating system offering full contextual search facility and a new widget/desktop accessory thing with shades of Konfabulator.

There was no indication of a new iMac at that presentation though. Which is odd given the story about the supply chain.

Perhaps the following days will bring more rumors (false of course) which I can think about.

I just got finished adding a few new links. It’s getting to be this sort of six-degrees of weblog kind of thing. How can I get from here to any other page on the internet via only the links on this page? I don’t think that can be done from my blog yet but there are weblogs that it probably will work from.

Yet the odd thing about weblogs is that they’re moving away from the main web at speed. The design and technology powering them is diverging quite rapidly. RSS seems to be the preferred way to read web logs and the styling is becoming quite unlike traditional web pages. Content is typically not even on a unique page.

What purpose does the keypad actually serve on a mobile phone? Most people these days are not typing numbers on it. Numbers are usually stored in the address book. People type sms messages on it, but is that efficient? T9 predictive text input is ok but it really isn’t as efficient as a proper keyboard.

I wonder if it’s faster or slower than graffiti like pen based input systems? Would a screen based keyboard be better? Maybe some kind of thumb-board?

Mobile users have been carefully trained to type at speed on a very poor keyboard. Could they become used to a different and more efficient arrangement or are we permanently stuck with the legacy of the 12 key number pad?

Dhruba posted a review of the Nokia 6600 a while back. He also let me borrow it for a few minutes to play a game on it and it is beautiful to use. Smart phones definitely seem to taking the place of the PDA.

I definitely want one 🙂

I was thinking the other day about whether you actually need physical manifestation of media content. Does a movie gain something by being physically on a DVD rather than being stored digitially on a computer?

There is definitely one advantage in actually storing the movie on some kind of physical object because you can pick it up and move it around, even take it to places where the network infrastructure doesn’t exist. The obvious disadvantage is that you do actually have to take it physically to wherever you actually want to watch it.

It is also somewhat less impressive to give a gift of piece of paper representing a piece of content rather than an actual CD or DVD.

So I was wondering if the answer might be in tokens. The token would represent the digital media and identify ownership but the content itself would be stored digitally on the network. It would solve some of the problems of trying to squeeze more and more content onto smaller disks although it certainly wouldn’t solve the disconnected problem.

The token would be used to actually read the media, so there would be no problems with damaged content affecting the film. Tokens might be damaged but they could be replaced in that situation and since they would be simple anyway the survivability would probably be high. I carry around a collection of plastic cards everyday that are replaced about once every three years. That is somewhat more robust than video tape and probably better than DVDs too.

I see the token as being a smart card like object of some kind and perhaps the tokens might even reusable.

It’s a thought anyway…