todd.tokubo.com

After a nearly three year experiment, I have decided to go back to a desktop machine at home.

Reasons:

1) My Gateway M8510 was getting really long in the tooth.  When the new entry level desktops are coming out with miles of more performance, it was tough.  Oddly, I could still do 95% of my work on a 3 year old Pentium M 1.73 GHz with 2 GB of DDR.

2) I had last year’s low-end Gateway system sitting in my closet.  A quick peek at Passmark scores showed that even a sad Sempron 2.2 GHz beat the living crap out of my system.  So, I pulled that low end system out of the closet.  Slapped an ATI Radeon X1300 into it (I can already hear webmonkey laughing in the background) and exchanged the 1 GB of DDR2 with 2 GB of DDR2 from my home server and fired it up.

Between me and my brother we had two low-end 18.5″ displays, so I have an expanded desktop for the first time in forever.

Sadly, this system is enormously faster than my crappy Centrino system.  So I am starting to see Intel’s logic in rebranding their ICs going forward.  I also found out what will drive the need for higher speed systems, virtualization.  I’ll start playing around with virtualization and trying to optimize my distributed systems at the same time.

Now, my upgrade bug has started again.

While I’m not a huge fan of MLB, I think it’s fantastic that Boxee now has LIVE content from MLB.com streaming to their front end.  More importantly, you can now use Boxee on your Windows PC.  I’ll be using this shortly.

Along with Hulu Desktop (which incidentally brings my ancient Pentium M 1.73 to a crawl) and a bunch of kiddie front ends using Adobe Air.

It’s almost time to upgrade to support for my next killer app… Flash!!?!?!??!

As of today, broadcast TV in the USA is offically digital.  In an effort to close the “analog hole“, we now get all of our broadcasts coming in lucious 1’s and 0’s.  There’s a really good read (with suprisingly civil comments).

Summary: with digital broadcast TV being seen as one of the ultimate forms of DRM to preserve the broadcast TV business model, TV as a business is now officially in denial.  Much like the newspapers have been for the last 10 years.

What I find interesting is that I would basically agree that TV advertising revenues are basically out of whack, but what happens when they “normalize”.   The biggest victims will be the professional sports leagues and athletes.  Now, I love sports, but I don’t have much love lost for the outrageous salaries of pro athletes.  Wall Street got their come-uppance, and in a couple of years it will be sports’ turn.  The NBA has already started taking steps, they actually DROPPED their salary cap by 10% next year.

So now that the finance guys are no longer paid ungodly sums, and pro athletes are soon to follow, maybe being a professional geek (engineer) is not a bad thing.

I just came back from Europe (and actually got to travel in First Class).  This week I feel oddly bummed.  It will be the first year in 8 years (although last year doesn’t count) that I won’t be at E3 in LA.  Not that standing in line with all of my other sweating, booth trolling brethren is a ton of fun mind you… it just feels weird.

Ambition as you progress through school.

I think my first job was like this.

Please find a new business model FAST.

If you’re thinking that holding onto HD sports and Reality TV show finales (the only things I use broadcast TV for now) is going to save your revenues, please think faster…

One reason the Lakers are actually popular in the LA is because you can tune to KCAL9, and see the broadcast on local TV.  Here in the Bay Area, I missed most of the Warriors season (not that it was a great one, mind you) because I need to pay an extra $50 to get ESPN and Comcast Sports Net.  Next season will be: NBA Internet Season pass = $99 / year.

So, Dear Comcast: Please do the math… quickly… deploying DOCSIS 3.0 and moving your headend to H.264 over IP based stuff would be a nice start.  I like my fast internet.  It’s where I watch my TV.  I don’t mind paying a little extra there.  I do mind the extra $50 a month for 327 channels I never watch.

Memories of my youth…

The 70s

The 80s (but I think the Transformers are in there somewhere also, the real Transformers, not Michael Bay’s monstrosity)

The 90s

My son has started with Clone Wars, has moved to Legos… so I’m worried about what comes next.

Oh by the way, according to CNN, my friends and I have won!

It’s not just going after a few select people in Sweden, the Slate has the best succinct article, that I’ve read,  about why Netflix and iTunes fit in the current “byzantine” (their word not mine) motion picture distribution system.

We all understand the first couple of steps in this life cycle—first a movie hits theaters and then, a few months later, it comes out on DVD. Around the same time, it also comes out on pay-per-view, available on demand on cable systems, hotel rooms, airplanes, and other devices. Apple’s rental store operates under these pay-per-view rules, most of which put a 24-hour limit on movies. 

It’s a short read and well worth it to understand the current monetization issues the MPAA faces.  It doesn’t make me any more sympathetic tho.  Note to MPAA: Please see RIAA and print newspapers as examples of what happens when you hold on to your existing business model too long.

I read a lot of career things.  From this Slashdot post, is an article saying… “Coders your days are numbered“.  One thing that always bothered me about software engineers were that many of them refered to others as coders.  It took me reading the line “Too many software development teams are still staffed like secretarial pools…” to really resonate.  

Software development doesn’t need more typists, secretaries, intermediaries, or middle managers. What it needs are more skilled, engaged, communicative, responsive, assertive developer-analysts — the kind who can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation. 

Yes… I read so many career posts where people complain about their jobs being outsourced.  Now some of those may have been done unfairly by mismanagement.  However, I tend to believe that many of those people are feeling entitled even though, their job has been marginalized.  Or you rank somewhere below 4 on this guy’s chart.

I suspect more articles like this will start popping up.  This one compares ARM and Intel at a transistor level and notes that ARM does not directly follow the revered Moore’s Law as Intel seemingly does.

Looking more and Moore like Intel needs to have ARM stick around for a while.