Further television thoughts...

So, Congress is debating giving networks until 2008 to completely cut over to digital from analog television. While I like the display of high-def television, I think by 2008 no one will care whether it's "broadcast" digitally. IPTV, or television sent over Internet Protocols, will be a major competitor to broadcast and cable by then.

Here's my thought on how it will go:

First, more and more people jump on the broadband wagon, mostly via cable modem as opposed to DSL but the method doesn't really matter.

Second, Tivo and media PCs are set up to receive content via an Ethernet connection Tivo-to-Go pretty much enables this already. So does BitTorrent, and there are others.

Third, the inexpensive "TV-out" cards you can get have s-video, DVI, etcetera as output . Bypassing the tuner provides a picture on an analog set that's "good enough" (you knew I had to get it in there!) for most people. HDTV output is already appearing, too. Possibly instead of adding a card to your computer there'll be a "converter" - wireless or cabled, but you plug it into the component/s-video input of your TV, the other receives output from your computer.

Put it all together, and you have time-shifted and space-shifted television where people can watch what they want on the schedule they want, much like Tivo (or EXACTLY like Tivo if Tivo jumps on this method) but the middleman of the cable company or broadcaster is eliminated.

The method of paying the content creators is yet to be determined: will we have ads and product placements embedded in shows, or will we subscribe to shows we want for a per-show price? Will we get Yahoo!TV Unlimited for $10 per month?

I don't know for sure how fast this will happen, of course, but I do know it is already happening, it's just a matter of which media companies will survive it.

Thoughts on television

When will television producers begin to get it?

A new show comes along, that people like to watch (pick your own example, because I don't want to single one out) and they start watching that instead of other stuff that's on. The year after, there are 10 shows like it! The main reason we watch the new show, however, is because it's different from everything else. If they'd just grasp that simple fact, perhaps we'd have a broad spectrum of innovative programming to watch rather than having to choose from among several clones of the same concept.

Update on the cell phone / organizer issue

In this post I hypothesized that the cell phone would be better than the organizer. It is, in fact, better.

The desktop software enable me to export some contacts from Palm Desktop - of course in the lingua franca of data exchange the comma-delimited file, rather than some contact standard - and import them into the Desktop program for the phone, then sync them to the phone. A cumbersome process, but it works. Maybe there's a better way but I haven't found it yet.

It's got one nagging problem - you can't download schedule items from the PC software, only contacts. If I want a schedule item on the phone, I have to enter it by hand, which is not only a pain but violates one of my cardinal rules: if data is in a computer, one should never have to re-enter it to move it to another computer (and your cell phone is a computer, nake no mistake about that). So, I'll have to see what can be done about that, but otherwise the cell phone is "good enough".

A cell phone may be good enough to solve two problems

In relation to this article, and this article -

The cheap organizer works, but synchronizing data to it is a pain as the cheap software that comes with it isn't designed to grab data from the Palm Desktop software I already own, or in fact from any PIM software. You get to pay money for that upgrade, and if you don't you can either manually enter your contact information or try to figure out their file format - and I haven't had time for either.

I bought a pre-paid cellular phone, a Kyocera K9 from Virgin Mobile. The I paid $14.99 for software and a cable to synchronize it with my PC, turns out that it can contain 100 contacts and a schedule - so we'll see how that works. I'm not holding my breath, though, because what little I've learned of the software says it plays nicely with Outlook and Outlook Expres, and I don't use those.

My suspicions are that the cell phone will be better than the organizer - after all, I can actually make a call to the person in the directory; whether it becomes "good enough" only time will tell.

Sounds Good Enough to me...

I've copied my LPs and some of my tapes to .wav files, split them into tracks, and put them on my hard drive. Now I'm about to convert them to MP3 or Ogg format. I see a lot of posts that purport to tell me how many bits per second I should go for - but you know what? I'm not sure it matters. For an old dinosaur like me, who probably ruined his hearing at Who / Allman Brothers concerts by standing too close to those stacks of Marshalls, the music quality doesn't matter so much. I hear what I hear and that's it. So, I'll probably go with 96Kbps or 128Kbps because I see a lot of people doing that, but I could probably get by with 56Kbps, because with the type of music I'd carry with me and the state of my ears, anything that sounds more-or-less like the LP is going to be "good enough" for me.

Good Enough and The Long Tail

"The Long Tail" is a very interesting concept, partly about how companies can profit by selling to the many thousands of people who want marginal things, rather than just the millions who want the most popular things (as I understand it, but I may be less clear on it than I think).

This fits in with the "Good Enough" philosophy because a lot of things which are "good enough" for me (or you) aren't going to be big hits, necessarily. Think cheap pickup truck versus SUV, or seeing "The Spanish Prisoner" instead of "Spider Man". There's still money to be made with the items that aren't "hits", because they're good enough for a lot of people, or because there are enough people in that niche market to make some money.

One niche market that I'm looking to be served is in video or television content. For two examples: I'd like to be able to legally buy all the epsiodesof Max Headroom, and I'd like to be able to legally buy copies of several different commercials from over the years. I've not yet found any legal way to purchase these that's affordable. Those are niche markets, because Max Headroom wasn't a commercial success and because most people don't want to watch commercials anyway. Yet, if the people that owned that content made it possible to buy, I'd wager there are lots of other people that might purchase some of it.

PS: Here's a LazyWeb request: if you know of legal sources for the above, let me know by posting a comment here.

Give Me That Old Time News

Long ago, on a cable system far away, there was a channel that wasn't used for anything. So, they chose to broadcast what looked like the output from a Commodore 64 or Apple II (remember I said this was 'long ago'), with the contents of a basic newswire feed. Just the facts, Jack. Something like what the AP or Reuters transmits to your local paper; what they read before they sit down, crank up their typewriter replacement units, and spit out however many column inches the editor demands.

I want that newsfeed back, with a little more text added to flesh out the details. I want it on my TV, for my local and national news, and I want it in an Atom-based format so it can be picked up by a program (browser, aggregator, news search engine, whatever). It does the job and little else... say it with me now - it's "good enough".

I am so tired of the local network news that spends half its time trying to give me a tease before the commercial in the hopes I stay through the commercial. Just give me the news, the weather, the sports in a simple factual style and I'll take it from there.

Are Pre-Paid Cell Phones Good Enough?

After a few months without one, it's time to get a cell phone again. At the risk of being called a "Luddite" or worse (see some of the posts of Russell Beattie) I'm going to say we just need a phone right now, not a mobile computer. With limited usage and no use for a camera phone or text messaging, our criteria will be a screen that's easy to read day or night, buttons that are easy to use, and easy to listen with. After those are met, the phone that will be "good enough" will have the lowest cost for us with the least lock-in, and currently that seems to be a pre-paid cell phone.

Please don't infer from this post that I'm against cell phones with George Jetson era features. If I needed them, I'd buy them, believe me. And I agree with Russell that the platform is incredibly important - if I ever decide to do more software development, the cell phone is what I'd aim for, despite having a mainframe background, because a lot more people use cell phones than use personal computers. I just don't need the features right now, and so I'm not going to pay for them right now either.

'Twas the Season

Another Holiday Season™ has come and gone. Mine was, as usual "good enough" - I had fun, I got a couple of nice presents, and I enjoyed visits from relatives. One present I'll talk about in the context of this journal.

We bought ourselves a digital camera, which we'll enjoy as we travel. We didn't buy the best-of-breed, but rather picked a price point more-or-less and then picked a good camera in that range. I'm no camera expert, so we didn't have a long laundry list of featuers we wanted, just a few: made by a camera company (i.e. Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Kodak, etcetera), optical zoom, relative ease of use, and a memory card that was fairly popular. You, of course, would have your own criteria. But as I've probably said too many times already - if you get what you want, at a price you consider affordable, that's "good enough".

That brings up another holiday issue, too. If you read all of the hype before and during the holiday buying season, there are any number of expensive new things you might feel that you should have bought. Well, it's not true. Ads and newspaper write-ups are the public relations game for the people that want you to buy their stuff, they're not interested in the stuff you want to buy. If you bought gifts you thought were "good enough" then good for you! You probably managed to have a holiday buying season that you figured you could afford, whether you paid in cash or you bought it on credit; and the recipients of the gifts will enjoy them just the same.

As this new year begins, I hope your new one will be "good enough" - for you and yours.

While I'm on the subject

In the previous post, I mentioned public libraries. Public libraries are definitely in the "good enough" category as I've defined it. Where else can you get access to all of those resources for free? Not to mention the help of the librarians. I don't know about every town of course but in our town it's worth it to memorize the number of the reference desk at the library. Any time you have a tough question, try calling a librarian - they know where and how to find some of the most obscure answers out there. They're the unsung heroes of the information age!

"Good Enough" for reading

While I was browsing the bookstore the other day, in my annual check for books I should put on my Christmas gift list, it occurred to me: the reason e-books haven't caught on as well as people hoped, and the reason book sales seem to continue to do pretty well, is that books are, and have been "good enough". They have great resolution - better than an current LCD screen that I know of - and they're at least as portable as a PDA even though they're not always pocket-sized. The only way that e-books really have them beat is in weight and volume - you can certainly carry 200 e-books on your person, but 200 books? The price of books versus e-books is a matter of debate: you can get books for free at the public library, just as you can download public domain e-books for free. If you want to own one, books range from reasonable to outrageous ; I haven't checked e-book prices in a while but I'd guess they're cheaper - but as I just said, the advantage is nullified if you use your friendly public library.

Downgrading to "not quite good enough"?

This is an update to this earlier post about trying to downgrade to an organizer instead of a PDA.

I bought the organizer, and ordered the "free" (I had to pay shipping and handling of course) software that comes with it to back up organizer entries. The organizer works, and the software works, but it's just shy of being "good enough": there's no east way to convert my PDA address information into the backup format for the organizer.

I've played around with the file created when I backed up some test entries I made, and you can see where some of the fields go in the comma-delimited file, but there are a couple of columns that are put in the file whose purpose and meaning aren't clear.

The next step is one I'm debating, whether to spend $30 to see if their "desktop" software will work better for this purpose. I might do it, just to see, since 12.99 for the organizer and $30 for software is still way less than the PDA cost.

The other issue is the LCD on the thing, which is not the finest, but again for this purpose will work OK.

I'll let you know more if and when I find out.

Systems that are "good enough"

Bruce Sterling wrote a note about Clay Shirky's article about evolvable systems and the Web. The article is old, but definitely relevant to what I'm writing here.

The systems we all use daily, whether they be Internet, Web, television, telephone, or electricity; the ones we just assume are there (until they're not) - these systems all evolved over time, until they were "good enough" to be widely adopted, but not perfect. The key is that they continue to evolve - when something no longer is good enough to do what we want, extensions are created, grafted on (sometimes with bubblegum or duct tape), and we move on. Sometimes, we come back and make the extension work better, sometimes it evolves until it seeems part of the original fabric of things, sometimes extensions die out when something better comes along.

If you're old enough to have had a personal computer in the 80s (or even back in the 70s), think of your first personal computer, then look at everything on your current one. It's still a computer, still basically the same system. Possibly, it's still running an Intel architecture. But look again, or think again, and you realize how much it has evolved over time. Try to remember all of the extensions as they occurred, and the proposed extensions that didn't make it - it's an eye-opener in many ways.

No matter how the changes occur it's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, process that produces results that stand the test of time. The changes at any given moment are just "good enough" to do what we're trying to do, but with plenty of room for improvement. When you see those changes occurring, you're in a good place. When someone tries to give you a "quantum leap" or "completely revolutionary" change - watch out, that particular technology is possibly going to be a backwater eddy to the main stream.

"Good Enough" tech blog?

Alice and Bill want to know if they're good enough to win the Best Tech Blog of the Year award.

Given the title of this blog, I just had to comment. I can't say whether they're the best or not, I've not sampled all of the ones out there. But, they're definitely "good enough" in the sense I mean on this blog: they give you what you need, without extra frills and at the right cost. I think they're good enough to be considered one of the best, so I put in a nomination. I'm not making a suggestion - make up your own mind.

Downgrading to "good enough"

I've begun an experiment, of sorts, in the "good enough" vein. I think I've mentioned previously that I bought a low-end PDA to use for addresses and phone numbers. Low-end as it was, it still cost over $100. Now, I've purchased a $12.99 "organizer" and when the software is installed on my PC, I will see if I can download my current address book information into it. It's got a backlight, a minimal 4(?) line LCD, and a QWERTY keyboard. Other than address book functions it has the usual for these kinds of organizers including clock, scheduling, spell checking and calculator functions. There are less expensive models, but they don't have any PC connectivity and I'd really like to avoid re-entering my data again. I chose a keyboard-based one because doing the stylus hunt-and-peck for entering text was really getting old. If this works out, then I'll have successfully downgraded to something that meets my definition of "good enough" - it will do what I want, at the price point I want. Remember, my needs are not for a full PDA, I'm just going to throw this in the suitcase or car to use for looking up phone numbers and addresses, an electronic replacement for a little address book.

Good enough for me, maybe not for you..

At Lost Remote, an article referencing Wired's article about "the Long Tail" reminded of something I've wanted to post for a while.

Media, and especially television, has for so long has been about mass-market consumption, that they've forgotten how to sell to anything less than millions of people. You and I know, however, that none of us all agree, all the time on what's good television. I, for example, would buy DVD copies of Max Headroom episodes and certain commercials (Miller Lite sports-combos like sumo high-dive and full-contact golf, for one example). You probably want the entire "Edge of Night" soap opera and early Milton Berle. Television executives, however, only market DVDs of shows which were popular in the ratings sense; they market to the masses, not to the small niches.

If they'd wake up and market to the hundreds, or thousands, instead of the millions, they'd realize that they could sell this stuff they have on the shelf. Just digitize all of it, and wait for the orders to come in, which can be filled on demand - no shelf space, no warehouses, nothing but a few disk drives to hold the content and a few DVD burners for filling orders. The income wouldn't be huge, but hey - any income from something they didn't think would sell ought to be "good enough", wouldn't you think?

"Good enough" to be President?

You may or may not know, but I live in Florida. We've suffered through two major hurricanes recently (my parents and brothers and their families, thankfully, had some damage to their homes but not a huge amount) and are about to have a third, it looks like. Through all of the aftermath, Governor "Jeb" Bush has provided what appears to me to be pretty good leadership. While I'm a state employee, I am not directly involved with the crisis situation, so this isn't one of those "he's my captain right or wrong things". In fact, some of his policies make me nervous for the future of my job or of my colleagues', and his politics and mine differ quite a bit. But I have to say that I admire the way he seems to be handling this crisis - he's in there leading, doing stuff, not on the front page every day with a new proclamation. When a false rumour about gas rationing started, he had to make a statement - and he said we had way more imortant things to do than to get hyper-excited about rumors. He chose, after Hurricane Charley, to not go to the Republican Convention even though I'm sure he would have enjoyed being there to cheer on his brother. There has been speculation, supposedly substantiated, that the GOP wanted JEB to run for President in 2000, not his brother, but that an unexpected loss in Florida's gubernatorial election of 1994 ruined those plans. I have to say, I think he is "good enough" for the job. I might not like his policies any better than some of his brother's, and I probably wouldn't have voted for him - but I think that he'd have been more thoughtful and less dogmatic about them, and less likely to be listening to whoever is pulling GWB's strings. I think JEB is more his own man. If he runs later in life, he'll have a real shot at winning.

"good enough" disaster response?

Yes, I'm in Florida but no, I wasn't in the area affected by Hurricane Charley. You can find plenty of other reports of damage, suffering, and the like. What I want to mention is the disaster response. Since Hurricane Andrew hit south of Miami, the various responding agencies from federal down to local, have done a lot more planning and learning, and it is evident in how they have responded to this disaster. They were there quickly, and were very prepared. They can't, of course, foresee everything, nor can they be everywhere to handle every issue, or to be on top of every dumb yahoo that wants to drive into a disaster zone and get in the way.

To so many, who are hurting, the response will never seem "good enough", but in fact it has been really good in an objective sense.

"Good Enough" transportation?

Can electric vehicles ever be "good enough" for daily transportation? I ask myself this whenever I'm considering how often I am driving to work, a solo driver in a car with an internal combustion engine. I know there are electric cars which can cover the distance to and from work, with some lunchtime errands thrown in - but is that only in flat terrain, not up and down hill like my trip to work? Can they keep up with the local traffic which averages 35 MPH the entire way (the speed limit is 35 MPH, but in my town at least most of the traffic is going 5-10 MPH over that)?

If I could find a car that would meet those criteria, then I'd still have to deal with the cost - most electric cars are somewhat expensive (I am not referring to the hybrids, which are priced close to the price of their gas-powered counterparts). I don't know why that is, whether it's low demand or something else. The problem is that with current technology you'd have to have two cars - one (the electric) for daily commuting, and another (gasoline, diesel, or hybrid) for distance travelling.For that to be "good enough" the electric has to be fairly inexpensive.

When I was learning to drive, and gasoline was 25 cents a gallon, Volkswagen Bugs sold inexpensively ($2995 I believe, it could have been slightly more). They got good gas mileage for the times ($2.00 drove me to work for at least a week, sometimes more). They were easy to work on, too (low maintenance cost). Those factors all combined to make the VW Bug one of the most popular vehicles for young people.

What we need now is an electric version of the VW Bug, accessible to first-time car buyers, with the same ease of maintenance. That would be "good enough" to start a change in commuter habits, I think. But - is it possible? That, I don't know.

NOT good enough!

What's not good enough for me, lately, are the various calendaring things around me. Various pieces of software have various features, but of the few that I own, not one has all of the features I want to use. This, despite an IETF RFC describing calendar objects - RFC 2445, also known as iCalendar - which has been out for a number of years. Here are some of the currently frustrating examples of calendar "failures":

• Palm Desktop- my wife and I use this at home to coordinate schedule information for ourselves. She's more of a planner than I, but I still participate. This product will NOT open, import nor export iCalendar information, instead continuing to support the earlier standard, vCalendar. If I find iCalendar files (usually an .ics extension) somewhere that I want to add to my personal calendar, I'm out of luck. Why a company so focused on personal information management hasn't done this is beyond me... and it's worse than that, because iCalendar is a superset of vCalendar, so managing to implement just the backward-compatible part of it would only mean that they have to check for "VERSION: 2.0" in their code instead of "VERSION: 1.0" to "get by".
• Lotus Notes - can import .ics files from attachments but not open them directly. This is the choice for mail and calendaring where I work, and the same limitations as mentioned above apply - I'd like to be able to click on the .ics files and add schedule information. I believe Outlook can do it, but I don't have Outlook to try it out - Outlook Express doesn't do calendaring that I know of.
• Event listings on the Web- far too many do not provide iCalendar versions of the event calendar, though this is improving, probably due to the support in Apple's iCal (and Microsoft's Outlook?) for the iCalendar standard.
• Band touring schedules! Not only do many of them not supply iCalendar files, I've noticed that an awful lot of them don't include the time of the engagement. If I'm driving to a concert, say from West Palm Beach to Miami, not an unusual occurrence when I was living down there, I need to know when to arrive, wouldn't you say?

These things are bound to improve. There's work going on to improve iCalendar and related standards, and software publishers (except maybe for Palm!) look like they're improving their support for the standard. It would be nice if more of the Web publishing tools like FrontPage, ColdFusion, and the like, provided easy ways for people publishing event listings to provide the support too.