We computer junkies are a bitchy little bunch. Part of the impression of intelligence is the fear and paranaoia that comes along with the notion of someone telling you you’re wrong, so the tendency is to lash out proactively against thosw who might oppose you. Case in point: I had a friend I worked with at one point, let’s just call him the Microsoft Fan, who hated Leo from The Screen Savers, because the man was “stupid and always dead wrong.” Translation: he’s a Linux enthusaist and therefore a threat to Microsoft. While I have noticed Leo state things wrong in the past (or at least be misguiding about it, which is bad considering he’s “here to help”) and I do notice a bit of an anti-MS bias, I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with what he says or how he chooses to go about doing it – rather the fault probably lied with my friend, as he felt his knowledge somehow undermined by a person on TV.

However, every morning on KTSR they have some recurring content, including the local news, the jokes made by Jon Stewart and Jay Leno the night before, and Lazlow’s Underground Hard Drive. Let me tell you, this guy is a putz. This morning’s little diatribe: “With all the Windows operating systems out there, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and now Windows XP, consumers may feel a little bit overwhelmed…” Yes, Lazlow, do that. Play on the igorance of the masses to make Microsoft seem like an evil fuck. Nevermind the fact that Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT aren’t even available anymore (as MS buys the copies back once a new version is out). Nevermind the fact that Windows 2000 is only found at certian places and even when it is it’s so expensive as to ward off the average user. Nevermind the fact that once Windows XP hits shelves it will be the only OS MS will market anymore and the only one on shelves, just sit there and make a big deal out of nothing, fucktard.

Maybe my friend was right after all.

I guess now I’m officially an old fart. I participated in the Aggie Band reunion. It was interesting to see how I compared to the “real” old farts. This weekend was the Corps reunion – 125 years old (the Band only goes back to 1894). They did a presentation and some various events around campus – it was pretty cool.

Also this weekend, and perhaps more significantly, at the football game A&M did a little stunt called “Red, White and Blue Out”. A little history – a few years ago (1998) seems we kept not only getting beat by Nebraska (where they breed their football players big apparently) but we kept getting annihilated by them. Everyone did – they had an undefeated record stretching back a year or so. So someone came up with idea to do “Maroon Out” – since the Nebraska game that year was at Kyle Field the idea was to print out tons of maroon T-shirts with “Maroon Out” on them (maroon and white are the A&M colors) and sell them as cheaply as possible – $5 (barely covering the $4+ price of printing the shirt) with the hopes of the football players’ spirits being encouraged by seeing so much maroon in the stands and the opposing team being scared by the strong showing. When the Aggies won the game 28-21 the Maroon Out concept was given most of the credit. For that game 31,000 shirts were sold to the crowd of 68,000+ (remember that most A&M fans already own a maroon shirt of some sort). Now each year a game is designated the “Maroon Out” game (this year it’s Notre Dame, next weekend), but there’s always a ton of these shirts at the game.

In wake of the WTC incident someone came up with a concept to do “Red White and Blue Out” – only this time to infest the three different decks of Kyle Field – third (top) deck was red, second (middle) deck was white, first (bottom) deck was blue. And as you can see from this picture the effort was not only successful, but was an amazing success – 70,000 shirts were sold to the 82,601 people at the game. The section of khaki on the first deck is the Corps of Cadets and the splotches of orange on the other side of that deck are Oklahoma fans, but the second and third decks especially were more or less perfect in their participation. The $150,000 profit from the $5 shirt sales will go to the relief efforts.

The “USA” is being spelled out by the Aggie Band and somewhere in that cluster of maroon people on the top of the field is me – that’s the Reunion Band and we had just left the field after playing “The Noble Men of Kyle”. All in all it was pretty cool and it’s futher evidence that I’m involved in something that will never die.

If you didn’t see The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart’s address is available for reading here.

Here’s a mind-blower. You know Shenmue the 16-chapter epic role playing game from Yu Suzuki on the Sega Dreamcast? Well since the DC is going the way of the Dodo, Shenmue III is of course going to come out on something like XBox, PS2 or GameCube. While some people believe that it’s blasphemy for Shenmue to continue/finish its run on another console, others realize it’s better than no conclusion at all (Shenmue was the first two chapters, Shenmue II will be the next four, leaving 10 to go and likely a fourth and fifth title before it’s all done).

However, it turns out the Dreamcast-centricness is unwarranted – Shenmue began development for the Sega Saturn! Here’s a video clip that proves it – it’s apparently on one of the Japanese Shenmue II discs and it’s unlocked when you finish the game.

What blows me away about it is how far along this title was in development for the Saturn before it was shifted to the DC. Also, it makes me do a double-take on that machine. I had always heard the Saturn thought in “quad”s (i.e., 2-D) and the PlayStation thought in “tri”s (i.e., 3-D) and that it was mainly luck that 3-D took off. I had also heard that it was akin to jumping through flaming hoops trying to get the Saturn to do 3-D environments – clearly AM2 is a very talented developer.

This really wants me to go home and finish the first game (never got past the “wandering around aimlessly” part – which is most of the game).

Alrighty, here’s a major complaint of mine. Two of them, actually.

There are these two words, digital and analog. Digital roughly means “ones and zeroes” and analog roughly means “not ones and zeroes”. With me so far?

Picture a vinyl record player (for you children of the ’80’s, ask your parents). You take your needle and you place it in the groove. The vibrations of the needle cause the sound you would hear from the record. This is an “analog” method of sound reproduction at its very basic definition. Now picture a Compact Disc player. The CD spins and a laser bounces off the little microscopic pits on the disc. The pits are either there or they’re not there. When there is a pit there, it’s considered a “1”, and when there’s not a pit there it’s a “0” (or vice versa, I can’t remember which). The 1’s and 0’s are collected together to create a sample, a very quick “burst” of sound. The music you hear is comprised of lots and lots of these samples. 44,100 per second to be exact (double that if you count the left and right channels separately). This is “digital” sound reproduction.

So what’s better? The quick answer is the CD. If you count a sample per second as a hertz (the common method of doing so) then a CD has a “sampling rate” of 44.1KHz. This is pretty much adequate – no one complains that a CD sounds subpar when they hear it. However, what is the “sampling rate” of a vinyl record? Well, as the record doesn’t consist of data but rather of a single groove, the sampling ratre paradigm doesn’t really apply, but if you were to force it to apply the rate would be infinity. Now compare infinity to 44,100. Which one comes out bigger?

Of course, this doesn’t take into account real world concerns. Vinyl records are prone to scratches and dust – their storage is “naked” or “exposed” – as opposed to the plastic coating on a CD. You can, of course, scratch a CD so bad it screws up, but it’s harder to do than a record. The data error correction is such that the laser can usually neglect minor scratches (unless it’s so bad as to act as a “prisim”) and dust. Also, a vinyl record is prone to wear due to simple friction – the grooves wear down over time and over excessive use. Finally, the vinyl record usually has to have a cushioned, staticless surface to spin on and a $1000 tonearm to perform at optimum conditions – the $50 boom box you can get at Target produces similar results to the $300 CD stereo component. Plus there’s aesthetic concerns as well – more CD’s can fit in a store and consumers decided they liked the smaller discs as well – you can take them in your car without having to convert them to cassette.

So the official answer to the question is that the vinyl record has the potential to sound better. However, the CD is more practical. It doesn’t have the pops or scratches a record has and it doesn’t have the “tape hiss” which plagues analog cassettes. For all practical purposes it’s superior, but here’s the rub: it’s not an absolute superiority.

Why is this important? Well because an absolute superiority implies that it wins hands down and that, ipso facto, the characteristics which make it what it is make it a superior medium. Translation: the CD is better because it’s digital.

Step in the wayback machine to 1986. You’re sitting there playing Nintendo (once again, ask your parents if you’re not sure). You have your little crappy controller that came with it. Now look down at it – there’s a “D-pad” – the official name for the directional portion of the controller resembling a “+” sign. You hit left, Mario goes left. You hit right, Mario goes right. Now if you want him to go to the right faster, you don’t hit to D-pad harder, you actually have to hold down a different button in addition to the direction. Why is that? Because it’s a digital pad – the directions have values of either “1” (you pressed it) or “0” (you didn’t).

Now it’s a decade later and you’re playing your Nintendo 64. You see two direction pads – one looking like a “+” and one looking like a tiny joystick. You’re playing Super Mario 64. You move the little stick a little bit in one direction, Mario moves in that direction. If you move it all the way, Mario runs in that direction. The little joystick is an analog controller, and the Nintendo 64 was the first to bother with it. Later PlayStation models (the “Dual Shock” ones) had it and every console since does, but Nintendo was the first to innovate it. In this case analog once again means “not ones and zeroes” – the stick had a number of points to it. The PlayStation 2’s Dual Shock 2 controller has analog buttons – they’re pressure sensitive to 256 degrees (though I don’t know if anything takes advantage of them yet).

This pretty much cinched the fact that digital was not absolutely better than analog, until Microsoft unveiled a new force feedback joystick with the tagline of using “advanced digital technology!”.

Now think back to the mediums in which video is delivered. In the late 1970’s to early 1980’s, there were two different paradigms being pushed, the magnetic tape based mediums of VHS and Betamax, and the large compact disc like medim of Laserdisc. Since VHS and Betamax were based on the same principles as the analog audio cassette, calling them “analog” mediums seems an easy fit. Laserdisc, then, as it was a larger parallel of the compact disc (stored movies in terms of ones and zeroes) was a digital medium. Laserdiscs never took off beyond devout movie buffs for various reasons, none of which singly doomed the format – the fact that they were more expensive than VHS, the fact that it was a non-recordable medium, the fact that movies often spanned multiple sides, the fact that the public was being sold on the CD with the tagline of “smaller is better” and here was a LD the size of a vinyl record – the list goes on.

Today we have DVD. DVD is superior to LD in nearly every way – the discs are smaller, movies often fit on one side, the picture and sound is better than LD due to the latest technology, etc. DVD also winds up being a slap in the face of everyone who supported LD all these years. However, DVD employs something known as MPEG-2 compression to work its magic. A movie is still too big to fit on a DVD untouched, so people figured out that if you only draw the portions of a screen which change from frame to frame you can save space. Foe example, if you watch CNN you’ll notice the little CNN logo in the corner never goes anywhere. Were this to be compressed on a DVD, the little CNN logo would only get drawn once (it works a little differently due to the use of “key frames”, but you get the idea). A laserdisc never used any sort of compression, the frames were just presented one after another (which is why, even with a larger disc, movies often spread to two sides – the Star Wars movies spread to four sides each). As a result, for some reason Laserdisc is now seen as an “analog” medium – DVD is now the new “digital” medium.

This is wrong in my opinion – both mediums are digital.

Which brings us to the reason I made this post. There are cell phones out there, and there are a number of different methods of “doing” cell phones. Apparently in the last couple of years there’s been a new type of phone network manufactured, so once again this new type of communication method is called “digital”, and the older method is known as “analog”. I know this because my wife had a cell phone, and then she was lured into trading her phone in for a new digital one. I never knew there was a difference (read: there wasn’t one before they came up with the new ones). But what I started to notice in subsequent cell phone conversations was that there was a “lag” – a fraction of a second passed between the time she would say something and when I would hear it. Also, anything I said took a little while to get to her. This was annoying but tolerable.

Now I have a cell phone and of coure it’s a digital one. The lag is now twice as bad – maybe even worse, since the phones are on different providers. As a result, a cell phone conversation is not entirely unlike a walkie-talkie conversation. I miss half of what my wife says and she misses half of what I say because we’re talking over each other because what we’re saying is not heard instantaneously, so what I’m talking over isn’t being spoken at the moment and vice versa, and the minutes are drained on asking each other to repeat ourselves. Also when the other person stops talking you have to wait for a second or two to see if they really are done talking – a pause which can be easily misconstrued as an awkard or pissed off one.

The final irony is that I can’t tell what’s better – the sound quality is basically the same as the old “analog” phone. For that matter, if this is a digital phone, what was the old phone recieving – a cassette from the sky? This is the final straw for me in the whole “digital = better” debate – a clear “no”.

So, to summize – I hate the fact that there is a misconception that “digital = better”, I hate the way “digital” and “analog” are thrown around as buzzwords instead of useful terms, and I hate the fact that because of these facts a cell phone conversation more than a minute or two long is an excercise in pain.

Quick note. Although the mere fact that you are reading this page means that you are smatrer than the average person, I still think it bears mentioning that there is a widespread misconception that Pong was the first video game. It wasn’t. A game called Spacewar was the first, and it celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. Pong‘s claim to fame was that it was the first successful video game. Spacewar was deemed “too complicated” for the average user. However, if you’ve never played Spacewar, a Java version of the game has been created for you to try.

Pathetic.

So for the next little bit (not sure how long) I’ll have SchnappleCam. It’s the video camera my parents loaned me, so they may want it back soon. If they do, I plan to get one of those little logitech dealies and do that instead. Not that my little office here is that interesting, but the image is live (which is more than I can say for some webcams). Of course this means I can’t pick my nose or scratch indiscriminantly, but maybe that’s for the best.

And yes, I stole that one line of JavaScript from Moe.

So, these latest viruses (like Nimda) spread through email – sending itself to address book entries. Yet I’ve never gotten one. Should I feel relieved or offended?

One of these days I hope to make posts without having to mention the WTC tragedy, but Stephen King has a blurb in the New York Times (registration required) which has encouraging and discouraging things to day about the incident. Not sure if he’s completely right about the Columbine bit, though – I had heard they wanted to hold the Principal at gunpoint and have him call an assembly at which the shooters would unload or explode a bomb. When I heard that I figured it was pretty far fetched – but nothing’s far fetched anymore.