Pete Austin’s Blog

I would challenge you to find anyone who describes themselves as a fan of movies who doesn’t look forward to every Pixar release. While they are certainly not the only powerhouse digital animation studio in Hollywood, they are the only one who consistently produces films with a level of artistic quality that rises above that of your average children’s entertainment. Whether by intention or accident they’ve discovered the perfect balance of all-ages entertainment, digital art, and message without subjecting the viewer to awkward moments of supposed moral clarity. My biggest complaint of American animation studios is that they are so consumed with fitting some kind of moral message into every production that it consumes the creative process until it spewed back at you the viewer in an assaulting fashion with no tact or thoughtful delivery. Pixar has always and continues to produce films that incorporate said mandatory message by keeping it subtle and giving the benefit of the doubt to the viewer to catch it. In general, this is sorely missed in America nowadays – but I’m drifting off-topic.

In many artists’ lives and bodies of works a “breakthrough” work occurs that cements that focuses the art world’s attention on their talent. I truly believe that WALL-E is Pixar’s breakthrough work. It’s not that their previous films were poor. In fact every Pixar release has been a raging success. It’s just that by comparison every other Pixar film was the work of a studio with a unique view of the mainstream. WALL-E is the work of a studio with an epiphany of where the world of digital animation can go. As most movie-goers know Pixar always inserts a cute short film (the medium they first gained attention from) before each movie. They are always fun and a perfect compliment to the film. But the short that preceded WALL-E was not just another one of these. It was brilliant. The entire theater was in hysterics. Most “comedy” films cannot even generate the kind of humor and entertainment that Pixar latest short did. If you thought every Pixar short was sort of the same – this one is not.

I know I said that I’d be keeping my movie reviews short but WALL-E was just that good. The film itself is mostly silent – yes silent. Do you know how rare that is in our 60-second, ADD, ultra connected society to find entertainment in silence? The film just oozes futuristic vistas, digital soundscapes, and robotic personalities to the point that words could only ruin it. Eventually humans are brought into the mix, but they are merely there in a supporting role – and the experience is better for it.

I know a lot of people have sworn off the experience of going to the local theater due to the fact that they seem to overrun by pre-pubescent teens who can’t shut off their mouths or cellphones for 10 seconds. Trust me, you want to see WALL-E in the theater while it’s out. Pixar always has upped the digital ante with each subsequent release and to be honest it was their last film, Ratatouille, that I noticed something different happening with their animation techniques. I now see that Ratatouille was the dry run of the animation that has reached a true art form in WALL-E. The image quality, level of detail, and camera work (yes, there is camera work in Pixar animations) is beyond compare of any current animation studio. In the years ahead I expect that WALL-E to be one of the most evaluated and discussed animated films of all time.

For all the reasons above, it is entirely possible that WALL-E might acutally be one of Pixar’s least commercially successful films. And you now what, I’m OK with that. Kids will surely enjoy it, but they’re not going to loop it endlessly en masse like say Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc. In fact, after reflecting on WALL-E I think it may have more to offer to adults than kids. My wife and I are 27 and I can garauntee you that we picked up on more humor than any of the younder kids in the theater did. WALL-E also marks the first time in as long as I can remember that both my wife and I have walked out of the theater, looked at one another, and said “We have to see that again!”.

(5 stars of 5)
See it in the theater!
But it on DVD!

Last week at work, I sat down with a couple representatives from Intel to talk about the latest iteration of vPro technology and how it may fit into our infrastructure and SCCM (Microsoft System Center) management. Perhaps I’m just a little jaded from almost a decade in the industry but honestly, I was really underwhelmed by the presentation. And to make it worse, the part that any technologist really cares about – the demo – amounted to demonstrating that they could remotely power cycle a machine on the network. Color me unimpressed. Of course the technology allows for greater abilities but the demonstration was just lame. But all of this is just context to what I really want to talk about, solid state disk technology.

About half-way through the presentation one of the reps stated that a cornerstone of vPro technology is the improved power management of devices on the network. He then mentioned how they had seen even further benefits on Intel’s upcoming line of low-power solid state disks. In his opinion this made vPro technology even more compelling going forward as “hard drives are on their way out” and that “in ten yours you won’t even see hard drives in the marketplace”. Under different circumstances I would’ve called “bullshit” but I bit my tongue. Not too long ago I actually had this very conversation with my parents who were considering purchasing Seagate Technology (a hard drive manufacturer) stock (STX).

Let’s start by making one thing clear. Intel is a leader in the industry and knows how to build the best CPU’s on the planet. However, they need to learn to stick with what they’re good at. Their recent forays and trash-talk about entering the integrated graphics and solid state markets have done nothing but poke the chests of other heavyweight tech manufacturers such as Samsung, AMD, and Nvidia – all of whom proceeded to launch superior products that simply embarrassed Intel. So when a rep tries to impress me with, “we’ve got our own secret sauce to building solid state drives” and then offers a very thin argument for the obsolescence of hard drives, it just rubs me the wrong way. For the record, I find the notion that Intel will somehow eclipse Samsung in the development and production of flash memory highly suspect.

Global data storage requirements are greater than ever and there is skyrocketing demand in developing nations. If you ever question the exploding economic growth in developing markets just look at the price of oil. That is largely driven by explosive demand in new markets. Right now, and regardless of price, magnetic storage technology like that of hard drives is the only reasonable solution for implementations where capacity is a top priority. Flash storage enjoys the advantage in applications where size and speed are top priority. Some examples would be portable devices, consumer electronics, and of course laptops. However, in applications where you need a ton of capacity and proven reliability, (which every business requires) hard drive systems can be implemented for less than a quarter of the cost of an equivalent solid state system. In the ever-expanding business world the data center is core to operations and simply will not be entrusted to solid state disk technology any time soon.

Just remember one thing, as we evolve in our own technical abilities and in computers’ data processing abilities, the amount of data that we process globally is inextricably linked to a data infrastructure capable of storing it all somehow. The usefulness of data becomes almost null without a way to archive it. The companies that diversify their product lines to incorporate the best technologies at the best times will enjoy significant and sustained growth. The question of solid state or magnetic drive technology is not black-and-white. There’s room in the industry for not only these two, but other technologies that have yet to see the mainstream.

I was watching CNN last night and they were covering the endorsement of Barrack Obama by Al Gore. The CNN anchor was posing the possibility of Obama choosing Gore as his VP to a panel of political pundits. This notion was unanimously panned by the panelists so then the CNN anchor pressed further and offered the possibility of a cabinet-level position for Gore, namely that of Energy Czar. The panelists dismissed that as well citing that Mr. Gore is more than content in his current endeavors and having already been VP would not settle for anything less than a presidential role. The idea of putting someone like Al Gore in a Energy Czar role got me thinking about broader energy policies of the next American administration.

A lot of people are really caught-up in the politics of the energy industry right now, driven almost exclusively by the price per gallon of gasoline. If you take a step back and look at the bigger picture the price of a gallon of gasoline is such a small component of the energy industry you wonder how it ever got to be such a big deal. The energy industry encompasses method of producing energy that we as a civilization know of. There’s renewables such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric and then there’s comsumables such as coal, oil, and nuclear. Now I’m not an environmentalist or a member of Greenpeace; I am however a capitalist – through and through. And I’m telling you that the new economic boom is coming in the form of renewable energy infrastructures.

If you think about any sovereign nations’ energy policy, there is a holy grail of sorts. Energy independence. Having a diversified energy policy that your citizens can both afford and feel secure in in times of crisis is great, but what if your larger economy suffers at the cost of it. The ideal energy-independent policy would be one that holds the above benefits but betters the economy by keeping the cycle of buyers and sellers within its own borders. If you want to see how other countries are achieving energy independence just look at Iceland and Brazil. Iceland in particular has developed a solution of energy production that makes our supposed “American Ingenuity” look like the retarded offspring of George Bush and Brittany Spears…wait a minute.

Energy independence isn’t about completely closing off a nation’s energy trade as most critics like to argue, it’s about producing 99.9% of the energy that the country needs both currently and in the future using your own natural resources – whether they are renewable or not. The bottom line is American politicians just don’t know how to commit to anything other than pandering to our own citizens incompetence and aggression to other nations. If a politician were to come along and run on a platform of change – I present the ultimate challenge. Commit to creating an energy-independent nation in the course of a single administration (8-years with reelection) using a hybrid energy policy of renewable and consumable energy. If America’s people and leaders could commit to a challenge like this image the benefits. Imagine the centuries of prosperity that could come of just 8 years’ commitment. Stop thinking about energy 15 gallons at a time. Take a step back and see the greater challenge.

In part 1 of my article on digital materialism I gave a little background on what got me thinking about the subject. What digital materialism really is, is the transition from buying/owning/using physical (material) media to a single digital library containing all of an individual’s media. Where once people’s media collection consisted of material items, soon it will become entirely digital. Your personal library then in turn follows you anywhere via an internet –connected device and is available instantly through streaming technologies.

Imagine that you live in Seattle, but you are traveling abroad in London. You carry with you a single touch-screen smart phone (yes, like an iPhone you Apple zombie). You arrive at London Heathrow and decide some music is in order while you wait for your luggage. You turn on your phone and associate to the wireless network. You then access, through secure web login, your personal digital library and instantly you see every song and movie you own. You pull up a favorite playlist and the music plays. You get on the train and decide you’d rather watch a movie to pass the time. So again you pull up your library and out of the 200 movies you own you choose your favorite and begin to watch. You’ve listened to what you want to listen to, watched what you want to watch, and you’ve never been nagged to purchase anything because it’s your library. You’ve used your media just as you would at home if you had loaded the discs into your DVD player – except you’re nowhere near home. Also, you’ve never had to worry about your device’s storage capacity or synchronizing your device with your computer because everything is streamed to you.

My family asks me technology questions all the time. Sometimes it’s about how their computer isn’t working right and other times they’re more general questions like, “What do you think will be the big tech trend this year”. A couple years ago I was asked the later and I remember saying that without a doubt, it would be the continuing development of convergence devices. Portable devices that served multiple functions. I was specifically talking about cell phones and in the time since, what used to be just a phone is now so much more. Cell phones are now capable of running almost any type of media; voice, images, video, internet connectivity, e-mail, and more. When I talk about digital materialism, I’m talking about the next step. The further evolution of these devices.

But there will eventually be a revolution, and I believe the revolution will be in the creation of personal digital libraries. So what would enable every person in world to have their own digital library? IPv6. IPv6 is the successor to the current internet protocol IPv4. As people and businesses continue to purchase internet addresses the pool of available IPv4 addresses in shrinking fast and will eventually run out. The IPv6 internet protocol however would allow for trillions of addresses to be given to each of the 6.5 billion people on Earth today. An internet infrastructure capable of supporting the traffic of the world’s population will be a revolution and a building block of personal internet media libraries.

There are certainly major obstacles to this scenario and I don’t think it’s going to happen in even the next two to three years – but it’s coming. Some of the biggest obstacles to personal internet media libraries will be in the form of security and licensing. If you read the news at all you know about the ongoing war between media houses and recording associations vs. P2P file-sharing over licensing issues. The key to personal internet media libraries is that you are recognized as an owner of the music/movies in your library, just as you are recognized as an owner of any CD or DVD in your collection. It’s yours and you can use it as much or as little as you want. Delving deeper into that would be an entire article itself and there are even entire websites devoted to the topic, so I won’t go into it here. The bottom line is, if security and licensing concerns can be adequately addressed and resolved, personal internet media libraries and digital materialism will be in our very near future.

Almost a year ago now, I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine whom I went to college with at the University of Miami.  Purely by circumstance we both moved out to Seattle from Miami, (at separate times) where he currently works as a video game designer. My wife and I had recently moved into a new condo and one of the side effects of moving is that it forces you to confront just how much shit you’ve accumulated.  A particular pain point for us was the five moving boxes full of DVD and CD jewel cases that made up our media collection. And while packing them into a box is easy, finding a place to store them all in an aesthetically pleasing way (milk crates is not a way to decorate your home) was proving challenging. In describing our search for some sort of bookshelf or media tower my friend said, “You need to stop buying physical media.” He went on to describe his own method of managing his media library which consisted of hosting all of his media in digital form on his desktop pc’s hard drives and streaming the media to his Xbox 360 which was in turn connected to his TV and sound system. He had all but given up buying any physical media and instead was relying on BitTorrent and P2P sharing to obtain new movies, TV shows, and music. In the end both he and I accomplish the same thing, we both watch videos and listen to music on our home theater setups. The difference is that he had eliminated the step of putting in a disc or plugging in an mp3 player. The idea of streaming one’s media in the home is nothing new. People have been doing it for years now and with more integrated home entertainment devices it’s only become easier. What struck me about what he said was not what he was doing, but rather his philosophy towards it and how adamant he was against physical media.

My first reaction, like most people to change, was of resistance. I said, “I know it works, I’m just not ready to give up owning a tangible piece of media. When you purchase a disc and store it properly you can enjoy it for a long time with very little risk of losing it. Computer crashes happen all the time. Data is destroyed. Data is corrupted. If a hard drive contains my entire media collection and something goes wrong I could lose everything in one fell swoop.” Obviously there are ways to duplicate your data. RAID hard drive arrays or just plain backup to external disk are the two most common, but I was trying to win the argument. He of course laughed at my nativity and said that the system isn’t perfect now, but it’s coming. Physical media is dead. At the time I didn’t want to think about it, but after looking a little closer at the state of the music and film industries my eyes are open.

There’s a new model of media ownership coming very very soon. I call it digital materialism and the first company to create a truly seamless system of digital media ownership for people is going to reap huge benefits. I guarantee it. Here’s what the new business model will look like.

Instead of the measure of your media collection being how many LPs, DVD’s, photo albums, etc you own, soon your entire media collection will instead exist in digital form as a single virtual entity. Furthermore, you entire media library will follow you anywhere in world over a high-speed internet connected device capable of streaming your media to you instantly. In part two, I’ll elaborate on exactly how this would work.