Pete Austin’s Blog

One of my first posts on this blog was about the revelation I had when talking with one of my friends who works at Microsoft. What he opened my eyes to was a brave new world of streaming media distribution that will become the wave of the future. I said back then that the first company to successfully develop a streaming media infrastructure where you actually retain ownership privileges for what you buy online, will be the leader in the new era of content distribution. I also said that there are only a handful of companies on the cusp of achieving this including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and others.

CES 2009 has come and gone and having looked at all the players and their announcements for 2009, I believe that a clear winner has emerged. Keep in mind that the key to winning the digital content distribution crown is that when you purchase an item, be it a song or a movie, that item goes into your own personal media library with that company. From there you can play the media as often as you like, at any time you like, and from anywhere you like. Just like when you own a piece of physical media such as a CD or DVD.

Internet integrated televisions were everywhere at CES this year. Everything from YouTube streaming, the Flickr browsing, to sports, weather, and news streams. But only one company presented integration into a key technology. Panasonic announced it’s streaming media technology for plasma screen TVs called VieraCast. And the content provider of choice was Amazon Video on Demand. What separates Amazon’s Video on Demand service from all other stream media providers is that they are the only one to add your video purchase to a personal online media library from which you can play the video in all the ways I described above. When you consider other streaming media services what you get is a nickel-and-dime structure where you essentially rent the media for some amount of time with inherant restrictions. Amazon stands alone in their approach and as the combination of being first to market with this approach as well as providing non-content-protected music downloads.

Amazon’s service is not perfect out of the gate though. Right now they are still working with manufacturers to develop devices with access to their web-service. Current partners include TiVo, Sony Internet Video Link, an Internet-connected Windows or Apple PCs connected to your TV, and new VieraCast Panasonic plasma TVs. The only drawback of the current implementation of the service is that it is standard definition content only. Eventually HD content will be available, but there is no firm date for this. The bottom line though, is that Amazon is the first content provider to give you a personal online media library for your online media purchases. Before you continue to throw money at physical media, consider how streaming media through Amazon Video on Demand might make movie-watching a little easier.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy – I probably would have my job if I wasn’t. So when I noticed my computer exhibiting strange video behavior a few months I was sure I could figure it out pretty quickly. But then days of troubleshooting became weeks of annoyance and weeks became months of frustration.

One day I picked up a new mainstream video card for my home desktop. It was a single-slot middle-class Nvidia card that did require a 6-pin power connection but was by no means a power hog. Almost immediately after installing the card I began to notice single-pixel video artifacts popping all over the screen. Then the artifacts turned into complete picture outages on the monitor. The screen would just go black, flash a few times and then come back with the artifacts.

I tried everything to isolate the cause. I went through driver revisions. I replaced the card. I swapped between single and dual-link DVI cables. I thought perhaps the motherboard was overheating from the added wattage and put extra fans in to increase cooling airflow. I cleaned the components of any dust. I swapped the jack that the video card used on the modular power supply. At 600 watts, I was sure that my power supply was capable of supporting the middle-class video card and my small form factor system.

For a while I just learned to accept the flaw and conceded that I would need to replace the motherboard. My budget G965 motherboard used an extremely cheap 3-phase power system and electrolytic capacitors. For the record, I will never again buy a mother board with less than 5-phase power and all solid capacitors, but in this case even these cheap components were not the cause of the video problems.

Today at work I was cranking away on my dev box and it suddenly occurred to me the most likely candidate that I had not even considered yet. The power strip I had all my home computer equipment plugged into was an ancient strip that I had had since college. I started think that maybe my five-year-old, $15 powers strip was the real component incapable of dealing with the added wattage of the video card. So I picked up a new APC power strip on the way home from work, swapped everything to the new strip and just like that – my system ran flawlessly. No artifacts and no video outages. In fact, the video quality is amazing compared to what it was on the old power strip. The colors are deeper, the contrast sharper, and the brightness increased. All because of a defective power strip.

So this brings me to a point I want to make about power conditioning. As an avid home-theater buff I’ve seen all sorts of power-conditioning products peddled for high-end electronics use. Products from Monster, Panamax, and APC are advertised everywhere from A/V forums to big box retailers like Best Buy and Fry’s. Up until now I’ve thought them to be the single biggest rip-off in the realm of consumer electronics. I won’t back off calling Monster the biggest rip-off brand in consumer electronics, but I will say that I stand corrected on the question of whether or not clean power makes a difference in audio and video quality. I’m not saying that everyone needs to have $200 power strips and stand alone home-theater power conditioning units. I’m just saying to spend the extra $20 on a higher quality power strip and rest-assured that you are seeing and hearing everything you are supposed to be.

In a previous post, I talked about a meeting I had with a group of Intel sales reps back at the end of June. I’ve gotten a lot of hits on it and I thought I’d post a follow-up. When we met, Intel was in full hype mode about their upcoming solid state drives and promised that they were about to change the market. Fast forward three and a half months and there have been some new developments. While I’m usually a very modest individual, I want to point out that I was right on a few points. Now don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not posting out of hubris. I wanted to follow up on this because I think it’s an indicator of greater market conditions. What’s changed is that Intel has lifted the NDA on their first solid state drive.

But I want to work my way back to that. To follow up on my mention of Seagate; at the time (pre stock market crash) Seagate Technology was (and still is) the market leader in magnetic hard drives and I mentioned that its share price looked like a great deal considering the doubt many people had about the realistic timelines surrounding solid state drive technology. Well, then the bottom fell out of the market and everything went to shit. With the economy in its current state it’s hard to see any company actually growing profits and their share prices reflect that. But are Seagate and other hard drive manufacturers facing obsolescence? Not at all. In fact, it’s leadership has just come out with revised roadmaps for 2009 restating that not only will they themselves be releasing their first solid state drives (solely focused on the enterprise market mind you) next year, but that they will continue to lead the expansion of magnetic storage technology in the form of 2TB+ hard drives. Furthermore, they have reiterated that they will be slowly releasing solid state drives into retail as appropriate in light of the fact that they are simply not cost-competitive in the marketplace. By the way, they are speaking directly to Intel with that statement. Not the other SSD manufacturers.

The next thing that happened occurred just yesterday. Apple announced its latest notebook refresh in the way of its new MacBook Pro and MacBook models. And what was the big hardware improvement for these models? Apple completely dropped Intel’s G45 integrated graphics in favor of Nvidia’s latest discrete mobile graphics. Ouch. So basically Apple confirmed to everyone what most already knew, that Intel’s latest graphics chip was not the next big thing in integrated graphics, but rather a barely adequate stop-gap that only served to allow Apple to release its previous generation of notebooks with the stellar Intel mobile CPUs it really wanted.

So we find ourselves back at the point I made almost four months ago. Intel makes simply the best processors on the planet. But they’ve strayed into unfamiliar waters of technology that some of its competitors are far more established in. Consider the following: Intel announced that it would be releasing two models of solid state drives. One mainstream drive based on MLC NAND flash and another enterprise-focused model based on SLC memory. However, only the mainstream MLC drive has actually been tested by independent reviewers, it’s still not available in retail channels, and it’s priced at $600 for a 64GB drive. To put that in perspective, it would be easy to configure a complete Dell laptop with an 80GB hard drive included for just $700. Hmm, $600 on an otherwise inexpensive component that’s not even available yet or $700 on a complete system now?

So did Intel at least get the performance of their drives in line with the hype? Actually, yes. Their mainstream MLC-based drive simply outperforms every other solid state drive currently on the market at any capacity level. Of course Intel knows this and has also priced their drives higher than every other solid state drive currently on the market. Compared to the magnetic hard drives that it is supposedly going to make obsolete, performance is very good but in many applications it’s on par with today’s fastest consumer hard drives and there have been observed performance problems with random write operations. Not exactly the stats you expect to see in a product that proclaims to be the end of magnetic storage technology.

Furthermore, you didn’t see RAID results included in the reviews. Why does that matter? Because many business systems rely on RAID to provide protection from data corruption and drive failure. The price of these drives is already a sticking point. If the RAID performance is no better than current technology at a fraction of the capacity, you can expect business customers to look the other way.

The bottom line, Intel needs to pull back on the hype and modestly release their solid state drives. Solid state drives will have their day. The performance speaks for itself, but whatever level of success they achieve in the market will show you exactly where the technology is positioned and how it will fare against a very scalable magnetic storage technology.

As a footnote: remember the example we all hear about how computers that used to be the size of an entire room are now the size of our iPhones? We are fast-approaching the day when technologists will say, “Enterprise SANs that used to fill half of our data center, now resides in just 4Us of rack space.” Magnetic storage technology will be how we get there.

So we’ve got an old friend from college visiting Seattle for this next week. We took Sunday to show her around some things in Seattle that she hadn’t seen before. A highlight was the Sub Seattle tour. A sister tour to the renowned Seattle Underground walking tour, the Sub Seattle tour keeps the lighthearted feel of the underground tour and puts it on a bus. The bus makes the rounds of several touristy highlights in and around downtown Seattle accompanied by some colorful commentary from the tour guide. It was expensive at $30/person, but it really was a fun time and we saw a lot of parts of Seattle that even we as locals had never seen.

I also spent part of the weekend setting up my new home theater receiver. Before we moved to Seattle I owned an entry-level Sony receiver that worked great, but of course when you’re moving across the country you have to sell as much as possible. So the Sony was sold and I just never got around to buying another one until now. I spent well over a month researching the latest receivers and trying to match price with features with dimensions that would actually fit in our entertainment center. I had been looking at Denon’s latest models but the prices were a little high and Denon is notorious for not getting the online discounts of other manufacturers. In my research of the Denon AVR-1909, I found myself in the AVS Forum where a thread had been started regarding the launch of the model and that J&R was offering a “phone-in” price for the unit. So I called J&R sales and found out that the phone price of the unit was $150 less than any online price I had seen and had free shipping. I ordered it on the spot.

I had read in a lot of reviews that Denon equipment is very close to Audiophile grade and that their setup process did not have the layman in mind. I consider myself pretty good with technology so I really didn’t give the reports much weight – but after spending the past few days toying around with the Denon – I can say with certainty that they weren’t kidding. The feature set is exhaustive, the menus confusing and downright fugly compared to Sony’s Xross UI, and the manual is pretty close to useless. But I’m willing to forgive all that for the best qualities of this receiver. The sound quality and build quality are absolutely awesome and significantly better than my previous Sony. Lately, the auto-configuration of sound measurements has been the “must-have” feature for receivers. I’ll say this, Denon’s Audessey setup does work, but it’s by no means perfect. You’ll still be tweaking individual speaker output levels to your liking after the wizard runs. If there were a company that matched the ease-of-use of Sony with the sterling quality of Denon in the mid-range segment, home theater enthusiasts everywhere would be in heaven.

So, would I recommend the Denon AVR-1909. Honestly, no. If you’re regularly changing components and settings as most audio enthusiasts do, Denon’s UI is a deal-breaker. I would gladly give up a little sound quality (because let’s face it, not everyone can tell audiophile-quality from “very good” quality) for an interface/menu system that it easy and fun to use. But for now, I’m keeping it because it really is the best feature set for the money.

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.

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.