Good Lord, you've got about a back up of like 20 drafts up in here.
This is a first draft and as such I'm leaving off any editorial comment on the long term implications in The Unites States and the world over of such electronic food ordering devices on Surplus Employee Issues, since I want to do a couple more takes of this, and being barred from such eateries for life is not the way to go about it.
One thing I will talk about is how I see the process of making the above video applies to yesterday's announcement by Google that they are planning to roll out a proprietary Operating System to go up against MSFT, because I believe that they also have Apple in their sights as well.
The raw footage of the above 8.5 minute file started out life yesterday as a 2.5 GIGABYTE 1080p HD video file in the .MOV format.
Because home bandwidth sucks here in Germany, (it would take a full day to U/L the original file to YouTube), fiddling with a variety of video compression schemes in Quicktime Pro I managed to shrink it down to a more reasonable 88 megabytes, without completely destroying the quality of it.
Took minutes instead of hours to upload, and then YouTube went ahead and cut that 88 meg file in half, actually a little bit more, and further compressed it down to a 40 meg file.
This means that the entire 8.5 minute clip is about 1.5% the size of the original.
40 megs of the original file wouldn't even be a full 10 seconds of film.
Remarkable.
What I think Google is going to do with their new Chrome OS, to have the General Public switch en masse is to offer a complete package to the consumer via their Netbooks.
Remember about 5 odd years ago when they first rolled out GMail with a base amount of 2 gigabytes of free storage with each account?
That was their response to their competitors in the the Web Based Email environment that were offering free email accounts with all of a 10 to 25 megabyte limit.
People made the switch to droves to GMail, and their competitors at Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL had their hands forced, and they too began offering accounts in the multi-gigabyte range.
Today the two biggest issues facing end users who are doing photography and HD video is the exponential growth in file sizes that the new generation of high resolution cameras have come to market with, and the inability of the most common desktop configurations that people have to process those files efficiently.
This is not to mention the insanely high costs associated with the software, such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.
Sales of 1 TB external drives have been driven by this phenomena, but as any end user will tell you they are susceptible to failure.
With high speed bandwidth becoming ubiquitous what I see happening is that Google will offer with these Chrome OS netbooks of theirs terrabytes of storage in The Cloud, which, people fed up with losing years of work from HD crashes, will gladly embrace, privacy issues be damned.
Better Google's servers go down, and take the planet's data down with it, and have somebody to blame, rather than it all being on my shoulders, thank you.
Add to that Google doing all the high CPU back end processing on their equipment, using their apps, which are also in The Cloud, which means that no one ever has to ever update a piece of software, ever again, and all of a sudden Apple and Microsoft are looking at a real threat to their business model.
Especially if these Chrome OS Netbooks of theirs come out with a Price Point in the $300 to $500 range.
If they can pull that sort of thing off, and given their resources, the probably can, then who in their right mind would pay the thousands of dollars needed to do the same thing that Google's machine can?
It's called making the General Pubalick an Offer they can't possibly refuse.
This is not a new idea, in fact it's a return to the era of the 'Dumb Terminal' model that existed at the Dawn of the Computer Age, and again reared its head about 10 years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle broached the idea of 'Thin Client' 'Network Computer' about 10 years ago.
In other words. everything old is new again.
On a personal note, if I'm right about this; I'm feeling a little irked right now, since I made a not insignificant capital investment this year, and if I had waited a year and a half, I coulda had all that, and had plenty left over for my hookers and coke habit.
many amazing photos here - I remember being shown 16 mm film footage of students being shot down by helicopters when I was a student then. Thinking also of the repression in China and the rightwing coup in Honduras at this time.
NPR had a story on slavery in the north - a woman from the DeWolf family traced her heritage, and it's all here in this link. Funny how things just drop out of history.
James Dewolf was a Senator and second richest person in the country when he died in 1837. He and his brothers built up Bristol, Rhode Island and their family included legislators, philanthropists, writers, scholars, bishops and priests. Their family furtune was built partly on buying and selling slaves.
Over three generations, they were the country's leading slave traders and brought at least 10,000 Africans to auction blocks in Charleston SC and other ports and to their own sugar plantations in Cuba and cotton mills in the US. They continued even after federal laws made slave trading punishable by hanging. Today there are as many as a half million living descendents of people traded by these Northerners.
You can see the film trailer at the link. The documentary will be released July 14. (photo shows DeWolf family members meeting with Ghanaians at the river where slaves received their last bath before shipping out to the New World.
Filipino inmates in `Thriller' video stage tribute
An inmate at the island province of Cebu in central Philippines impersonates the late Michael Jackson as he leads in the music icon's "Thriller" to pay tribute to Jackson Saturday June 27, 2009. More than 1,500 inmates became famous in YouTube with over 23 million hits after they performed Michael Jackson's "Thriller". The "King of Pop" died in Los Angeles, CA Thursday. He was 50.
On May 4, 1970 members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others at Kent State University. Some of the students were protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Others in the line of fire were just seeing what was going on, or walking to their classes.
Yesterday, a young woman who was part of the crowd in Tehran, either protesting or simply watching the events unfold, was shot in the chest, apparently by Iranian Basiji security forces on rooftops. Her death was recorded on video, and the gruesome end of her life sped digitally and virally around the world on social media sites, such as YouTube and Facebook. "Neda," as she was known, has in a matter of hours become an icon for the Iranian protest movement. Read more at WorldWatch
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