Let me apologize in advance for my really crappy camera work
here. In my defense I was caught a little off guard by the Christopher Street Rally in Munich yesterday, because I had no idea it was going on and I was in the Marienplatz shopping district on another errand and I just wasn't able to make the mental gear shift that I needed to, so I'm all over the map with this footage that I literally shot from the hip.
My wife was a bit more focused than I was, so I'll be posting some of her stuff once we go through it.
One thing I didn't notice right away until I got home and looked at it is that the thing that really stands out is the thing that doesn't.
Not a lot of flaming flamboyant Brünö stereo types to be seen in the crowd, save for this guy I spotted while I was on the second floor of a retail store as he was passing by in the street.
I like the color coordination he's got going there, what with him using all the colors of the German Flag in his outfit.
A little irked I didn't spot him 10 seconds earlier though.
When I post some more clips later, be sure to look at the crowd and how 'normal' looking most people are.
I'm beginning to form the belief that a lot of socially persecuted/ostracized so-called 'fringe' people go for outrageousness as a defense mechanism.
As in:
'Oh, yeah, you think I'm a freak, do you? Lemme show you what a freak REALLY looks like.'
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.
I saw the news at work! Nyc let me know that Michelle Malkin used a "Send in the Clowns" video on her website (her reference to Franken) to she is pissed.
& Nyc says 'Our Long National Nightmare is Finally Over, and now I can finally go get a damned haircut.' He said he would not do so til Franken was allowed to be Senator.
Here he is in Germany with his grown-out hair and his laptop.
Now I will go get a picture of his last haircut, which he got during the Obama Inauguration, at the Senate barbershop. & then he'll probably show up soon with his new haircut.
It's Vauban, Germany (site of a former Nazi Army base),where people have given up their cars. All streets are car-free and there is a tram. Cars can be parked only in large garages at the edge of town, for those who buy a space when they buy their home. Thus 70% do not own cars and 57% sold one to move here. People claim to be less tense and they get more exercise and they can use communal cars to ski or go to IKEA, and pull carts behind bikes to go to the store. More than half voted for the Green party. It's a great thing in a country used to the Autobahn and home of Mercedes.
Suburbs are developing all over the world, which does not reduce greenhouse gas/global warming. Cars cause 12% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and up to 50% in some areas of the United States, with post WW2 dream homes and beyond. We need better public transport to the suburbs rather than just focussing on highways. There are some experiments with car-reduction in the US, such as in the Oakland area (connecting to BART.) Europe and the UK have more such projects in development.
The story mentions that the Hitler actor is "swishy" and that the Nazi flag can't be shown so they use a sausage & pretzel. Real Hitler had a private balcony in the theater where it is being performed.
Audience members are all given a small flag of their own, which they wave enthusiastically when showgirls clad as storm-troops swing their legs in swastika formation and belt out the big song of the evening:
And now it's ... Springtime for Hitler and Germany Deutschland is happy and gay! We're marching to a faster pace Look out, here comes the master race!
With a swishy Hitler playing the lead Übermensch, a pretzel on his Nazi armband and a Busby Berkeley dance extravaganza sending up the whole business, who could take the lyrics seriously? But would the audience have been more receptive to the racist poppycock if German law allowed them to wave flags with real Nazi swastikas?
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