Stilgherrian » richard chirgwin

Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008

Stilgherrian — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:17:29 +0000

Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

In a follow-up, Avi Miller said:

I challenge you to find an HD-PVR with the same functionality, size and form of the Mac Mini.

“Challenge”, eh?

Yes, let’s issue “challenges” about arbitrary mixes of functionality in a particularly-shaped black (or, in this case, white) box. Lets “challenge” someone to find something that isn’t a Mac Mini that looks like (has the “form” of) a Mac Mini.

As first glance, this looks like precisely the kind of techno-macho-wank that Richard was talking about.

Running water and sewerage, people, then health care and education… and then perhaps we can worry about what shape the digital TV recorder is…

[Update 8.40am: Avi Miller writes: "Sorry, I seem to have misplaced the in the original email. My reply was intended to be the exact techno-macho-wank previously implied." Ah, irony! Such a tricky beast...]

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Government releases broadband tender documents

Stilgherrian — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:47:16 +0000

The government has released the tender documents for the national 12Mb/second broadband network. As Richard Chirgwin notes, “I don’t think the minister will get 98% of the population, since that last 8% covers a very big geography. And I think that October for announcing the winner is a very slow process. And that a 5 year rollout is a real snail’s pace. But things have started…”

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SHM gets broadband figures wrong

Stilgherrian — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:17:56 +0000

Don’t newspapers fact-check any more? In the Sydney Morning Herald, Jason Koutsoukis reckons most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second. And yet, as Richard Chirgwin points out, last year’s ABS figures were that 22% of subscribers had up to 256kbps and 45% had more than 256kbps. “Since when is around 1/3 of the broadband population equal to ‘most’ users?”