I haven't posted anything in a bit, and I have a draft article unfinished, but that's for another moment. Right now, I wanted to rant about the ongoing technology war, which has been happening since the days of my youth, when cavemen were trying to decide between wooden clubs and bone clubs.
Those of you who have been paying attention might have noticed how the market tends to influence the development and survival of new technologies. For the most part, those who have the most money win, although occasionally the better PR campaign works, and once in a great while a genuine innovation sneaks in.
Back in the 1980's, they had these new devices called VCR's. They took cassette tapes and recorded both audio and video onto them, cost between $200 and $600, and were fast becoming the "must have" gadget of the decade. In the early 80's, there were two formats. VHS is the one you're familiar with. The other was Betamax. Beta was technically superior to VHS in several ways. The cassette design was better, meaning there was less stress placed on the tape itself, so it didn't break or get stuck in the rollers as often. The recording format was better, clearer picture, full stereo with a very good signal-to-noise ratio. By all rights, it should have won.
Why didn't it? Video stores, and specifically the porn industry! In those early years, many local video stores would have racks of both format tapes as they tried to find ways to get people to come in and rent movies instead of going out. Cable TV was also new, and if you lived in a small town, you probably didn't have it. The porn industry knew that one format or the other would have to win, and they jumped on VHS. Despite the fact that porn was (at the time -- no internet!) supposed to be a back-room, seedy thing that only perverts watched, the sale and rental of porn generated big bucks. The movie industry noticed, and they too sided with VHS.What does that have to do with anything today gramps???
Glad you asked. Years later, that battle has replayed a few more times in the technology war. SCSI lost out to IDE in the same manner... IDE is cheaper to make, even though SCSI is more reliable and was faster until the IDE camp too over. Blueray trumped HD-DVD, mainly because it embeds a Java runtime in the player, giving you more annoying fancy menus AND easier DRM controls.
If anyone ever read this blog, they might have noticed I got a new computer a few months ago. It runs pretty well, even though I'm still cursing CrApple for crippling OS X so it has to be hacked to work on AMD chips. One thing though... I noticed a LOT of errors in my Event Viewer, scary disk errors like "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR6 during a paging operation."
Of course, setting up the new machine, I installed 4 hard drives in a RAID setup. The disks are split into the safe RAID 10 container for the OS, and the fast RAID 0 container for games/movies/porn/whatever. Doing some research, I tracked down the error and pinned it to one of my removeable firewire drives!
Now, we're not talking a single error message here. We're talking thousands of them! So, on a hunch, I tried moving that same drive from the firewire port to the USB port. Bam! No more errors.
Back when I got these externals, Firewire was about the same speed as USB 2, but was more reliable and had better sustained speed (IE: big files). Like Betamax though, the world has chosen USB, and the money isn't being put into developing or fixing Firewire anymore.
Word to the wise... stick with the money. Any time you go with the underdog, you will suffer, and you will end up having to live with it, or support it yourself.
