Posted Thursday, January 22, 2009 by Hap Aziz
The commercial that launched the Mac aired only once, during Super Bowl XVIII, and it is credited for starting the Super Bowl creative commercial competition among ad agencies. It is considered to be one of the most innovative commercials of all time, on a number of levels. Advertising Age selected it as the "Commercial of the Decade."
It has its own Wikipedia entry here. Wired Magazine online gives an interesting history of it here.
But you really need to watch it here.
- Hap
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Posted Friday, October 10, 2008 by Hap Aziz
We're witnessing a convergence in the word of photography and videography, and it's an unusual one if you consider the history of the technology. For years, digital video cameras offered the capability to shoot still pictures, while digital still cameras often allowed the photographer to capture short video clips. For a variety of technical reasons neither cross-over solution was particularly impressive. If you wanted to shoot good video, you used a camera built primarily for video, and if you wanted still shots, a DSLR was the typical choice.
This article at Wired.com gives a bang-up description of the technological convergence taking place, and it is fascinating reading. The short story is that with new cameras hitting the market, such as the Canon 5D Mark II, the world of digital still and video photography is being turned on its head. Imagine a 21 megapixel DSLR that shoots full-frame while using the amazing Canon L-series glass. Now imagine that same camera shooting full 1080p video with a pricetag of about $2300, without the lenses. That dual-purpose capability at that price point is simply amazing!
We are witnessing the beginning of a fundamental shift in our visual image-capturing paradigm. And I think I've just figured out what I want for this Christmas.
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by Hap Aziz
Every so often, I like to play the game where I think of how much technology things cost when I first got them. For much of my life, I was a dedicated early adopter of all sorts of gadgets. Well, as the gadgets have become more complicated and more expensive, I've become much more comfortable waiting a little bit before picking up the latest and greatest. It may not be the latest anymore when I get it, but the significant price drop is always appreciated. Here are some of the devices I've picked up over the years:
- the original IBM PC - this machine came with a whopping 16kb of RAM, a single sided floppy drive with a 160kb storage capacity, and a green monochrome monitor. The CPU ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz speed. The total cost to me, monitor included, was about $2700 in 1981.
- Yamaha CD R/W drive - this was a tool necessary for my game company to burn master disks for reproduction. The drive had a 4x read speed and a blazing 2x write speed, and I got the drive for the bargain basement price of $3,000 in 1995. By the way, each recordable disk was a gold master, and they ran $10 apiece.
- Hewlett Packard fax machine - in 1988, the communications consulting partnership I had needed to receive and send documents by fax. We considered leasing a machine, but we decided to make a purchase for the long-term instead, picking up the machine for a cool $2800.
- 10 Mb hard drive - when it came time to upgrade my IBM PC, I found a great deal on a hard drive. 10 Mb of storage space (I'd never fill that up!), and only about 5 pounds. I got it cheap at $600. (Yes, that was 10 Megabytes of storage space.)
- NEC 3D Multisync monitor - Sometime in the early '90s (though I can't recall the exact date), I was so thrilled to get this $700 video monitor. It gave me an incredible 1024 x 768 interlaced resolution on a whopping 14" CRT. (Today I just ordered a 24" LCD monitor capable of a full 1920 x 1200 resolution for $269.)
- Online BBS service - before the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web, I paid an hourly rate of $12.95 for my blazing 1200 baud connection. Ah, the good old days of getting a $400 montly bill to get an online text service.
There's a whole lot more, and I'm afraid to do a full inventory--I don't need to think about how much money I've spent to stay in the hi-tech club, especially now with my 401k taking a nosedive. But the more important point is the fact that the cost of technology has dropped so dramatically over the years, and it continues to do so. Free market innovation and competition takes the lion's share of the credit in that regard. All I can say is, keep the gadgets coming!
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Friday, December 28, 2007 by Mark Krupinski
 Skulltrail sounds like a game machine platform if ever there was. Yet Skulltrail is the name Intel has given its new server-class motherboard... that has been tweaked for the "enthusiast" market. Read that as "game machine" platform.
Quite a few people (no, unfortunately not me!) got a peak of the new hardware at the fall Intel Developer's Forum, where Skulltrail was still in the pre-production phase. But it was far enough along for those who saw it to come away with a good idea of its power. I especially like the fact that it is configured with dual 45nm quad-core processors, for an impressive eight core total.
You can find more information along with some revealing benchmarks here. It's fitting that after so many years of being belittled as "not serious" computers, game machines are now being built from the ground up with such capable hardware cores.
- Hap Aziz
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