The D word

[pmcray]

I see that the MPC has just cut the base rate by 0.25%.

Obviously, the economy is in more trouble than we thought.

Oh, dear.

On a lighter note, I had a look at the LiveJournal list of most popular interests. The first 24 were unremarkable enough. 25 was Weezer. Who or what, I thought to myself, is Weezer. In turns out, unsurprisingly, that Weezer is (are? Are bands singular or plural?) a popular beat combo (me lud). Quite why they are so popular with LiveJournalist, I have no idea. But indy music does seem particularly popular around these parts.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

But Paul, you've got a big new mortgage - this is nothing but good news for you! Plus Ubinetics made a 3G call today! Woo!!!

Re:

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

David,

my mortgage is fixed on a yearly basis. I won't see any benefit from this cut until next year.

Who are Ubinetics? Lots of people have made 3G calls. My boss has a 3G phone. There's nothing special about 3G anymore.

Death of 3G

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps 802.11b and other hot spot based solutions are going to kill 3G stone dead. At least one consultant I know who's involved in the 3GPP thinks so. Watch for home based micro cells too.

Death of 3G Greatly Exaggerated

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

You will need need UMTS to provide service outside hotspots. WLAN basestations only have ranges of a few tens of metres (longer distances are possible, but on a point-to-point basis, which is no use for providing a mobile service, but great for fast fixed wireless access). Not much use in Exmoor.

Re: Death of 3G Greatly Exaggerated

[daveon.livejournal.com]

True, but in cities a typical 802.11b hotspot is about 100 metres, if you have a good antenna I've known people manage almost a kilometre.

The question is, how many people want broadband access on Exmoor. How many people get cell phone coverage on Exmoor?

Anywhereyougo.com

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

David,

even a 100 metres isn't much use if yiu live in (say) the suburbs. Longer distances are only good for fixed wireless access because you have to beam form. One of the good things about GSM is that it works in remote places such as Exmoor. In the future, when all calls are packet-switched, we'll want our SIP-based videophones to work in Exmoor (the A&E department can take a look at the broken leg while the mountain rescue team come to get you). Or even Goosnargh.

Re: Anywhereyougo.com

[daveon.livejournal.com]

It depends on what you are planning to do with wireless broadband. Do you seriously want your phone for streaming things in real time?

More likely you'll be sitting somewhere with a laptop.

Hmm.. I could lynched for saying that :-)

Mobile Revolution

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

The answer is yes. You have a PDA. It's got an compact form factor ideal for taking up mountains. Why wouldn't you want to be streaming a realtime feed into it?

Re: Mobile Revolution

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Why wouldn't you want to be streaming a realtime feed into it?

I'm less than convinced this will be a killer app for 3G, few people stream into their PC's from broadband - there might be some data hungry applications, but the real killers remain things like surfing and email - neither of which work well on a small form factor device. I tend to think that we lose sight of the key function of a mobile phone. That is, you make phone calls on it.

Obviously other factors might change this and there will be 3G whether its used or not, I'm just not all that convinced that it will be a rapid adoption or we'll see the kind of use levels we associate with SMS, which, at the end of the day is what the network operators want.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Oh, ask me a hard one!

Weezer did a single called "(Just Like) Buddy Holly" - it was, incidentally, very good.

It used lots of trick shots and some very clever state-of-the-art video compositing to make it look like the band were playing in the diner in the old TV series "Happy Days" - it even had the Fonz dancing to the song. It was superbly done, and as a lovely finishing touch, they had the actor who played the diner's owner, Al, come in at the end, tell the band they'd done a really good set, and ask if they'd tried the food. They replied "that's not so good, Al", which became a catchphrase of mine for ages.

He was 80-odd and retired, but he'd been old and fat 20 years earlier when the series was made, so he blended in perfectly and seamlessly with his own and the others' images on the archive footage.

It won the award for MTV Best Video of the Year for 1995.

Why?

As otherwise, the band largely sank without trace?

Because it was one of the two promo videos included on the original launch CD for Windows 95.

And for many people, Win95 was the first time they'd been able to watch video on their PC desktop. This was largely before the Web and you couldn't download it over the ~10Kbps connections of the time; you certainly couldn't stream it.

The other was a fairly forgettable track by Edie Brickell, after she dumped the New Bohemians. "You Don't Even Have To Try", IIRC.

Win95B used some crappy movie trailers instead - Rob Roy or something. I don't think the record company had a clue what they were doing when they gave the Weezer vid; next release, it was an expensive paid advert and it flopped.

That's why.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Just dug it out. My Win95 CD's scratched but it's playable. The "high-performance" version is a laughably poor quality AVI, and even 8 years on, its 60MB is not terribly emailable. Good vid, though.