Joost

I've been using the Joost BETA now for little over a week. For those that don't know, Joost is a IPTV application from the makers of Skype, which combines P2P technology with traditional streaming to deliver (supposedly) DVD quality, full-screen, free TV.

It is ad-based, with one 30 second ad every 10-15 min, which is much less than on normal TV. One problem I'm hoping they can fix is that the ads start randomly, sometimes even in the middle of a word.

The promised DVD quality isn't there. Some show are almost DVD quality, like a documentary about snakes (did you know snakes come with built in optical zoom?), while other fast-paced shows like Indy car racing is unwatchable, due to the compression artifacts. Bandwidth wise it uses, if I got all the numbers and math correct, 700 kbps down and 230 kbps up.

It is nice, easy to use, no more complicated than a media player. Vector based interface, meaning it zooms bigger without any problems. At the moment channels work like simple playlists, which works fine when there still is only a little content, but they will have to do something about it if they get a lot more content, which hopefully they will.

What about the content, then, you ask? Mostly a bunch of smaller independent channels. A couple of better known ones like Comedy Central (not available here), National Geographic (not available here) and Gong. CBS has signed up to show CSI, CSI: NY and CSI: Miami, NCIS, Numb3rs, Jericho and Survivor.

Realist

Somebody told me that pessimists always claim they are realists. This struck me as odd, not because it isn't true, but because there was a judgment in it, as if that makes a pessimist less than an optimist. Doesn't an optimist also consider himself an realist? In fact, I would go further and say it has to be so.

A realist is someone who sees the world as it is, without putting a positive nor a negative light on matters. An optimist put a positive light on the world, and sees things as better than they are. But what the optimist sees and believes about the world is what he believes the world to actually be, and thus sees himself as an realist. For what he sees as the world is what he believes the world to be. It is not like he could believe the world to be something other than what he believes the world to be.

Everybody must, deep down inside, believe that what they believe the world to be, is as close to what the world is as it is possible for them to believe, otherwise they would not believe it.

If the BIOS ain't broke, don't fix it

It's good advice. Screwing up a BIOS update can make the computer unbootable.

But (and there's always a but, isn't there?) how do you know if it is broke? A buggy BIOS can cause practically any conceivable computer issues except pop-up storms. Any kind of performance issues, stability issue or compatibility issue could be caused by a faulty BIOS.

Practically every piece of data going through the system goes through the hands of the BIOS. There was the well know problem on the 680i motherboards when they came out that was corrupting data on SATA drives. There was a MSI motherboard where a bug in the BIOS was causing the southbridge to overheat. Lots of motherboard went haywire with the 7950GX2, not expecting to have to look for a graphics card behind a PCIe splitter.

So the question becomes: Sure, don't fix it unless it ain't broke, but how do you know it is broke?

Scientific truths

There are many theories about truth. Scientific truth seems to fall into several of them.

It seems to fit with the coherence theory of truth, especially if you subscribe to Khun's paradigm idea. It also fits with consensus theory of truth, considering science is a institutionalized form of knowledge, with its authorities (experts), journals and peer review. Even the pragmatic theory of truth finds a foothold in scientific truth. There is Occam's razor, the aversion to ad hoc theories and the requirement for they theories to be ably to make measurable predictions.

The really interesting part is that scientific truth doesn't need the correspondence theory of truth, which is the one the comes most naturally. There is no need for the theory to actually correspond to the external world. If you had two theories that in different ways described something, and both were just as provable and stand up to all tests equally well. The one chosen would be the easier one, or the one that majority of the scientific community backs, or the one that fits into the prevailing paradigm. Which one actually corresponds to reality doesn't matter.