So, I got rid of my 20-dollar Logitech keyboard and bought my self a DK9008 mechanical keyboard from Taiwanese manufacturer Ducky Keyboard. Lame brand name aside, this is probably the best hardware investment I’ve ever made.

If it were possible to marry a keyboard, I…wouldn’t but the DK9008 is still a pretty darn good keyboard.

The world of mechanical keyboards is a secret subcultural gathering of people who are way too obsessed with the amount of pressure they need to depress plastic buttons so that they can discuss on online forums, while throwing around jargons like “Tenkeyless” and “NKRO”, in great details how awesome it is to type out what they are discussing while discussing it. It’s kind of meta.

I thought those people were crazy but mechanical keyboards are actually pretty cool if you swoon over them in moderation.

White balance is a bit off; the LEDs are actually blue

The basic idea is this: Most keyboards were once mechanical back in the lost era known as the 80s. By “mechanical”, it means that each key has its own physical “switch” that is triggered when you press the key. Sometime in between the 80s and modern times, rubber dome-switch keyboards (with rubber membranes instead of mechanical switches under the keys) were commercialized. Cheaper and easier to produce, they soon dominate the market and almost all keyboards today are dome-switch keyboards.

Mechanical switches come in many form, the most common of which are manufactured by a German company called Cherry, who specializes in making business-grade keyboards for POS (point-of-sale; not piece of shit) devices and server racks. The types of switches and technical bits are too much to cover, so check out this FAQ if you want. For those who care, my DK9008 uses Cherry MX Blue switches.

For a while, people who wanted mechanical keyboards had to rummage through eBay for condemned POS keyboards or ancient IBM Model M, but eventually many niche providers started providing higher-end customized coding/gaming keyboards, most of them using Cherry MX Blue, Brown or Black switches. Ducky is one of them; Filco, a Japanese brand, is another.

And more recently, mainstream brands such as Razer and SteelSeries also entered the market with their eyes on hardcore gamers (the logic being that mechanical keyboards are more resistant to wear-and-tear). The Cherry Corporation must be doing quite well selling all those switches to everyone.

So how exactly does a mechanical keyboard improve your typing skill, speed, intelligence and sexual stamina? Well, the specific details differ from individual to individual, but there are some general benefits.

Being marketed at enthusiasts, mechanical keyboards generally have better build quality. Many of them incorporate functionalities and manufacturing processes that are considered not cost-effective in regular keyboard production.

Numlock with LED

For example, my DK9008 has a removable USB cable; built-in options to disable the Windows key, to swap the Ctrl and Capslock keys (for programmers) and to swap the Windows and Alt keys (for Mac users); cool LED lights that are embedded into the -lock keys themselves; and full n-key rollover.

Mini USB slot behind the keyboard with cable guides

The main benefit of a mechanical keyboard, in my opinion, is faster typing because the switches produce a tactile feedback that allows your fingers to sense a keypress without full depression. But this is somewhat subjective because it involves personal preference, which is why Cherry manufactures different types of switches to carter to different tastes.

Cherry MX Blue switches are blue

The main drawback is that, depending on the switch mechanism used, the keyboard may sound significantly louder to type on. Again, some people actually prefer the louder sound as feedback mechanism. Personally, I don’t care about this either way. Cherry MX Blue is notorious for being the most “clicky” switch (you can listen to it here), but I chose it for the typing sensation. On the other hand, Cherry MX Brown and Black are basically the same as a regular rubber dome-switch keyboard in terms of noise.

I am really content with my DK9008. It’s much more pleasant to type on, especially if you learn that you don’t have to fully depress keys anymore. The sensation and tactile feedback take some getting used to but I can already feel myself typing faster.

In addition to the type of switch, Ducky also offers options for the key caps. I chose black-on-black (black text on black keys) key caps because I am too chicken to choose the completely blank key caps but want to look like I can type without having my keys labelled…which I can. Most of the time.

Special key caps and cap remover

The keyboard also came with a more wear-resistant set of WASD replacement key caps for gamers, but I prefer to keep my keys consistent.

That said, at the end of the day, it’s ultimately just a keyboard. I am content with the DK9008 because it fulfils my typing needs and I probably won’t need another one for 20 years or so, assuming that claims of mechanical keyboards’ longevity are true. I won’t be starting a mechanical keyboard collection any time soon, unlike the more hardcore enthusiasts.

Still, it’s pretty interesting how online communities can form around pretty much anything. Thanks to them, I now have a pretty sweet keyboard that makes me feel like I’m co-starring with Angelina Jolie in Hackers every time I type a blog post. Woot.

Mess with the best, die like the rest

P.S. Singaporeans can get Ducky keyboards from SmallWalrus on VR-Zone forums for around S$150 depending on options.

I blame this one on moyism

I’m glad I waited a full year for the ensuing orgy of product announcements to peak before making my choice, because Aspire One is the best purchase I’ve ever made. It also has a superior product name compared to its major competitors. (Dell E? EEE PC? WTF?)

Introduction

I have the Windows XP version with a 160 GB HDD and a 6-cell battery. I bought it for 600 SGD (400 USD), which is somewhat cheaper than its normal retail price. This is because SingNet recently bundled them with its broadband internet plans and a lot of people are unloading them online.

The Good

• Battery – Long battery life; 6-cell battery lasts 6-7 hours with wifi use.
• Portable – Small and compact; fits in my normal sling bag.
• Functionality – Has built-in multicard reader, webcam, and all the basic ports.
• Usability – Runs Photoshop and older games surprisingly well.
• Screen – Very bright; I prefer reflective screens to matte screens.

The Bad

• Touchpad – Horrible touchpad; not unusable but would prefer not to.
• Keyboard – Not the best keyboard ever but badness is on par with most netbooks.
• Heat – Bottom left where the HDD is gets pretty hot after extended use; bearable considering small storage space of SSD.
• Weight – Not as light as it looks; 1.26kg with the 6-cell battery; not a huge issue due to tiny size and long battery life.
• Drive – No DVD drive makes installing Ubuntu a slight pain; fine for everything else with Daemon Tool and network sharing.

Random

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I think it’s really lived up to my expectations (for once). The 8.9″ 1024×600 screen is quite decent, surprisingly. The 1.6ghz Intel Atom processor runs everything I need in a laptop, including Office 2007 and Photoshop, and it plays videos just fine. The portability is the cake and eating it is great.

I installed Intrepid Ibex on it in dual-boot configuration using a USB flash drive, and it’s pretty awesome. It does take a lot of tweaking to work properly (as usual) and the sound support leaves much to be desired but it’s not a deal breaker.

Aspire One running Ubuntu 8.10

I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn that a patched madwifi driver adds injection support to the AR5007EG wireless module used by Aspire One. This discovery happened to coincide with the release of the new WPA exploit for Aircrack, so I ended up spending the whole day playing around with the latest built of aircrack-ng for Linux. (No illegal acts took place.)

Sadly, when it comes to aircracking, the patched AR5007 seems to perform much worse than the Netgear WG511T PC Card — which also uses an Atheros chipset — I bought on Ebay for my old Samsung laptop. This means that if I ever had to crack a WEP passkey to save my life someday, my chances of survival are now significantly lower.

Also, if I were to be attacked by a group of ninja assassins, the lightweight Aspire One would make a much lousier kinetic weapon than the 2.4kg 15.4″ Samsung.

Conclusion

Aspire One running Windows XP

Aspire One is good for most things that you need from a normal laptop. The low price and the long battery life of the 6-cell model are pretty sweet too. It is however definitely not a desktop replacement and should not be used as one. But unless you absolutely need to edit videos or play games on the go, the Aspire One is definitely a laptop replacement.

P.S. TKIP keys for WPA are not crackable yet, but the new exploit does make the possibility one step closer to becoming reality. Switch your routers to WPA2 today! (And use Tomato if your model supports it. It’s awesome.)

Linux’s graphical interface is no longer so ugly that you have to hide it behind a black command prompt and call it “non-bloated and functional”. In fact, a Linux installation that is customized to perfection has the most beautiful GUI eye candies ever known to computing outside of Hollywood movies.

Take a look at this video demonstration if you don’t believe me.

Installation

I chose Ubuntu as my distro of choice because it is widely supported and frankly the minute differences between Linux distros have no effects on my intended uses. Installing Linux is pretty simple: Most distros only require you to boot up a Live CD and then click install. (That’s provided you either don’t care about it formatting your hard disk or you have already taken care of the partitioning using something like PartitionMagic.)

Linux has relatively little support from hardware vendors. Most of the drivers it uses were written by third parties and released under an open source license for free, so it’s pretty amazing just how much stuff it can support by default. Ubuntu auto-configured my sound card, my USB devices and pretty much everything. In fact, the lack of official drivers ironically made the process a lot more painless than on Windows, provided your hardware is not too obscure.

But alas, my configuration is somewhat uncommon. My motherboard has two PCI-e slots and I have three monitors running off two Nvidia graphics cards of different models. I couldn’t get this set-up to work, even with the official closed-source Linux drivers from Nvidia. After hours of frustration, I gave up and stuck to my single 24-inch monitor instead. I sort of expected this to happen.

That annoyance aside, Ubuntu is pretty user-friendly, relatively speaking. My prior experience with Linux consisted of: Mandrake when I was in primary school (didn’t support my sound card and couldn’t mount FAT32 drives), SimpleMEPIS about three years ago (couldn’t do dual monitor), and Gentoo (took about five years to configure the install), so Ubuntu came as a pleasant surprise, especially when it didn’t threaten to blow up my CPU or format my Windows partition.

Compiz Fusion rocks!

Pretty soon I got all the essential apps up and running and was happily flipping video screens and Firefox windows around with Compiz Fusion. Here’s another video if you skipped the last one, this time with explanations:

Compiz Fusion is simply awesome. It’s not just eye candy either; it’s seriously useful. Everyone who has ever used Vista should give Compiz’s windows management effects a try. My AMD machine is a few generations outdated and it runs all the effects that you see in the video, completely lag free. Clearly, Vista must be doing something seriously wrong when turning on a few visual effects makes it run like a cow.

The rest, not so much…

But sadly, Ubuntu is not all sunshine and roses. Like most Linux distros in general, it is basically tsundere.

Setting things up still involve quite a bit of command line fiddling and pure luck. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or self-deluded. Applications have graphical interfaces that fall into two categories: overly-simplified options that force you to access vital settings through the terminal, or overly-complicated options with a ton of useless selections that no one will ever touch.

Some annoyances I encountered: Amarok doesn’t manage songs the way I want it to, gedit takes years to open a 8KB text file with no line breaks, applications in Wine look uglier than they do in Windows, Firefox in Linux renders Arial like crap, (after I installed Arial via apt-get because Ubuntu doesn’t come with it) and the list goes on. I’m sure there are fixes out there somewhere for most of the problems, but these things shouldn’t be issues in the first place. Moreover, Open Office and GIMP just don’t cut it for me.

The good news is that Wine now works extremely well. Games like World of Warcraft run fine with it, and apparently Photoshop CS2 works too. I tried a few Windows application and they ran without a hitch. This makes things much more bearable, but it still doesn’t excuse the lack of quality native GUI applications.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the roles have been switched: Windows XP is now the productive but ugly desktop, while Linux is awesome-looking and a blast to use but lacking in substance. (Vista is ugly and unproductive.) Of course I am referring only to GUI interfaces and purely desktop-related functions; Linux is after all still the king of productivity and stability when it comes to CLI implementations, such as servers.

In terms of general desktop usage however, Ubuntu (and Linux in general) currently covers the needs of two extremes: people who don’t need anything more than a browser, e-mail, chat and Open Office, and people who dream in Python and can write their own Linux kernels.

It needs to work on the middle: people who require more advanced features but don’t want to deal with command lines, or worse: write them from scratch.

That said, I for one don’t mind living with all Ubuntu’s flaws, except one: my monitor setup doesn’t work. I find that the lag-free window effects actually improve productivity and the seamlessly-integrated virtual workspaces (different sides of the rotating cube) create a very nice clutter-free working environment. I would totally run it on my laptop too, but alas Samsung has some seriously unorthodox hardware configuration that kills every single Linux distro I’ve tried.

I will definitely switch over to Ubuntu as my main OS the next time I build a new rig (after making sure that the setup is compatible) and use my current machine for network storage, BitTorrent and perhaps running an occasional Windows application or two.

I feel kind of empty inside as I write this post back in boring old XP… I want my rotating cube back. ;_;

P.S. I also gained a greater appreciation for Apple’s vision behind Mac OSX… But it’s still overpriced.

P.P.S. I wonder how many of you actually read this entry?

Winamp 5.5 Beta Preview 1 (Bento Skin)

I love the new skin. It’s called Bento and it looks really neat. It has a dedicated box to display the various information for the current song, unlike most other skins which display only as much as you are willing to cramp into the scrolling song ticker. The also makes use of the new album art support and displays the album cover in a little box next to the song information. I like it so much that I ended up spending nearly six hours going through music folders to resize and format my cover scans… <_<

Playlist and Visualization panels

The reason why Bento is called a “SingleUI” skin is because it keeps all of Winamp’s various panels in one single interface. The rectangle expands downwards when you open tabs like Media Library and Visualization, unlike the default Winamp 5 skin which splits them into individual panels that can be move around independently.

Media Library panel

The panels can be resized relative to each other and the entire rectangle can also be resized. However, there is a minimum size for each component and their positions are fixed. This design may be good or bad depending on your preference. You can’t have the playlist and main window on different monitors now with this skin, and the width of the playlist is somewhat limited unless you want the entire player to be really elongated.

Media Library and Playlist panels

The font-size used by the theme is also not very good for displaying Asian characters. Well this always been a problem with Winamp skins and it can be solved by manually mapping the fonts for each individual component in the settings. However, this doesn’t seem to work on the 5.5 Beta for some reason. Hopefully it will be fixed in the final release. Still, despite the slight drawbacks, I personally like Bento’s integrated feel.

Album art

Of course the feature I like best is the new album art support. That brings us back to why I spent nearly six hours resizing images. Cover art display is nothing special, and other players and even Winamp plugins have long supported it, but it still makes me feel all warm and tingly to see the album covers of the songs I’m listening to. :P

Notification pop-up

Another nice thing about Bento is that it has a notification window that pops up when the track changes. You can change where you want it to appear and tweak the transition animation. And of course, it displays the album art of the song. Nice.

Sample folder.jpg

Unfortunately, album art support is not done automagically. Winamp does not connect to any database or use any algorithms to smart match your MP3 files to the proper CD covers and fetch them for you. You have to do it yourself by either embedding the cover image into the song itself using a meta editor like the latest release of Mp3tag, or by placing an image file named “folder.jpg” or “cover.jpg” in the album’s folder.

I find the first method to be rather silly as you need to embed the same image into every single song belonging to the same album, which takes up a lot of unnecessary diskspace. I guess it’s only good for people who do not organize their folders by albums. (Which is also a rather silly practice if you ask me…)

Sample folder

While both “cover.jpg” and “folder.jpg” work for Winamp, “folder.jpg” has the added advantage of being used by Windows as the preview thumbnail for the album folder. This makes directory-browsing quite interesting. On an unrelated note, here’s a screenshot of my Maaya collection! LOL.

After formatting all the existing cover scans, about 60-70% of my song collection still lack cover art. I guess I have no choice but to do it manually. There are some programs out there that try to grab album arts automatically from Amazon API but they are generally hobbyist projects that do not really work, usually due to a lack of proper Japanese support. You can give them a shot if your songs are mostly English. MediaMonkey seems to work decently. I would’ve used it if it wasn’t incompitable with Amazon Japan’s unicode API output.

Anyway, I love album arts (even though they are so useless)!!! Now that I have wasted so much time on them, I should really get an iPod touch to make them worth… >_>

Yes, this is the “good thing” I was talking about yesterday. Although now that I think about it, it might not exactly be “good”. I blame it completely on moyism.

キターーーー！！！

The delivery was supposed to be Saturday morning but I wasn’t home. Dell’s customer service is pretty good, though. (At least for this region of its global operations.)

The stand

The stand is pretty nicely designed. It snaps easily onto the monitor and requires no screwing. You can adjust the height, tilt and direction of the monitor. You can even turn the whole thing sideways and use it in portrait mode or just to make it easier to see where you are sticking the plugs into.

In the box

Other than the 24″ screen that you can really only fully appreciate when you see it for yourself, the monitor comes with a lot of useful features such as Picture-By-Picture, Picture-In-Picture, memory card slots and a built-in USB hub.

Lots of inputs! Just wait till I get my PS3 in 2010!

It supports both VGA and DVI-D. It also has component and composite inputs if you want to connect your game consoles to it. (No HDMI though.) If the picture source has a lower resolution or a 4:3 aspect ratio, the monitor settings also provide you the option of displaying it in its original size, stretching it while maintaining aspect ratio or stretching it to fill the screen.

Assembled

I am half-tempted to dig out the Xbox (original, not 360) and try it out on the monitor. From what I have read on blogs and forums, this monitor is apparently a pretty good alternative to a HDTV when you use the component inputs for game consoles.

My desk now

And yeah, I have three LCD monitors now. The other two are a 15″ BenQ (formerly Acer) FP555 and a 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 713N. Notice a pattern here? >_> I am running two PCI-e graphics cards, a 7600GT and a 6600GT, on a SLI-capable motherboard but with SLI disabled.

As you can tell from the picture, the 15″ screen doesn’t have much longer to live. The backlight is slowly dying.

My current desktop(s):

I am running UltraMon if you’re wondering about the taskbars on the secondary monitors.

All you have to do is to upgrade your firmware 1.5 to the hacked 3.02 OE-B firmware and convert the ISO image of your PS1 game into a PSP-bootable EBOOT.PBP file using the bundled tool.

3.02 OE-B also allows you to boot UMD ISOs directly from the Memory Stick folder under Games, bypassing the need for Devhook. And of course, it also identifies itself as 3.02 and thus supports all PSP games that are currently on the market.

The first game I tried out was FFVIII because I happened to have it lying around.

Basically the official 3.00 firmware introduced the Playstation Network feature that allows you to download emulated PS1 games through your PS3 and play them on your PSP. The catch is that the selection is very tiny right now and the games cost 5.99 USD each.

Someone realized that the official PS1 downloads are actually the compressed ISO images wrapped with a fully functional emulator and cracked a copy of Hot Shots 2 to accept other ISO images. And It worked.

So now you can emulate any PS1 games on your PSP with the hacked firmware. Of course you need the downloaded copy of Hot Shots 2 from the Playstation Network in order to extract the required emulation files, but there are ways…

Basically what this means is that, licensing issues aside, Sony is trying to charge people 5.99 USD for every single PS1 game downloaded, even though no extra work is required on their part to release more emulated PS1 games for the PSP since they have already created a fully functional PS1 emulator that works with all games.

Free money?

But of course we are all dirty pirates with no PS3s so it doesn’t matter. Ironically, I probably own more original UMD games than most PSP owners in this pirate-happy country. (The average being close to zero…)

To Sony’s credit, the emulator works very well. (Well duh, they were the ones who made both consoles…) R2 and L2 functions are assigned to either the d-pad or the analogue stick depending on your preference, which is sufficient for most games but not all. (e.g. fighting and maybe FPS?) Can’t be helped I guess.

Screen size is of course not ideal. You can choose to play at the original 320 x 240 resolution (leaving lots of ugly black space), stretch to maximum while maintaining aspect ratio (leaving two ugly black bars) or stretch to fill (ugly distorted graphics). Then again, so many PSP games are ports from other consoles that I’m sure that PSP gamers are all used to this dilemma by now.

Here’s a video of the emulator in action.

Why wait for Sony to release PSP ports at full retail price when you can play your old PS1 games on the go for free?

PSP-Hacks has everything you need.

I need to get myself a 4gb MS DUO so that I can carry all four discs of FFVIII and four discs of Tokimeki Memorial 2 around with me.

Image from Akiba-blog

From Akiba-blog: Enter 「ツンデレ☆りなっくãã€ or “Tsundere Linux”, a book that supposedly teaches you about the famous open source operating system in a totally moélicious manner. It even has a cute abbreviation もえりな (moerina).

Image from Akiba-blog

The book apparently covers various topics such as getting cheap second hand computers, explanations of the various distros and installation procedure for Debian, Firefox and 2ch browser. And a tsundere girl. Don’t forget the tsundere girl.

They totally need to make one of these for Cisco networking, the most goddamn boring topic in the world.

The Long Tail is a book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and the person who first coined the phrase, that explores how the theory can be applied in so many different aspects of the world today, from YouTube to retail marketing.

Before we move on to my thoughts, I shall explain the concept of a Long Tail. Here’s a primitive graph I drew with the pen tool in Photoshop that shows the relationship of sales with respect to popularity of products.

Figure 1

Popularity is sorted by rankings, with the most popular starting with “1” on the left. As you can see from Figure 1, the most popular items sell significantly better than the less popular items. (Well, duh!)

The area shaded yellow in Figure 1 contains products that a brick-and-mortar retailer will stock. It makes sense to stock only the most popular items so as to maximize profit. CD shops can only stock a limited number of titles because they have a limited amount of display space. Cinemas can only screen the latest Hollywood hits because old and independent films do not get enough audience to pay for the limited number of screens and timeslots.

But what if an online service like RealOne’s Rhapsody can offer as many songs as they can license, all at the same time? We’ll get a graph that looks like this:

Figure 2

It’s still the same graph, just extended further. Online retailers are not restricted by the traditional retail bottlenecks. Having 100 million songs costs only slightly more than having 1 million songs in a digital library, and digital storage is only going to get cheaper.

When online retailers increase the variety of products they offer, they notice an interesting trend: the popular items still sell better, but even the least popular item sells at least a few units.

In traditional retail, an item needs to sell a predetermined amount per time period or else it will be unprofitable due to the overhead costs of maintenance and the potential revenue you are sacrificing by giving shelf space to a less popular item.

In online retail, it doesn’t matter. An item is profitable as long as it sells one or two copies. The cost of maintaining a huge catalogue online is so low that the cost of including more items in your offerings is virtually zero. You don’t have limited shelf space, you don’t need to hire more workers to maintain a bigger shop and you don’t need a bigger warehouse. Hard disks are getting cheaper by the second.

When you have such an enormous catalogue, the items at the bottom of the popularity list are really unpopular, to the point of selling one copy every year perhaps. But even then, you still make a profit off it because it costs you nothing to offer the product. For every day a CD sits unsold on your physical shelves, it lowers your overall profit margin. But a 10 megabyte song left unsold in your terabyte-size music catalogue costs you nothing to offer. In fact, when it does sell, even if it’s just one single download, you automatically make a profit off it.

The idea of the Long Tail is that instead of making millions of dollars for each item near the top of the popularity rankings, you can make one dollar each from a million items at the bottom of list, something that was not possible before the Internet due to the bottlenecks associated with physical retail.

Tyranny of the Mediocre

The area that is most affected by the Long Tail revolution is the entertainment industry. In the days before the Internet and even now, Hollywood’s business formula has always been to create mass-appealing works. These are not the best movies in any sense of the word, but they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everyone watches Hollywood movies not because they are that person’s favourite movies but because those are the only movies available.

Each Hollywood movie must sell a set number of tickets or it will be unprofitable and therefore a failure, therefore each movie was created with the Average Joe in mind. If you are a film critic seeking higher forms of artistic expressions, well too bad for you because you aren’t part of the majority and therefore insignificant in terms of overall profits. Independent films may be better in terms of artistic merits, levels of creativity or entertainment value, but they will never capture enough of the average audience to find a place in the cinemas.

Let’s face it, everyone has different tastes. A movie that I think is the best movie in the world may not be so for 90% of the world. People differ so much that it’s simply easier and more profitable for Hollywood to create one single mediocre movie that appeals equally to everyone instead of a million extraordinary movies that each appeals greatly to one or two person. When the only movies available to the average consumer are Hollywood movies, he or she will end up watching Hollywood movies, simply because there is no other choice. It is the tyranny of mediocrity.

Internet is changing all that. A video that involves in-jokes about a specific interest such as anime can get a few thousand hits on YouTube. To an anime fan, that video targeted at people who share the same interests as him can be a whole lot more meaningful than a Hollywood movie targeted at no one in particular. To him, that video might just be the best video in the world, even though it’s FAAAAR from a Hollywood movie in terms of popularity.

But there are millions of little videos just like this, targeted at millions of differing interests shared by millions of different communities. Each video, viewed by only a few to a few thousand people, is just a small part of the Long Tail, but together that Long Tail reaches a larger audience than the biggest Hollywood movies. Such a long tail cannot survive in the traditional market because distribution used to be limited by physical distances.

If there are only ten fans of Movie Y in the whole of Country X, then there’s no point for a shop to stock Movie Y DVDs because the potential customers are too few and too dispersed for the shop to make a profit off it. However on the Internet, all the tens of fans of each country are connected to one another by near-instant digital communication. An online retailer can sell 10 DVDs of Movie Y to 10 fans from each country and still make a profit off it, even if less than 0.00000001% of the world has even heard of Movie Y.

And if the movie is stored and sold digitally, then it costs next to nothing for the store to stock it. And since in such a system an independent film costs just as much to distribute as a Hollywood movie, there is no reason not to offer both. The Hollywood movie will still sell a few thousand times more copies, but there is no reason not earn a little more profit by offering an independent film too, or any movies you can get your hands on for that matter. Unlike running a cinema, selling an independent film online is not depriving you of a chance to sell ANOTHER Hollywood movie and thus earn more profit. You can afford to stock and sell them all.

And when you offer more choices, people will choose them. An estimated 40% of Amazon’s profits come from books that even the largest brick-and-mortar book stores in the world cannot afford to stock simply because they are too far into the Long Tail. Of the tens of thousands of CDs released every year, a CD store can probably afford to stock only a few hundred of the most popular titles, but ALL of them can be purchased online. And people do buy them. The untapped potential of the Long Tail that stretches to infinity is just beginning to show itself.

The Long Tail is NOT Junk

It is a common misconception for people to think that the the Long Tail consists of nothing but junk and those items are unpopular because they are bad. That is probably true for some of them, but the reality is that the Long Tail consists of both ends of the spectrum. For example, compare a 4″ portable TV, a 32″ TV and a 60″ plasma TV. Which one is going to accumulate the highest number of sales?

My bet is on the 32″ LCD. The 4″ and 60″ do not sell as well not because they are bad or useless but because they have more specific targets. Not everything in the Long Tail is bad, just niche.

Beyond Retail

The Long Tail is not just an economic theory, its social implications are also far-reaching.

So… what has this theory got to do with you, a reader of my little blog? Well the truth is that by reading this blog, you are part of a Long Tail: The Long Tail of Blogs.

There used to be a few publications read by millions of people each, now there are millions of blogs read by a few people each. My blog is one of them. The Chris Anderson calls this the “democratization” of mass media and I agree.

It doesn’t matter whether you think that those millions of blogs are worthless compared to professionally made publications. A majority of them are probably trash if you judge them by journalistic merits, that is the truth. But at the same time, those blogs hold unique meanings to their readers that a publication targeted at the masses can never hope to achieve.

A blog about anime is a lot more meaningful to me than an entertainment magazine that occasionally has one page on anime. A blog about Gundam is a lot more meaningful to a Gundam fan than an anime magazine that occasionally has some articles about Gundam. There is no such thing as a niche too small for the Internet.

Indeed, anime itself is part of the Long Tail niche and it received a huge boost from the Internet. Before the Internet, only the most mainstream of anime can hope to ever reach an audience beyond Japan. People did not watch anime simply because they were never given a chance to try it. With the Internet, people are now given to chance (albeit illegally) to watch anime that they would never have otherwise watched and more and more of them find that they like it. Anime is still a niche compared to mainstream entertainment, but now it’s a profitable one for American companies.

In Other Words…

In traditional media, things that are mainstream (popular) are given more airtime, more shelf space, more advertisements and more of everything simply because they are deemed to be more likely to succeed. And if they do eventually succeed, they become even more mainstream. Similarly, things that are niche are not given any attention by the media distributors and these things can never hope to raise out of their niche status.

With the Internet, everything is given equal opportunity to succeed and you find that surprisingly some things that were classified as niche do a lot better than expected.

A really good Hollywood movie and a really good anime movie both cost nothing to download from BitTorrent. A person who has never watched these two movies can download them both with equal ease and, after viewing them, decide on which one he/she likes better. Out of a 100 people, perhaps 20 will end up preferring the anime and watch anime over Hollywood next time. I am one of them.

In the old model of media distribution, the executives decide that the anime movie is not even worth releasing on DVD and you don’t even get to make that comparison. Out of a 100 people, 100 of them will watch Hollywood movies next time simply because they know nothing better. You as the consumer do not get to make the first decision.

And that is why Chris Anderson calls it the “democratization” of media: The consumers are taking back our right to watch what we want to watch and not what the companies THINK we want to watch.

So really, anime fans and companies in America owe a lot to online piracy for breaking down the vicious cycle found in traditional media distribution.

The Problem of Diversity

One huge problem with this trend is that people are watching and reading more and more diverse topics. Thirty years ago, you would have been watching the same TV channels, listening to the same radio stations and watching the same movies in the same cinema as everyone else in the neighbourhood simply because there was no other choice.

Today, you can instead surf the net, rent some movies through Netflix, play a MMORPG, watch a video on YouTube, listen to a podcast on an obscure topic or watch one of the hundreds of niche and diversified channels available on cable.

This means that a teenager of today’s generation has less interests in common with his or her neighbours than one from any generations in the history of mankind. Only two people in my class watch the same anime I do. No one plays the games I play (and I’m not even talking about eroge). I bet no one has read “The Long Tail” besides me. Thanks to the Internet, people can spend their time on what they are really interested in. But at the same time, we lost the common topics needed for small talks and social interactions in real-life. As popular as anime is, if you are an anime fan living in a small town of a few hundred you are likely to be alone.

That is why many have turned online and why you are reading my blog. Instead of trying to find common topics with the people around us, we can instead find people online who already have the same interests as us. Arguably, this is diluting social bonds in the modern world.

The Paradox of Diversity

But is it really a problem?

People used to organize themselves based on physical proximity. We used to associate ourselves with our town, our city and our nation. A nation of people with similar culture bonds together, often with the encouragement of shared xenophobia.

Over a century ago, an East Asian was unlikely to have much in common with an European, whether in terms of interests, life style or mindset. The physical distance between places prevented people from sharing their ideas with anyone other than their neighbours. Barring the rich, the scientists and the politicians, no one knew what was really going on in other countries and what the thinkings of people of other nations were really like. This set the stage for the two World Wars, where the national leaders fully exploited the ignorance and xenophobia of their people and their soldiers.

The diversity brought about by the Internet is actually unifying the world, as counter-intuitive as it may sound. Fifty years ago, the only things my grandparents in China knew about America was that it supported the Nationalist enemy and fought against China in the Korean War, in other words it wasn’t exactly what you call a good impression. My grandmother had not met any Americans before in real-life until late into her seventies. By diluting the traditional bonds we share with our neighbours, the Internet is at the same time allowing us to form new bonds with people on the other side of the planet, something that my grandparents could not do just fifty years ago.

I have chatted with anime fans from America, Finland, China, Japan and Australia and found that lot of them were nice people just like most people I meet in real-life. I also read about the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution and the Nanking Massacre. Twenty years ago, I could only have done the latter and I would have formed my opinions (extremely negative ones no doubt) about those countries based on that alone. It’s no wonder that in the last century, people hated each other so much that they fought two World Wars over it. Those people never had a chance to understand each other.

Physical bonds will always be there. No matter how advance the Internet becomes, we will always need to maintain physical relationships for a variety of reasons. But the Internet is creating a whole new world by allowing us to communicate and to understand one another despite our physical distances. Not only does it give us the means to communicate, it provides us with the countless common topics we can talk about. Thanks to our common and often niche interests, I can get to know a person on the other side of the planet so well that it would have make no difference even if he lived next door to me.

Perhaps when everyone gets on the Internet, we may someday finally have world peace.

Of course, I can foresee a few possible problems with my idealistic dream. For example, the world could end up being redivided into countries with Internet access (and thus eventually have similar culture and values) and countries without (outside the global culture sharing network). Also, the Internet world, while unrestrained by physical distance, is still currently fragmented by language barriers. It is entirely possible for geo-political influences to be redivided into a few language blocs, perhaps as few as just two: English and Mandarin, after the rest gets assimilated as Internet progresses.

But eventually, whether it takes three hundred or three thousand years, the Internet will unite mankind. You can quote me on that.

Wow. 2800 words. That was a long rant… 眠いよ　＿|ï¿£|O

I was looking at the visitor statistics for this site in Awstats yesterday when I noticed this…

Note: August 2006 results taken on 20/08/2006.

As you can see from the above rudimentary table that took all of 10 seconds to create in Microsoft Excel, Firefox-ko is now kicking IE’s sorry butt! At least amongst anime fans, whom I presume to be the largest demographic represented by this chart.

At the rate it’s going, we might just see a complete reverse of the July 2004 statistics in about two years.

EDIT: The aliens prefer Firefox too.

1. Intel Core Duo
2. Less than 2.5 kg
3. Glossy widescreen
4. Well-cooled
5. Non-integrated graphics maybe…

After collecting handouts from every major brand name except Dell and HP (…seriously), I was torn between Asus and Samsung. Both are 15.4 inch WXGA and 80 gb HDD. The Asus one is slightly heavier than my requirement but has dedicated graphics (X1400 Radeon if I remember correctly). The Samsung one is nearly 300 SGD cheaper and weighs only 2.48 kg, but has 512mb of RAM instead of 1gig, and Intel GMA 950 graphics.

I couldn’t decide, so the Samsung salesperson threw in a free upgrade to 1gig RAM (which sealed the deal) and a 100gb USB external harddrive (which I didn’t really care for). And now I’m the proud owner of a Intel Core Duo Samsung X60. Weee.

It’s very cool and quiet, which is probably not possible on a laptop with dedicated graphics. I probably won’t be using it for games anyway. (At least not the ones that require 3D acceleration… if you know what I mean. *cough*)

The full specs are:

• Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.66 GHz)
• 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 80GB 5400RPM HDD
• DVD-RAM drive
• 15.4 inch TFT WXGA
• SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, xD reader
• Bluetooth, Wi-fi a/b/g, Firewire, VGA-out, S-video out

It’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance difference when multi-tasking as compared to my AMD-64 3500 with 2gig RAM desktop. Of course, I don’t think I’ll be running World of Warcraft on it…

Speaking of which…

Zephiris, lvl 60 Night Elf Rogue

Epic kitties are t3h win! Sadly, I’m only half-equiped with Shadowcraft and my mainhand sword is a lvl 51 quest reward. Sigh… Well that’s one two New Year resolutions done…

More blogging later.