It’s interesting how things are constantly being driven down in terms of cost.  But really is it that good to have things be free?  When things have no associated cost it seems that it is quickly abused.

I just looked through all the comments on this blog and unfortunately the vast majority of them are spam.  Most likely the result of some bot(s) going crazy generating snippets of text fishing around for at least one or two people who would actually click on one of their links.  But for the owners of the bots, who cares if it’s free to make a million (or a trillion) comments?

Unfortunately it costs time to weed through these comments.  If only I could get paid a fraction of a cent for these comments.  It would be enough of a deterrent to generate a million comments and wouldn’t be a deterrent for real people to make comments.

Time to look for captchas.

This might be a new category that I’m going to write about since I feel as though I’ve got a lot of thoughts regarding this topic.  It’s a recurring theme that I see all around me and of course it’s nothing terribly new.  There has always been quality versus quantity tradeoffs.

But what I find interesting nowadays is the fact that a lot of people don’t even realize that their supposed high quality product isn’t necessarily all that very high quality.  Take for instance HD video.  The concept is simple.  Higher resolution must mean higher quality.  But of course the devil is in the details.  1080i video compressed using different H.264 profiles will yield dramatically different results.  And even using the same profile it is possible to get differences when bitrates are different.

Video designed for the iPhone would look horrible on a 50″ TV.  Most video on Youtube is in a format designed for a small window on a computer.  Scale it up and it starts becoming unbearable.  On the other hand there is video at high bitrates (in today’s perspective) that look great on a 50″ TV.  Those things are much more costly to generate, store, edit and broadcast.

In between the two lies a vast gray area of acceptability.  And therein lies the question.  At what level of quality are most people willing to accept (and of course pay for)?  If everyone is watching TV on an iPhone then there is absolutely no need for HD video to be pushed around.  If everyone has a 20″ TV then it probably doesn’t matter that the HD video is at a low bitrate because the video artifacts will be scaled to a level that most people could not perceive.

But the human eye and human brain are amazing things.  We really have not come anywhere close to what we can process.  So why settle for okay stuff?  Demand higher quality otherwise what is available really won’t get better at all.

I just read this article (nearly 7 years too late) about ocean currents and the potential mechanics of its behavior. A pretty good read with interesting statements about how it is possible to have regional cooling while the overall global temperature increases.  Kind of like, if we’re having a beautiful day someone else in the world is probably having a really bad day.