Amazon vs Kazaa vs Netflix

You know technology is definitely getting interesting when an article on a respectable publication like The Register (take that with your chosen amount of salt) makes a comparison between movie delivery time and the contestants are: Netflix -a DVD rental company with a very unique rental method-; Amazon -well, we all know this one, right?- and Kazaa.

Yes, Kazaa! Can you believe it? No? Well, here is a sample, but you can just as well read the article:

“No, it is a simple fact that at the moment Netflix takes between one-to-three days to get any given film to a home in the US, and this is largely due to the fact that the US is such a large geography. If a similar service was launched in parts of Europe, even the local postal service could deliver packets next day.

If we compare this with both Amazon and Kazaa, it compares well.”

If you are curious but have no patience or time to read the whole article it discusses the Netflix’s model of DVD rental and how it gives VoD (Video on Demand) over broadband connections a run for it’s money.

American Mars Rover Missions Weblog

I’ve been trying to avoid simply posting links here but this deserves to be mentioned.

I’ve been following the American mars rover missions from a number of sources, but more and more I’m using the Mars Rover Mission Blog as my primary source of information.

It is complete, updated with a regularity which is compatible with my viewing time constrains and the comments by the author of the weblog are usually interesting.

Good show James, keep up the excellent work!

Daily dose of on-line fun

There has been a recent addition to my daily dose of fun on the net when, quite by chance, I’ve found out about the Down-time Manga.
So far it shows great promise, even if the story is still somewhat incipient and the story-line doesn’t seem very well defined, but then this maybe because I’m just not used to the characters and the story universe.
The drawing style is not one of my favourites but the story potential more than makes up for it so let’s wait and see where it goes from here.

Ever since Megatokyo started going downhill in terms of story development and especially the cadence with which new episodes come by I haven’t found anything new really worth seeing but maybe down-time will turn out to be a good replacement.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Megatokyo! It’s been brilliant from the beginning and it is probably one of the most satisfying stories I’ve ever followed on-line but nowadays we get more and more interludes and less and less story. I know the guy is just so busy with the dead-treeware edition and promotion of the manga itself that something has to give. Unfortunately for us what gave in was the development of the story itself.
An unfortunate side-effect of this is that the story doesn’t have the same feeling it had in the beginning. It should be a fast-paced, action-full almost manic chain of events on one level and (probably) a really weird love story on another but when you get one episode every once in a while the feeling of continuity just isn’t there and you have to go back just to remember what the hell happened last.
This is not a complaint, it is just a statement. I’m really very sorry that the business side of it got in the way of a really great manga, but that is the way of it, everyone has to make a living, right? :)

Other than Megatokyo I usually follow some other comics/mangas I grew to like.
All of them have their ups and downs which leads to periods when some of them are really great to follow and other periods when there’s nothing really interesting happening at all in any given comic but with a big enough assortment you usually have at least one or two good stories going on at any given time which is a good thing!
But then again none of the others even gets close to Megatokyo. If only it would once again pick up it’s pace… Maybe when the second book craze dyes down a bit (it just got released) we’ll get lucky… Maybe.

Anyway, this is my current list of daily fun:
Calvin and Hobbes
Dilbert
Garfield
Snoopy
User Friendly
Megatokyo
Down-time