Via Chris Lanier, there is nice rant from Jason Dunn about problems various Microsoft products have in dealing with album art embedded in music files.

I note for those that are interested that I have used Tag & Rename to successfully embed album art in WMA files for years. It has some nice features for grabbing copies of album covers from Amazon and the like. There may be better solutions, but this one has worked for me.

The broader question that this made me think about is when to use embedding and when to use pointers to external data. Not just for music, but for applications, databases, web pages and the like. I'll bet there are even analogues to this question in other fields like manufacturing too.

Embedding isn't always the right answer. To return to music for a moment, if you value having artist information, you would not necessarily want to have to update 100s of files each time you made a edit to the bio of a favorite artist. (Sure it could be done automatically, but it seems just as inelegant as some beefs with non-embedded album art.)

Another good example of the tradeoffs involved in embedding involves the DLLs that have led to DLL hell (Note that my choosing to link to this article is an example of choosing a pointer rather than embedding the relevant information here!). Having external, shared DLLs for applications allows common updates to shared function libraries, on the other hand it also creates potential problems as the updates may break some applications. Those problems probably wouldn't occur if each application had its own individual libraries for which the developer was responsible for updating. But that would be more work for the developer.

I am curious as to whether there is any more analytical and less anecdotal work that has been done on when to link and when to embed.

We recently powered up the networked devices in our home after three days without power following the storms that hit Chicago last Thursday and Friday. Aside from a few anomalies the startup after the unplanned and extensive loss of power went pretty well:

• I had forgotten that the Uninterruptible Power Supply that protects our home servers against less sever power interruptions needs to have the power button held in for two seconds to turn it on. I don't have the servers set to shut down on a loss of power, figuring that I don't want them shutting down after a short loss of power and I've never had any ill effects from the uncontrolled shutdown after the UPS runs out. Ideally, software on the servers would start a controlled shutdown after about 15 minutes, but I don't know if such a regime is easily implemented.
• The Media Center server had to be restarted twice to get both CableCard tuner to come back to life, but they did!
• The Small Business Server had to be restarted as well-- which seems to take about 10 minutes.
• In order to get J River's Media Center operating, I need to log onto Small Business Server as a user. To avoid this necessity, I once tried briefly to run Media Center as a service, but this approach is not supported by J River and I was not successful in getting any useful service running. It would run, but there were problems.
• Each of the three Roku Soundbridges needed to be restarted as well-- I used the restart as an opportunity to upgrade the firmware on each one.

All in all, restarting the network was fairly simple and painless. I suspect that would not have been true about five years ago. For all of the complaints about the unreliability of PCs compared to consumer electronics devices, PCs have certainly come a long way from where they once were.

1Up reports that Silicon Knights President Denis Dyack believes we are headed toward a common console platform in which games written for that platform will run anywhere. Perhaps given Silicon Knights' lawsuit against Epic he downplayed the possibility that middleware might play that role. He compared the future of consoles to that of DVD players, where a DVD will play on any player even though there are many models-- differentiated by features other than the movies they play.

I think there is little doubt but there will probably much more of a common software platform for consoles in the next generation. I alluded to such a future in one of my first posts. The forces pushing for such a common platform are so strong that they are leading the the extinction of the third party exclusive even in the current generation. Without the third party exclusive, there is little reason to eschew a common platform and I believe developers will push console manufacturers in that direction.

The interesting question to me is what is the likely platform going to be? Will it be common middleware like the Unreal Engine? A common console operating system? The ability to use XNA with many types of consoles? And how will the affect the console pricing model and business structure?

Based on my earlier posts I would be loathe to bet against Microsoft not having a significant role in crafting the future console platform for several reasons:

• The are a platform company. They design, promote and sell platforms. Sales of hardware and software are just manifestations of that core business. The Xbox 360, Windows and Office are all really platforms.
• With the Xbox 360, the PC and XNA Microsoft will have the largest common platform in the current generation.
• The PS3 is notoriously difficult to develop for in comparison to the Xbox 360.

Another question: If a Microsoft platform became the common console platform, would it even want to make hardware anymore? Wouldn't everyone be better off if Microsoft just made the OS's for Japanese manufactured consoles?

It appears as the the Core Xbox 360 is being replaced by the Xbox Arcade. Which will have an HDMI port and come bundled with a wireless controller, a 256MB memory card and 5 Xbox Live Arcade games.

On the most recent 1UpYours podcast, I believe Garnett Lee referred to Microsoft's decision to keep a version of the 360 without a hard drive as "retarded."

Setting aside the obvious point that whatever faults Microsoft has, they employ pretty smart people. Therefore though they may make wrong decisions, it is pretty unlikely the decision is so obviously wrong as to be "retarded."

In this case, the decision is pretty clearly motivated by a desire to keep the price of the console low enough to compete with the Wii. Faced with buying a 360 without a hard drive and Wii without a hard drive for the same price, many will opt for the console with the superior graphics and superior library: the 360. Of course, this contrast would be clearer if the 360 and Wii really were priced the same instead of the 36 being priced $30 more, but the concept is the same.

But what about the disadvantages of having a model without a hard drive and a model with a hard drive? The main disadvantage is that due to Microsoft guidelines, developers of anything but MMOs have to design their games to function without a hard drive. Is this really a big impediment? The main use of a hard drive will be for caching, updates, downloadable content and game saves. Of these only the inability to do caching really will affect performance in the game out of the box. This seems like a fairly small price to pay (as evidenced by the fact it has not hurt Xbox 360 games to date) for the ability to price the Xbox Arcade much lower. Note also that no one complains that the Wii lacks a hard drive.

If this did become a big problem, Microsoft could relax the requirement that all games run on the Xbox Arcade, perhaps combined with a more reasonably priced hard drive add-on-- say $50. Would that be so bad?

In short, the potential advantages of a hard-driveless Xbox 360 seem to outweigh the fairly marginal disadvantages.

The U of C Law School blog has a nice post in which Randy Picker discusses the economics of the game console business and the rationale behind the pricing model for games and console hardware. I alluded to this previously here.

I fixed a nagging critical error that had been popping up in my SBS event log on a daily basis relating to Shadow Copy: VSS error 7001. It turns out this dates back to when I replaced a hard drive with the Drobo. I had forgotten to turn of Shadow Copy, which now could not find the old volume. I followed the instructions to turn off Shadow Copy, delete the scheduled event relating to the missing task, and then turn Shadow Copy back on again. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Unfortunately I think a side effect was the loss of any shadow copies made to date. In may case this is not a big deal, but I can see it being a big deal for some.

Specifically, should I buy a PlayStation 3 in addition to the stable of Xbox 360's around our house (mostly serving as Media Center Extenders)?

Even assuming further price drops, I think the answer is probably "no." Here are the reasons why:

• Money is not a fundamental constraint that prevents me from purchasing another system. If there were a really compelling reason, I would probably spend the $500 for a PS3 right now.
• Time is probably the most important constraint. Between work and family activities there is not that much time left to play games. Which is a shame, because there are a bunch of universally hailed, really good games out for the Xbox 360 now. This is not true just of the 360, but generally-- games have never been better.
• Another game console would also take up rack space, in our house however, the consolidation of multiple functions in the Xbox 360 means that this is not a key constraint.
• Another game console would also require installation: running wires to the A/V Receiver; reprogramming the remote; and disposing of the box. These are not huge costs, but they are costs nonetheless.
• When playing the PS3 I would not be able to get invites or communications from my friends on Xbox Live or MSN Messenger. Another cost that is not big in and of itself.

There really isn't any experience I could get with the PS3 (or the Wii for that matter) that is so much better than that from buying another triple-A Xbox 360 game, that it would be worth the costs associated with a new console. It I had more time for gaming, or the bench of 360 titles were not as deep, that would not be the case. But for me, right now, it is the case.

So we remain a Microsoft household.