Of YouTube and Cell Phones

Sorry about yesterday guys. I'm feeling much better today though, and I even decided to start taking a boxing class at the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week, so that should be fun. Anyhow, anyone get the lame reference to the John Steinbeck classic? No? Yeah, I know I'm sad; deal with it. The first thing I wanted to discuss was this business with Helio and charging $6 a month to go to YouTube. There are two ways I see this. On one hand, they're providing the Internet service and can show you or not show you whatever they want, per their user agreement. On the other hand, it's outrageous, and the fact that they promise unfettered web access in their advertising leaves them vulnerable to a class action lawsuit. Hear that Helio users? It's not legal if they promised that to you! Under standard contract law, they'd have to let you back out of your contract should you choose to. The bigger issue is the moral issue of charging for a free service that is free on any other mobile phone or web browser. In fact, it's even free on the bloody iPhone! They have ads out for it and everything, and it looks better on the iPhone since it fits it to the screen. Of course, the lack of Flash support is disappointing on the iPhone, but that's aside from the point. YouTube on cell phones is about the cheapest way to get some form of television on your mobile phone, an idea that I think is kind of a big step in digital media, and they're trying to stifle it, the very thing that's meant to help them already! The very idea is baffling to me. Just wanted to rant a bit about it.

Back to YouTube real quick: the five Apple TV owners out there will be able to watch YouTube videos on their set top box via a free update that plays videos re-encoded to H.264. This is what the iPhone is doing as well. Why? The iPhone has hardware dedicated to displaying H.264 content, whereas Flash would take valuable CPU clock cycles, hence, hurting battery life on the iPhone. That's a really stupid reason to tell users they can't see Flash content on their iPhone, why not just warn them about that? There had better be a better reason for them not including it at launch than that. Oh, by the way, YouTube will get the beloved 12th spot. Isn't that a bit much for one website?

As most of you should already know, Dell has begun selling computers loaded with Linux rather than Windows at a reduced price. However, they're refusing to sell these machines to business customers. Why? I don't really know. I have a suspicion that it involves some deal they've made with Microsoft though since I can't imagine them making much more money off of Wintel boxes, but it's more likely a liability issue with support and such.

This is really interesting: Google filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft regarding the desktop searching in Windows Vista, and Microsoft budged. The complaint isn't being disclosed, but it's most likely the difficulty of changing the default desktop search application in Vista and, apparently, using another vendor's program was actually slower (presumably, from how it sounds, artificially so). No details as to what changes are being made, but whatever they are, they've kept Google quiet, who's still facing an FTC investigation regarding their planned purchase of DoubleClick.

Speaking of Google, did you know you could Google search terms from Docs and Spreadsheets from within the document? I also didn't know how many regressive copies of your documents they keep. It's slightly creepy, but more impressive than anything else (like most of what Google does).

Being a college student, I couldn't help but plug these cool bottle openers. I personally like the ring one best (my stupid keychain ones broke off).

Ok, so this news is huge! I've literally been waiting over two years for this. My bread and butter, Amazon, has listed Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair for a November 7 release date. It's a 4-disc set putting together both volumes in a nice, NC-17 package. Rest assured, I will be pre-ordering this as soon as humanly possibly; my first DVD pre-order ever.



There you have it folks! Our first look at Harrison Ford back in his fedora for Indiana Jones 4. It's nothing special, but still may send chills up the spines of true action junkies to see this classic character again.

Despite previous reports, it turns out that Cillian Murphy will actually be reprising his role for The Dark Knight according to tipsters who saw him on set filming a scene involving some sort of gang fight. Not sure why they'd want to keep this a secret, because they really have bigger secrets to keep for this one.

We've got a couple of new trailers today. One is for The Simpsons Movie, and it's better than what we last saw, but that's not saying much. I really hope that this movie is funnier than the show has been these last few seasons. The other is for Into the Wild, which I only bring up because I haven't seen Emilie Hirsch much in a while and he's a pretty decent actor. Plus, it has Jena Malone. Anyway, sounds interesting, though I just feel like it'll end up being boring.

This actually leaked a couple of days ago, but I didn't see it before it got taken down, and now it's on Yahoo Movies: the first 8 minutes of Live Free or Die Hard. To be honest, it looks pretty neat. Then again, it is dense in action, so they're catering it to look cool.

Now for a Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. Who?
My beautiful girlfriend
2. What?
She's freaking amazing
3. Where?
In Austin, far far away =(
4. Song
"Hey there, Delilah" - The White T's
5. Food
Pizza
6. Animal
Tiger =)

I'm going to Vancouver tomorrow for the weekend, so I don't imagine that I'll be able to post for a couple of days. Have a good weekend everyone!