Cloud Security

How Safe is it in the Clouds?

As you can tell, I'm not all that skilled with photo editing, so I went with the Gizmodo approach. Anyway, the story I'm highlighting this week comes by way of Computerworld about Carbonite (a company whose main product is backing up your computer to the Internet, "the clouds") suing a hardware manufacturer for fault hardware that caused backup failures losing them data on about 7,500 customers. Carbonite claimed that the failsafe mechanisms on the machines didn't perform to spec whereas the hardware folks claimed it was mis-managed. In the end, much of the data was restored, but it has brought to question whether the cloud can be trusted. While some journalists would use this as an opportunity to blow your mind and tell you how unsafe it is, much like you'd think by watching the news that you're probably going to get shot if you walk outside, I'm going to say that cloud storage is safer than keeping it in your home, for most people.

When I say "most people", I mean average folks. If you're very tech savvy and good at what you do, then maybe you would take more appropriate measures. While I obviously can't give a lot of details on how Amazon stores its customer-sensitive information or how S3 (affordable, online storage) works, I can assure you that it's pretty secure on many levels. If you store your data on S3, or even likely on some of its big competitors, that data is replicated across multiple locations across the country (or Europe if you're an EU customer). You'd need a pretty ridiculous series of events to cause enough failures for your data to be lost, as opposed to you spilling coffee on your computer, or your external hard drive having a mechanical failure, or a thief robbing you, or something of that sort. I will grant you that you may have occasional issues of unavailability with online services, which is one leg up you have on keeping your small business data in-house or keeping your personal computer's backup in your bedroom where you have direct access to the hardware. Still, data being temporarily unavailable is not the same as it being lost.

What about your data getting stolen? What are the odds on that? This is a tough call, but I'd still argue that the data on the average person's computer (or small business network) is less secure than in online storage. There are so many ways to get owned by a hacker online it's almost miraculous to never get a virus or become part of a botnet or something equally terrible in the span of 6 months. It's kind of like the drug war - it'll never end. With every passing day malicious hackers get more clever and more malicious. Besides often being physically secure, a lot of these data centers are very restricted in the access to the Internet, and the traffic is often monitored pretty closely. Nothing is ever impossible when it comes to network security - it's all about playing the odds. The odds are just worse for you as an individual then a data center as run by (hopefully) competent professionals.

I know that cloud storage is a bit scary and requires a big leap of faith, and it may not be sensible in all situations, but it's not as bad as articles like the one I referenced earlier would make it out to be.

More Security News

I won't drag on the other security news too much, but there is some interesting stuff out there. Like the Conficker worm, which is the biggest thing since Blaster. In essence, it exploits a Windows remote server vulnerability that was patched already but unpatched machines are at risk and, since it's a worm, it looks quietly for others to infect (including your own USB drives). It has infected millions of machines and, on April 1, will ping 50,000 domains for instructions (I'm guessing that only a few will actually have the instructions, the large number is to throw off security engineers). So get ready for Wednesday, which will either be apocalyptic or just a big joke. I think it'll be the latter, but the worm writer may be renting it out for monetary gain so it's really anyone's guess. By the way, make sure you're clean.

Make Use Of has a really excellent round-up of extensions you can install in Firefox to make your computer just a little bit more secure. It has everything from a panic button to security ratings next to your search results.

I recently reported a story about a Pwn2Own (a hacking contest) champion stating that Safari on a Mac was the most insecure browser, who is now saying that Macs are more secure than Windows machines because there's less malware out there for them. I talk about Mac vs. PC security every once in a while, and either one is less secure depending on the context. The bottom line is that Macs are less secure software-wise but PCs are a larger target, which is why people perceive them as being not very safe.

Microsoft Marketing

This might've been a good headline topic to talk about, but oh well. I talked about Internet Explorer 8's release last week, but no one else really is. The bottom line is that it really wasn't marketed very well at all. Very few people knew it was coming (or cared), and though it was a pretty good product the number of downloads per day was pretty disappointing for the boys in Redmond. So what happened? My guess is that it may confirm rumors from a couple of weeks ago that IE8 would be the last one on this engine. It would make sense that they'd keep the release of IE8 quiet if they're planning on trying to ween people off of Internet Explorer. I know people have become skeptical of upgrading Microsoft products, but there really wasn't much bad mojo associated with IE8.

On the other hand, Microsoft is not doing to bad with their Windows campaign. A lot of tech elite have scoffed at the Seinfeld ads and the I'm a PC ads as being too little too late, but I think coupled with the buzz surrounding Windows 7 and an economy that's not favorable to Apple it could mean great things for Microsoft. This clearly isn't lost on them as they're getting ready to start a campaign comparing the relative affordable of a PC compared to a Mac. I think this is super smart. I'm sure that Apple will come firing back with something about quality and the fanboy war will continue, but you cannot dispute that PCs are almost always cheaper than Macs with arguably comparable hardware.

Executive Branch Supports RIAA Damages, EFF Fights DRM

President Obama's administration has taken a stance on RIAA lawsuits that is likely to shock some supporters: they believe that $750 to $150,000 per track in piracy lawsuits is a reasonable award in such litigation. I can't see how these are statutory damages as opposed to punitive damages at such astronomical rates, but I guess the administration felt it would be too liberal to disagree with the RIAA. Given that they're not going to be suing so much anymore I guess it's not that big of a deal, but I still think it's a terrible precedent.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) testified at the FTC's hearing on Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology against it and has made publicly available its briefs on the issue. It really all boils down to DRM causing worse damage to consumers than the little help it provides to content owners. The EFF's comments aren't as long as they look (probably a 10 minute read) and they're a great read.

Monster's Tactics Still at Play

I'm giving bold text to this short article because I hate Monster and I love spreading the word against them. Sales of Monster's overpriced audio/video cables result in big commissions for Fry's employees, and so there are Fry's stores that have in-store displays comparing Monster to the other guys under the guise that you should "see the Monster HDMI difference" when the competing cable is composite instead of HDMI. For the non-geeks: composite cables are not capable of carrying true high definition, so they're obviously going to suck compared to any HDMI cable for HD content. This is an old trick that some thought died a long time ago, but apparently not.

On my last visit to Fry's to get an HDMI cable some sales guy tried to push an $80 Monster cable on me because it was "handmade" and rated for some asinine transmission speed. I saw one of their digital audio cables at a friend's place and it was terrible - it wouldn't even fit in the PS3. Don't buy Monster, Amazon has much better deals.

Final Stories

Ok, ready for the lightning round? I'm sick and it's almost drowsy medicine time, but I have a few stories left on my list. Let's see how fast I can run through them.

Tech Crunch ran a really good article about why advertising online is in such bad shape (basically: people hate and don't trust ads) and the article presents three alternatives for making money online: selling real things, virtual things, and access. I can imagine why it would piss off some people, but I agree with a lot of his key points.

Facebook is semi-caving to the backlash regarding its recent facelift: they've pledged to make improvements that they think will address some of the large concerns with the re-design. To be honest, I don't think the new look is that bad. I can understand that people like to trust a UI though, which is easy in offline software where you choose to upgrade as opposed to online where it's forced on you.

Twitter has confirmed that they're going to have premium accounts later this year for commercial customers. No word yet on exactly what they have in store (they themselves may not know quite yet), but with nearly 10 million visitors a month now, I'm sure they're ready to start making money.

A non-profit campaign on YouTube raised over $10,000 in one day. I'm sure YouTube is going to use this to try to sell YouTube ads to commercial advertising firms, but I don't think you can compare commercial ads to the faces of needy kids in Africa. Still, I think the non-profit tie-ins are great.

Skype handles more international calls than AT&T now. Bam.

If you hate the Craigslist UI, you may like Craiglook. Having had to spend a lot of time on Craigslist last summer, I always like to see mashups like this.

I hope everyone has a great week! I wonder how many days this week in Seattle will be as pretty as today?

The Advertising Battle Begins

Kill Bill on Blu-ray

Before I jump into the news today, I got Kill Bill on Blu-ray last week, after waiting like 4 years for The Whole Bloody Affair release, and it's really incredible. It was my first Blu-ray purchase (which is funny because the first DVD I bought was my favorite movie at the time, The Matrix, and Kill Bill is my new favorite), and I am really impressed with it. Aside from the lack of special features, it's just incredible. The video transfer is a lot better than what the DVDs were at an output of 1080p and the audio is crystal clear at uncompressed, lossless PCM 5.1. I doubled over with shock when I saw the opening scene of the Vernita Green chapter because of how wonderfully vibrant the colors are. It really made me feel like I was back in the theater again, even though my TV is only 40". If you love Kill Bill, then this is pretty much a must-own. While I don't think you should dump your DVDs for Blu-ray discs, you should know that there's an appreciable difference in quality if you have the TV for it. I know that not many people do, but you'd be amazed how quickly you turn into a videophile when you see a movie like this in Blu-ray.

Misleading Apple Ads vs. I'm a PC

Apple's switch ads and Mac vs. PC were initially rather successfully campaigns. It's no secret that the key to their success has always been their fantastic marketing and that these ads helped the Mac gain market share inch-by-inch amidst the negative press garnered by Vista. Somewhere down the line though the Mac vs. PC ads degraded into attack ads that only fueled Mac enthusiasts' zeal to argue with Windows fanboys. Where's the innovation there?

Of course, there's also their product ads, which aim to be creative along the lines of the image that they want to send with that product, so the size of the Shuffle, or the colors of the Nano, or the intuitive touch interface of the iPod Touch. With the more recent iPhone ads for the iPhone 3G though, they've strayed into shady territory much like with their Mac vs. PC ads. The speed with which they show things happening in these ads is near impossible. Silicon Alley Insider replicated what was done in the ad in the most generous way possible and took over 3 times as long to do the same things with a real iPhone. Even if you had really good 3G coverage, it's really unlikely for you to be as fast as the ad. Hell, my computer on cable Internet can't load up the New York Times or navigate Google Maps that fast, but the people that these ads are targeted ad don't know these things. So is Apple being disingenuous?

I know what most people are going to want to say: you have to take all ads with a grain of salt. That's true, but there are laws established against false advertising, and how can you claim that this isn't false advertising with such an extreme disparity from reality without any disclaimer that they had a modified iPhone for the sake of the time constraints of the commercial, or something of that sort? I just feel like they're totally cheating. The entire point of the commercial isn't to sell the iPhone 3G, though that is the desired end result. The entire point of the ad is showing how much faster this iPhone is, which is what makes this so egregious. I'm sure the mainstream won't notice this because an iPhone is just such an exciting product regardless, but I just really don't like it.

What I like a lot better, surprisingly enough, is the new Microsoft "I'm a PC" ads. When I first heard that they were going to do these (early last week), I cringed at the thought. It gives an acknowledgement of the Mac vs. PC ads and I didn't have any faith that Microsoft would understand how to reverse the negative label that Apple has created for the PC. I actually think that they're off to a really good start with these though. It reminds me of when I was entering high school and I was trying to hide what a huge nerd I was to try to look slightly cooler and make more friends, and then by the time I was in college being a nerd was somewhat cool and I didn't have to worry about it anymore. This is kind of an interesting way to get people to see that owning a PC does not make you a businessman or a wuss, it actually makes you quite normal but still quite special. Maybe Microsoft stands a chance in this advertising standoff with Apple, after all. Maybe (hopefully) I underestimated them.

Apple App Store Upsets Continue

Sorry to harp on Apple here, but this warrants further discussion. Someone created an iPhone application to download and manage podcasts directly on the phone, but Apple rejected the app because it competed with iTunes. Yeah, that's pretty lame. Creating software like that takes a lot of time, so to invest all that time into it only to get rejected because it creates competition, what I consider one of the basic tenets of capitalism, is completely absurd to me.

There's a couple of issues to consider here. The iPhone has gotten so big that it's almost stupid for mobile developers to not create apps for it. I know, it doesn't carry a majority share in smartphones or cell phones in general, but it's still a sizeable chunk with an avid fanbase. They can't really be ignored. So Apple can technically do whatever it wants with this app store, as long as it doesn't go out and start disabling people's applications for no legitimate reason, and its customers will be happy because there will still be a selection of great apps available. The other issue is how many developers this kind of moderation will deter. Will it be enough for Apple to change its policies? My guess is going to be no, but it will mean that the iPhone will never live up to its full potential until Apple gets more lenient and much more transparent with how it runs its app store. Until then, you're going to lose developers who could, theoretically, write some of the iPhone's best applications. Apple also loses all the money they could've gained, which stands to be a lot if enough developers rebel. More importantly though, does this create an opportunity for the Android platform to woe these lost sheep and gain a decent number of existing iPhone developers? I'm really curious to see how this all plays out, but I really hope that Apple makes the smart play and loosens up (though given their history of keeping their hardware closed up and being stubborn, it's not likely to happen).

Best Buy Buys Napster

Best Buy's decision to acquire Napster is definitely an interesting one. Why would a well-established brick-and-mortar retail chain buy a failing mp3 download service? I think it has everyone scratching their heads. One likely possibility is package deals with their products, so buy an Insignia mp3 player and get a free month of Napster, or maybe buy the new Muse album and get a free download of a live Muse track. Maybe they're trying to boost their CD sales with deals like this? Or maybe they want to leverage their connections to expand Napster to be bigger and even serve video content? Or maybe they want to diversify because they recognize that digital content is the future? A part of me hopes it's all of the above, because I feel sympathetic for poor Napster and would like to see it go somewhere (though of course, not do as well as Amazon MP3 ;), and I think losing Best Buy would reduce the retail competition that benefits consumers so anything they can do to stay alive sounds like a good move to me. I guess we'll see what happens!

DRM Sucks

I have to always advocate an end to Digital Rights Management (DRM), because it only serves to make life harder for those who buy music, movies, and games legally and makes it harder to do things legally. Mashable waxed on the inevitable failure of DRM in light of the "Buy Once, Play Anywhere" initiative that reminds me of the PlayForSure DRM that didn't really play "for sure". Apple, TiVo, and Amazon are not part of the initiative, but Sony is leading up the effort with the smaller guys and it juts doesn't really make sense to me. If the biggest players aren't at the table then what's the point of talking? It's not clear if the three companies weren't invited or simply didn't want to join, but the real solution for creating media that definitely plays anywhere is to not strap DRM to it! It's just that simple. If people can already easily pirate the content, is selling it to people that actually want to buy it really going to make it harder on them?

Closing Notes

Alright, it's past my bedtime so I'm going to wrap up these last items real quick.

The Techcrunch 50, which lets a bunch of startups strut their stuff for publicity and cash prizes, featured a product that I really want called FitBit. It's basically a fancy pedometer that tracks your activity while you're awake and asleep to generate cool charts and graphs and allow you to share it with your friends. What a useful gadget! (EDIT: See a video of it here)

The game that I've been lusting after since PAX, LittleBigPlanet, has gone gold and so it's definitely going to be out on October 21! I'm so stoked that I even created an ad for one of the LittleBigChallenges (fortunately I got good feedback on it, I just did it for fun):



Amazon has launched a new site (into beta) called WindowShop that allows you to visually browse what's on the site. It gives you quick, very visual, access to the latest music, movies, and books with a fancy Flash application. It needs some more evolving, but I think it's off to a great start.

IMDb has launched full-length movies, TV shows, and movie trailers onto the site, largely supported by Hulu. It makes using the site more immersive than just for quick lookups, and my guess is that they want to keep people on the site longer to help sell more advertising and just improve the overall user experience. I personally like it.

Have a great week, everyone!

X-Files and My Semi-Glorious Return

I'm back to blogging! I meant to write this post yesterday, but opted for Rock Band instead (sorry). I should be posting at least weekly, but I'll shoot for bi-weekly. I'm still getting adjusted to living in Seattle, and I am a bit homesick, but I am enjoying the scenery out here.

X-Files: I Want to Believe

Full disclosure: I can't remember the last episode of this show that I saw, but it was probably the only one I've seen. This show was on when I was pretty easily scared of stuff in general so I never got into it. I'm sure it was a good show, it just wasn't my cup of tea and now I'm on to bigger and better shows (Burn Notice is currently rocking my socks).

The movie revolves around one big missing persons mystery (an FBI agent) and a psychic, so given the psychic's involvement the FBI have called on Dana Scully to call in Fox Mulder, who requires her to help if he's going to help. They've basically been going on with their own lives (Mulder's being as a recluse) so this is kind of a major reunion for them. The more I think about the story though, the more I have problems with it. I walked out of the theater feeling no better or worse than when I walked in, and the movie seemed pretty good but not amazing.

Let me start out with my issues. They had a psychic helping them and they called in Mulder because they were stuck. Anyone see a problem with that? They have a psychic, which is hard for them to believe naturally, but why does this mean they need to call on Mulder? It seems like he's been estranged by the FBI, so I don't see why they require his help. Even if you're ok with that though, I just never believe the chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Their reunion in the movie seems to have been after a long time and yet they weren't very affected by it. Their love story progression seemed like an after thought they clumsily wove into the movie, which is strange because I had heard in an interview that the movie was supposed to center on them. I also hate that we never connect with the antagonists at all, and the motive involved isn't all that compelling.



I don't know if fans really loved this movie. It seemed to drag on a bit. There wasn't a whole lot of thrill moments or action, and I never really got pulled in. Granted, I had no investment in this series and only went to see this movie in the first place because a friend wanted to, but I figured that it would be good. It could be that I'm dealing with a hangover from The Dark Knight and any movie I see will pale in comparison, but I watched Ratatouille the other night and still managed to enjoy it.

I definitely wouldn't say that the movie is bad though. I think it could've explained things better and tightening itself up a bit on time, but it was still entertaining. I think you should rent it if you're at all intrigued by the series or murder mysteries. It's definitely nothing out of the ordinary though (if you really want a great murder mystery just go rent Mystic River), and there are certainly better movies out there right now (obviously The Dark Knight, but I loved Wall-E and I've seen good reviews for Mamma Mia and Step Brothers). I give this movie a C-, because I can tell that they were trying to reach out to fans rather than people's wallets, but I think that they've probably just run out of ideas. It probably would've benefited from not being released right in the middle of a competitive summer for films.

The Dark Knight's $300m Dash

I counted on Box Office Mojo that The Dark Knight had topped 23 of their charts including biggest opening weekend ever, biggest second weekend ever, and biggest opening day gross. The one everyone is focusing on now though is that it is the fastest movie to hit $300 million (it's already at $315 million domestically, but over $350 million worldwide) with a record of 10 days. The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had the title before at 16 days, and now people are predicting that The Dark Knight may beat Titanic's $600 million record for biggest total gross. I think that it can probably pull it off since it is past halfway there in its 2nd weekend. By the way, how the Hell did that movie make so much money? It wasn't a bad movie, but I saw it once and never want to see it again because it was so heavy and depressing. Anyway, this movie deserves the massive amount of money they're making. It seriously is a good time to be a nerd when something this phenomenal comes out that literally must seem like to many people, including myself, that it's straight out of their childhood fantasies. (I wasn't that dark as a child, but darkness always intrigued me)

Up-marketing Vista

In case you haven't noticed, Windows Vista has been taking a beating as far as publicity goes ever since its released because it didn't deliver on several of the promises that was made of it early in its development (always a fatal mistake). It took Microsoft far too long, but they're finally gearing up some positive marketing for Vista. They tested the waters by showing a "new OS" to people called Mojave and seeing how they liked it. In the end, it turned out that Mojave was Vista with the "Vista" name stripped from it and people were pretty shocked because most (or all) of them had the impression that Vista sucked. I'm personally glad about this because I'm freaking tired of having to defend my computer: it's a great machine and Vista works very well on it. It is no worse than XP and I admit that it sucks that you need a good computer to run it but if you do then the extra features (including the massively re-vamped search functionality) are pretty cool. The only problem I've had is that my downloading can sometimes impact my computer's overall performance, but I don't think that's necessarily Vista.

That's just one component for their response to Apple's smarmy Mac vs. PC ads. They're not going to do the same thing in reverse to attack Apple, but they're going to stop being such a sleepy giant and try a pro-Vista message. Some have seen the ads and are already excited about it, but they have not yet been made public. For the record: I don't hate Apple or Microsoft, but I do hate Apple taking advantage of its underdog status to continually take low-blows at Microsoft. Their ads are often unfair and prey on stereotypes, which bothers me. I'll admit that they're clever, but they've gone on far too long.

Open Xbox

One more quick piece of Microsoft news: they've decided to open up the 360 platform! That means that you don't have to be a big studio to write your own Xbox 360 game and put it out on Live. Not everyone will be allowed to put their game on Live, but the fact that they're encouraging this is just a massive step in the right direction. I wish that Sony would do the same. It's just going to breed more competition and produce higher quality of games that rely more on just flashy graphics and big budgets to attract attentions.

Yahoo! Music Store Folds

In another giant stab to DRM, Yahoo has closed up shop in the digital music game. They are the second DRM music service to go down this year (MSN was first), but the difference is that in a couple of months their key servers are going offline! What does that mean? The what DRM music often works is that they're locked by a key (in the case of subscription based services, these keys usually need to be renewed monthly) and you need these keys to be able to open these tracks. If you transfer them to another computer, this computer asks the server for the appropriate keys using your login information and it obliges, but in Yahoo's case you can't move your songs to another computer so if your computer dies then so does your music. Lame, huh? That's why you should use Amazon MP3: I still personally thing that it's the best digital music around and something like this would never happen to its customers. I wonder if enough people used the service for this to impact Yahoo's image? I kind of hope so, because it's a pretty raw deal (MSN's key servers will only be up until 2011, so they're not much better).

Comments and CS Concepts

I just wanted to briefly mention a couple of articles that I liked. The first one is concise and talks about why comments in code are appropriate and why. It's a great read, even if you do use comments in your code.

The other one is a list of the top 10 concepts that all software engineers should know. With the exception maybe of layering, I think that your success in the IT industry is doomed without an understanding of these ideas and a willingness to flesh them out throughout your career.

Streaming Torrents

EZTV, a huge group for trafficking torrents, has started putting up content that can be streamed using Swarmplayer, which streams content using bittorrent technology to distribute it. This is an excellent idea and I think could seriously revolutionize how we stream multimedia online, if it's harnessed in legal uses. This would really cut a lot of overhead out of putting things like TV shows online because a media company would no longer need to keep them on a centralized server and pay for the bandwidth to deliver it but rather could just seed a show well (i.e. have a few powerful machines dedicated to serving up the shows) and let everyone watching the show upload the show to others as they watch it. Couldn't someone compete with Hulu if they harnessed this technology? I imagine that you could put out HD-quality content with this sort of infrastructure. Only time will tell (assuming that this technology does get picked up by someone big).

One-Liners

I have a couple more articles that I want to talk about but they're just one-liners:

Legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick was part of a panel recently at a hacking convention and told some great stories (including a live prank). He's probably the father of social engineering attacks (tricking you into giving up sensitive information or making yourself vulnerable).

CNN has a pretty good article on how to prepare yourself for the transition to digital TV. If you're on cable or satellite, then you're ok. Otherwise, read that article.

Rock Band

I just wanted to conclude by proclaiming that Rock Band is an incredible video game. As expensive as my 80 GB PS3 was, I'm really glad I got it. I'm excited to start buying Blu-ray movies (especially Iron Man and The Dark Knight), Metal Gear Solid 4 is beautiful, the Playstation Network store is just how things should've been on the PS2, and Rock Band is by far one of the coolest games I've played.

I never thought I'd like it that much because I never got into Guitar Hero, but it's definitely worth checking out. The closest any game has come to replicating the kind of co-operative play you get from this game is probably Wii Sports, but this game tops that. You really do feel like you're part of a band because when you play hard song it's rewarding and you start patting each other on the back and stuff. Also impressives are the nuances: the presentation is flawless. They had my band name (Elton and the Fun King Band) on a tour bus, on CD album covers, and in neon in the World Tour mode! Plus, the load screens are customized with your band! Any musicians will really be impressed with this game (or non-musicians), because I think that it handles guitar a lot better, as well.

*deep breath* Ok, enough of that. I'm going to go read Salem's Lot for a bit. Have a great week, everyone!

Legal Torrents for Movies?

No, I'm not referring to a new site. I'm talking about an interview that TorrentFreak had with the creators of The Pirate Bay, who have been in the lime light because of their upcoming trial. Anyway, one of the big quotes from that interview is their advice to the movie and music industry to start their own torrent site and put The Pirate Bay out of business. Would this ever happen? I kind of doubt it. Yes, there are several popular movies on BitTorrent, but how many people do you know who have tried it? Why would you pay $20 for a digital copy of a movie that you can only watch on 2 computers? The over-arching issue here really is DRM. Releasing DRM-laden movies on BitTorrent is like if someone orders a hamburger and you only give them half of it. How many years did it take the music industry to turn to DRM-free mp3s? It will take at least that long for the movie industry to come along. I have a feeling that they eventually will come around, I just don't know when. So if I believe they're guaranteed to eventually ditch the DRM why don't I think they're likely to use torrents for distribution? Simple: control. These companies like to have a lot of control, hence DRM. Getting rid of DRM will be losing a lot of control for them, and I think it'll be a while longer before they lose control of distribution to a peer network, despite how well-constructed BitTorrent DNA is. I'll admit that it's possible though, but getting studios to come together on a torrent site won't be much easier than getting the labels together (I have no idea how Amazon MP3 pulled this off). I think they'll associate torrents with the enemy for a long time, and not be trusting of it. But I'll be optimistic and say that it's possible, just not in the near future.

The more content that Hulu has been getting, the more street cred it has been receiving. In case you don't remember, this site's goal is to provide television shows on-demand (current and past) for free. You can think of it as a competitor to Joost, only it's not hard to use and has popular TV shows. NBC's defection from iTunes was a pretty bold statement, I think. I've been using it to watch Firefly and other stuff since the writer's strike began and I never missed my television set during that time (though I did use it to watch DVDs). That article makes a good point that they should advance television to the next level with this with more interactive features and discussion, which I definitely agree with. I think that it should become an integral part of IP TV, as time progress. I've been reliant on Hulu and Miro for the past 3 months, to be honest, so I can see these two ideas combining later on. Anyway, the big news is that Hulu is public now. That means that you can see my favorite Superbowl ad and much more at Hulu; you won't be disappointed:



Mozilla released Firefox 3 Beta 4 just a couple of days ago and apparently the GUI has been retooled to play nicer with the Vista UI experience. In fact, it's designed to look native to the OS you're in and integrate more tightly with OS X, Windows, and Linux. I actually haven't played around with the new Beta much myself, but so far so good (I don't have Vista anyway, so I wouldn't be able to attest to the above claim). Apparently, they've been putting a lot of effort into improving their memory usage. Reading that post was really cool to me, but if you haven't had a course in Operating Systems then it'll probably bore you to tears. I just thought it was cool because you can tell that they've really been digging deep to improve complaints about crashes and memory leaks. I just love it when developers are so responsive to the concerns of their customers. I think IE has been gradually learning lessons like this from the Firefox team. If you look at the development of IE 6 as opposed to 7 or 8, you can see how radically different they are.

I just want to make a quick note about Dropbox because I think it's really cool. You can see a tour of it here, and it's basically an online back-up and synchronization service that is still in beta. I think the concept is phenomenal: it will synch your data across multiple computers and with the online backup of your data. It kind of reminds me of Drobo. It works without inundating you with details but providing you with data integrity (an underrated issue nowadays in the mainstream) and and synchronization. I worry about its speed as you work with larger files, but I'm sure that they've been designing it with scalability in mind. I'll let you guys know if I get in the private beta.

I've never been a big fan of Nine Inch Nails (I liked the crazy video for "Closer"), but I've always retained a certain degree of respect for Trent Reznor. Since they're no longer tied to a record label they decided to release an instrumental album called Ghosts, and I really dig it. They've followed in the footsteps of Radiohead and released the first 9 tracks for free. What's really awesome is that each track is associated with a picture that helps convey the mood of the song, and I don't think I've ever heard of a band doing that before. If you decide you like it, you can buy the whole album (36 tracks) for just $5. The first 9 tracks are actually pretty good, I recommend trying it out. They're also selling hard copies in different editions with DVDs and vinyls and such for more money. What's great is that all that money goes to them, and none of it to a record label.

Before I close out here, I have to say that I find Hillary Clinton's recent antics ridiculous and unacceptable. She is supporting John McCain over Barack Obama! If you're a Republican and you support McCain, then that's fine. I respect that you believe his policies and you can vote for him, that's cool. However, it's ridiculous if you're a Democratic nominee for the candidacy of President of the United States and you betray your party for someone whose beliefs are completely contrary to that of the Democratic Party. Obama has a lot of experience as a community organizer, Illinois legislator, and Senator. Being a first lady does not count as experience. She was a Senator for a few more years, but how much more did she get done than Obama? Her negative campaigning just aggravates me. I'm trying so hard to respect her and what she has accomplished in her career, but the mudslinging does not help, especially when you antagonize what may be the only hope for your party to regain control of the White House. Even some of her front-line supporters are defecting. She's being hypocritical in her attacks, and if she didn't make these ridiculous claims then people wouldn't be so harsh on her and she'd have a much better chance of winning. Can't she see that? She's only going to hurt this Party's resurgence by giving material to McCain if Obama wins (which is becoming more and more likely now that he's erased her gains last Tuesday in just one week). Ok *sigh*, I'm off my soapbox.

Victory for Digital Music

A belated 'Happy New Year' is in order! I would've posted sooner except that I've had a fever since Wednesday evening and I'm only now starting to recover from it. It did give me a chance to pop open my Veronica Mars Season 2 DVDs though. I think my recent posts have been on the attacking or cynical side, but I think it's amazing news that Sony has caved and so now all the major music labels have switched to DRM-free music downloads. I cannot emphasize how big of a deal this is. After years of issues with mp3 players only playing certain mp3s and rootkits and breaking DRM schemes and all that jazz, the big guys have finally admitted that DRM-free is the way to go. Why? It's not altruism. Rather, they're scared of Apple. Amazon made a bold move when they decided that they only digital music they'd offer would be DRM-free. Some probably thought it was stupid for a nascent service to be so greedy. Funny how in less than half a year they brought around every major record label, huh? I don't know how many of the labels (besides EMI) is selling DRM-free through iTunes, but some have been selling to others as well (e.g. Rhapsody and Wal-mart, whose pompous site insists you use IE). Somehow, Amazon mp3 has been the common denominator. I really want to meet that team when I get back to Seattle to find out how this all came to be.

The point is, this was a huge risk for these labels. They're making a huge statement in saying that they'd rather risk feeding piracy with DRM-free music offerings than let iTunes remain the #1 digital music source with no close competitors. Think about that for a second. It seems a little paranoid, doesn't it? There's probably more to it than that, but I'm really curious as to what was going on behind closed doors for Apple to piss these guys off so much. It may very well be true that the labels saw the error in their ways in sticking with DRM for so long (especially the bad PR that geeks like me spared no time in propagating). It may even be true that they crunched numbers and thought that selling DRM-free may make them more money. Or maybe they did surveys or something. It's tough to say. There's no doubt in my mind that at least one factor in their decisions was to diversify who receives their content, and the fact that Amazon Mp3 now has claim over a library formidable to Apple means that my prediction from way back when may be true: Amazon can give iTunes a run for its money. They're finally proving that Apple is not invincible, something that companies like RealNetworks and Napster never accomplished. We just have to wait and see what the numbers say at time progresses. Amazon can still blow it, no doubt (though I've only seen the UI get better). But the fact that they've made it this far is a pretty big deal, in my opinion. One more thing: if this DRM-free thing works out for music than we can hope to see it spread to movies and television shows as we see mirroring trends in putting content online.

Of course, not all is well in online music. Napster has raised its monthly rate by $3 to $12.95. Mashable likes to be melo-dramatic and claim that this signals their downfall, but I think that's a premature statement. I think they still have a chance, but I do think it'll be hard for them to attract more subscribers with a higher rate. Also, Apple is being sued, again, for having a monopoly in digital music and mp3 players. Given that there are some sizable competitors though that are doing decently well (not gangbusters, but not bad either), I can't see this lawsuit going far.

Warner Brothers has decided that it will not sell HD-DVD discs, only for Blu-ray. Why? Well, Blu-ray sales were apparently strong in Q4 last year and they claim that the numbers are not in HD-DVD's favor. Could this be the start of a Blu-ray victory? Over the past year there was never really a clear winner, as there isn't still, but rather one would just inch in front of the other. If what Warner claims is true though, then maybe HD-DVD won't exist this time next year. We'll have to wait and see.

I have some bad news: Intel has decided to put an end to their involvement with the One Laptop Per Child program. Sounds kind of weird, right? I don't know if Intel is fully to blame here as the OLPC project asked them to not work on any other platforms but OLPC. Anyway, they've had issues working together for a while and Intel has its own low-cost laptop platform called the Classmate PC. It's not a total loss, but the impasse is still mildly tragic.

Seth MacFarlane made a speech at one of the WGA rallies and I thought it was interesting enough to share with you all:



It just gives a very real viewpoint from their side as to why the strike makes sense and why it's not about being greedy. Plus, he does his Stewie voice at the end.

I have a couple of quick things. There's a new torrent site called YouTorrent that searches the torrent search engines for the good stuff. It's pretty good and worth giving a shot. The other thing is that Google has had a couple of high-profile defections including their UI designer for Gmail. These probably don't mean anything because it's not unusual for young talent in the tech industry to move around, but it just shows that Google isn't a paradise for everyone, despite popular belief.

To compensate for not posting in a while I figure that I'd share a video I took on New Year's Eve after we finished setting up my brother's house for the New Year's party. The featured drinks aren't out yet (mojitos and pomegranate martinis), but it still looks nice:


Shawn and Selina's New Year's Eve Tour from Eptiger on Vimeo.

Lastly, I haven't played in a meme in a while, which is kind of a shame. I thought I'd give newcomer Saturday 9 a try:

1. Do you have a dishwasher?
I do, but I never use it.

2. What noise do you hear?
The TV behind me. I swear cable is the devil.

3. Next concert you hope to go to?
I don't have one in mind, but I still need to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

4. When was the last time you said I love you and meant it?
To be honest, I'm not sure. Maybe a week ago? I used to say daily, and I usually say it to my mom on the phone, but since I'm here in Houston I don't talk to her on the phone.

5. If all of your friends were going on a road trip, who would be most likely to over pack?
Me, I'm sure.

6. Who is the youngest in your family?
I guess my cousin Sherylann's son, who is not even two months old now.

7. Do you know anyone with the same name as you?
Kind of. I know this guy is out there. ;) If you just mean by first name: I know there's Elton John, but I don't know anyone personally.

8. How many shoes do you own?
Probably 6 pairs.

9. Do you mind flat soda?
I don't drink soda period, except with alcohol. Even then, I don't think I'd mind terribly.

Superbad

Before I get started here, I have to say that I hate Sprint. I called them to activate my brother's old Treo 650 for me, and they were rude and ugly the whole time. If you can help it, don't use Sprint. Anyhow, I saw Superbad today so I felt that a brief review was in order. It was a pretty entertaining movie, but quite crude. Maybe not quite on the level of Clerks 2, but still pretty heavy on cursing and gratuitous innuendo. If you can look past all that though, it's quite funny. The last portion of the movie is definitely the funniest, but it's pretty evenly sprinkled with what-the-hell humor. I guess I laughed so much because I could see the inner perv that every, and I mean every, guy experiences for a couple of years following puberty, cut lose on the big screen in the character Seth. What makes this movie so funny is that the casting is spot-on. I just love every character in this movie; they're perfect. Keep in mind that this is a comedy, not a drama or anything, so good acting means good delivery and believable caricatures. There were a few scenes where I had to look away because the scene was so shocking or I felt embarrassed for a character; that's what good acting is in a comedy. Anyhow, I give it a B because it was rather crude, but worth seeing if you can appreciate juvenile humor. You have to basically try to not be mature about it or an adult and realize that it's all just for fun.

This is truly amazing: so Google decided to refund customers of Google Video in Google Checkout credit when they shut down their video on demand services, but people were pissed. However, they actually responded and are additionally going to refund people's credit cards of purchase as well now! That's really quite an impressive response from Google. They're even going to extend the life of the videos by 6 months! This is how customer service should be.

Oh, they're also allowing you to embed Google Maps, handy for web pages and blogs and such. Very useful, I imagine. By the way, while I'm on Google Maps, have Houstonians noticed that we have Street View now?

Remember yesterday how I reported that Paramount and Dreamworks went HD-DVD only? Well, it turns out that they were paid off to do so, according to a Viacom insider, which doesn't make them look too good. What does it say about Toshiba that they have to pay studios to want to use only their format? Ouch.

Wal-mart has jumped on the DRM-free bandwagon at higher quality than typical protected content from UMG and EMI. Again, another solid step for DRM-free music since Wal-mart is such a big player, but I just hope that this pilot doesn't fail horribly, or that they don't misread it as increasing piracy but rather see it as a way to trust their fans and hope to bring back their business after all this alienation of lawsuits and DRM.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, torrent-sharing site, Supernova, is finally back online after quite a long hiatus. The Pirate Bay took over to get it back online, and it looks like it's here to stay. It's too late to say if it's back to its original capacity, but it's still looking good.

Lastly, this is a good read for the casual Linux user. It's just some commands that no Linux user should be without knowledge of.

In movie news, I only have a couple of trailers to talk about. The first is for Cassandra's Dream, which is a Woody Allen movie, but I have no idea what's going on in that trailer. If you've actually decoded it, please do comment and fill me in. The other trailer makes more sense: it's a rockumentary from Martin Scorcese about a Rolling Stones concert from 2006 called Shine a Light. Both are low quality because they're on YouTube, but the latter is cool to see.

Let me show you guys a cute picture before I close off of my brother's dog enjoying a jog on his tredmill:


Now for the Tuesday Twosome, on canned meat:

1. Do you check your email once a day or more? Explain:
More, because Gmail is always on for me. Now that I have a data plan on my phone though, I'll probably check even more often!
2. When you receive SPAM emails, do you just delete them or take the time to mark it as SPAM? Explain:
I mark them as spam, but it's pretty rare with the Gmail filter in full force.
3. When a friend/acquaintance emails you a “forward” email like a joke or chain letter, do you forward it to your friends or just delete it? Explain:
I never forward those things unless they're either extremely important or extremely funny. I hate forwarding stupid stuff.
4. Who are two people whose emails you look forward to receiving? Explain:
Pretty much just my girl. I don't know of anyone else who sends me any good personal e-mails.
5. Do you believe that email has completely replaced other forms of communication?
Not at all. People don't use it near enough for that. However, I think that text messaging and IMs have gained power quite quickly in recent years.

Out-Recruiting Google

Has anyone noticed the irony of the ads on the Forbes site about how the Fake Steve Jobs has been revealed? Anyway, what's more interesting is an article that Forbes is running about how to beat Google in recruiting the best tech talent out there. Being a student who has been through two recruiting seasons now (I don't count Freshman year), I figure that I'd offer my point of view. Google is like this magical fruit that's just out of reach, and I've begun to resent them almost as much as National Instruments. That's right, NI, your interviews are lame and your representatives are arrogant. On the other hand, Google just brags about their perks (they literally do no publicizing for their company nights and pack the room) and pays for the fancy O's food (overpriced crap, but use of the nice auditorium only allows their food), then goes nuts on the interviews. They emphasize way too much on math, and are still using brain teasers. One of my friends had to endure a month of phone screens to get an offer, and by that time he already had an offer from Amazon. This is what really pisses me off about their recruiting: they recently sent out a sneaky e-mail to Amazon interns (they just rope in one to tell his friends) behind the backs of Amazon's HR to get them to come to a recruiting event in Seattle. That is sleazy. They do this for normal employees, too, as I understand it. I wonder if they realize that they can't compete with Amazon in compensation (not speaking out of my ass here). Anyhow, it's fairly simple to undermine Google's recruiting: be fast, be inviting, and don't be so bloody selective. There are people with GPAs below 3.5s that are still brilliant, you know. Take the time to conduct thorough, balanced interviews rather than doing 8 of them (not an exaggerating comparison to Google). The best thing you can do, above all, is sell students on the company culture, environment, and management structure. That's what the good students will really care about (aside from type of work, that is).

There are a couple of U.S. Senators I feel I should applaud for actually being awesome: they're threatening SoundExchange to not try to strongarm Internet radio stations into DRM technologies in these recent negotiations. Not sure if they can follow through on these threats, but I think we all appreciate the effort and support.


The problem with taking a hiatus from blogging is that you miss out on things like Apple having a special event tomorrow, which is supposedly Mac-focused. Mac Rumors put up that fan art picture, which I kind of liked, though I can't imagine that they'd do a touchscreen iMac. Now if the touchscreen was just an extra feature that didn't affect elemental functionality then I maybe impressed. Still, the iMac needs an update, so that's a likely candidate for tomorrow's event. There's also strong speculation of updates to .Mac given that the service is to be down for the duration of the event (like how the Apple Store is usually closed during these events).

Nissan is showing off some technology akin to Volvo technology that I had reported on a few months ago regarding safety improvements. It provides collision prevention (braking when collision is imminent), lane departure prevention, and bumper sensors to assist in the sportier models from normally severe crashes. I'm skeptical on braking for suspected collisions because of false positives, but maybe it only does this if it's like 100% sure or something.

Wired usually doesn't put up ill-conceived editorials, but I have to slam this one about opening up social networks. First of all, Facebook is not totally closed. Besides the obvious API (which, I'll admit, is still limited), you can share pictures, among other things, with users outside of Facebook's realm; I have done this several times before. Another problem is the fact that I don't think people really care about opening up all these social networks. As made apparent by the clamoring we saw last year in response to the mini-feed addition, the Facebook community is pretty avid about privacy concerns, so this is a terrible idea. At the most, if you really want to open up people's data, it should be a private RSS feed or something. Lastly, they recommend mashing up your own Facebook via other social networking sites, but this defeats the purpose of Facebook, which is to unite all your social networking needs in a single convenient place. Zing.

One liner: to all you Firefox haters (*cough*my brother*cough*), go here.

Before I get to the trailers today, i thought it was interesting that Ridley Scott has decided to make a Monopoly movie. That's right, the producer who brought you Gladiator and Hannibal has decided to base a movie off of a board game. Wow.

Since I've been pimping Amazon so much I figure there's no harm in plugging their exclusive trailer for Reservation Road. I think this is their first exclusive movie trailer, and the video quality leaves something to be desired but I'm glad that they're starting to get into this business. They're clearly using their acquisition of IMDB to help beef up the page, and I hope they'll do even more with these pages in the future. The trailer isn't bad, but I'm just not interested in it. You know too much of the plot right off the bat (it's about a guy trying to hunt down a hit-and-run driver who killed his son, but the trailer reveals the killer).

MySpace is hosting the trailer for Amanda Bynes' next flick, Sydney White, a movie that makes me literally cringe with disgust. It's about this "hot" chick (Amanda Bynes is really not attractive) who doesn't get into a sorority so she leads a band of 7 geeks to shakes things up. I don't know what I hate more: this promotion of geekiness in a completely superficial (and, what I consider offensive) way or the idiotic plot itself. The comments on that video speak for the quality of MySpace users.

Lastly, IGN has the exclusive trailer, an interesting horror thriller detailing an archangel's battle against fallen angels in a fight for souls. Yeah, doesn't sound too compelling, but it still looks like it could be fun.

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. What ONE thing would you like to accomplish before the end of the day?
A full guitar practice session.
2. What one goal would you like to attain before the end of the month?
Getting the NSC site back up and running at full capacity.
3. Are you a "to-do list" writer? If so, do you stick to your list and cross things off as you complete them?
I write less-organized to do lists if I actually have a bunch of things to do, usually in my planner during the school year. Currently, I hack up Outlook calendar for this.
4. In general, how organized do you feel you are?
Reasonably organized.
5. How many piles of papers/junk mail/etc. do you have laying around your house?
I think four, but that's only because I have no bookshelves or storage space in this apartment because it's temporary.
6. Which ONE surface in your home
This desk? I don't know what that means...

Beautify Your Landing Page

I love talking about usability. I was talking about it today with my manager with regard to my geographical visualization tool (I'd show screenshots, but it's backed by sensitive, proprietary data, sorry) and how to best display options to mess with it, and he brought up the good point that we're dealing with an technical user (Amazon business units) rather than your average person, who would have different needs and intuitions and such. Anyway, today, I wanted to talk a little bit about this article on how to make the first page your users see of your site a lasting experience for them. When it comes down to it, the sites you get pumped to come back to or talk about are different and fresh and fast and dynamic. I recommend browsing that post, and allocate like 20 minutes for it because it has some really fun links. Basically, the core concepts are that your site is user-friendly, it's fun to navigate, it's unique, and it communicates well on a visual level. That's what that entire article boils down to. When it really comes down to it, I think all web designers should sit in the driver's seat and figure out how likely you'd be to keep visiting the site and whether you actually enjoy using it. I think sometimes people get too caught up in little things and don't realize that using technology and navigating the web should be enjoyable!

Remember how SoundExchange decided to ease up on internet radio regarding those royalty hikes? Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the price internet radio has to pay is DRM. That's right, they have to actively fight against streamripping, which basically will end up limiting how users can get to the streams since they have to be clients that support DRM (like Windows Media Player). I guess it's better than losing internet radio altogether though.fees to the winner.

On the bright side, Capitol Records lost a lawsuit and had to pay like $60k in attorney fees to the winner! The is the first time someone has won money from the RIAA in one of these lawsuits, and let's hope that it starts a trend!

The Apple rumor mills are hard at work with word that we'll probably see an iPhone-like iPod as soon as next month or as late as January 2008 due to a contract for touchscreens won by a Taiwanese company. I suppose that this could be for the iPhone, but they're not having supply issues with the iPhone and so they probably wouldn't need a fresh contract for that. I think next month would be too soon for a new iPod, but I'd guess for October maybe. Speaking of the iPhone, this is probably my favorite iPhone rant. It's NSFW, but still hilarious.

Google is really pushing its Street View thing with a whole fleet of Chevy Cobalts ready to hit some big cities. Ok, that's making an assumption, but what else would they do with 30 brand new cars with vertical extensions attached to their hoods?

Speaking of cars, if you text when you drive, then you're an idiot. If you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I can maybe understand, but come on! If you need to see this sign to know to not text while you drive, then you don't deserve to drive:


Lastly, this thing is freaking hilarious. If you've ever been in the industry, you'll definitely appreciate it. Hell, even if you haven't, I'm sure you'll find it amusing. It's a list of ways to know your software project is doomed, and it's quite accurate.

I don't watch much anime, though I can respect it, and I like the teaser for The Five Killers, which is from the makes of Afro Samurai. The only other thing I have is the trailer for The Last Legion from The Weinstein Company and featuring Bollywood star (and the wet dream of a lot of Indian dudes, I'm sure; I only dream of my girlfriend, seriously, so I wouldn't know). The trailer isn't particularly amazing, but it's still interesting subject matter (first leader of Rome and stuff).

Now for the Tuesday Twosome:

1. Two nicknames that friends and family call me:
My girlfriend calls me tiger, and some of the guys here call me Ford/Fjord.
2. Two items of clothing I would never get rid of:
The tie I wore to my brother's wedding and the kurta I wore to his Roce.
3. Two movies that I can watch over and over again:
Donnie Darko and Pulp Fiction
4. Two people that have influenced me the most:
My father and my brother
5. Two goals/dreams I hope to fulfill in my lifetime:
Marry the girl of my dreams and create software that really changes the world

Reinventing Modern Computing?

PC Magazine is running an article on what they claim are the five ideas that will reinvent modern computing, but I always take their articles with a grain of salt. Their first one already has me suspicious: IMAX at home. It sounds cool and all, combining a bunch of $1000 computers to simulate IMAX, but who cares that isn't rich? What does this reinvent? I'll give them the quantum computer and the midair mouse though: those are both things that could be big. We wouldn't need pointers for presentations and such, just the same mouse you always use. The quantum computer could theoretically break RSA encryption, so that's a massively huge deal. I also like the idea of extreme peer-to-peer: like BitTorrent for servers or even home networks. Interesting, but complicated and hard to fit in one's head. Much easier to fit in your head is simulating the human brain, about which there's actually a course at UT, and it's a ridiculously large project. I personally don't know that I believe that a computer, even with thousands of processors, can simulate a human brain, but one of my most respected professors believes so, so I'm sure it is theoretically possible. Still, how close are we to attaining than? And when we do, what will we do with it? I don't know if these are the top ideas reinventing computing, but I'd say that four of them are valid.

Microsoft's DRM has been cracked in an interesting arms race between a hidden hacker and Microsoft. He keeps releasing new versions of FairUse4DRM, which strips DRM from .wma files, and he's done it once again to crack Microsoft's latest patch. What stuns me is that one of the richest companies in the world cannot attain the identity of one dude so they can sue him. Kudos to this guy for being great at hiding, and I hope he keeps it up. He's sending a great message: DRM will never be unbreakable.

There's no doubt that Firefox is a great browser, but could it be better by taking lessons from Safari? One blogger is pointing out several things it should take from Safari, and I think I agree with spawning windows from tabs, draggable images, highlighted text fields, and better bug reporting. I'm not convinced that page rendering is noticeably faster in Safari (please comment with benchmarks if you have them, I'm not saying it's not possible), and these are rather nit-picky things. Safari is still a second-class browser compared to Firefox. Plus, if you care so much, write an extension for it (for some of these things they already exist).

Now for the rest of the news: Apple stuff. If you're getting your first Mac then you'll probably find this site helpful, which is filled with articles to help ease the switch. What I love about this site is that it's not fanboy dribble. Just check out this article and see for yourself.

This is really a really interesting rumor: Jay-Z may be starting a label with Apple since he's reportedly been interesting in leaving Def Jam to start a "superlabel" with Beyonce. It sounds crazy, but it may be profitable for Apple, though I imagine they'd be control freaks so not sure if this will pan out. Still, could mean very interesting things for Apple to get involved with music production, though may spread them a little thin, in my opinion.

Now for some one-lines. iPhone users can also check out this site for more great iPhone apps in an iPhone friendly format, no less. If you're looking to hide your iPod or iPhone from crooks, you may want to protect it inside a brown Zune. That thing is so ugly no one would dare want to steal it. I love that they noticed the idiocy of the "squirt" term as well.

Harry Potter did predictably well in the box office with $140 million grossed since its release. It underperformed its predecessors over the weekend, but made more money in five days than they each did in a week, so that's pretty good money. I should probably go see it, huh? Transformers came in second with an impressive $36 million, and Ratatouille was close behind with exactly half that. Those movies both have some great legs on them, and are slaughtering Die Hard with its unnecessarily long title.

Yay for Dark Knight news! Despite previous intimations, it looks like Two Face will, in fact, be in The Dark Knight! I hope they don't try shoving too much in this film with so many villains. And alas, check it out, spy pics of The Joker!


I don't usually dig romance movies, but I think I'm interested in Feast of Love. I don't know why, but I really dig the trailer. It has Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear after all, so it has to be at least somewhat good.

We have an early review of Rush Hour 3, and it's just as I suspected: not as good as the first two. Disappointing, but that's what happens when a franchise becomes a cash cow, I suppose.

Last, but not least, we have rumors about the plot of Indiana Jones 4 about the Soviets wanting immortality. It's too involved for me to even summarize, so just go read it for yourself.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Situation :: Room


2. Theme song :: Human Giant


3. Kelly :: Clarkson


4. Club :: Music


5. Swerve :: Cologne


6. Couch :: Potato


7. Bigfoot :: Chupa Cabra


8. Arbitrary :: Random


9. Inventor :: Device


10. Blazer :: Blue

Dumping on Apple

It's finally time to talk about some articles that aren't too flattering for our favorite company in Cupertino. That's right, some dirt on Apple. They gave Leopard beta builds to attendees of WWDC, and it sounds like it has some ostensible UI issues. Did some of the Vista developers defect to Apple or something? Because it sounds akin to what people hate about Vista: GUI upgrades that are really downgrades. They made the top menu bar transparent, which looks retarded when you maximize applications. More ridiculous is that little Spotlight bar. Wow. What happened to subtle elegance, Apple? I'm not even a Mac user and I liked Panther. You'll probably be more shocked by some of the iPhone fine print though. I scoffed at this article at first because it was listing known facts, and then I almost fell out of my chair when I read that there was a limit on the number of times you can use WiFi. What the Hell is that?! Oh, and you can't send attachments in e-mails? It looks there are also restrictions on calling non-AT&T subscribers, and you can't stream video content from the Internet. If you text message international users, you get charged extra, or if you send messages over 300 KB, which I assume means e-mail since you can't send picture mail is my understanding. If you own an iPhone, that little expose is a must-read. Very disappointing, Apple and AT&T.

There is a bright spot for Mr. Jobs though, Apple stock has hit a record high with a market value of $115 billion. A 55% increase in 6 months is really impressive, and I don't imagine that the Apple TV did much for their stock so it must've been speculation on the iPhone.

One of the really painful things about using Windows if you also use Linux is missing utilities like cut and grep and such. Well, now there's Windows Grep, but I can't install it on my company laptop. It looks awesome though, so let me know if you try it out and like it/hate it by commenting.

The RIAA, in true villain style, has decided that if Sirius and XM merge that they're going to have to pay higher royalties. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they already pay high royalties than broadcast radio stations do, and now they have to pay more? Why? Do they get better music or something? The FCC is hearing out the RIAA, who also are pissed about those portable devices to record satellite radio. How does this differ from using a cassette player or several mp3 players (including mine) to record live radio?

Oh, and I don't think I mentioned this before, but the FCC has an online form to submit comments on several issues, including the XM-Sirius merger and a la carte cable channels.

How awesome is that T-Shirt? I would totally wear it, but then again, I'm pretty vocal about hating DRM, and I'm a total dork. That design is the winner of a contest TorrentFreak was running for the best anti-DRM T-Shirt, and even the runner-ups are pretty cool.

I'm not usually easily swayed by up and coming social networking sites, but I'm really impressed by what I've seen of Streamy. I've signed up for the private beta, so I'll talk about it more if I get an invite. Basically, it's a mix between Digg, Google Reader, Jaiku, and Meebo. That's kind of a loose way of saying it, but it's a smart news aggregator that aims to make sharing easy and prioritizes what you're likely to want to see. Trust me, it's cooler than it sounds.

Lastly, Time put up an article on the 5 worst websites, and I don't think those sites are really the five worst, but I felt that MySpace and Evite being on there is important because they're both popular sites that have serious issues. I also learned from it that eHarmony discriminates against gays, which means that I'm officially going to start railing on eHarmony if anyone ever talks to me about it.

The only movie news today are teases. One is for Indiana Jones 4, which is little more than a look at Indy's outfit and talking to Steven Spielberg. It's not a trailer, just, quite literally, a little tease. At least Ford can still has the look down. The teaser trailer for 10,000 BC gives us much more, but I have no desire to see it. It almost makes me think the creators were watching Apocalypto and decided to make a movie that went farther back, which doesn't sound exciting (though Apocalypto wasn't bad, just long).

Now for a Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. What makes you cheer up?
Thinking about my girl

2. Who makes you cheer up?
My girlfriend =)

3. What location makes you cheer up?
My bed

4. What food or beverage makes you cheer up?
Ice cream!

The iPhone Release Date

I'm back! I hope. My room mate is jerk and despite my being really ill today (I believe it's a fever), he unpacked his clothes hangers rather than set up wireless Internet (which he has been hogging for a week) for me, so I'm still on low grade Internet. Hence, I'm probably going to keep this post short. Anyway, the big news today was that Apple has announced, by way of plain old advertising, that the iPhone will be released on May 29. Obviously, this is a pretty big deal. Apple geeks have awaited this day many moons while regular geeks have been writing cocky editorials about why it's going to fail miserably. Personally, I think people should wait until its release to start passing judgement, and I think it has a good chance of succeeding despite the astronomical price because their laptops are overpriced and yet sell like hotcakes. A few more tidbits have been discovered more recently, as well. Apparently, the device will not support iChat when it ships, nor will it come with a SIM card slot. I don't know how many people would be deterred by iChat not being included, but I'd imagine it to be fairly important since people love their instant messaging. Whether they release this as a free update is yet to be seen. Meanwhile, we're going to have to just wait on June 29!

That's definitely not all the Apple news though. It turns out that they're attaching some personal information of yours with your DRM-free music purchases, which could compromise your privacy if in the wrong hands, and the EFF is livid. Some people really aren't all that alarmed, but being as conservative about privacy as I am, I think that it may cross a certain line. First of all, they really should be disclosing this information, because I consider it fairly important. Of higher concern though is the issue of your iPod being stolen rather than you distributing the mp3s illicitly yourself. Is it really ok to just overlook this case for the sake of deterring users from promoting piracy? Tough call, but I personally don't believe you should be so distrustful of your audience.

While I'm on the issue of DRM, I think it's worth noting that the RIAA has lost a controversial case to a disabled single mother whom they accuse of distributing gangster rap music. Oh, and her child is a 9 year old daughter, so she really wouldn't care too much for such gems as "Hoes in My Room". I really just posted this because I like showing how evil and retarded the RIAA is for continuing with this campaign of fear and litigation against the very people they need to save their pathetic industry.

Big news from YouTube: they're partnering with a number of local stations to give them a slice of the advertising revenue in exchange for legal rights to show select programming from them. Not only that, but apparently I missed a huge deal with EMI in which they gained the rights to show music and music videos from their vast library of artists, and so they've now joined the trio of Warner Music, UMG, and Sony BMG in licensing their music to YouTube. Very nice, YouTube. Very nice. Now don't let us down!

I just have a couple of one-liners here. Coding Horror has an awesome blog post on the importance of reducing the complex of user interfaces that I really liked and meant to talk about last week but was held back by technical difficulties. Also, if you want to test your typing speed, this is a cool Flash application to do just that. I'd reveal my results if I was feeling well enough to test my typing optimally.

Speed Racer was one of my favorite cartoons the summer I spent in India (I was 12 years-old), and now we have a high-res shot of the Mach 5. I personally think it looks pretty sweet, and I'm still extremely curious to see what the Wachowskis come up with.

If you want to see Optimus Prime duke it out with Bonecrusher, then this clip is a must-see. Oh how I miss that animated series; it was so awesome and campy.

All I have left for you guys are trailers. The first trailer is for Heartbreak Kid, and I'm not impressed. I didn't even come close to laughing, the plot sounds like it's been done several times before. The trailer for the Fantastic Four 2 is much more impressive, and makes it out to be the movie that the first Fantastic Four movie should've been. W00t!

I'm going to try out the Monday's a Bitch meme:

1. Do you like Coldplay?
YES! I <3 Coldplay! They're definitely one of my favorite artists.
2. Were you jaundiced as a baby?
Nope.
3. Who's your favourite blond? Do blonds have more fun?
I supposed Elisha Cuthbert. I know one brunette who has a lot of fun, so I kind of doubt it ;)
4. Is this shit bananas? And is Gwen Stefani a talented artist?
No and she was back when she was with No Doubt. Go back to them, Gwen! PLEASE!
5. Have you ever been stung by a bee? If so, where?
Nope, thank God!