Apple Patent Lawyers vs. the World

Apple Sues HTC

It's unfortunate that all these big negatives stories keep coming out about Apple because I'd much rather talk about other stuff. The news is what it is though.

In a way, this was bound to happen, but I guess it's been so long since Apple threatened to enforce its patents that everyone had forgotten. Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC for 20 patent infringements. The list of patents include things like swiping on a touch screen to unlock, turning off the phone screen when held near your face, and the idea that a foreground app can send off a background process to do work while the foreground remains responsive to user input. These patents would kill a lot of modern touchscreen phones, if upheld, but some of them are OS-level ideas that I'm pretty sure had prior art before being filed. Even though the lawsuit is against HTC, Google is verbally supporting HTC and some are speculating that legal advice is being provided behind closed doors. Apparently, lawsuits aren't so uncommon in the mobile phone space where it ends up in patent trading so that people can build on each other's ideas, but I think it's kind of sleazy either way.

Apple is not hard up for money and is not by any means getting killed competitively by HTC. HTC has surely cut into Apple's market share, but probably not by enough to warrant a lawsuit. Apple makes plenty of money, so they're not hard up for money. I see 3 possible motivations here (and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive): Apple wants to bankrupt HTC to eliminate them from the market, HTC has patents that Apple wants to take advantage of, or Apple wants to scare off other competitors from building on concepts that Apple has pioneered. Except for blatant ripoffs, most other big companies in tech, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, don't file lawsuits like this. Most patents filed are for purely defensive purposes. It's a little crazy to say that you can't act on an idea you have just because Apple had the same idea before you did. Not all of these patents are like that, but I think several are. If you have a touchscreen phone, it only makes sense that you need to gesture to unlock it because you have no physical buttons to do it with - why should everyone pay royalties to Apple for that? I'm all for Apple protecting themselves against people making exact iPhone copies, but I don't think HTC has done that at all. I think they've been doing their best to innovate, and lawsuits like this only hurt innovation and competition.

TiVo Premiere Announced

It's been well over two years since the TiVo HD came out and TiVo hasn't financially been doing all that hot. As I've said before, I have a TiVo HD and think that the user experience is unparalleled. My brother has AT&T Uverse and his DVR setup is the closest I've seen in quality compared to the TiVo, but it doesn't have the connectivity with external services (like Amazon VOD and Netflix) that TiVo does.

TiVo has finally revealed to the world the TiVo Premiere, which is a 320 GB HD TiVo with an all new, improved interface. What's really cool, and I was hoping would be included but will actually be extra, is the qwerty peanut remote:



I've always wanted a keyboard on my TV remote for searching, so that's a pretty killer feature. Still, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade for existing TiVo users. It's only $300 so it makes sense for new buyers to pounce on it, but it doesn't sound like the guts have changed much. I wish it would support Tru2way, but at least it supports Verizon FiOS. The new Flash interface (which will finally include a storage capacity meter) is getting rave reviews from reporters who saw it at the announcement, and it's probably the TiVo search beta currently available. Hopefully it's snappier than on the current hardware though.

Of course, I say it's not worth upgrading and I really want one. It hits a sweet spot, in my opinion, with storage capacity (at least for a single person) and I really want that new remote. It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to it.

Windows Phone 7 Game Demo

Microsoft showed off something at TechEd that has created a lot of positive buzz since about Windows Phone 7. They demoed Indiana Jones being played on the PC, then on a Windows Phone 7 device, and finally on the Xbox 360. What's unique here is that the game state is being shared between all 3 to provide a seamless gaming experience. Well, seamless except for that the graphics are drastically worse on your phone than on your Xbox 360, of course. Still, I'd be impressed with your phone having a mini-game that ties into your game progress instead of tying into exactly where you are in the main game. It's exciting that for the first time in God only knows how long, Microsoft is trying to innovate with their mobile platform instead of just replicating stuff that's already out on the market. The question now is whether or not December can come soon enough in a market as hot as the mobile OS market even with as unique a feature as this gaming experience.

Lifelock on Lockdown

You have probably by now seen an ad for Lifelock at some point. They claim that they proactively guarantee the safety of your identity for a monthly fee and even challenged that you'd get a million bucks if you could steal the identity of their CEO, given his social security number. Of course, someone did eventually withdraw money in his name but not sure if he ended up getting that reward money. Well, the FTC is investigating them for deceptive business practices and being too forceful in trying to gain new customers. Lifelock was unable to deliver on its promises because it didn't protect customers from the most common forms of identity theft, and they had almost no security for customer's private information on Lifelock's corporate network. It's ironic that their slogan is that no one else guarantees your good name because no one else can. It looks like Lifelock couldn't either.

Less interesting but more importantly, the US government has declassified part of its
cybersecurity plan, which excludes monitoring private traffic but does include deploying intrusion detection systems on federal networks, which I'm pretty happy about because that was my short-lived research interest in college. The basis of an IDS is that it tries to detect behavior that's uncharacteristic for a system and raise an alert for such behavior - it's preemptive rather than reactionary like most mainstream security software is. The plan also calls for improving the security of private critical infrastructures. With China threatening the likes of Google, we can use all the precautionary network security measures we can get.

AT&T Claims Tiered Pricing Inevitable

In the world of cell phones, we've always had tiered pricing on voice but almost always have had unlimited plans for data usage (not including text messaging, of course). Well, AT&T has already started rhetoric preparing people for tiered pricing, and it's a bunch of bologna. It shouldn't be possible for a mobile phone to use enough data to really put a heavy dent in AT&T's network, so I'm really skeptical that 3% of smartphone users could be using 40% of AT&T's network capacity. Maybe they should work on a better network - they have plenty of cash from all their iPhone users. The claim that they're in no rush to push out a 4G network, which means they want to charge people more to stay on a slower network than competitors like Sprint. It just doesn't make sense. To their credit, they claim no short-term plans of tiered pricing, but it's clear that they're not dealing well with the burden of so many iPhone users. It's just astounding that they don't believe the bigger bandwidth and reduced latency offered by 4G isn't going to help them out as much as sticking with their current infrastructure.

Hulu Loses Heavy Hitters

In the world of media conglomerates, Viacom is a pretty thirsty beast. Unfortunately, Hulu's revenues couldn't quench Viacom's thirst and so Hulu has lost their two biggest shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's odd that Viacom thinks that they can do better with these two properties than Hulu, which is a fairly established brand nowadays. It's well known in the mainstream, especially because of the recession as people cut out their cable providers. Contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, I don't think Hulu is in quite as deep of a hole as it may seem. Hulu still needs more time to grow revenues, and as other offerings gain success, I think Hulu will show that not only is having your shows available online is approaching a point of becoming vital, but no one does it more efficiently or effectively than Hulu. Of course, YouTube is probably Hulu's biggest competitor, but YouTube is definitely not as browsable for this kind of content compared to Hulu.

More Competitors to the iPad

I don't have much to say about either of these devices, but I definitely think they're worth knowing about. The HP Slate is starting to materialize by way of official video footage, and it's clearly proud of running Windows 7 and supporting Flash, which Steve Jobs is still trying to woefully will out of existence. While I can see the argument for HTML 5 being better in the long run and Flash maybe not being so vital on a small device, I think it's absolutely important on a tablet in the short term and it's definitely one of the things HP should capitalize on. More importantly though, the Slate will give you more freedom to run the applications you're used to if you're already on Windows 7 on your desktop/laptop. Whether or not people want that experience is yet to be seen though.

Meanwhile, a fresh leak has been dropped regarding the Microsoft Courier, which is a tablet that looks like a foldable booklet. The video footage revealed is similar to what we saw months ago, but still very exciting. Who knows if it'll ever become a reality - it seems more like a concept bred from a set of requirements than anything else.

Closing Stories

Ok, as much as I love my new laptop and how much easier blogging is on it, I have other things to do so I'm going to wrap this up with some quick stories I still think are worth taking notice of.

I have too much App1e negativity in this post already, so I'm not going to really talk to the heinous secret agreement Apple has its iPhone developers sign. It's so detrimental to the developer that I'm almost surprised that it's legal.

Real Networks gave up their fight for Real DVD, which aimed to legitimize DVD copying by replacing the DRM already on DVDs with their own DRM. I don't know if it kills the future of copy protection, but it could've created a major precedent so it's definitely a disappointing ending.

Gizmodo has an excellent article detailing the sordid history of Sony. I have a love-hate relationship with Sony - I love some of their products, but their vision is often misguided.

Props to YouTube for launching auto-captioning. That's an insanely awesome technology.

The Core i7 6-core Gulftown processor is finally out and I actually enjoyed reading this review. It's a fairly technical review, but it sounds like a great architecture.

The FCC has released a very capable tool for measuring your Internet speed with the added bonus that they can use your data point to help understand the status of broadband Internet speeds across the country. In addition to just down and up speeds, it even gives you latency! The URL is easy to memorize: braodband.gov.

Torrents are now legally available of free music from SXSW 2010. Check them out!

Popular Science has opened up the entirety of its 137-year archive for free!

I'm a big fan of these free, troubleshooting tools for Windows. If you only download one, definitely get the Blue Screen View one. My next vote is for WinDirStat, which is an application I've needed for years.

Last, but certainly not least, College Humor has a great video on the true use case of Google Wave: cyber sex.

The Apple iPlop

The iPad

I don't know how many years it's been since we've had rumors of an Apple tablet. When people saw the Modbook - OS X running on external tablet hardware - I think that really fueled the fire. I never really thought it'd be more than a giant iPhone given how much Apple had invested in the iPhone, and it looks like I was right. Instead of a Mac-based tablet we got an iPad. Engadget did their normal great job of liveblogging the whole event, but it was all about the iPad. It's funny because when you look through the pictures and read about the iPad it actually sounds pretty good. I'm sure seeing Steve Jobs demo it made it even more enticing. However, it's not long afterwards that you start to realize what's wrong with it.



In case you've been living under a rock: the iPad is literally almost just a big iPhone at about 9.5" x 7.5". It can do everything an iPhone can, other than make calls (or send texts), take pictures, or take videos, but it can show you eBooks natively, comes with iWork, and supports painting. Some of the other native apps are a bit varied from what you'd see on the iPhone but just to take advantage of the larger size. I don't think it's bad at anything that it does, but at $500 it's too expensive for the need people don't have for it. It's more or less a toy device for people who already have an iPhone since it's limited by the Apple App Store. You can see some videos of it in action here.

I figured that everyone else would be drooling over it, but not so much. At least not among the tech journalists. I think it's a neat niche product that will sell a few units, but it won't be a smash hit with this many people disappointed almost to the point of being offended by it. It has plenty of things wrong with it. It's locked to the Apple App Store, there's no HDMI, still no support for Flash (supposedly because it's buggy), and you can't really multitask. On the plus side, it's fast and it does has affordable data plans starting at $30 a month. Oddly enough, they partnered with AT&T again for the data service, which may be just that AT&T gave them the best deal. Plus, AT&T has a more widespread WiFi network than Verizon.

I wonder if this will end up being the nail in the coffin for the tablet PC? It's a niche market that has never taken off and maybe it's a product that's cooler to think about than actually develop? Or maybe it's still ahead of its time? If there was an iPod or iPhone of tablets though, I don't think anyone is going to look back on he iPad and consider it that thing. I think if it was $300 cheaper it would be a really awesome device, but at $500 it keeps it out of reach of the average person. We'll have to see when it comes out if people forget its negatives and buy it anyway. Until then, if you watch one parody video you should definitely watch College Humor's.

CES 2010

I missed out on CES being in India, but if you missed out also then it's never too late to catch up. I don't think there was a lot of really impressive stuff, but Robert Scoble put up a pretty impressive roundup of the biggest articles around CES. One of the more high profile announcements was Microsoft's tablet, which was seen as a flop, as well. Microsoft keeps trying to build tablets without carefully thinking about what the user interface should be like.

The coolest thing I saw was the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus coming to Verizon (just a week ago, actually), which feature tethering in addition to more RAM and more on-board flash memory. With the new webOS coming out next month though all Pres and Pixis will get video recording, video editing, and Flash support. This will either support Apple's criticism of Flash or debunk them. The new webOS update is coming later this month.

Apps on the Kindle

Amazon recently announced an SDK for the Kindle to allow for third-party apps on the Kindle. Some people have criticized the Kindle as being a one-trick pony (even though it does do that one trick very well), so this touches on that a bit. I think it'll be neat for really simple applications, like word games and restaurant guides and stuff. It's not the reason you'd get a Kindle, but I'd file it away in the "nice to have" category.

Firefox 3.6

We now have Firefox 3.6, which has HTML 5 support, form auto-completion (like entire forms, not just individual fields), personas, and significant performance improvements. It's still not at Chrome's level yet, but I'm glad that they're at least trying to close the gap.

Ready for 3-D?

Digital Trends put up an article that I wanted to talk about because it's an issue that keeps coming up: do we really need 3-D TVs? Will they sell? Well, as I understand it, it's not very expensive to add to TVs (at least the kind where you need to put on 3-D glasses) but helps drive sales to buying new TVs for folks who don't have high definition yet and just needed that one more reason to upgrade. In reality, it'll still be at least another couple of years before people actually seek out 3-D TVs. The content just isn't there, which I think makes sense. Why invest in 3-D content if no one can view it? That would be like creating a bunch of HD channels when no one has an HD TV. HD TVs didn't make a whole lot of sense when they first came out but it wasn't long before they did become useful. I think we'll see the same with 3-D, we just haven't reached the point yet where it's really desirable.

Quickies

I'm surprisingly exhausted so I need to end this post rather quickly and pass out. Here's some quick last notes.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (still weird to say that) is taking a hard stance for cybersecurity and the free flow of information. This supports Google's decision to stop censoring their Chinese site and tries to combat censorship in other countries as well. It may be a little overreaching, but it is important for the portion that seeks to punish those who do hack the United States military.

Samsung threw its hat in the e-Reader game. It doesn't impress me, but it's just YAER (yet another e-reader).

After a long courtship, Oracle now owns Sun, he creators of Java among other things. In other news, Oracle is slowly taking over the world (it wasn't long ago that they acquired Linksys).

If you want to know how secure the identity of your browser is, this is a really cool tool to find out.

Have a great week, everyone!

Immigrants in Technology

America is Losing the Edge

I decided after much contemplation that I wanted this to be the headline topic for this week's post because it's something that people don't like to talk about enough but it's a serious problem. There's not enough American-born students with degrees in technology and yet the American government still has very stringent policies on immigration. There are arguments to be made for and against allowing more foreigners in the country to fill these positions, but the point is that we have a fundamental problem. Over half of all startups in the Valley are founded or co-founded by immigrants, and yet more immigrants aren't able to get their idea off the ground in America even if they were educated here. We're living in a world economy in our own bubble. We can't shelter American workers from the rest of the world. By turning away these great ideas, we're doing one of two things: letting them grow in other countries instead or letting them die off instead of possibly benefiting humanity. In the former case, we're reducing our influence in the world and in the latter we're doing a disservice to everyone because there are countries where starting your own company simply isn't as feasible. We can't shelter ourselves from outside pressures in the hope that we're going to continue to come up with the best ideas. Technology is growing too fast for it to be contained in a single country, the question is how big a part we want in that future.

Bing's Share Grows

I'm officially impressed by Bing. They managed to grab 10% of the search market. When they got a couple percent, you could say that they bought it with their advertising. At this point though, they're actually getting enough mindshare to maintain a pretty big piece of the pie. I think we are seeing the aftereffects of the advertising campaign and it'll be interesting to see if they can maintain this. They've definitely been working hard to differentiate themselves from Google and that's going to be key to their long-term strategy. They recently launched visual search, which allows you to browse results with pictures rather than texts. Supposedly, people can process pictures faster than text, but it's just kind of a neat feature that gets them good press coverage. It's actually clever and I think an implicit strategy in Google's arsenal since they're constantly making updates to their products and launching new ideas, which gives them free press coverage and makes them more prominent in people's minds.

Fast Flip and Chrome 3.0

Speaking of which, Google has made a few noteworthy announcements recently. The first is Fast Flip, which allows you to read newspapers and magazines digitally as if you were flipping through them on paper. They're trying to get rid of the taboo associated with reading newspapers and magazines in an electronic form that traditionalists have acquired. It allows you to browse through the articles with more words than you can currently get on Google News, but they're hoping that people will be enticed to click through and read the whole article, which will contain some more advertising. It looks like in the browsing itself the advertising will be off in a bar on the right side so that it's not too obtrusive. I don't know if these publications will accept this or if it will work out as Google hopes, but I think it's a really good idea still.

Another bit of Google news this week is that they've released version 3 of Chrome, which is faster but, more importantly, supports HTML 5. If I'm not mistaken, Chrome is the first major browser to support HTML 5, which supports embedded video, audio, and canvas tags.

Chrome Frame

There was actually one more big announcement from Google last week: Chrome Frame. This is a plug-in for Internet Explorer that allows you to render pages with Chrome from withing Internet Explorer and gives you the bonus of being able to properly render HTML 5. Why would Chrome do this? It's not simply to make the lives of web developers easier since Internet Explorer is notorious for being terrible with web standards, but rather to help increase the audience for their products that utilize additions in HTMl 5. Given that some employers are skeptical to allow employees to install Chrome, Google is probably hoping that at least this frame will be allowed. It shouldn't be too surprising that Microsoft advises against people installing the plug-in citing that it poses a security risk. They haven't really given hard proof that this is true and have instead done a lot of hand waving and proclaiming generalities.

Zune HD Faces Off With New Nano

The Zune HD is finally here, and the reviews are pretty positive overall. I feel like Engadget had the most balanced review that I read really giving a good balance between high points and lowlights rather than focusing too much on one or the other. Microsoft has definitely put a lot of care in the interface and making this a solid competitor, and I think it has succeeded in shaking things up a bit. I don't know if it'll get the popularity they'd like in light of the recent iPod releases, but it sounds like it definitely should.

One of the open questions for the Zune HD is if the app store will work out anywhere near as well as the iTunes app store. It's unlikely to ever be quite as successful, and is off to a bit of a slow start as you're faced with ads when starting up the applications available right now. I think that's a really bad model. I think it's better to say you can pay a buck or two to remove ads from an application and just have ads if someone really doesn't want to pay for an application or just wants to try it out in its full glory without having to worry about an expiring evaluation period or something like that. By having pre-roll ads though, they're really disincentivizing folks from using them.

Meanwhile, the new Nano is out there and doesn't seem all that compelling to me. It's definitely a beautiful device, and Ars Technica gave it a positive review overall, but the only really big addition is a video camera that can't take still pictures. If you really want a camcorder though, you can just get a Flip MinoHD instead. Sure, it's a separate device, but it's better quality (and easily pocketable) and that seems to be the only reason someone would upgrade their Nano to this model.

Switching to Linux

I really enjoyed this article about a guy who had been working on his development of a project solely on Windows and decided to try switching to Linux instead. Surprisingly enough, even with the initial setup he had a much easier time overall in Linux. Things were much speedier and wrestling with dependencies seemed to go easier for him. I actually switched to Linux myself a while back and haven't looked back. The command line tools you get with Linux right out of the box are invaluable and doing scripting just feels so much easier because everything you need tends to come right in the box.

CableCARDs Now Open

36% of all households in the US now have DVRs, which is a staggering percentage when you sit down and think about it. DVR adds a whole new dimension compared to VCRs, and it totally changes the dynamics of how people watch TV and advertising on TV. It's kind of ironic that most viewing still happens live with people turning to their recordings when nothing good is on TV, but that shows that people still aren't ready yet for a 100% on-demand model, which is what proponents of IP TV would be in support of.

You'll probably see DVRs become slightly more prominent now that CableCARDs (the card you use to decode the cable signal) can be acquired outside of an OEM, which makes it easier for people to build their own Home Theater PCs (HTPCs). This is an attractive option for people who have a spare PC lying around and I'm sure Windows 7 aims to make it even easier to have an HTPC. This is a pretty big victory for DIYers and overall just a great thing given how bloody the fight for DVRs and CableCARD acceptance has been over the years.

Quickies

Ok, it's getting late so it's time to race through the last stories.

There are some pretty solid rumors out there regarding a tablet from Mirosoft called Courier that has the interesting physical feature of a spine to split it in half making it feel more like a book. It looks neat, but details are still scarce.

The FCC chairman has taken a harder stance in favor of net neutrality and made it clear that inaction is not an option. That's more than refreshing to hear, and hopefully he stands by it.

After several years, the IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n wireless standard, which is is capable of much faster speeds than 802.11g (which is probably what's in your computer right now) and over longer distances. Say goodbye to routers with 802.11 draft N support and hello to full-on 802.11n support (hopefully).

Yahoo started a $100 million advertising campaign to try to salvage the Yahoo brand by bringing Yahoo back in the picture as people's choice for a web portal, but only time will tell how successful it will be. To be honest, I'm not optimistic from seeing some of the ads already:



This stick figure guide is probably the best explanation of AES I've seen and why you shouldn't use it. Ever. It's a really fun read.

Gnome 3 looks pretty.

Whether or not you've heard of the Windows 7 launch party promotion, you'll enjoy this parody of it. Trust me.

One more bit of humor: the evolution of a programmer. If you're a programmer then you're sure to love it.

Have a great week everyone (though I'm sure the change in weather will make that harder for those of you in Seattle)!

The Bid For Yahoo

I'm clearly crazy for writing this post since I've been awake for more than 60 of the past 72 hours. Regardless, the pile of stuff I want to talk about is growing and I just have to let it all out. Let's start the most jaw-dropping news this week: Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo, which is a 62% over-valuation based on the current market price of its stock. The point? That shouldn't be too hard to figure out: Google has been threatening Microsoft for years with its heavy stake in Internet search and Microsoft is hoping to strike back by purchasing a company that fell from on high and never fully recovered. Google, naturally, is not happy. That's an understatement: they're so displeased with this deal that they've become conspiracy theorists claiming that Microsoft's control would bring "inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet" and that this is a "hostile bid". Plus, they implicitly suggest that it'll create a monopoly. So first of all, Microsoft has been on the Internet for a while (even though they got on board a bit late), so their influence hasn't really been inappropriate so far. I don't know how illegal a merge they r would be with Yahoo because I'm not sure if their combined market shares would be enough to be considered so, but that's something for the SEC to figure out. Essentially, Google is trying to cast doubt on the deal and shovel dirt on it in hopes that they won't have competition. I, amazingly enough, agree with MSNBC though: Google is going to stay king of search. Ignoring the huge hurdles Microsoft would have to overcome with cultural differences is the enormous momentum that Google has to the point that their brand has created a barrier to entry in and of itself.

Yahoo and MSN actually have cool stuff (have you ever tried Live Image Search or the bird's eye view in their maps?) to back up their search portal, but no one is looking because their eyes are glued to Google. This merger, I hate to say, would greatly benefit both companies. Yahoo may be reluctant just because being bought out by a company like Microsoft is a bit of a shock, but I don't imagine that anyone else will take them and years of mismanagement have shaken the foundations of the companies core technologies. The people there are smart they're just not acting quick enough to put a dent in Google's empire and they need a lot more resources if they hope to take on Goliath. I know what you're thinking, Microsoft is evil and if they get Yahoo then they get the PC market and the online market, and then Microsoft will rule the world. It's not that simple. Much like no one has toppled Windows as the predominant OS to more than a niche market no one has really dented Google because both brands are too ridiculously strong. Yeah, Mac and Linux have gained steam and are doing better and better, but they're not going to take over any time in the foreseeable future unless Windows just completely implodes. Even with this merger, it'll just create competition for Google and we, the consumers, will get more fun tools to play with. It will likely hurt Google's revenues, but it won't screw them over and it won't give Bill Gates the keys to the Internet. If Yahoo is smart though, they'll take the offer and try out something new. They've had plenty of time to adjust and have gotten nowhere. Steve Ballmer is really focused on winning this deal, so don't expect it to end just because Yahoo holds out or says 'no'.

There has magically been a breakthrough in the Writer's Guild strike: there were actaully some talks on Friday and we may see some good news before next week. It was a leak so we don't have details, but let's cross our fingers because I miss The Office, 24, and Heroes, damnit!

Of course, sports don't require writers and plenty of people still tuned in for the Superbowl; almost 98 million to be exact. It was the best ratings ever, probably because people were praying for New England to lose, and the Giants thankfully came through. The ads were pretty funny, in my opinion, and my personal favorite was the FedEx one with the giant pigeons. That was legendary. You can see them all here, organized by quarter. Once again, the GoDaddy one was really dumb. One of the things mentioned that I never saw a press release for was Pepsi's promotion with Amazon MP3. Much like Coke's alliance with iTunes, Pepsi has codes on the bottle caps for points for Amazon MP3 downloads and other stuff from Amazon.com as well. I think it's a really smart promotion to help showcase Amazon's newly acquired selection of DRM-free mp3s with deals from all 4 major labels. I hope it helps Amazon MP3's exposure! A lot of stuff like this will be necessary to even touch iTunes. While I'm on Amazon though: they recently acquired Audible.com and I totally missed this. Audible.com is an excellent service and I guess this will just lengthen the Amazon Mp3 arm to more audiobooks, but I wonder if it will be used at all in connection with the 2G Kindle (whenever that gets made)?

What you see on TV now that the game is over though is election stuff. I should disclose that I really support Obama and I can't imagine that so many Democrats support Clinton. Anyway, I wanted to plug this Obama video because it was just really well done:



If you have any Democratic inclination, I strongly urge you to watch it. Please, watch it for me! It combines words from his speeches with various artists who sing them (including the awesome John Legend). I'm not alone in the Obama boat though: the Times in the UK claim that Obama is the Democrats' best shot at the White House for various issues including the fact that she really pisses off the Republicans and helps unite them. It's an interesting read, and I'm plugging it because I think that it's important that people educate themselves. No matter who you vote for, make sure you understand the issues and not stupid smear campaigns or other nonsense.

Here's another big topic I need to address: the 700 Mhz spectrum and open access. So what is open access? Engadget explains it better than I can, but it allows interoperability of cell phones so that you can easily take your cell phone to another carrier because they can buy pieces of the spectrum as well and also that any applications must work on the spectrum regardless of your carrier. It should be obvious why the telcos hate this: it means they have to compete rather than just lock you in to their service. The iPhone wouldn't exist, for example, on this spectrum because you couldn't take it to Verizon or Sprint. The telcos are lumping it under net neutrality and fighting it as being "antiproperty". This is bull though: the point of open access is not to give up ownership of the network so that no one can make money, but rather so that to make money your service has to have value and actually competitive functionality rather than schemes to force you stay with them for crappy service. Anyway, what's really cool about this spectrum is that you'll be able to make/receive calls from anywhere because of its ridiculous range, and the fact that the FCC agreed to open access and open applications is a great victory for net neutrality proponents.

Speaking of phones though, there's news from Cupertino. Apple quietly started selling 16 GB iPhones. We all knew it was coming because of the 16 GB iPod Touches, we just didn't know when. This bad boy only costs $100 more than the 8GB at $500, and we don't know if anything had to change internally for the form factor to remain the same. I guess we just hope for the best.

So I think that this is a pretty huge deal: the 2007 Turing Award winners were announced yesterday. Usually it's one person, but 3 people collaborated on Model Checking so they all get the award. Dr. E Allen Emerson, an endowed professor here in UT CS, is one of these three people. This award only pays $250k (split 3 ways in this case), but the point is the prestige since this is the highest honor in CS in the world. I'm proud of this department for having him on board, and I'm sorry I never took his course but I was just tired of theory last year. Their research was a procedure for quality assurance, used to verify formal systems. This is a lot easier to do in hardware than software so this drastically improved the quality of chips from the semiconductor industry and the rest, as they say, is history. This unexpectedly boosts the stock of my Bachelor's degree though, but I really wish I could do the 5-year masters program that the department is putting together now. Even better is the new curriculum they're coming up with. I'm so glad that UT CS is really adapting itself to the needs of today's world and recognizing barriers to entry in getting a masters degree for applying to grad school and such. Very exciting stuff.

I don't know about you, but solving a Rubik's Cube has always been a great mystery to me and now there are some great videos online to explain how to solve it step-by-step. I'm keeping this for later when I have the time to try it all out.

I'm going to end with some humor here before I hit the sack. You're sure to chuckle while reading this redux of questions from FAQs that probably weren't asked. My favorite one is whether it's safe for a dog to chew gum. If you are feeding your dog gum then you have serious issues. The other thing is that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Conan O'Brien have been having this whole tiff about who created Mike Huckabee, that then evolved into who created Stephen Colbert, which snowballed into who created Jon Stewart and Conan. A quick summary: Colbert and Conan both claim to have created Romney, Conan claims to have created Colbert, Jon claims to have created Conan (and, hence, Colbert), Colbert decided that he was John McCain, and Conan later claimed to have created Jon and Colbert in a very compelling photo. And here's just a really funny scene from all this commotion:



You can see more at the Comedy Central site and NBC.com if you look at all three shows from February 4.

Macworld Wrap-up

As usual, the focus has been on Macworld this past week rather than CES. I think that the media and even a lot of geeks have just become disenchanted with CES and have begun to care more about the words of Steve Jobs. Barely anyone really seemed to care that it's Bill Gates last CES keynote ever. By this year's end, Ray Ozzie will be the new CEO of Microsoft. Of course, there is the fact that this video from the keynote of his supposed last day at work spread pretty fast and is pretty funny. I love that he can make fun of himself and that he managed so many great cameos. Oh, and I have a lot to talk about today to make up for not writing this post like two days ago when I should've.

Anyway, back to Macworld. There are a few things I thought were worth mentioning related to that keynote. Game Daily has a great article pointing out that this was another Macworld without any focus at all on video games for Macs. I agree with them in calling this a huge oversight. I have no idea why they don't believe the power of video games. That industry has really exploded in the past 5-10 years and PC games have seen a come back with titles like Half-Life 2, Portal, World of Warcraft, The Sims, and Civilization 3. They're losing the gamer market by forcing them to run these titles on a dual-booted machine or even a VM. They should be making it easier to run them on native hardware and they could be touting the consistency of Mac computers as ensuring that any game developed for Mac could work on potentially all Macs or say right from the get-go which ones work on which. For PCs, the hardware combinations are so diverse that you lose this slight advantage, which really only hurts you when you want to get someone a game as a gift, most likely, and don't know if they can use it. They're clearly not pushing iPod/iPhone games ostensibly, though Sonic has come on board, and I just imagine that there's a bigger market there than Game Daily believes because of how many people play phone games when they're bored. I just can't figure out why Apple has no interest in supporting this market.

Joy of Tech has a pretty great comic
about the MacBook Air that kind of reflects my views also.

This isn't really related to the Apple TV even though you may see articles around with people billing this as a big blow to Apple TV, but Time Warner is trying out a new pricing scheme similar to your power bill. The more you download, the more you pay. This indirectly affects Apple TV because renting/buying those HD movies is not going to be all that attractive rather than buying/renting the hard copy from a store. In any case, the point is that they're trying to penalize you for piracy or using up the "unlimited" Internet access you pay for too much. This is like opening an all-you-can-eat buffet where you see a few fat people and decide that if you're fat then you have to pay more money. It's crazy. Unlike your power bill or your water bill, it doesn't cost them anything extra to serve up more of the Internet to you, in reality. They make so much money with their outdated networks and large base of users that they really just want more money. In some areas you may see a higher quality of service, but the quality of your Internet should be higher because they're re-investing your monthly payments into thicker pipes and not because less people are online. People are not going to like this idea in this society of rising gas prices and other things where you pay a variable cost. They claim it'll only affect 5% of users, but in this increasingly broadband world, it's going to hurt more people than that. It's frustrating, but I'm honestly not sure what can be done. Maybe it'll end up being a tiered plan, which would be slightly better but still irritating since your service won't get any better for paying more money. Somewhere at Time Warner corporate there's a guy in a tall, black leather chair laughing diabolically. Oh, and whether this is a conspiracy against Apple TV so that people buy digital cable rather than watch TV online is a little bit extreme. I honestly do not think that it has anything to do with that. I believe torrents and P2P are hurting them, and they'd rather pass the buck than adapt. They're not smart enough to think ahead to IP TV; put their execs in a room of Neanderthals and you wouldn't know the difference.

I love PicLens. I think it's the best add-on since IE Tab (or the best thing since sliced bread, if you prefer). It works in IE and Safari, too; just not the new feature I'm going to talk about. I casually updated recently only to later realize that they've upgraded the UI. You can see it in the screenshot to the left, but it doesn't do it justice. It's just so ridiculously intuitive. They've made the pictures into a wall of thumbnails rather than a filmstrip at the bottom so that you can use the fullness of your screen to navigate and use your scroll wheel to casually glance at whatever piques your interest. They've also really improved the Facebook functionality. I don't think I've ever browsed pictures so effortlessly before; not even in Picasa. I was so struck that I took the time to actually port several galleries from the NSC site to the PicLens format (really easy with PicLens Publisher tool; you just surround the code it gives you with your layout) and will be using it permanently for the NSC site. It's a great thing to try out if you're running a website where you value viewing images over comments and ratings and descriptions and all that junk, and it even has a Flash-based thing to view the images in a slideshow even if you don't have PicLens. Oh, but word to the wise: look at the CSS I have on my galleries. I had to hack it up for IE6, which doesn't support max-width.

I think I've all but declared the HD-battle over in Blu-ray's favor. Gizmodo feels the same and has shed a little more light on what has been happening in recent weeks. While it's likely true that Sony did pay some of the studios to help them decide to move exclusively to Blu-ray, the fact of the matter is that they money they paid was much less than what they stand to lose/gain in a new HD format. All the studios were pretty eager to end the format war though, and I think Fox caving to Blu-ray caused a domino effect that almost ceded the battle to Sony. I don't think we know yet what motivated Fox to do this, and the exact reasoning for Warner and Toshiba hasn't totally given up yet, but I think it's pretty clear that they're gripping at straws. Only a few loyal studios remain; I mistakenly reported Paramount's switch because they haven't jumped ship yet though they legally can. Universal is bound until 2009 or the bitter end, whichever comes first. New Line, Fox, and Warner aren't small potatoes though, and it may be enough to tempt more studios to take the leap. The battle isn't over, but I think a lot of us want it to be. After all, Blu-ray has done a poor job of future-proofing the format and, not-so-coincidentally, the PS3 is the only Blu-ray player capable of supporting the 2.0 spec because it has an Internet connection and 1GB of local storage. It looks like they're trying to use Blu-ray in 2.0 to help spread gaming to movie enthusiasts from the looks of CES demos with trivia games and the like, but these Blu-ray versions will surely cause confusion (there's a 1.1 that only a few players, including the PS3, support).

I thought it was interesting that MySpace is still dominating Facebook in traffic. If you have any insight into this, I'd love to hear it because I have to say that I'm more than a little surprised. 72% of social networking traffic goes to MySpace compared to 16% for Facebook. This is more than a small disparity. I guess I live in a bubble where only a minority of the people I know have MySpace accounts, including the adults I know who are on Facebook. To be fair, Facebook's grew 50% over last year whereas News Corp's bastard child lost 8% of its prior market share. The hype machine would make it seem like Facebook is taking over the world. Hell, I kid you not, my own mother called me last week to tell me about Facebook and this guy who started the site in college and made all this money. She thought that I should do something like that someday. I'm suddenly glad that I didn't take the Facebook interview. It's not that I believe they're failing, I just think they're in this huge bubble. I don't know if it'll pop or not, but I also don't know how stable it is. In any case, my theory is that a lot of minors are loving MySpace whereas adults and many college students who do social networking use Facbook. There's also an overlap of college students who still check their MySpace but don't actively use it. That's just my theory, and I guess that it would mean that the Facebook audience is more valuable than the MySpace audience. Anyhow, I think it's even more interesting given that MySpace has been getting bad press over privacy issues. I mean when people can see private photos of 14 year-old boys/girls, that's creepy.

I have a few quick things to lump together here. AOL (AIM/ICQ) has finally caved and moved its protocol to XMPP, more popularly known as Jabber, which is what Google Chat runs on. I can't say anything about this other than that it's ostensible very cool since XMPP is open source. If you're uninitiated into the dark art of MySQL, this is an awesome primer. Woot has put up their always funny Wootable Awards from CES of random things including Most Racist Display and Best Alien Detector. I liked the new trailer for Baby Mama and so I thought I'd share. Tina Fey wants a surrogate mother because she can't conceive and so she turns to a childlike character(Amy Poehler). I thought it was quirky and funny. And last, but not least, my first upload to YouTube from going to Copa on Friday night:



Just because I miss it, how about some Unconscious Mutterings:

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

1. President :: Clinton (Bill ;)


2. Stare :: Glaze


3. Embrace :: Hug


4. Movie :: Theater


5. Everything :: On sale


6. Profile :: Facebook


7. Satire :: Comedy


8. Erratic :: Errata


9. Costume :: Party


10. Secretary :: of State

Yo Ho Ho, A Pirate's Christmas For Me

I had a couple of noteworthy items on privacy, so I felt like I could stretch the title a bit. The RIAA just gets more and more ridiculous as time progresses, it seems. They decided to distribute their own news segment about a big crackdown on pirated CDs and how to look out for pirated music. It's one of those things that's so stupid that to even highlight what's wrong with it is to state the obvious. I can assure you that a pirated CD does not have worse sound quality than a normal CD though, that's one of the things wrong with this video. Oh, and no one wants Christmas ring tones. The bottom line is that they're focusing too much on the negative and their scare tactics are clearly not effective. When you tell your consumers that CDs that are "too good to be true" are probably pirated, you're kind of a moron. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but it seems like everyone realized but them that there has just not been an upward trend in the quality of the content of music nowadays and so the reason the industry has been faltering is that people have been using the Internet to become more selective and only buy what they know they'll like as opposed to the 90s where people bought CDs that looked pretty or were from familiar/recommended artists. In this world of Internet radio and Seeqpod and Pandora and Last.fm, the playing field has changed. They need to move towards embracing that.

Famed torrent site Mininova found their pirate spirit and decided to use it to build a legitimate service: content distribution. You give them the content and they'll help you seed the torrent and everything, all for free. It's intended for independent artists and filmmakers, but there doesn't seem to be any restrictions on who takes advantage of it. I love it because they're just showing off how torrents can really help the world past just piracy.

Apple's PR people never cease to piss me off. Their desire to protect trade secrets is relentless. They finally got to Think Secret, which was a pretty well-known blog for Apple rumors and leaks. So basically, they were paid off to shutdown. They went to the Fake Steve Jobs blog and made him the same offer. He's under contract with his sponsor, so he's resisting at his own peril. Get this: they sent him a detail list of his assets at risk if he doesn't cease a desist, including his kids' college funds (with their names). That's all kinds of messed up. Their case against him is pretty thin. There's nothing wrong with writing a satirical blog about someone, even if it is about Steve Jobs. The posts they claim that are in violation don't prove that anything was leaked; the evidence is circumstantial. It's just upsetting to me that they have this cult following and they choose to run their name in the ground among geeks, their most loyal followers, with this craziness. Oh, and Fake Steve criticized the EFF for promoting censorship (i.e. helping bloggers settle with Apple and basically being sell-outs) so they won't help him. Hypocrites. Hear that, EFF? No one takes you seriously and no one ever will.

While I'm pouncing on Apple, they've filed for a couple of patents. The first patent made sense: auto-shutdown after charging or file transfers. Great idea. The other patent is for programmers to inject code into software's run-time stream so that it can restrict execution to certain hardware. So if you tried running a Mac application on hardware that Apple didn't like, it wouldn't work. First of all, this is bad for the same reason DRM is: you're restricted use too much. Let consumers do what they want with what they bought, don't nickel and dime them out of possible uses. Don't force them to use your hardware just because you wrote the software. That's called being snooty. Second of all though, am I the only one who sees the potential for security issues? If it actively checks the hardware and you put out a virus that gives it faulty information, couldn't you theoretically crash people's machines who ran software based on this patent? Oh, and what about the false positive rate? Let's not forget about base rate fallacy. I hope that this patent is an idea they don't intend to implement, but I'm afraid given their issues with people hacking iPhones that they will. On the bright side though, Apple is adopting Intel's UMPC platform Menlow. That doesn't mean a whole lot to us right now except that they're following Intel's roadmap so we can hopefully expect to see Apple on the cutting edge of mobile applications past just the iPhone (or even improving the iPhone in 2G).

Just a couple of quick, fun items. Google Talk lets you translate in real-time if you invite one of their translation bots into a group chat. Isn't that pretty cool? I've run into the language barrier before on Google Talk many months ago, and that would've totally helped then. Remember Y2K? It turns out that Linux wasn't built to last past 2038! I'm sure it'll be fine by then with the increasing acceptance of 64-bit processors, but it's still kind of quirky. This and this are wickedly funny. They're what video game boxes would say if they told the truth. This is one of my favorites:



Have a great Christmas, everyone! I'll have another post for you soon enough. Hopefully I'll be more productive over the next couple of days.

Creating a Niche

I ran into a couple of interesting things today that I figure I could combine into a good topic: creating a niche. Something I never really gave much thought to until today is that the big bucks out there really come out of making a niche. It makes sense in a lot of ways since the rule of thumb is that the more specialized the field you study is the more money your liable to make since you're probably in short supply. A direct example of this is David Elsewhere, who is actually the guy from some of the iPod ads and that cool Pepsi commercial with the dancing jeans and some others. His niche is crazy dancing, like he's made of rubber. No one can do what he does, otherwise they wouldn't superimpose people's faces on his body for some of these ads. If you don't possess a natural talent like that, then you can try creating something totally different like these three Berkeley grads who have come up with a high quality video compression technology for high-end e-Commerce clients. As far as video quality goes, there's no one above YouTube that has really picked up. I really like Stage6, but it hasn't really gone anywhere, and I think DivX has gotten a lot of bad press. These guys have the opportunity to become the YouTube of car companies and medium-sized businesses and the like. I know, it's not user-generated content, but its a video platform that doesn't really exist right now. It may not sound like much, but it has Steve Wozniak and Red McCombs backing it, which is pretty big. Moral of the story: find a niche, and build your business on it.

Ars Technica put out one of their great product reviews, this one for the new iMac, and it sounds like what I thought. It's an improvement, but the keyboard doesn't feel right. Why did they make it so low and flat? Anyway, still a solid machine, and I guess the glare isn't as obtrusive as one would presume.

New ground has been broken against the RIAA: an Oklahoma attorney brought in testimony from a computer security expert claiming that the RIAA cannot use IP addresses to identify litigants because IP addresses just aren't unique. They can be masked, shared, etc. I can't believe that no one used this argument before. Anyway, I can't imagine the RIAA winning this battle, so it should be interesting.

Is the iPhone set to get games? The Download Squad has snooped around iTunes's localization strings (I'm guessing these are some internal configuration settings used by iTunes in other countries) and found some strings that appear to confirmation messages for whether you want to remove a selected game from your iPhone. It could just be garbage, but doubtful. They already have games on iPods, after all, so this would make a lot of sense.

Beware of sites bearing pricey gifts and promises of robust file-sharing. uTorrent is prepared to file suit against one such fraudulent site trying to sell uTorrent, a freeware application. That really boils me: to profit solely off of someone else's hard work, and so blatantly. This site looks really authentic, so definitely beware of these sorts of schemes.

I know it defies the theory of evolution, but ever wonder if computers preceded us? Because if so, then our creation was probably something like this.

I have a few movie items for today. First off is a trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, a dramedy from Craig Gillespie featuring Ryan Gosling about a guy named Lars who pretends that a mannequin is his girlfriend to fill the void. The trailer actually looks really cute, I think this has the makings of a really interesting character study.

Speaking of characters, someone who saw Heath Ledger on the set of The Dark Knight had only good things to say about his portrayal of The Joker. I don't think he saw any dialogue, just his demeanor, and it sounded very true to the original villain. If I keep getting pumped about this movie, I may explode before we even get a real trailer.

Usually, I say that direct to video (DTV) movies aren't very good, but a part of me wonders if Return to House on Haunted Hill is the first movie to get it right because it takes advantage of being at home. How? It lets you choose your own path through the movie (I'm pretty sure this is only for high-definition formats), almost like a video game I suppose or those books when you were little that would have you turn to different pages depending on the path you chose. The trailer is pretty creepy, so I'm definitely not prepared to write this one off.

Lastly, I'm not a big Hitman fan or anything (though I think its story is one of those that is easily lent to a movie, unlike Halo), but I like the looks of this teaser poster:


Now for the Thursday Threesome:

Onesome: Swimming-- along? Do you swim? Can you swim? Do you like to swim? Do you have a place to swim? I'm drowning in questions here!
I can swim, but I don't often enough. At school, our gym has a cool Aquatic Complex, but I have never had the time to actually use it for exercise. I was sure glad I knew how to swim when I went rafting!

Twosome: Pool--? ...or billiards? Have you played either one? ...or would you like to learn?
Yeah, I have, but I'm not very good. I'm one of those people who makes key plays purely out of luck, not skill.

Threesome: Pump--ing iron: is that in your reps? ...or does the thought of that style of working out just do you in? Inquiring minds and all that...
I try to work out 6 days a week, but I'm a guy and so obviously muscle mass is probably of inflated importance to me. Hey, having a better physique sometimes correlates to bigger salaries because you're perceived as being more dedicated. I personally do it because I was overweight when I was younger and I feel obligated to keep myself in shape as a result.

I have a very special visitor coming tomorrow, and I'm dedicated my free time over the next several days to her, so don't expect a post from me for a week. Sorry to have to do this again after just coming back from my last hiatus, but stuff happens! I'm sure you'll all understand.

The Missing Mac

There's always been this gaping hole in the Mac lineup that some people like to ignore. It's called a business Mac. A blog post from the CEO of a startup got me thinking about it. I think it was Molly Wood who asked Steve Jobs yesterday about Apple's intentions, as in where they're taking their computer business, and his response was kind of a bland "we want to build the best machines." Whoopety-doo, Steve Jobs wants to build pretty machines. It's not always about that. It's like my favorite two lines in Pirates of the Silicon Valley:

"Steve: We're better than you. Our software is better.
Bill: Don't you see? That doesn't matter!"

They're not doing their best as disseminating computers by virtue of the fact that companies aren't adopting Macs in large numbers. There's no enterprise-level Mac. My supervisor loves Macs so much that he bought a MacBook Pro for work, but he still has his trusty Dell laptop in his office, though he tries not to use it. Amazon doesn't support Macs, so if you want to use one you're pretty much on your own. They need to fill this space. They need to start making deals, and they need to start marketing more to businesses. In my opinion, it's one of the biggest reasons Apple isn't doing better at grabbing market share from PCs. Until they make this move, I can't imagine them ever coming close to taking out PCs.

Interesting news from Google: they're giving Linux patent protection from their patents in exchange for use of some patents from the Open Innovation Network. While I agree this is a good move, you have to admit that it's kind of ballsy. I mean what if the Linux camp flagrantly copies Google on something? I guess there's a lot of trust involved though, as it should be.

One of the more attractive things to me about Amazon is the opportunity to work with massive amounts of data and learn about scaling and performance. So naturally I have to plug this article about the Digg architecture and how it deals with lots of data. It's kind of amazing that a site as simple (to the eye, I mean) as Digg requires 100 servers.

I heard this on Buzz Out Loud and had to report it: this NBC reporter Michelle Madigan tried to go undercover at Def Con 15 and catch hackers admitting to illegal things and then catch Feds there doing nothing about it. The idea of the convention is to share knowledge about security to serve the greater good and let your guards down so that you can talk about things you did in the grey without having to face the consequences. I don't know how she thought she'd outsmart hackers, but they found her out and there's a clip on YouTube of them playing a prank on her of sorts in inviting her to another conference where the secret point was to expose her to all the hackers.

Now for a few one-liners. This is a pretty big, awesome list of web development resources, so check it out. This is a great guide to being smarter about using torrents. I saw this site on an ad and just thought it was too funny:



I just want to touch on a few movie news items here. Michel Gondry has come out with a new movie: Be Kind Rewind. It looks pretty cool to me, and it stars Mos Def and Jack Black. They run a video store and all their tapes turn blank, so they film their own versions of movies. Gondry is definitely pretty creative, so I want to see what he does with this one.

Jessica Alba is going to do another comedy, but this one with Mike Myers called The Love Guru. I'm skeptical, but Mike Myers is really funny so you never know. I don't know why Alba wants to get into comedy now though. I guess it's because her acting could need some help so she wants to try lighter stuff.

We have a couple of Southland Tales pictures, and they're not much but they're something. I'm still stoked to check out this movie, despite early reviews from Cannes.

Now for the Wednesday Mind Hump:

List ten random things in your refrigerator.
Too easy: Turtles (like the candy, not the animals), sparkling water, an onion, milk, chocolate syrup, lunchmeat, strawberry jelly, ketchup, bread, flour tortillas, and some potatoes.

The Great Debate Returns: Women in CS

I know I promised an early post tonight, but I ended up getting caught up in other stuff. I'm sure you'll learn to forgive me in time. Anyway, I talked about this way back when, but it's definitely worth bringing up again. One of the biggest things in CS right now, across the nation, is the concern that not enough women are entering Computer Science nowadays. I think people totally underestimate this problem as a natural imbalance. Without a diversity of perspectives in this field, it will suffer greatly. When everyone in a discipline is like-minded, there's no one to break the mold and do great things or change the way we see the world. The less women we have the less chances we have of finding a brilliant female perspective that instigates something really cool. That's why programs like Girlstart are so important; we risk losing innovation that could spur other advances. So what's with girls nowadays? I think the biggest thing, honestly, is the whole nerd stigma. The dot-com bust and outsourcing are still over-inflated, popular concerns, but that affects men just as much as women. In reality, I think that there's this fear of being a code monkey, and people don't realize that there's so much more to this field than that, and so many more possibilities. Not only that, but the stuff you can create with computers can become so revolutionary without requiring a lot of money; it's incredible. Anyway, it's a very male-dominated field, and that can be intimidated. The fear of being like the stereotypical programmer can be debilitating, but I think programs across the nation are working hard at that. Unfortunately, I do not buy UTCS's commitment to this. Yeah, they do eagerly support WICS's projects, but are they actively trying to correct these stigmas? The solution isn't to make it easier to get in, it's to make it easier to get passionate about computing, and then everything else will just fall in place. Without that desire, getting into the program is meaningless, because you won't stay.

I've missed a ridiculous amount of news. Let's start with the Google stuff: it's confirmed that Google is, in fact, developing a Powerpoint clone for their own online office suite (so far, just documents and spreadsheets). They acquired Tonic to expedite this process, but I have no idea what their existing product(s) look like, so we'll just have to wait for a good old-fashioned Google beta release to learn more. Oh, and rumors are back about Taiwanese manufacturers getting orders for Google Phones, but I don't take this as a reliable source. I should try to tap connections at TI to see if that part of the story has any validity.

Remember my link yesterday to Better Gmail, the sweet Firefox add-on? I've been using it since then and it's so freaking cool. Anyway, Lifehacker put up a video to show you a little more of how to be efficient with Gmail, as well as more add-ons. Better Gmail is still the best one though. And remember, always use https in your URL to access Gmail.

Here's something fun: a bunch of pictures of nerd tattoos. I'm surprised that there were so many video game references and so few references to Star Wars (none to Lord of the Rings). I would've preferred more coding ones (how about showing the Oracle machine from reduction proofs or something?). Anyway, for some reason, I liked this one best (no, not because it's a female butt, I know at least one person with a much better ass ;):



I think this is pretty funny, too: Microsoft only sold 244 legal copies of Vista in China in the first two weeks of its release. That doesn't near cover the millions they spent on advertising there, and it's all because of how ridiculous the infamous black market is there. I wonder what would happen if Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) totally disabled illegitimate copies of Vista? Would sales go up in China, or would they not upgrade, or would they all get Linux?

The IRS is applying pressure to have online auction sites disclose the identities of its users so that their incomes from such sales can be accounted for. Aside from the obvious privacy concerns, this really will hurt the little guys who won't get many users if they have to disclose that kind of information. This will create a monopoly for the big boys, namely, eBay. Is it really worth the extra tax money to do that? I'd like to see some hard facts on this before they move forward with such action.

No doubt in an effort to be hip and trendy, you'll soon be able to purchase episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report through Xbox Live. No word on how much it will cost, but I wonder how much money this will yield. If it can only be watched via an Xbox, then that's still kind of flawed and won't help them much. Am I understanding it correctly? Please correct me if these downloads from Xbox Live can be transferred to your PC, I just never heard of such a think.

Last thing for techie news: Will Ferrel and Adam McKay have teamed up again, but this time to create a site called Funny or Die. I think the title is dumb, but the bare bones site is actually based on a good idea: only keep videos that people like. Only videos with a certain amount of votes stay on the site, and the rest go into a graveyard of videos that must be voted up intensely to return. That landlord video is really hilarious, by the way, so be sure to click through (NSFW warning though).

We have news of production beginning on a couple of films. The new Indiana Jones flick will apparently start filming on June 16, and it looks like The Dark Knight started a couple of days ago. We know this because we have photographic evidence of the bank that will apparently be robbed by the Joker. I never say this, but it really does sounds more and more like this movie will be a wet dream for lots of Batman fanatics.

Yahoo Movies has a trailer for Balls of Furym featuring Christopher Walken and Maggie Q, but I didn't laugh once during the whole thing. It looks like they're relying too much on low brow humor, and it just kind of runs in the wrong direction with an otherwise humorous premise. Too bad, I really love Christopher Walken usually, but he's made bad choices in films more recently.

They also have a clip from 28 Weeks Later, and it's genuinely a bit scary, so be forewarned. I really do hope that this movie follows the footsteps of its predecessor to be more than the standard surprise-scare horror movie.

Now, for a Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. What do you do when you need a time out from all of your daily worries and activities?
Besides checking e-mail and webcomics, I think of when I'll next see a certain someone who makes me feel happy no matter what.

2. What celebrity needs to take a time out in the corner for naughty behavior?
Probably Tom Cruise, but he already gets enough ridicule so I'm not really sure. Never gave much thought to this.

3. What do you wish you could spend more time doing?
Besides spending it with a certain someone? Probably practicing guitar. I feel like I've been losing the talent I once had. I still have that zeal, just not enough time to invest in it anymore.

Oh, and don't expect a post tomorrow night. I'll try, but it's not likely.

Lights Camera Apple

I have to get some Scheme written before I go to bed, so I'll make this post short and sweet. Today was that Lights Camera Apple event at NAB I had mentioned just a couple of weeks ago, and you can get the full recap over here. However, I doubt that many of you will need to, or want to, read through all that. The meat of the presentation was the release of Final Cut Studio 2, and Gizmodo has slightly more detailed impressions of that. It sounds like a solid, professional-grade application, but it will set you back $1300 (ranges from $500 to $700 for an upgrade, though). I think this begs the question: how do they determine this pricing model? I really am curious, to be honest. It seems like an exorbitant amount of money for just some code in a box. Is it because it requires a price that high to recoup their costs and profit for production on a newer version because of how few buyers they'll have for this kind of software? Is it just a status symbol (like how people will buy name-brand things rather than knock-offs based on its price rather than its quality)? Do they feel that this software just has the capabilities to generate the revenues to warrant such a purchase? Or is it simple supply and demand at work? I'm banking on it being the last item, but in any case, it sounds like it's pretty cool. Though I'm sure I'll never get to use it, I look forward to finding out what Ars Technica says.

One more tidbit about Apple: a recently filed patent application seems to imply the development of another Apple TV that would be like a media hub connecting all your home theater devices together. I hope that they have more up their sleeves than that to follow up a product that critics don't seem to find much value in.

If you're a Gmail user, you'll really get a kick out of this Firefox extension. Usually, I write off Gmail-oriented Firefox extensions as being superfluous, but this one is actually really awesome. Not only does it make it easier to identify labels and attachments, but it does cute stuff like warning you if it looks like you forgot to attach a file you promised. If you're on Firefox, it wouldn't hurt to give it a try. If you're not, then something is wrong with you. Seriously.

CBS has penned a deal to distribute some content on Joost, AOL, and MSN. By the way, Joost has not given us any invites yet, so don't ask me for one. I'll be sure to say in a post when we do get invites. Anyway, CBS is doing a really great job by diversifying its digital distribution efforts so well. They really are experimenting to see what their audiences want, and I like that.

Apparently, Microsoft has been developing a cross platform web client for better, easier media viewing online called Silverlight. It sounds nifty, but his explanation is too level. We need to actually see something.

If you want to see some fun computer rigs, you should check this out. I like the key-removing one best:



I'm getting real sleepy, so we'll keep the movie news short here. Entertainment Weekly is spreading rumors that Sam Raimi may direct The Hobbit, which would rule out a Spider-man 4 happening anytime soon. I think we could all live with that if the former ended up being good.

It looks like the title of the next Indiana Jones flick may be Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods. I personally think that it sounds really stupid and will strike a cord with conservative religious types, so I wonder if that will have any impact on the final title.

I hadn't heard of Atonement, featuring Keira Knightly, until now, but it looks like quite an awesome movie. The trailer is here and it looks like a WWII drama/romance. I know, sounds like a lot of other movies, but the style in the trailer is quite promising, to be honest.

Lastly, we have new pictures from Ocean's 13.

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. Who do you think is cuter, the host of Survivor, or the host of Amazing Race?
Um, ok so obviously this question came from a girl.
2. Have you seen any movies in a theater recently?
The last one I saw was 300, and I really liked it.
3. Do you read manga?
Nope, though I tried before. Nothing wrong with it, I just never got into it.
4. For people living in the US: Have you ever traveled outside of the state you were born in? For people living outside of the US: Have you ever traveled outside of your country?
Yes, I have. To New York, Washington, Arizona, D.C., and Florida. Outside the US: India.
5. Do you have a Yahoo! 360 page?
Nope.
6. How many blogs/online diaries do you have total?
One =)

Embracing a Harder R?

I know, I know. You all must hate me by now! I'm sorry, the blog isn't dead. I haven't abandoned it. Life has just taken an interesting turn for me the past couple of weeks, but I'm doing just fine for the first time in a long time, even if things don't end up exactly as I'd like. To compensate, I thought I'd show you guys my new haircut. I've never been to a place where they actually shampoo your hair and everything! Anyway, on to the real stuff: the MPAA's fight to not look like total slobs. It's no secret that they're despised for their ratings system among film buffs and geeks like me, especially once you see the first NC-17 movie that blows you away. Now, they're seriously considering splitting up the R-rating into a "soft" R and a "hard" R. I know it sounds stupid, but I think it'd be better than giving movies an NC-17 rating because it's merely an extra admonition. It holds no extra weight in enforcement. In all honesty, an NC-17 rating nearly guarantees that you're not going to make back your production budget. If they think this middle rating would mean less movies get NC-17, then I say we definitely push forward with that. And hey, while you're at it, why not make your methodology for assigning these ratings less nonsensical and more open? If they don't stop being so irresponsible then I'm sure that they'll face government intervention.

For those of you who don't know, the JPEG image format is a lossless form of compression that drastically reduces the size of a picture by way of a neat algorithm, but not every bit is guaranteed to be correct. Hence, Microsoft is leaning towards an HD Photo format that supposedly has a better algorithm and can accommodate both lossless and lossy compression. It sounds all good and well, but the adoption of a new format is a huge undertaking. Not only that, but it had better be damn good if we're going to make it a new standard. Not to be pessimistic about it, but this is an issue that has been an issue for a very long time now because JPEG is so meh. Microsoft definitely has the resources to do it right, I just hope that they do.

While I'm on imaging, check out these tips on taking good black and white photos. I've always been fascinated with how taking pictures in black and white makes things look cooler. Just look at this picture to the right that I took of my cousin's son. Why does that shot work in black and white? Just an interesting puzzle to me, I guess. I don't think my camera can shoot in RAW though. I'm a bit too poor to get a DSLR (yeah, the EOS is pretty hot).

Any nerd who wants a solid chuckle should definitely go here and check out some programming theorems. Despite them being stupid, they really made me laugh out loud. Only the most intense nerds can appreciate such intricacies as the 3-beer UI test.

Guess what, biatches?! 300 DOMINATED the box office!!! For the first time in God knows how long, Americans actually used their brain and saw a movie that doesn't both suck and blow at the same time. I'm actually going to go see it myself in a few hours, and am very excited about it. Obviously, I'll come back with a full review. Somehow, Wild Hogs managed an impressive cling to #2, while Zodiac somehow slip to #5. But oh well, at least Zach Snyder prevailed for geeks everywhere!

Yahoo Movies has the trailer for a movie called Slow Burn that I thought looked pretty cool, but I'll probably remain skeptical about it for good measure. Yeah it has Ray Liotta (I think he's way underrated) and Mekhi Pfiffer, but something about the way the plot is explained rubs me as almost contrived. I don't know, I think it could still be good.

If you want to see a really gory trailer instead, head over to the trailer for the low budget zombie flick, The Mad. I like that it doesn't take itself too seriously, but I'd only see it if the whole movie was a definitive kind of satire on zombie movies because of how ridiculous the plotline is.

AICN has a minor spoiler about the costume for The Dark Knight, and I don't even think it's a spoiler. It's so insignificant, I'll tell you: the suit is going to change. *gasp* It's going to look more like it should look. Big surprise. I look forward to seeing actual shots of it.

It looks like Toy Story 3 is slated for a 2010 release date! That's right, as in 3 years. Kind of a long time to make a movie, but as long as they do it right I don't mind. I'm sure no one else will. Tim Allen and Tom Hanks will be back, and the writer of Little Miss Sunshine (Michael Arndt) is handling the script. I definitely have high hopes for this one.

Lastly, Quentin Tarantino wrote a really neat article about why he makes movies and how it's important to break all the rules. Of course, it's easy to break the rules when you're freaking Quentin Tarantino. He definitely comes off as a bit arrogant, which isn't uncommon when you hear him speak, but it's still an awesome read and a must-see for anyone considering being a director.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

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

1. Contribution :: Donation


2. Ryan :: Stiles


3. Minimal :: Investment ;)


4. Cleansed :: Clean


5. Centered :: Life


6. Arrow :: Head


7. Beyond :: the Sea


8. Execute :: Death


9. Intuition :: Jewel


10. Apology :: Sorry

Oh, I almost forgot to say that I ended up getting another offer last week from a neat company called Xythos. It was definitely the saddest rejection I had to make because they sound like a real neat company and being at a small company for the summer would've been fun. But still, I just couldn't pass up Amazon in the end.