My iRiver Clix2 Review

**EDIT** I mention that you can't listen to music while playing Flash games, which was true when the product was released. However, the new firmware update fixes that problem, so I apologize for not checking that out.

I got a new mp3 player a couple of weeks ago and I love it so much that I've been dying to review it. It came out last Spring (though my model came out later in the year since it's 8GB), but since I didn't find a video review that had audio and video I thought I'd fill the gap. You don't have to watch the video to enjoy my written review, but I think the visual will help (just turn down the volume if you hate my dorky voice; I apologize for the cluttering).


My iRiver Clix2 Review from Eptiger on Vimeo.

I hope that wasn't too tough to watch: it was my first try at a video review. I recommend at least skimming it just to get a feel for the navigation (again, turn the volume down if you want).

Given that my iPod Shuffle barely stays on my armband anymore (I had to glue back the USB part because it so easily snapped off at the gym one day), I tried to replace it last Spring with the Sansa c250 and miserably failed. After that, I decided to pay attention to quality, not so much price, in searching for a small, flash-based mp3 player with a screen so that I could not only play music at the gym (from a playlist created on my computer), but also listen to podcasts on the bus and possibly even watch video podcasts. After doing a lot of research, I narrowed it down to the Cowon D2, the iRiver Clix, the Creative Zen, and the iPod Nano. After reading the reviews and deciding the features I wanted that they had issues with (the Zen's expansion slot is actually almost useless), I decided that it was either the Nano or the Clix, and when iRiver offered a $40 rebate it was pretty much a no-brainer. I have to say that it was a surprisingly smart decision: this is, without a doubt, the best mp3 player I've ever interacted with aside from the iPod Touch.

Let's start with size, style, and navigation. This device is pretty much as small as you really need to be. It's definitely a little bigger than a Nano and a little thicker, but I never jumped on the "I want the thinnest mp3 player in the world" bandwagon so it's pretty reasonably thin to me. It easily slides into one's pocket. It's not even that heavy because I don't really notice it at the gym except for when I have to rotate the armband on my arm occasionally (I bought a silicone case and armband from the iriver store). I think it gets big points on style for just being really sleek, smooth, and black. It's not adulterated with any symbols on the face, and the information on the back is quite reserved. Even the side button labels aren't too big (after playing with it for just a bit, you won't need them). What's really impressive is the navigation though. I was a little skeptical about the d-click navigation, but it's more intuitive to me than the iPod wheel. I love that rather than copy the iPod or the Zune, they went for something fairly original here in just having these 4 giant buttons on the edges of the device. It's pretty easy to use with just one hand if you're wearing a jacket and don't want to have to look at the screen, and there's never any confusion with icons on the screen to help you navigate. Holding the right button always brings up a side menu, and that's the most complicated thing you need to understand. I had the hardest time navigating my old Sansa, so this was a breath of fresh air for me. The only other buttons are power, volume, hold, and the smart key. I'll admit that the hold button can be a little tricky to get to, but I think you'll get used to it. Also, the volume buttons may seem backwards if you're looking at it from the wrong angle, but I got used to that pretty quickly. The smart key is excellent: it can turn the screen on/off, change the orientation, play/pause, go to the home screen, start/stop recording, shuffle, or do a/b repeat. You just change a quick setting and that's it! I think that key was a stroke of genius, because I may care more about easy of play/pause than battery life so I may want it to play/pause rather than turn the screen off, etc.

The next thing I want to cover is music. It supports all the most popular music file types and any Windows Media Player-based subscription services (including Rhapsody with free firmware update). The sound quality is very nice, in my opinion. I'm far from an audiophile, but I noticed a difference immediately from the sound I'm used to hearing out of my Shuffle. You get a full stereo effect, and you can really get immersed in your music, even at the gym (because I bought this thing primarly for the gym, I may keep referencing that) where it's relatively noisy. You can create however many playlists as you want on the computer, which I've only managed to get working on the iRiver Plus 3 software. That's the software that came with the device, and it's not bad though I wouldn't make it your new music management program. I've decided to betray the memory-hungry iTunes for Media Monkey, which does an excellent job of letting you auto-tag your songs from Amazon. Plus, when it tags your album art, it puts it in the tag (iTunes just dumps them in a folder), and the Clix will only show album art from the mp3's tag. I recommend adding all your music folders to iRiver Plus 3, and then just create playlists with the songs you want in your favorite music program and drag them into a playlist in iRiver Plus 3. Then, just load them onto the device this way (you don't even need to actually use this playlist on the device, it' s just to keep the songs in one place). This way, it'll automatically be organized on the device. Otherwise, if you just drag-and-drop, you have to rebuild the database on the device. By the way, file transfers are quite fast. Anyway, it does support MTP mode if you really like Windows Media Player, but I like UMS/MSC for loading videos and pictures easily in Xplorer2 and using iRiver Plus 3, which is quite lite. I don't even know how to load themes (see below) and Flash games on there in MTP mode (I haven't tried MTP). In addition to the album art and song information, you get the progress bar and what song is coming up next, which really comes in handy. You can also set the equalizer settings, change the playback speed, change the scan speed (very handy for long podcasts), show lyrics, rate it, and change the playback mode (e.g. shuffle, repeat once). You can also build-up a quick list on the device just by holding the right button when showing songs to get to that menu with all those options and adding a song to the quick list. You only create one of these, but I can't imagine that you'll need more than one of them.

It also supports podcasts and Audible, though Audible books are only usable in MTP. You can choose MTP or UMS/MSC mode, but you have to format in between changes so make sure you back-up the device before doing so. It claims that podcast support is only in MSC/UMS mode, but if they're just .mp3s then I can't see why you can't use them in both modes. I think it means for mypodder support, which comes on the device by default. You don't need mypodder though: all you really need to do is drag and drop songs into a 'Podcasts' folder in 'Music' and you can get to them straight from 'Podcasts' on the device rather than searching artist or genre or anything (though in MTP mode, you may need to). I really wish you could bookmark in podcasts, but I heard that you can in Audible books. Oh, and one thing about UMS/MSC mode: unlike the iPod you can drag your content to and from the device. So it doubles as a flash drive (on the iPod, you can't take your music from it, only put it on).

The FM Radio it sports is quite nice. It does an excellent job of auto-presets, and I only have trouble with reception where I have trouble with cell phone reception. My radio on my Sansa never worked, so believe in this device having a real radio, which you can record from. You can also record your voice (apart from the radio) because it has a mic built-in, and you can turn on a setting that will ignore all noise except for your voice. This works surprisingly well: the recording is nice and crisp, and you can even choose the quality.



I should probably mention that the AMOLED screen it supports is incredible. It also packs a Lithiom-ion polymer battery, which is just the next generation of Li-on. It has the same problems, but it's cheaper to make and more robust to damage. Anyway, the AMOLED screen has no backlight: it's just ridiculously bright on its own because it holds its charge so well, and it has a 180 degree viewing angle. Plus, since it requires less power (made of organic material) you can get 5 hours of battery life on just video and 25 of just audio. You can completely charge the device in just 2 hours (via mini-USB, or the cradle accessory that no one seems to like). I can attest to this being pretty accurate, though I haven't worn it totally down. Like any Li-on, it'll degrade over time, but I imagine it'll take a long time for most users.

This screen does a very nice job with your pictures and videos. You can create playlists with your pictures and play them in slideshow mode with music playing in the background. It really shines on video playback though: it's like you're watching video on a nice LCD TV except that it's been shrunk to 2.2". If you get the silicone case then you can even use the belt clip as a kickstand to place it on the table while you watch your video. I've managed to watch a 40-minute TV show with no problems, and the audio even came out quite well. It's really ideal for video podcasts (e.g. Revision 3), but I've put a couple of DVD movies on mine. Sure, it's a little smaller because the letter boxing is more on widescreen films (I haven't tried a full screen because I don't own any), but still watchable in pieces. I've been converting my movies to .avi using iRiverter because it only supports OpenXvid .avi (and some strain of .wmv), and I've found iRiverter to be the easiest (plus, it runs nicely in the background without disrupting the speed of your computer much at all). iRiver includes media conversion software on the software disc, but you can see all your options here. I managed to convert a DVD in about 80 minutes and a TV show in under 20 minutes on my old school P4. I like that it will remember your place in your videos (this can be turned off), too, and you can set the scan speed.

My absolute favorite part of this device though is how customizable it is. Because it's running Flash Lite, you can create your own themes (with animated backgrounds and a different background for each day of the week) or download them online. The Korean iRiver site had a contest last year so there's a ton of really nice ones floating around (just check the ClixHere forums for them). These are some stills from one of my favorites:



You can also add whatever fonts you want (as long as they're true type) to be used pretty much everywhere text is displayed on the device, which includes foreign language fonts. Not only is one unique in having this device since a lot of stores don't seem to carry it, but you can be unique from other Clix users in your theme and font, and you can change it as often as you'd like to keep you from getting bored with it. How many other mp3 players let you do that? Since they're small in size, you can put a lot on there and still keep your mp3s and videos even if you have a 2GB model (it comes in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB). Oh, and you can change the screen orientation (configurable to that smart key button, if you'd like) in case you don't like it being in landscape mode. It feels natural in any orientation, though I always use landscape just as a personal preference.

The last thing to talk about are the extras. If you have any text files with maybe a todo list or something, you can drag them right onto to the device and read them. It also has a handy alarm clock with a nice quick alarm option (e.g. 10 minutes from now). The best extra is the flash games: they provide you with a bunch of games already and I've found more free ones from browsing the ClixHere forums. They're really fun and include a frogger clone, blackjack, sudoku, a tetris clone, pacman, and many others (plus applications like a calculator or memo pad). Anyone who develops in Flash Lite is free to create content for it! There's also a bunch of other settings including sleep timer (can sleep or power-off) and screen brightness.

I think that about covers it. You probably think I'm a little nuts for writing such a detailed review, but I wanted to be thorough because there's just so much to talk about in this tiny little thing (and iRiver has no idea how to advertise it, clearly). As you can tell, I'm thrilled with it and I had to really think hard to find any bad points. Just to give you a quick summary...

Pros:
-Very nice battery life (Li-py)
-Extremely bright, high quality AMOLED screen
-Intuitive navigation (D-click and smart key work great)
-Fast! It's quick to charge, load content onto, and skimming pictures and videos and such on the device.
-Not intrusive at all at the gym (lightweight, nice form factor, good with the misticaudio silicone case)
-Impressive sound quality (even on low-end headphones) and video quality
-Completely customizable (theme and font)
-Actually usable FM radio
-Flash games!
-You can create playlists on the computer (my Sansa couldn't) or a quick list onthe device
-Voice/FM radio recorder (can filter out noise for the mic)
-Stylish (and unique)
-Fun to use (I still haven't gotten bored with it)
-It actually has a very customizable equalizer

Cons:
-Expensive ($240 retail for the 8GB red line, but you can find it cheaper at Amazon)
-Hold button can be hard to get to
-You have to get used to the volume keys' orientation
-No bookmarking on podcasts
-The iRiver Plus 3 software is nothing special, but if you drag-and-drop music you have to rebuild the database on the device
-An output to TV would've been nice
-If you really want to be nit-picky, the screen could be a tad bigger, but then you'd lose some of the nice form factor and big easy-to-find buttons

If you want other opinions, I love the Pocketables one, and the Anything But iPod one isn't too shabby either. I highly recommend this device if you're looking for something in the iPod Nano market but with a bigger screen and more features.

I have plenty of news to talk about that hopefully I'll get to later this weekend. Tomorrow is the Travis County Democratic Convention though, so I'm going to bed!

Many-to-Many

Sorry to be so tardy in writing this post, but this week has been absolutely ridiculous granting me no more than 4 hours of sleep a night for half the week. I think that things will be better now, and I'm real excited about my new iRiver Clix mp3 player. I'm planning on reviewing here, hopefully with video footage as well, as early as next week because I feel that it never got the attention it deserves. You'll find out why right here, so stay tuned.

What I want to talk about first of all today though is one of the best Joel essays I've read: Martian Headsets. He never disappoints me, and I someday aspire to be able to elicit the kind of nuggets of wisdom on my blog that he does, but until then I'm going to explain why this essay is so important. Developing the NSC site for me was fun and not really that bad until I started a part of the site where I allow members to review their professors and I turned to ext-js. I love ext-js, don't get me wrong, but Javascript is a complete pain to deal with for cross-browser compatibility. It wasn't long before Safari purists complained to me, and so I complained back asking why anyone would use Safari. In any case, I ended up just worrying about IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox, and even then one of the pages screws with the layout in IE 7. Getting it to work simultaneously on all 3 browsers was grueling, and people sometimes don't understand why I praise Firefox and tell them to use it. From my perspective, I've had so much more success writing code in CSS and Javascript and just working in Firefox as opposed to any IE browser. People also don't understand why certain sites don't work in IE or don't work in Firefox. These are both reasonable concerns, and that's why I feel that it's important to read this essay.

Something I really took from it that I really didn't quite grasp before is that these specifications for "web standards" and how browsers should be rendering pages aren't as glorious as people like to claim they are. I've probably been guilty of putting a little too much stock in them, and I apologize for that. With a concept as complicated as the Internet, I think that the current state of affairs with the browser wars was pretty much inevitable. There's this many-to-many mapping now between the browsers out there and the sites that they support because each version of IE, and some other browsers, add compatibility quirks with regard to how their interpret code. So we face a stalemate between browser compatibilities now. People have to write hacks to get their sites to work in certain browsers and walk on pins and needles. The only solution is a little far-fetched, but I like to think (when I'm in my happy place) that it's someday possible: all the browsers actually agree on the same set of standards in mind-numbing detail and focus instead on security and the user experience. In any case, IE8 now is facing the very real war of pragmatists versus idealists. The idealistic perspective is what I just mentioned: stick strong to standards and force everyone to conform to the them. The former is to focus on backwards-compatibility with the older version of IE. Currently, the idealists are winning, and it will definitely cost Microsoft dearly if they do win. If Vista has taught them anything, I hope that that it's to temper this idealism with pragmatism and try not to screw your market share. We'll see what prevails in the end.

The FCC's 700 MHz spectrum auction is almost complete with the Verizon and AT&T coming out on top. They took the C and D blocks for $9.4 and $6.6 billion, respectively. Apparently, Google only bid to reach the reserve and force open standards. Will this mean better cell phone coverage? I hope so, but only time will tell.

Yahoo has decided to release a very positive outlook for 2009 and 2010. It's so positive, in fact, that it surpasses the predictions made by pretty much any of the analysts forecasting their revenues. Whether or not Yahoo believes this prediction, which I'm sure they do, I believe that the real purpose is two-fold: to put confidence in the investors that they're in control and to try to raise Microsoft's bid in case they can't get out of being taken over. Relations between Microsoft and Yahoo seem to be a little calmer, but Microsoft still hasn't budged on its offer and investors don't sound like this new outlook gives them much more faith in Jerry Yang. Meanwhile, Microsoft has snatched up web analysis company Rapt, Inc. I imagine that they're trying to compete with Google Analytics here. I think that Microsoft strategy needs some work because they're falling into the Yahoo trap of competing with specific Google services rather than offering something out-of-the-ordinary that will bring them users. While I've said before that they do both have some great applications (Yahoo and Microsoft, I mean) they're lacking in user bases, and that's another thing for them to work on (hopefully together). You think they'll create an online university to compete with Google Code University (which, for the record, I think was a pretty neat idea)?

In the meantime, AOL has decided to buy social networking site Bebo for $850 million. I definitely got the feeling that this was under-covered, probably because AOL isn't as sexy as they once were. You may not have heard of Bebo because it's huge in Europe but not so much in the U.S., so maybe AOL is trying to expand Bebo's prowess to the U.S.? If it integrates well enough with AIM, it's not impossible. Now that you can do remote desktop in AIM, its professional user base is probably growing. Facebook had a response, that perhaps wasn't planned with this in mind: IM on Facebook. We're not sure yet if it will be built on Jabber or if they'll provide an API for it, so for now it'll be only for Facebook. I'm guessing that it will work similarly to GTalk as far as just pure functionality and I believe their goal is to keep people on Facebook longer so that it can continue to evolve into this web desktop that people often buzz about.

This is pretty neat news: Mininova is launching a closed beta to test out video streaming researched at Harvard with the Tribler team involved, as well. It sounds like it will work similar to how current torrents work: as you receive packets for the video stream you'll serve it to others trying to stream the video and use the "Give-to-Get" algorithm to ensure that the video becomes truly on-demand. I'm really excited to see what comes out from the other end of the beta and I have high hopes because I've always been fascinated by torrents and I'd love to see that technology applied in a more widespread legitimate way, even if it's directly through torrents. Video streaming, after all, has really exploded in the past few years.

Last, but not least: Miro has released a new update to Miro with plenty of performance improvements and bug fixes. Miro is a heavy application, but really awesome if you can afford the RAM.

I'll leave you with the new Wall-E trailer, which is really cute and very entertaining.

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.

The Other Boleyn Girl

This post is long overdue, so I'll be talking about some old news. I've just been so busy lately, and dealing with election stuff all night on Tuesday while having a midterm this morning didn't help things. Before I get to the news, I want to get on my soapbox real quick. I want to encourage the few of you who actually read my blog, as well as any transients, to speak your mind whenever possible except when it's intentionally offensive or slanderous. Someone made a ridiculous comment on my last post and I feel that now is as good a time as any to say that I blog because I think I have useful commentaries about what's going on in technology. I'm fairly young to this industry though I've been keeping up with it for a long time, and despite my rudimentary knowledge of politics I think my viewpoint is sometimes useful there in helping others understand my demographic. Don't let anyone make you believe that your opinions are trash. Stick to what you believe in and don't allow yourself to be censored or bullied into silence. Opinionated people make the world go round.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox now. I drove way out to Slaughter Lane last weekend to see The Other Boleyn Girl since it appears to be the only theater in Austin showing it. When a movie has Natalie Portman, Eric Bana, and Scarlett Johansson, it's probably worth seeing. The movie is intended to be a historical drama (based on the book of the same name) that takes place under the rule of King Henry VIII when he has an affair with the Boleyn sisters and breaks from the Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church. The book is known for drawing a lot of criticism on the historical bits and pieces that it pulls together, and the movie distorts the book further probably moving it to be even less historically accurate. So when it says "based on a true story", you should probably insert "loosely" in there. You have to come to this movie knowing to expect a twisted, dramatic romance movie that really falls under historical fiction.

Maybe I was naive to think well of this movie, because it got pretty bad reviews. I would say that I "enjoyed" it, except for that it was pretty depressing for the last hour or so. It's a pretty bleak picture of the greed of their father distorts the lives of these sisters and ultimately turns one harshly against the other. A number of critics disagree with me, but I thought that the acting was great. I definitely believe the female leads, though the King could've definitely been more kingly at times. Still, that's more a fault of the screenplay than the acting. The sets are incredible, as are the costumes. You definitely get the feeling that you're in 16th century England in the House of Tudor. The movie definitely comes to a halt in a particularly graphic rape scene. It's graphic aurally, not visually. So the climax of the movie ends up being, in a way, its lowest point. I just found that kind of interesting. I thought the dialogue was appropriate without being too haughty or annoying. I really believed what the movie was telling me, even if it was fictional, and I felt like it did a good job of turning a tale we don't know a whole lot about into a sordid tale of sex, love and betrayal. If you're feeling adventurous, give it a shot. I give it a B+, personally. That having been said, I can't see it again for a long while much like I can't see Brokeback Mountain again like ever (though Brokeback was considerably more depressing).

I'm definitely glad to finally say that the format war is over! Blu-ray has officially won as Toshiba announced that it will no longer produce HD-DVD players or recorders by the end of the month, though it will still keep a stockpile of media for those who already bought a player. This isn't to say that studios won't still release movies in HD-DVD or sell them in that format, but that's not likely to last long. If you bought an HD-DVD player: sorry. Don't say you hadn't been warned though if you bought one this year since I've been talking about studios focusing more on Blu-ray. One Japanese store is actually letting customers who bought an HD-DVD player from them trade it in for a Blu-ray player. I'm amazed at this act of kindness and customer loyalty, and don't imagine that anyone will be doing that stateside.

Maybe no one cares about this but me, but Stage 6 has finally closed up shop. I personally liked the site and felt like it was a great idea because it was trying to be a high-quality YouTube by encoding videos in DivX. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever gained the popularity in needed to sustain itself, and so on goes YouTube's monopoly over user-created videos.

Ready for your daily dose of net neutrality news? Sandvine, a company that sells the technology to ISPs used to throttle BitTorrents, has seen its sales drop 88% in the past year. Why? Maybe ISPs started to realize that this stuff is more trouble than it's worth. Comcast is actually being sued by a number of people in D.C. who are outraged by the throttling and are claiming false advertising of "unfettered access" to the Internet. Sandvine's "technology" is actually pretty shady, in my opinion: it injects RST packets over your connection that reset the flow of data prohibiting seeding of torrents. The FCC is siding with the plaintiffs: they acknowledge that disrupting the flow of data over the Internet to their users shouldn't be allowed and are calling for transparency in how ISPs are running their networks. Does it burn, Comcast? It's like when a boy punches his little sister and she complains to their mother, but when the boy promises that he didn't do anything the mom believes the sister and starts to crack down. Comcast claims that they're not throttling, though they clearly are. This should be interesting.

If you're a Democrat then odds are good that you've been watching the national news networks lately more than usual. I never watch CNN but I've been finding myself trying to get to a TV with cable for the live election coverage. In any case, I think that Fox News is infamous for being the worst of all these networks in the quality and right-wing skew of their reporting overall. I thought it was pretty cool that one comedian they had brought on to tell Huckabee jokes went on a really short rant live on Fox News against them before they interviewed some scantily clad Star Trek girls. Like I said last week, something is wrong when the crap we're being fed is about Britney Spears and Star Trek girls rather than our deteriorating health care system, or net neutrality, or even the long-term effects of deficit spending. I'm glad someone took a small step in the right direction.

And now, we find ourselves back at Yahoo. I apparently missed that a few weeks ago they fired their whole design innovation team. This was especially funny because of how uninspired their designs often are. Yahoo Live alone is enough proof of this, but there's also their ever-retro homepage and ailing mail interface. It's not going to help them much, but maybe now they can try to redesign themselves to help out their stockholders. More importantly though, they're seeking protection from Microsoft under Time Warner. I briefly mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but now they're really pushing hard on this. The deal would be that they'd control AOL and Time Warner would get a stake in Yahoo. Similarly, they'd be satisfied with control of MySpace in exchange for giving a stake of themselves to News Corp. To make matters worse for Microsoft, they don't have to hold another shareholders meeting until July, which could further delay a proxy fight and give Yahoo more time to seek an alternate route to the takeover.

Let me reiterate that this dance they're doing is ridiculous. Steve Ballmer is deadset on acquiring them, and he *gasp* actually has ideas for how to effectively integrating their services with competing (or similar) Microsoft products. AOL is not the best brand for Yahoo to take on and I honestly do not think that MySpace has legs on it. It's going to burn out sooner than later as bad press for it grows and its young user base outgrows it. Besides, I don't even know how likely Time Warner or News Corp is to go for these deals (I can't find information on if they suggested these deals, but I imagine that Yahoo did); they seem to be kind of one-sided. I will give credit to Yahoo for this onePlace thing they've unveiled. It's meant to be your mobile hub for online content and services, and it looks nifty, but I hope they're planning on porting it to the iPhone SDK and I hope that they'll port it to Android also. I see those two platforms as being big within a year from now. Anyway, at least Yahoo isn't letting this stuff get in the way of their businesses.

Going back to Microsoft real quick: they've made Internet Explorer 8 available to test drive (hmmm, you think this is because of the early release of Firefox 3's beta?) while admitting that it's not feature-complete. Some of the improvements they boast are better standards-compliance, integration with eBay and Facebook, and better functionality with AJAX pages (I'm really not sure what this means). The only thing on that list I'm impressed with is the standards-compliance thing, because they're making a better effort this time than IE7, but we'll see how it ends up. Meanwhile, Firefox has hit 500 million downloads, which I think is pretty awesome. I love seeing underdogs do better.

Joel Spolsky published a couple of articles on Inc.com about entrepreneurship that I recommend reading. One of them is about how it's important for top leadership in the company to not lose sight of what the lives of their employees is like and the other is about how to not write off ideas that may seem crazy without trying to believe in it first. I'm a firm believer in the latter, and I think you kind of have to be in this industry. Who would've thought that Facebook would've taken off the way it has? Or even YouTube, for that matter. It's an ever-challenging field that requires extreme optimism, at times.

Since I haven't done the Saturday 9 in a while, I'm going to give last week's a shot:

1. Did your mother go to college, if so where?
Nope, I don't think she had the chance to India (though she always wanted to).

2. Do you have a relative that is a lawyer?
I'm pretty sure I have a cousin whose husband is a lawyer, but we don't keep in touch with them much at all.

3. Do you have a relative that is a doctor?
Yes, but not an MD, just a PhD ;)

4. Did you take music lessons as a child? If yes, do you still play?
No, but I took guitar lessons in high school (just a class at school, actually) and I've been playing classical guitar off and on for about 5 years now.

5. Did you go to summer camp? If so would you send your child?
I think I did, but it wasn't very good. I think I'd send my child if I really liked the program and they enjoyed it and learned from it as well.

6. Do you believe that alcohol relieves stress?
To a certain extent, definitely. It's a nice, easy, short-term solution to stress. It's not healthy to always depend on alcohol to relieve stress, obviously, but it's nice for a lazy Friday night.

7. Have you ever performed on stage? If so tell us about it.
Not quite, though I have played guitar in front of a pretty big group of strangers in my high school's courtyard. I've also sung at a karaoke club if that counts.

8. What things do you find easy to remember ?
Things that I enjoy learning about (often techie stuff).

9. What things do you find easy to forget ?
Things that are way too complicated for me to understand or really boring/useless (*cough*DigitalLogicDesign*cough*).

My Precinct

The Caucus Precinct 247 in Travis county (in Austin, Texas) went to Obama. 19 delegates for Barack Obama, 8 for Hillary Clinton.

I'm sure no one cares, but just for those who are Googling it up out there ;)

Barack the Vote

Excuse grammatical mistakes: I'm very tired right now and slept 2 hours last night to go to this thing.

I have to say a couple of things before I really start this post. Directly below this post you will find a nice, long-winded post about what has happened between Yahoo and Microsoft over the span of this month since Microsoft's $44.6 billion cash-and-stock bid. I recommend reading it because it's a great way to catch up on that issue and I put a lot of time into researching what has been happening. I have lots of other tech news to talk about, and I'll have to get to it this weekend (I'm thinking tomorrow or Saturday). The other thing is that I am not a political pundit, nor do I ever claim to be. I give my commentary on technology under the pretense that I do my best to be well-informed and unbiased and knowledgeable in the things I talk about. With politics though, I can't keep up quite as well. I'm in tune a lot more with what Barack Obama has been saying rather than Hillary Clinton, so I'm going to try to not talk about her a whole lot aside from impressions I had of her from the debate. What I'm about to say are just my personal thoughts on this morning and I do not want to be flamed for these opinions. I don't remember all the nitty gritty, you can see this guy for that. Now we can get started.



I know the title is a little corny, but I think it's kind of cute. People were chanting it this morning at the Town Hall that Barack had at the Austin Convention Center. It happened very suddenly, being announced only two days ago, and it was at 9:30 AM this morning. I got up at 5:40 AM and we made it there by 7:00 AM. We got pretty good seats, but we were a few rows ahead of him yet, making it hard to take pictures. Fortunately, I did get to shake his hand though:


I Shook Barack's Hand! from Eptiger on Vimeo.

I think this little girl wanted to shake his hand, too (the T-shirt is cute, too):



He was a little late coming on stage though, and was preceded by a woman who told her vignette about life in Austin, that seemed kind of untrue because she worked at all these non-profits and her husband was a teacher so I don't understand how they could support their kids. We actually did get these 50-page booklets while we waiting for him explaining his policies and focusing a good bit on the economy, which is one of my huge issues so I really liked that.

This was a really exciting thing for me because I have never, in my life, felt so obligated to really get involved in politics. Clinton became president when I was 6 and I didn't know who George Walker Bush was until I was finishing up middle school. I feel like the Democratic Party has lost its way for the past 8 years. I have to say this real quick: it's amazing how Hillary brags about being the more experienced candidate but let the Republicans trample on some of the ideals this country was built on and bring our economy to shambles with an unabashed spending policy and a nonsensical approach to education. Yeah, cutting funds to students will create more jobs. She had more seniority than Barack did, and so she could've been an instigator for change. I look at Barack's voting record, as I have since he first started being on the Daily Show, and I find myself very impressed.

When we were waiting for Barack, I had this total zen moment while reading through his policies in that booklet and I turned to my friend saying, "dude, what if he was our president? Everything would be so different!" Mind you, I don't mean our country would be fixed instantaneously and we'd all be sipping out of golden goblets, but I mean that we'd have a reason to believe in our government for once. We'd be criticizing our president's missteps in policy rather than his overall intelligence. It would just be a complete paradigm shift. Maybe we'd go back to the Clinton days when families would gather around a television and watch their president speak to them. Does anyone really watch the State of the Union address anymore? Honestly?

Getting back on topic, Barack started out with kind of a mild stump speech, you could say. Just generally outlining his policies and what he believes in. This was not his typical rally fare: it was a bare bones explanation of the key tenets of his campaign that he talks about everywhere: get out of Iraq, jumpstart the economy with tax reform and restoring the living wage, and better health care, among a few other things I'm probably missing. It was inspiring, but not energizing the way his rallies are. It's hard for me to explain, but I feel like everyone there (by the way, a lot of older people, but a decent amount of college students) had this understanding that a lot of us supported Obama, but it was early in the morning and this wasn't the rock concert he had in Austin last Friday. Instead, we wanted to hear the answers we've read online and seen on YouTube to more questions and prove to the naysayers that he's not "all hat and no cowboy." For the record, that's a stupid saying. I'm sorry, but you have issues if that's your way of saying that someone is all talk.

Let me tell you that the people who say that Obama is idealistic and has no real plan for getting anything done has either been watching too much Fox News or too much Hillary. I heard nothing but plans at this Town Hall meeting. It was incredible. I don't know how to describe this feeling, because I've never had it before, but this guy represents how I feel about all the issues that matter to me most: health care, education, fiscal responsibility, taxes, the Internet, technology in general, welfare, and the list goes on. It's like I can finally breathe a sigh of relief that maybe not everyone in politics is completely corrupted. How many candidates for president in the past decade have run campaigns as clean as Barack? How many have actually kept talking about how they're going to cut out special interest groups and make deals between the people and the companies or issue leaders (I need a term here I can't think of because it's 1AM right now) where it really matters. The government has been usurped from us and given to these lobbyists, he's right. Some people say, "oh, that's just politics" and they let it slide. They don't care about the erosion of our privacy. They don't care about the degradation of treating people with equality. They don't care about the rug being pulled under us. Why do people know that Lindsay Lohan was in rehab but they don't know that without net neutrality we could give way to stifling innovation on the Internet? There is something very wrong and haunting about a society where we've become more concerned with our celebrities than our troops, many of whom are coming back from serving in Iraq and having a rough time transitioning back. Just because Barack Obama is saying this as a politician doesn't mean he doesn't believe in it. When I look into his eyes, I see promise. I don't see half-truths and pandering. Do you have any idea how refreshing that is?

Back to his having actual plans though; that's important. There was no fluff, no high level statements (not very many, at least) of what he intends to do, but real answers. I've been so jaded by the Bush administration that I figured that Town Halls were rigged events. As it turns out, this was not such an event. It was completely live, unfiltered questions. Let me tell you that I love Austin, because the questions were diverse and well-conceived (except for a childish one literally asked by a 9 year-old, though it was still a little cute). How do I know it wasn't rigged? Because a very good friend of mine, who will remain nameless at his behest, got to ask the very first question, "One thing that has been hampering growth in the software industry has been the activities of U.S. Patent Office who has been issuing bad patents. Do you have any plans to reform what has been going on with software patents?" Take a minute to watch his answer:


Barack Talks about Patents from Eptiger on Vimeo.

He concludes with Google for Government, which I didn't include because I was trying to keep down the ridiculously large size of these movie files (Canon Powershots aren't known for movie compression). It's going to be an online system where you can see every single dollar the government spends accounted for; so he's a strong advocate of transparency in the government. This is a complete reversal of the Bush administration, and I'd be excited to see what happens. Anyway, this answer was incredible to me because he did not at all gloss over the specifics of what the issue is and how we have to reform the patent office and that we should create a chief information officer to make sure the government is "wired". By the way, Lawrence Lessig from the Electronic Frontier Foundation endorses him, and it's no surprise when Barack supports deploying next generation broadband (spreading it all across the nation, mind you, additionally), protecting the neutrality of the Internet, and investing in the sciences. We're falling behind and losing jobs overseas because we're losing our status in science; and this is a travesty. I love that he believes in that. Oh, and whenever he would mention technology or something related to technology, he would point back at us because of my friend's question. I thought that was pretty neat.

The next question he received was about welfare: a woman who was earning just above the poverty line wasn't getting the benefits she needed when people next door to her keep having kids they can't afford and fleecing the government. I wish I had gotten Obama's response to this on camera because it was truly incredible: people who can work need to be working. He applauded Clinton's welform reforms as a good start and wants to give a $4000 in college assistance annually for community or national service among other things. My summary doesn't do his response justice: he really had it well thought out.

After that was a biggie: fiscal responsibility. The guy asking the question was willing to accept tax increases for these reforms that our economy direly needs (including relief for those stuck in the subprime mortgage crisis and screwed by debt from inaccurate loan disclosure), but he wanted to know how important keeping a balanced budget was to Barack. I loved this response, too: we establish a rule that we don't spend money unless we can get the money for it from cutting spending somewhere else or raising it elsewhere (as through cutting down on loopholes in corporate tax code that cost us a lot tax dollars and bringing the tax rate for the high income brackets back to the rates they were under Clinton). He was really emphatic that we not borrow from the Bank of China, and that was one of my "OMGI<3U" moments because he understands that we can't keep borrowing money from abroad. He ceded that he wouldn't have a "fetish" for reducing the national debt, a really strange term to use there but I suppose valid, because we need to invest in our country first. He also mentioned something I've kind of been thinking about also for a while: why oh why didn't we set aside money when we had a surplus back in the prosperity of the mid-90s? **UPDATE** Barackobama.com posted a video from the Town Hall with his answer to this question:



The next topic was education. Again, I'm a firm believer that we need to seriously reform our education if we want our children to have a bright future and we want our country to keep its competitive advantage for talented skilled workers. He hit a home run here for me. No Child Left Behind is a mandate that requires standardized testing that is unfunded by the federal government and takes money away from programs like music and PE that our schools so direly need to improve our children's capacity to learn and grow. It really doesn't make sense to administer a standardized test a few months into the school year to replace teaching material with teaching how to take a test, and it's better to have a test at the beginning and at the end of the year to gauge students' progress and provide valuable information to teachers. Plus, under NCLB the schools that underperform get penalized despite if weaker students end up progressing. His booklet goes on to talk about recruiting, preparing, retaining, and rewarding teachers as well as expanding summer and after school activities and addressing the dropout crisis. These are all truly excellent ideas for education. **UPDATE** They posted a video from later that day where the first couple of minutes is extremely similar to part of this answer in Austin.

I think that the next thing he spoke about was foreign aid with regard to a question about helping out the "motherland" (a Black guy did ask this question, though Africa was theoretical my motherland at some point also because of tectonic plate movements). The question was actually preceded with praise for running a clean campaign (earning a standing ovation) among a couple of other things. Unfortunately, I was so absorbed in this point at thinking over what else he had been saying that I can't give you a comprehensive rundown of what he said here. He was trying to get the point across that foreign aid is important for the long-term because we do need these countries to be part of the global economy. Any economist will tell you that free trade and a truly global economy is really efficient and very beneficial to consumers as a whole.

The last question was from a little girl (he wanted to give the last question to the next generation, and I have to admit that he picked a great diversity of people so this made sense in that context). She asked if he would sign her book (which I think he did later) and about jobs for young people and health care, as well. By young people, I think she meant 9 year-olds, not college students (though that's covered by child labor laws and his health care plan to guarantee coverage for children). Still, he answered the question as if it was for young adults. I wish I had recorded this answer, as well, to confront the claim that he's too idealistic. He spoke to us very frankly and explained quite pragmatically that he can't create all the jobs we need immediately or necessarily in his first term. It takes time and he's going to do all he can but he needs help and support from us, and I just loved that he wasn't promising us the impossible. He wants to put us back on the right directions and he's going to do this, this, and that to do so, but that's all he can do. He doesn't promise change in a box, he's trying to incite change from the bottom-up.

I think that's what I really love most about Obama: he wants to get people involved with the government. I can't remember the last candidate who really aimed to do that. For him, it's more than just a vague part of a hype speech, it's what he fundamentally believes in. We have to get involved in making change happen, and what he's really selling us is hope (by the way, I'm at the point of conclusions now so I'm past quoting things he said and making my own statements). This country needs hope though. Does Hillary give us hope? Look at this. She's more interested in muckraking than inspiring her supporters. I think that she lost the debate last week simply because she was being so catty and focusing more on Obama's campaign than his beliefs. That mistake cost her some swing voters who didn't understand how they differed but probably just saw Obama as being nicer overall and a better speaker (ok, that's arguable, but I think he is). Hillary wants partisan change, Obama wants to unify. Hillary will say she wants to unify, too, but only because she likes to play politics. Just read this uplifting editorial from the The Daily Texan; I'm not alone in claiming these things. Even if Obama can't achieve everything he believes and evangelizes, isn't it enough that he gets some of it done and promises the rest in the long-term? And how does he back up these promises? With the inspiration he plants in people that makes them want to start change from the bottom-up. You've probably already seen it with this amazing grassroots movement for his campaign, if you're from Texas. It's really quite incredible. Can we fix this country? Can we put it back on the right track? Can we recover from years of being gradually bludgeoned? Can we change the paradigm of how we look at our own government? Can we make a difference? The answer is quite simple: yes we can.

Texans: please vote today or on Tuesday, and then go caucus on Tuesday night. The eyes of the nation are upon us, and the Democratic primary is now partially in our hands.

Yahoo's Refusal?

I wrote this a couple of days ago, but didn't post it because I was intending to finish it out with tech news. My back log of articles and this post both grew too large for that though, so I apologize for the tardiness of this post. The other tech news will come tomorrow or Saturday and will be a huge post.

Not long after Bill Gates left Austin (in his private jet, I'm sure), a memo went out to Microsoft employees explaining how the takeover process would work and merging of cultures, almost implying that Yahoo had turned down the offer already. So as everyone hinted at and Steve Ballmer nearly cried out, Microsoft isn't going to rest until they own Yahoo. There's a lot to summarize about what has happened since the bid though, so let's start there.

There were a couple of knee-jerk reactions that Yahoo had. The first one is that they're worth more than $44.6 billion. Either they're bluffing or delusional, because some pundits believe that they're worth much less than that. At the time of the bid, they were worth less than $20 a share and only have come closer to Microsoft's $31 a share bid because of the bid. If Microsoft withdrew, I bet the stock would plummet. After all, Apple and Google's stocks have been dropping for a while now and they're much more stable companies. The other reaction is culture shock: the idea that Microsoft's "stodgy" environment would stifle innovation. Right, that's why Microsoft is the one whose stock hasn't been battered gradually over the past two years, because they don't take care of their employees. Having been to the Redmond campus, I can attest to it being pretty cool actually. I prefer Amazon, personally, and Google is obviously a lot more fun, but it's really not that bad considering how big and how old Microsoft is. I haven't been to Yahoo, but from how former employees have described their work life to me, it's really not quite that different. It may just be a little more risque and a little more open because it's a smaller company.

Yahoo has made no press release, as far as I can tell, saying that they formally decline the offer, but they keep saying that they don't want to do it, and so Microsoft has went ahead and explained that they're willing to send their own people to join the board of directors and establish an exchange offer, which basically implies cutting a deal directly with stockholders. This is what's commonly known as a hostile takeover. What's the problem with this? It's called "hostile" for a reason: it will hurt the morale of Yahoo's engineers and indicate that they care more about brand name, infrastructure, and customer base than talent. I heard Bill Gates say with my own ears that they are really interested in the engineers at Yahoo, but they would be willing to go forward with competing with Google on their own, if necessary. So basically, Microsoft is not so evil that they want to do this the hard way; they want to force Yahoo into submission. Maybe the proxy fight (i.e. forcing their own directors onto the board) will help them come to their senses, or maybe Microsoft will raise their bid (I think this is unlikely, but not impossible).

Microsoft has additionally sent out an e-mail to its employees explaining that they're going to work hard to merge the cultures of the two companies together (by the way, Yahoo will stay in California) after the deal is completed (a bit presumptuous, but it sends a clear message), but that employees should continue to compete with Yahoo until then. How has Yahoo reacted to this? In preparation for a hostile takeover, they have improved severance packages because it's definitely likely that people working in overlapping divisions will be laid off (though Microsoft isn't currently planning any) and they think it'll make executives more likely to consider the company's welfare rather than their own. This is a move that has upset shareholders. Some pension funds are suing Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft's higher bid last year while others are just impatient about Yahoo's holding off on this bid. In an act of strange defiance, they've purchased ad technology company Maven Networks, whose technology manages ads in videos, a quickly growing market. This just makes them all the juicier for Microsoft to swallow though, ultimately.

What's the bottom line of all this? The short and simple: Yahoo's Board is resisting Microsoft's offer despite the repeated requests from shareholders. Despite the fact that they haven't saved the company for the last 8 quarters, they don't want to cede to a giant and have turned to companies like Google and Time Warner for help, even. Microsoft believes that this would be an extremely strategic alliance and would create competition for Google, which we know is true because of how much Google is publicly flipping out over this acquisition. They'll stop at nothing for this to happen, in the ironic interest of increasing competition. Something I very much believe in and I would hope this deal will create. Are we feeding the Microsoft beast here? Maybe. If it doesn't happen though, we're guilty of feeding the Google beast though, and then we'll really see online innovation decline. I hope that Yahoo will just take the money and give up; it's not going to be that bad. I'm sure Bill Gates will even give Jeff Yang a lollipop.

Semi-unrelated to the takeover, I've been accidentally forgetting to talk about Yahoo Live, a service that launched a couple of weeks ago. I personally feel that it's an example of bad management at Yahoo and just proves the case for why Microsoft needs to step in. So what is this new service? Basically, Yahoo will host a live feed of your webcam, and then people can talk to you in a chatroom where you can also see a few of their live feeds in a tray at the bottom while chatting with them (well, anyone can who comes to your page). My initial reaction is that this is ridiculous: it's encouraging voyeurism, you get people saying "show us your boobs" in the female ones, and I don't get why people would want to be on camera like this. It does actually have it's uses: Diggnation loved the idea and wanted to use it for a town hall (they've probably already done this by now). It's perfect for that. I have a feeling that the initial drive were these online celebrities (I can't for the life in me remember their names) who had large cult followings of people who watched live feeds of them that were always on. So maybe Yahoo wants this to be the YouTube of that kind of stuff? I think that it's too much of a niche market and not mature enough for this. Do they really think that services like this will help save them?

2 Post Forthcoming

Sorry to be so behind on posting, but I have 2 posts coming up, one of which will be super long (addressing Yahoo's implicit refusal of the M$ offer) and the other will be a little shorter (addressing being at Obama's Town Hall today).

The long one is started but I'm adding in a slew of other tech news, the Obama one has to be written and will definitely be completed tonight. I'm trying to get both up tonight.

Bill Gates Comes to Austin

Before, I get to the topic at hand, there are a couple of other exciting news items I need to briefly mention. There are rumblings that the Writers' Strike is over. I don't think official press releases, but it sounds like it is effectively over; the details are still unclear. Shows like Heroes, Desperate Housewives, and the Office will be back on within the next couple of months. If I see more details, I'll post them here. Also, Barack Obama has taken Hawaii and Wisconsin, which gives him a 10 state winning streak over Clinton. Early voting started in Texas yesterday, and apparently the caucus is on March 4. Anyway, the debate is tomorrow night and I hope I can make a post on that soon (though I'm going on a retreat Friday evening to Saturday afternoon).

I've been excited for a few weeks now because that's how long I knew that Bill Gates would be coming to UT; I just didn't have the details until last week. I may not like all of Microsoft's products or agree with their tactics, but I still idolize Bill Gates because he pioneered an industry, he is a phenomenal visionary, and he's really a fantastic philanthropist. Say what you will about Microsoft, but Bill Gates is a better man than Steve Jobs probably ever will be. So I felt honored that before my time was up here to have been able to see him in person. Even President Powers and Dean Rankin came (as well as Turing Award winner Dr. Allen Emerson). I believe this was the second stop on his 5 campus tour, and high-profile tech people always seem to overlook Austin so I was really glad that he recognized that some talented people definitely come out of UT Austin. This was semi-technical talk aimed at CS/CE majors so you're not likely to have gotten a whole lot out of it if you didn't care about technology. That having been said, it was also not a Steve Jobs keynote. It wasn't glamorous or flashy, it was pretty frank. He's not the best public speaker, but he's not too shabby at putting his thoughts into words either. He also doesn't say "uh" or "um" or anything like that. Anyway, if you want to see it in it's entirety, it'll be online this Friday.

He was introduced by the winner of his own scholarship, which I thought was kind of neat, and then went right into the popular video from CES of what he'll do when he retires. The CES version is a little different; the joke with Clooney in this one was that Gates wanted to be in Ocean's 14 and Jon Stewart had an additional joke that he had stolen the mic he had on him the last time he was on the Daily Show. There were a couple of other minor changes as well, plus a bloopers reel. The next 10-15 minutes was stuff I already knew about, but it was still nice to hear it from his mouth. He emphasized the trend of processors to multiple cores rather than faster clock speeds and the need for programmers to design with that in mind, as well as how he was gladdened by the research going on at UT in this area. The other topic he talked about that wasn't really anything new was ways for natural input. He had a term for it that had the word "natural" in it that I can't remember, but he mentioned Surface and the Wii and how the keyboard and mouse may never go away but advances still are being made and are important in more intuitive human-computer interaction.

Now the good stuff started (or what I thought was the more interesting stuff). He started talking about linking business with research, and how excited he was 15 years ago to start the Microsoft Research group. He really loves collaboration with universities, not just CS departments. And he actually went into a specific example with neurobiology. Apparently, it takes something like 1 million petabytes (1 PB = 1,000 TB) to model an entire human brain, and it's more manageable for a rat brain (1,000 PB), but they managed to fit a small cube of a rat brain in 1 petabyte. So Bill was just playing around with visualizations of it on the screen and it looked pretty cool. I always knew that computer science had applications in Biology, but I don't think it really set in until Bill Gates shoved it in my face how important and how incredible this sort of interdepartmental collaboration can be.

The next part of his talk was equally engaging: attending to the lowest 2 billion people of the world. As he rightfully claims, spreading technology to the world is regarded as only diffusion to those who can afford it. If you don't have money then your vote in what happens in the world simply doesn't count, and he recognizes this imbalance. This is the second time this semester that I've been inspired by people doing this kind of work. He talked about how they took DVD players and TVs to farmers, showed them better ways of doing things and how they're done in other places, and the farmers really took to it. In fact, they were rather competitive about it and wanted to improve further so that they could be on the DVD as well for making some new breakthrough in farming technique. He also talked about how ridiculous it is that there's more research done into baldness than into malaria. That kind of goes more with the not having a vote if you don't have money. If you're poor and dying of malaria, it's alright to the world, but if you're moderately wealthy and have money then it's a really big deal. He recognizes this disparity and his Foundation tries to help alleviate these issues wherever it can, is my understanding.

That was the end of his formal talk, but then there was the ever-painful Q&A. I knew that we'd have some people asking stupid questions, though I was definitely surprised that no one took a jab at Microsoft's antitrust litigation. When one guy said that he had a comment rather than a question I was a little worried, but he just proclaimed China's love for Bill Gates and gave him a present (security was surprisingly laxed, so I'm glad it wasn't a bomb or something equally bad). The guy who gets my award for worst question bragged about helping with the Obama campaign, how he interviewed with Microsoft last month (by the way, that means he got turned down because their interview turnaround time is real tight), and how he's applying for a job at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was wanting interview advice and a recommendation (what a cute joke). His answer to this question was actually good though: the foundation apparently focuses on 3 areas - infectious diseases, propagating technology to those who can't afford it, and spreading knowledge. People that die every day because those who can make a difference don't care to or can't afford to is a big deal, and so that's a big deal. There's always this dispute that there's no point in spreading computers to villages who can barely feed themselves, but I disagree with that because technology can help these societies function better and lead to a better quality of life. That goes hand-in-hand with learning though. The overarching value of the Foundation is that every human life should be treated equally, and I like that. It's simple and to the point. The girl after him actually asked the best question (about the issue of women in CS) and started out by saying, "I felt really bad that I didn't bring a gift, but that last guy just made me feel a lot better." I wish I could've shook her hand. Anyway, his response to that was pretty standard: it's a huge issue, and the attrition rate among women for science (and, more significantly, for CS) grows with age. Maybe the problem is that men aren't encouraging women enough, or maybe the field just seems more intimidating because it's male-dominated. Whatever the case, he's definitely behind diversity.

There was actually another markedly ridiculous question: someone has the gall to ask how far Microsoft was willing to go to acquire Yahoo and how much money Bill thought that they were worth. That deserves a slap to the face, in my opinion. What an insult. Does this guy hold stock in the company or something? How's it any of his business. Bill took time out of his busy schedule to talk about what's going on in technology right now at our little corner of the US and what he feel really matters in the world right now, outside of just Microsoft's little microcosm, and this guy asks a question that Bill obviously can't answer. As I've said before, I believe that they'd be willing to go as far as a hostile takeover, but I hope Yahoo wouldn't be so naive and just take the generous buyout offer. Amazingly enough, Bill had an interesting answer: search engine ads are the one form of advertising where you have to pay without getting anything in return, really. Each one of us contributes $80 a year (on average) in revenues to Google and get nothing in return. Of course, he's kind of overlooking the fact that we get to use their search engine and other free Google services, but I think I see his point. With television the benefit is immediate to advertising: being entertained with engaging or funny or scary stories. Google holds kind of a monopoly and, as a result, doesn't really have to give us anything extra for staring at their ads. Competition is important in this field. I know it's a funny thing to hear from Bill Gates, but competition is important and I wholeheartedly agree that Google cannot stay the uncontested king of search for much longer or else we probably will see a degradation in quality from them. He wrapped up the answer by saying that Yahoo has smart people and Microsoft is giving them time to look at the offer and evaluate what they want to do. Very diplomatic, but he shouldn't have had to answer the question at all, in my opinion, so I'd say he did pretty well. I wonder if this is some precursor to how MSN plans to compete with Google search? Is there something big they have planned for consumers to reward them to searching with MSN? It's cool to think that maybe there is, but it'd be presumptuous of me to suggest that some master plan lies in a simple answer to a dumb question. I guess we'll see what happens though.

All in all, it was an interesting talk. Or maybe you found this post boring and are glad you didn't see it or catch the live webcast. I definitely drew on some inspiration from it and I honestly felt like Bill was pretty down-to-earth. My friend disagrees with me, but I just didn't see a facade about him. He's the same geek I read about when I was 11 years old and dreamed of monumental success like that. He'll probably always be that same guy in my mind though unless he does something really drastic. When you consider him in the context of Microsoft, you should realize that all corporations do bad things whether you want to believe them or not. Apple and Google do bad things whether or not the press tells you about them or you choose to read about them (e.g. litigation against fans and censorship), so don't hate Bill Gates for the actions of Microsoft. Instead, realize that he did something pretty amazing for this industry and continues to give back to this world and his vision never stops. As old as he is he spoke like he was much younger in terms of his use of modern technological jargon and concise understanding of what was going on in the world (when you see the CEO of Sony speak, you feel embarrassed for him). I think the one thing to take away from this talk is that we have to work together in this world to make progress, and we should never lose hope as long as we continue to do that.

Help Save Ruckus

I got my super pink wristband this morning to see Bill Gates! He's coming to UT on Wednesday so you can bet that I'll be blogging about it later that day. Hopefully it'll be inspirational or educational or both. Additionally, there will be an Obama-Clinton debate broadcast nationally from campus and I can't imagine I'll be able to get a ticket but I'll probably talk about that on Thursday as well. So it's kind of a strange week, though I'll have another normal post this weekend, I'm sure. Oh, and thanks for the feedback on my teaser. I've received as much feedback from people that hate it as people who are intrigued. For the record: the large amount of text is on purpose because it's a teaser. I'm low on footage here because we barely started 2 weeks ago; give me a break!

I'm here to write a brief post supporting Ruckus. If you're not a college student, you may not care about the rest of this post. Basically, Ruckus is a completely legal way to download free music. How is this possible? Advertising on the site and on the music player you use to play the music because it's strapped with DRM.

I know, I know: DRM is evil. I tend to agree, but the whole point of this site is to show labels that music can be distributed online for free to poor demographics like college students and still earn royalties. If we don't support Ruckus and piracy continues on an upward trend among college students, we're basically telling them that we're not interested in free music unless we can steal it. I know that's not the actual case, but these people at the RIAA barely have functioning brains. The point is that Ruckus was such a great idea and tries so hard that I hate for it to end.

It has a pretty enormous selection of mainstream music and some stuff that's off-the-beaten path. I've found a lot of indie music on there and some Latin music as well, so it does include some obscure stuff. I discovered artists like Snow Patrol, Michael Buble, KT Tunstall, John Legend, Jars of Clay, Damien Rice, The Decemberists, Bloc party, and several others because of it. These are artists I definitely wouldn't have bought in the stores on my own and probably wouldn't have even gone to the trouble of trying to find illegally, but I've actually bought some of these albums (to not be bound by DRM and play them in my car and stuff) in stores after becoming addicted to them on Ruckus. It's just a great way to try albums before you buy them and check out new artists. Oh, and for a fee you can transfer the songs to your mp3 player.

It's not perfect, no doubt. The site could use a major UI overhaul. The DRM is annoying, but you can play the songs in Windows Media Player if you want to be mean and take away their ad revenues. The player always shows a banner ad, even when minimized (the banner ad isn't visible if it's not in the foreground). You have to renew your licenses on these songs every month unless you just listen to them every month (that automatically renews the songs you play). You can't really create playlists with the songs. Still, it opens you up to trying out new music without the guilt of having possibly regretted the purchase and you don't lose anything by getting Ruckus, really. When you hear a song on the radio you like you can check out the album. Or maybe an artist you hear about all the time, like Muse, but never bothered checking out because you don't want to bother with P2P and you can't afford the album. It's just too interesting of a project for us to let it die. Please, use Ruckus and tell your friends about it. They're seriously considering shutting down because of their user base size, I'm not making it up.