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)!

Apple Undercuts the Zune

Apple's Rock and Roll Event

I hate to say it, but the biggest news from the past couple of weeks is Apple's event. This isn't unfortunate because I have a vendetta with Apple products (I think they're very high quality, in fact), but it wasn't a very exciting event. Not every year can be an iPhone year, but it sounds like it was still a good event. You can get all the juicy details here but the gist of it is: new iTunes, new Nano, and new Shuffle. The new iTunes 9 allows you to share music across multiple machines, has a re-designed store (geared more towards sharing than before, in a legal way), features endless genius mixes, and adds iTunes LP for enhanced liner notes. The only brand new feature here really is the home sharing thing, but this doesn't seem very different from what Windows Media Player already does. The new Nano is kind of nifty, I have to admit.



It comes in some beautiful colors, features a camera (for pictures and video), has a larger display, includes a pedometer, and allows you to pause live radio. Interestingly enough, it also has a mic and a speaker. More than ever, the Nano feels like just a small iPod. It's not a mind-blowing update to the Nano series, but it does look great overall.

The Shuffle update was much less eventful: it supports normal headphones (like it always should've) and comes in 5 colors, plus a limited edition stainless steel.

What I really wanted to get to were the prices: they're lower and come at an inopportune time for Microsoft with the Zune HD looming in the very near future (as in, tomorrow). The Shuffle is $60 for 2 GB and $80 for 4 GB, the new Nano is $180 for 16 GB and $150 for 8 GB, and the iPod Touch was dropped down to $200 for 8 GB, $300 for 32 GB, and now there's a 64 GB flavor for $400. Comparatively, the Zune HD is $290 for 32 GB and $220 for 16 GB. This definitely takes away some of Microsoft's thunder, and Apple may have timed this event for the purpose of undercutting the Zune HD's great price points. In the end, this is all great for consumers, but I hope that Microsoft doesn't get sidled out of the market by an event proclaiming only incremental updates. I'd like to see some real competition for Apple aside from just Sansa, which has a pitiful share of the market compared to Apple's more than 75% share, which leaves Microsoft with a single digit share of the pie. I'm not a fan of Sansa's showings and I'm a little afraid that if the Zune HD fails that we won't see innovation in portable audio for years. So here's to hoping for a clean fight!

Palm Pixi

Who is this guy that Palm is hiring to name their products nowadays? I mean seriously, is this guy high out of his mind? Treo and Centro were good names, I thought, but the Pre and Pixi are really bad names. It's pretty emasculating for a guy to carry around a phone named 'Pixi'. Anyway, it's official now and it's what we suspected: a candybar webOS phone akin to what Centro was to the Treo. Unfortunately, it'll be exclusive to Sprint, but it will be out this holiday season. To be fair, I'm on Sprint and don't think it's as bad as people say: my coverage, especially 3G, is excellent, the pricing is fair, and I love the new Any Mobile feature (free calls to any mobile phone in the country with an Everything Plan), but their customer service sucks. Still, I was hoping that Palm would expand to other carriers in the spring with webOS. They still can, but I don't think Pixi is going to do a whole lot for Palm or Sprint.



The software is pretty much what you'd expect from seeing the Pre; the only major difference is that it now adds LinkedIn and Yahoo to the list of sites it can sync contacts from, and will include a Facebook app that looks better than the terrible website Facebook has for webOS. On the outside, it definitely looks slick. It's even slimmer than the iPhone 3GS, has the nice back plate that you normally only get with the touchstone for the Pre, and keys on the keyboard are higher so they're supposedly easier to type on than the Pre (mind you, I'm quite comfortable typing on my Pre so I have high hopes for the Pixi keyboard). Under the hood, it's less powerful than the Pre but looks like it performs quite well from Engadget's videos.

I know I started out negative on the Pixi, and while I don't think it'll be groundbreaking (since it's staying on Sprint), I think it's going to turn more heads and bring more people into webOS who were turned off by the Pre's slider or keyboard or the fact that it was first generation. I'm really concerned that Palm won't make it to Verizon with webOS before the iPhone, or that it'll never be a success on AT&T because of the iPhone, but I do hope it flourishes because I'm really loving it. I still haven't had time to play with the SDK, but I'm liking the apps on it so far (new ones every Friday) and all the basics of the phone have worked out great for me with very few glitches compared to my old Treo 650. Plus, it looks like the app store really isn't going to be crazy strict like Apple's despite a media player being turned away. Palm reached out stating that it was only rejected for use of unsupported APIs and they'd like to find a way for the application to get released but have nothing against it being a homebrew application freely available outside of the app store. Now that's how you're supposed reject an application, not with smoke and mirrors like Apple does.

Government Control of the Internet

A cybersecurity bill has been proposed that gives the government the power to control the Internet (e.g. cut people off) in an emergency situation, and the Internet was not pleased. I agree with them: this bill is flat out stupid. I'm not a big proponent of big government, and I don't think the government has the technical expertise to manage the Internet in a time of crisis. Does it really need to, anyway? The Internet is bigger than the power of the U.S. government, and it's not really clear, as far as I can tell, what the use case for this really is. I feel like it gives too much power in the case of a situation that's hypothetical. There are cyber security threats all the time that are handled by private companies, and of course the military handles cybersecurity threats against them, but I can't envision a situation where the government would need to be involved, especially since the Internet isn't a public utility.

Best Buy Employees Spread Misinformation

This story was too crazy for me to not talk about it briefly. It's been confirmed that Microsoft has provided training documentation to Best Buy employees that attacks Linux and, by most Linux users' account, slanders Linux. Like the "I'm a Mac" ads, the information provided wasn't full of outright lies, but anyone familiar with Linux would be able to explain why the claims aren't true. It's disappointing that Microsoft is standing on the cusp of their best product release since XP and yet they're doing crap like this. This came to light a couple of weeks ago when a Best Buy employee leaked the training documentation, and Daily Finance then followed up and got an official statement from Microsoft on it.

I have two points I'd like to make. First of all, this shows that Microsoft is scared of Linux. If they didn't feel threatened they wouldn't bother with this. 5 years ago they scoffed at the mention of Linux, but with the popularity of the open-source operation system growing every year (albeit, not to a mainstream size yet) I guess they decided that it had reached a critical mass. I think Linux contributors should take this as a compliment, to be honest. The second point is that this shows why brick and mortar stores are losing business. Retail is a crazy industry and if you're not going to raise the bar and you're going to choose to provide a bad customer experience by spreading questionable information then you deserve to lose business. I haven't been to a big box electronics store in months and since I joined Amazon Prime I literally have had no desire to do so, especially since (as I mentioned a while ago) a Fry's employee try to pimp Monster cables to me with bullshit. Ok, time to get off my soapbox.

Quickies

I have a few more stories I'd like to cover before I start preparing for my recruiting trip this weekend (Longhorn CS majors should stop by the Amazon booth next Monday at the career fair, for sure - I've got some fun questions lined up for people).

Google has announced a plan to develop a syncing service for the Chrome browser to sync bookmarks and other browser data to the clouds. Clearly, they're gearing up for Chrome OS.

YouTube is looking into movie rentals, which is just one more avenue Google is investigating in its longstanding hunt to monetize YouTube. It doesn't seem unreasonable that we could see movie rentals on YouTube next year given that you can already rent movies digitally from the Playstation 3, Netflix, and Amazon Video on Demand, among others.

More solid rumors surfaced regarding an Apple Tablet and the possibility of it coming out as soon as November. It seriously does sound real this time, but only time will tell.

Tech Radar has a really cool article up about OLED highlighting its advantages and disadvantages. If only it was cheaper to produce!

Sony pushed out version 3.0 of the PS3 firmware (aka XMB, the Cross Media Bar), and it may be the most drastic change yet with animated themes, a fancier default theme, a better notification area in the top right corner, improvements to the friends list and trophy section, simultaneous output across audio connectors (still not sure what that means), more avatars, and a What's New that the PS3 boots up to that features new updates in the store and the games you recently played. Very cool stuff (I'm a fan of the simple elegance of XMB).

I don't know if I'll be able to post next week since I'll be in Austin Friday through Tuesday morning, but I'll do my best to get something up here next week.

Google's [N]OS

Google Chrome OS

Every other tech blogger is talking about Google Chrome OS, and since it was the biggest news of last week I'd be remiss to not talk about it myself. Wikipedia (the ultimate authority for information on anything, of course) defines an operating system (OS) as "an interface between hardware and user...responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer". To break it down even more: it abstracts away the details of the hardware its run on so that software manufacturers can easily develop the software you love/hate to use. Of course, you probably are already familiar with the biggest ones on the market right now: Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and, probably to a much lesser extent (save the geeks out there), Linux. Linux is the only one of the three that's open source, and as such it comes in many flavors, or distributions, so that it's customized for the end user in terms of what's supported right out of the box and what it's optimized for. Companies on Linux tend to use Red Had Enterprise Linux while a lot of individuals and universities tend to stick to Ubuntu, and there are many more in between. In fact, webOS (the OS for the Palm Pre) is running on Linux as is Google's
Android mobile platform (currently only available on the G1 in the U.S.). Typically, Linux companies make their money off of support.

Ok, that's enough of a crash course in operating systems, so what is this Google Chrome OS thing? In a very terse nutshell, it's Google's flavor of Linux designed for netbooks (i.e. cheap, small, highly portable laptops) fitted with the Google Chrome browser. This is why I call it a NOS (read: No S) and crassly called shenanigans after a couple of beers last week at trivia. I've been called out by multiple people on this: it is, by definition, an OS. However, this is only because it's built on Linux. They're not really developing a new OS, just re-packaging Linux for a more mainstream audience and calling it their own (granted, with the disclosure that Linux is running under the hood). A part of me thinks it's cool that rather than re-inventing the wheel they're building on a great product that more people should be doing, but another part of me feels ripped off that they're getting all this free press from combining two old technologies.

To be fair, it's not a bad idea: building an OS that is tightly integrating with the Internet we've come to know and love. It's really quite incredible how far along the world has come as far as embracing the Internet in just the last 10 years. There was no YouTube or social media or even the idea of blogging as it stands today - it was almost the wild west of the Internet age. Things have come to the point now where a lot of average consumers don't do a whole lot on their computer that's not in their web browser, aside from maybe word processing, spreadsheets, or slide presentations. Meanwhile, Microsoft came out with XP, which was a solid and time appropriate OS, followed by Vista, which wasn't a bad OS but was plagued with development hitches and being heavy overall. This was ironic because people often complain that their computer are too slow as it is even despite getting newer and newer machines. Apple made incremental improvements to OS X, which were great but they've really been playing it safe for a long time now with OS X. No one has taken up the banner of an extremely minimalist OS. The reason that I've come to appreciate Chrome OS in the past week is that at work I've become accustomed to realizing what we really need in the software we're currently developing rather than all our long-term goals. I never short-change opportunities to make our long-term outlook better, but it's really important to not compromise getting done what needs to get done this year.

I believe that Chrome OS was born out of a fear that the trend of installing Android on netbooks would continue and give Google a black eye since Android is not intended for use in mobile devices bigger than the size of your average smartphone and is optimized for very different operations from a netbook. If Android gains steam in netbooks, they have to build Android as being good for phones and netbooks, or else speak out against their own platform for use in netbooks and make themselves look bad. So, in a way, creating Chrome OS makes a lot of sense for them. It's intended to have a thin UI and their full-featured Chrome browser, hopefully with improved security functionality (it's not terrible as is, but if it's going to be the main attraction then it could stand to be beefed up).

TechRadar has a good explanation of the announcement blog post and points out rightly that it is going to end up being placed as a competitor to Windows 7 even though it's not going to be scaled to meet the functions that Windows 7 is intended for since it's merely a front for a web browser. Apparently, it'll be available for developers later this year and shipped with netbooks in the latter half of next year. Rafe Needleman at CNet makes another great point about it: netbook users so far, on average, haven't been all that impressed with netbooks running Linux. This isn't a sleight at all to Linux on netbooks, that's just based on the sales figures of Linux netbooks versus XP ones. With Windows 7 RC1 weighing in as more performant than XP, it's going to be an uphill battle for Chrome OS once it comes out an Windows 7 is already established in the market.

If things weren't interesting enough already: the products under the Google Apps brand are now officially out of beta (including Gmail, Calendar, and Docs). So Chrome OS is trying to sell everyone on trusting web applications and is removing the beta tag from their other services to help promote that. It's smart, but I wouldn't short change Microsoft amidst all this. It's already well known that they're going to be beefing up Office in its forthcoming release to have collaborative features online that compete with Google Docs except for fully supporting all the Office formats in a richer way. There's also Gazelle, which aims to add significantly more security to the web browsing experience and could someday replace Internet Explorer.

All in all, I'd call Google Chrome OS a well-calculated experiment for Google. I respect their noble aims of speed, security, and simplicity, even if it isn't radically innovative. It is the next logical step in our acceptance of web applications since we now have smartphones with fully-realized web browsers, and so people with those phones are going to typically be more excited about web services than shrinkwrapped software. Whether or not they want this same experience from their netbook though or if they want what Windows 7 can provide remains to be seen.

Firefox Continues to Swallow Market Share

I'm really impressed by the beastly download numbers Firefox 3.5 has gotten weighing in at 5 million downloads in its first 24 hours (and is now at over 14 million downloads). This doesn't best the 8 million downloads for the release day of Firefox 3. I didn't know until reading that article that Firefox had been downloaded more than 500 million times last year, which is incredible. To top it off, Internet Explorer has lost 11.4% market share since March while Firefox 3.5 already claims 2.5%, which almost seems impossibly high to me except for the fact that it makes sense that 10%+ of Firefox users are huge fans anxious for upgrades. It may be a couple of months yet for the dust to settle on this upgrade an the IE upgrade to version 8 for us to see a more definitive trend though.

Meanwhile, we have improved performance and stability to look forward to in future releases of Firefox with the start of the Electrolysis project to investigate gains to be had from multiprocess browsing. In computer science, it feels like the solution to any performance problem is to throw more hardware at it or parallelize into multiple threads (5 cooks in a kitchen working on different parts of an entree will be much more efficient than one guy doing it all in serial). These improvements probably won't be ready until Firefox 4.0, at the earliest, but it will certainly bring it up to speed with one of the more innovative concepts that Google's Chrome browser brought to the table at its release.

DPRK Gets Cyber Frisky

Yesterday was a pretty eventful week in security. The biggest thing that happened was the crazy Distributed Denial of Service (DOS) attack staged last week against dozens of government and commercial sites in the US and South Korea, which North Korea is alleged to be behind. The 50,000 infected computers in the botnet actually had a program capable of wiping the machines clean to the point of being completely inoperable, though this functionality was not triggered (possibly to be triggered at a later date). That's pretty scary. To make matters worse, we can't actually prove that it was North Korea, so far. Given their lack of tech savvy, it's much more likely to have come from China given their recent track record. Maybe they were trying to incriminate North Korea, but what did they have to gain from these attacks? Was it a cover to steal information?



If that didn't scare you, Goldman Sachs was revealed to have been compromised last weekend by a Russian immigrant who stole top secret trading codes. Compromising a financial company like Sachs could unfairly game the stock and bonds market for ill gained profits. Amdist all the issues the financial markets have faced in the past couple of years, its no big surprise that this story didn't get too big last week. It shows that maybe these companies aren't as secure as we trust them to be and I hope that it'll encourage them to audit their current security measures (including Goldman Sachs).

In somewhat less scary news, Twitter has started suspending the accounts of users with the Koobface virus, which spreads itself through malicious tweets for a bogus URL that ultimately installs malware on the victim machine programmed to receive remote instructions. I'm definitely impressed with Twitter's aggressive measures to try to minimize the effects of this virus. I hope that they continue this trend, but I'd really like to seem them have their own URL shortening service built-in to the platform to filter out malicious links like these.

Now that you're good and scared, Techradar has an awesome roundup of tools that will fit on a flash drive to keep you safe while you're on-the-go. Go download them now!

The 7 Types of Best Buy Employees

This is the kind of Internet story that's always fun to read. Early last week, Gizmodo posted an article with a graphic that outlines the 7 types of Best Buy employees you'll find in any Best Buy store no matter where you are. It was pretty brutal but definitely funny as you've almost certainly met one of these people if you've ever been in a Best Buy, though narrowing all Best Buy workers to 7 types is definitely a tad harsh.

This article made its way in a lot of people's inboxes and RSS readers, and Best Buy could've easily ignored it as simply one blog's jab at their image. Instead, their CMO responded with the 1 type of Gizmodo blogger. I have to admit, it's pretty funny. Gizmodo accepted it in good humor in an attempt to spit in the face of the intent of the post, and they felt successful even though the feeling I'm getting from comments I'm reading is that Gizmodo got owned.

Why am I talking about this? Besides being a fun story, it's a great example of the right way to deal with a situation like this. Best Buy didn't make a big deal out of it, but a simple blog post dealt with it for just the audience that heard about it in the first place rather than the whole country via a mass media outlet. Plus, it wasn't a stodgy professional response, it showed that they actually had a soul. I was impressed. I'm still not going to shop at Best Buy because I absolutely adore Prime and hate the customer service I get at Best Buy (it's also not at a convenient location for me), but at least I have some more respect for them now.

Everything Else

I'm way over the time I allotted for this post (which happens every week so I don't know why I'm consistently surprised), but I do have some more articles to at least point you to for your own reading pleasure.

ASCAP is now going after people who embed YouTube videos of content protected by ASCAP in a slimy way to try to tell everyone how greedy they are about what they own. If they really want to mark their territory they should just walk into people homes and piss on their music collections.

The Boston Globe ran an article I enjoyed reading about why voicemail is dying. They're completely right, in my opinion: I hate getting voicemails because I don't have time to listen while at the office or it's not easy while to while walking home from the gym, but a text is much easier for me to process while I have headphones on.

Microsoft's XML rendering engine takes on deciding how it thinks the XML specification should work instead of how it does in rendering your XML. Aside from being totally contrary to the whole point of a standard, now that it's been done they can never undo this wrong. Ugh.

Twitter has been experimenting with ads on select profiles. I don't think this is the cash cow they need, but at least they've finally started trying things out.

Maximum PC has a wonderful Windows 7 upgrade guide including a bit of information I actually didn't know when asked the other week: each edition will include the 32-bit and 64-bit installations for both types of processors. For those who don't know what that means: you can use more than 4 GB of RAM with Windows 7 without getting a separate disk.

Rather than dropping the price of the PS3, it looks like Sony will be selling a bundle through Best Buy with arguably the two hottest games (Killzone 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4) for the standard $400 for 80 GB. Subtracting the price of the two games, this is about on par with was the PS2 cost at launch ($300), but they should really still drop the base price.

(Warning: shameless self-promotion) Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 last week by about 15% to $300, which makes the gap between it and the DX more pronounced and makes it a much better deal. From playing with it hands-on, I have to say that it's a pretty slick, fun device. While I'm doing shameless promotion: Amazon Wireless also launched last week selling phones for Verizon and AT&T with the goal of bringing the tried and true Amazon customer experience to an audience that typically has a rough time buying phones.

Speaking of phones: Verizon and Sprint have committed to restricting all future phones they take on to having WiFi support. This is a great step forward to reducing consumer confusion in buying phones from them.

The Blackberry Tour launched today.


VideoLAN finally reading version 1.0! This is the best video player out there for watching any kind of content on any operating system.

The people working on the HTML 5 spec couldn't agree on a video codec, so the standard has dropped creating an open source video codec. This is unfortunate news, but at least the standard supports embedding video.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Microsoft Takes on Google...For Real This Time

Bing

Before I start, does "Bing" really give you that positive a connotation? Yeah, it was the last name of a character on "Friends", but that doesn't amount to much. Anyway, Microsoft has had a hell of a time trying to compete with Google's chokehold on search with Live Search and MSN, so they decided to try out something new in Bing. They're investing $80 to $100 million in advertising on it to try to make people aware that the search experience they have right now could be so much better with Bing. It actually isn't too bad of an idea since people really use Google for the brand name - it's not like they compared it to many competitors.

The reviews of Bing so far aren't that bad. It's a clean interface and it gives you a sidebar with smart spinoff searches that try to get at what you want (for example, type in a TV show and one of the things on the left sidebar will be "Theme Song"). The results aren't always on par or better than Google, but the search experience is definitely decidedly different. It tries to encourage you to help it refine down to what you're really looking for and has customized ways to do this for different subjects. Try a type of food and it'll have a Local tab that will let you filter by atmosphere, price range, etc. Try videos and you can play videos on rollover rather than having to open them in new tabs or hit "play" and wait for them to load. The little things like that are kind of neat.

The reason I decided to highlight Bing today, besides the fact that it was a slow news week, is that it's just funny that Google has been a big deal for over 10 years now and Microsoft still hasn't been able to put a sizable enough dent in its market share. To be fair, neither has Yahoo. I think search is a fascinating market because people are so complacent - they like Google only because it's familiar and simple. I don't know whether or not Bing stands a chance or not, but I think that a lot of advertising is definitely going to be necessary for it to get off the ground. If Microsoft were really smart though, they'd be going after mobile phones. Put out strong search applications and appliances for major cell phone releases soon after they come out and try pushing that. Mobile search is the one place people are going to be more picky because time is important to them. If you're searching for a restaurant nearby and your friend is driving, time is super important. Google has some great mobile applications, but I think it's somewhere that Bing can get their foot in the door and make a name for themselves if they can really answer users' mobile needs.

Microsoft's Netbook Limitation

This is another quirky Microsoft story: there are rumors that they're planning on limiting the cheap version of Windows 7 to laptops no bigger than 10.2 inches. This could, in effect, limit the largest netbook you'll see to 10.2 inches since any bigger and the manufacturer will not be able to keep a competitive price due to the Windows 7 licensing fees. Of course, they could sell Linux netbooks in any size, but people are going to be more interested in a familiar OS, and Apple hasn't shown an interest in netbooks because they think it's beneath them (seriously, they think they're too high-end to sell netbooks, I don't have the time to hunt for the article but they've said something to this effect), so that just leaves Windows machines.

Is this fair? To be honest, I think so. The fact that they're selling a cheaper version of Windows 7 to netbooks is already sort of a concession, and they have to protect themselves against the slippery slope of normal laptops being called netbooks and manufacturers shaking them down for lower prices. Also, any bigger than 10.2" seriously is a laptop. I have co-workers with 13" laptops and they don't call them netbooks because they're not designed for people with child-like hands (I kid, I kid - netbook keyboards aren't that bad).

Zune HD Announced

Here's a story I'm excited about: Microsoft finally validated all the rumors about the Zune HD by just coming clean about it. It looks pretty sexy, in my opinion:



It's a full-on touch screen mp3 player (like the iPod Touch) with a few important additions. It has an OLED screen, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that OLED screens are beyond gorgeous. It's shocking how great they look even in small forms. It allows you to output via HDMI, which is a very forward-thinking step with digital distribution growing in the HD realm since you can't otherwise carry digital copies of movies easily to friends' places. Playing on the HD name, it will also broadcast HD radio, which usually carries more artist and track information than you can get from terrestrial radio and is, supposedly, much better quality. I don't think it ever really caught on, but it's a neat little feature to throw in there. It's also WiFi enabled with a full web browser.

As you can tell, it's definitely a direct competitor with the iPod Touch much like the previous Zune was to the scroll wheel iPods. I really want this device to not fail miserably, because I like seeing companies try to innovate and compete with Apple. I don't think this is the most innovative thing Microsoft could've come up with, but it does look slick, and I'm really interested to see how it'll integrate with Xbox Live. If they handle it well, it could be a killer app feature. Microsoft has no handheld gaming system, so maybe they want this to be it? They'll be revealing more on the Xbox Live integration this week at E3, so I'm sure I'll have more to talk about next Sunday.

Pre Syncs with iTunes, and More Randomness

Yep, Jon Rubinstein announced last week at All Things D (a conference put on by the Wall Street Journal) that the Pre can sync with iTunes. I wonder how many rules they broke by doing that. There's no way that's sanctioned by Apple, and Rubinstein was SVP of the iPod division until he left in 2006 (and subsequently joined Palm's Board in 2007), so am I crazy or can't Apple just sue him for sharing trade secrets? I'm sure his NDA only lasted for like 18 months (which makes me wonder how he was allowed to work for Palm since he definitely knew about the iPhone before he left Apple), but it's still secret information as far as being able to have a third party device identifies as an iPod by iTunes. In any case, you can sync your Pre to iTunes until Tim Cook leads Apple's legal team to Palm's doorstep with pitchforks and torches.

The real shocker (for some, at least) is that Verizon claims they'll be getting the Pre in January. They are a CDMA network so it's not a huge technological leap. I think we already heard that Sprint's exclusivity would be short-lived, but I wonder how much of a boost the Pre will give them if people on competing carriers will be getting webOS phones (AT&T and Verizon, at least) before this time next year. Anyway, Verizon will also be getting the Storm 2 in January, which is supposed to be a huge improvement over the Storm, but I don't think improving over a terrible phone is a huge challenge. I've messed with a Storm and the haptic feedback thing doesn't help at all with typing.

Lastly, Gizmodo has a pretty comprehensive guide to everything you could want to know about the Pre if you know nothing about it right now (or not enough, in your own opinion). If you want to learn even more though, the manual and some other documents from the upcoming launch were leaked in the middle of last week.

H-1Bs Outnumber the Unemployed

The issue of immigrant workers is a very sensitive subject for a number of reasons. Adding fuel to the fire though is the recent revelation that there are more H-1B workers in the U.S. tech industry than unemployed Americans in tech. Apparently, the government has been going after companies with fraudulent visas. While I agree that it's unfair for subpar foreign talent to displace great domestic talent, but I don't think that's happening. I don't think there's anything wrong with highly qualified and motivated foreigners displacing lazy, stupid programmers. It's going to hurt us in the long-run to protect employees who suck at their job and would be better off in another industry. It's a delicate balance though because there has to be a cap, especially in education if talented Americans are getting sidled out of top programs by foreign workers. We have to give the people here who want to excel a fair shake, and doing that is really hard. It's not fair to read a headline that there are more H-1Bs than unemployed techies and become outraged, because companies shouldn't fire good employees because they're from abroad.

Identity Theft and Spam

I don't want to go too in depth on this because I could easily put together a entire post on identity theft, but I definitely wanted to plug New Scientist's story on the subject because it's a really well-written and exhaustive explanation of the dire situation we find ourselves in. "Identities", which are really just someone's credit card numbers, social security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name (to name a few) are traded readily online at fairly affordable prices. What really sucks is that even if you avoid phishing and social engineering attacks and all that stuff, the people you trust when you do business could be incompetent and lose your data. Thinking that you're going to go cash only and abandon plastic is not the safety net people think it is, it only is likely to make you less careful in situations where a credit card may make you more paranoid (in a good way).

What can you do about it? To start with, here are some Firefox extensions that would really help your cause. If you're not using Firefox 3, then that's your first problem. Those extensions are seriously awesome though and cover some of the most common attacks you could run into, like forms that go to malicious third parties, hidden Javascript code that could re-configure your router, password sniffing and cracking, and hidden trackers.

Semantic revealed last week that 90% of all e-mail sent over corporate networks is spam. 58% of this spam is coming from botnets, which means that there are a lot of people sending spam who don't even know it. It's a dismal statistic, but it's pretty rare to see good news in security, to be perfectly honest.

Hulu on Your Desktop

Hulu has released a desktop application to better jive with home media PCs and laptops with remote controls in the side of them. In other words, it's what Joost should've been if it had better content and was less CPU and memory intensive.

I've been so busy with work that I didn't get a chance to test drive it, but Ars Technica has some great thoughts on it and I always trust their reviews. It's interesting that they don't want to be a part of Boxee and yet the content providers are ok with Hulu's own homegrown desktop application. This is a big step towards putting a nail in the coffin of cable television as we know it (i.e. watching shows at a pre-determined time) and helping coax Hulu into the mainstream.

Final Notes

Ok, I've really got to get a good night's rest tonight so it's time to wrap up with some quickies.

Google Chrome now has extensions! It's long overdue and small in selection, but Google is aiming to make them easy to develop to help ramp up in comparison to Firefox's expansive add-on library.

Google also announced a new online collaboration tool called Wave (in beta, as always) at their I/O conference, and it seems like the next evolution of Google Docs.

Dell's earnings dropped 63% last quarter, but they're expecting a solid rise this winter due to Windows 7. It looks like until then they'll have to try to dial down their cost structure.

If your computer has become considerably sluggish, then this article has your name written all over it. It's a pretty solid article of easy tweaks to make your computer perform better (analogous to a tune-up for your car).

Have a great week everyone! I know it's going to be very long for me as I await the Palm Pre, and hopefully I'll be able to actually get one.

The Great Buck Howard

The Great Buck Howard Review

I don't know how they pulled this off, but HD Movies got exclusive rights last week to air The Great Buck Howard on television a full 3 days before it came out in theaters nationwide, so I thought I might as well give a short review of it (as I like to do when I see movies so close to the release date). As a side note: I saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona last weekend and liked it a lot! It's worth seeing if you're ever looking for something to rent.

The basic premise of the movie is pretty simple: Colin Hanks's character (Troy) is in law school because his father (real-life dad Tom Hanks) pressured him into it, but he hates it and ends up answering a call for a road manager for the Great Buck Howard (John Malkovich) - a somewhat self-satisfied magician ("mentalist") who has been performing for some 40 years but only gets half empty venues in small towns now.

I never really felt compelled to continue watching the movie other than I was trying to figure out where the story was going. The overall message of the movie was pretty clear in the end, but for a while the movie ostensibly seems to go nowhere. Still, for going nowhere it ends up being pretty entertaining. It's called a "show biz comedy", but it's a very dry comedy and could almost qualify as a dramedy. Unlike Tropic Thunder, the last show biz comedy in recent memory, it wasn't littered with stupid inside jokes. John Malkovich definitely shines overall and is almost like a Michael Scott (from The Office I mean) - you develop a real love/hate relationship with him. Colin Hanks is, well, Colin Hanks. I was surprised that I found myself liking the inclusion of Emily Blunt - the romantic angle in the story wasn't prolonged and never distracted the film from its main plotline, and I really dug that.

I wouldn't seek out this movie right now in theaters, but I think it's a very solid B movie and a great rental. There's nothing really bad about it - the only thing is genuinely struggles with is getting you to care about the movie. The cameos are pretty fun, the script is quirky, and it's a worthwhile way to spend 90 minutes.

Computer Science Back in Style

According to a recent study (i.e. take it with a grain of salt), enrollment in Computer Science in the U.S. increased last year for the first time in 6 years (so around the burst of the .com bubble) - 8.1%. That may not sound all that significant, but the industry has been importing talent from abroad because they're just not finding enough of it domestically, so this is great. Technology is a pretty resilient industry overall, so even though things are down now there are still companies hiring right now and there will be more than ever at the end of this downturn. The class of 2012 should definitely be pretty well off as far as entering the job market. Some people are attributing it to the "coolness factor" of social networking and others to the iPhone, but I think that there was a big uptick in CS jobs leading up to last year and I had friends in other science majors who were jealous of all the choices we had, so I can see the job market having a huge influence on this rise. Unfortunately, female enrollment only stayed about steady, but hopefully the industry continues efforts to encourage women to give C.S. a shot.

IE8 and Chrome 2.0

A goliath browser and a newcomer to the market both saw fresh releases last week. Internet Explorer 8 was available on Thursday and boasts improved security, much improved tab management, and a better address bar (akin to the Firefox omnibar or the Chrome awesome-bar). From what I can tell, a lot of the new features have been around in Firefox for a long time by way of well-established extensions (although some are native to Firefox). For example, IE8 considers new tabs opened from one tab being colored the same to be a new feature, but some Fireefox power users have had this for a long time. There are two fresh features that I find interesting though. One is the concept of Accelerators, which is basically a mashup that allows you to plug text on a page into certain services to enrich the content (e.g. map an address or get pictures of a celebrity by right clicking on some text). The other is the idea of having Web Slices on a page, which can alert you when they change without having to have a tab open for it (like weather or stocks). Security-wise, it sounds like the anti-phishing feature is good and its attempt to restrict sites from gathering private information about you. It also tries to highlight the domains of the URLs you visit so that you don't get tricked too easily to visit a fake bank website or something, and gives you an impressive view of your cookies. It's a strong release compared to IE7 and it's finally approaching the point where it's in the same neighborhood of Firefox, but Firefox users have no reason to switch to it. However, if you're actively using IE7 then you should really upgrade - it's much better.

I don't know if anyone is still using Chrome, but Google made a 2.0 beta of their browser and it's actually much less impressive than the IE 8 upgrade, if you can imagine that. The feature list is thin with the main reason to try it out being a faster Javascript rendering engine and full page zoom. It doesn't look like people have anything to look forward to in the final 2.0 release.

Shuffle Lockdown and the iPhone Event

I talked about my disdain for the 3rd generation iPod Shuffle last week, and I had a hunch about this story but didn't want to talk about it until it was confirmed, which it now is. The headphones for the new Shuffle have a proprietary chip, which means that you can't use any other headphones on it if you want to be able to control it at all since the bloody thing has no buttons. The communication with the Shuffle isn't encrypted, so the chip could theoretically be cloned, but I think that legally you have to pay licensing fees to Apple to be able to sell your own headphones. I'm guessing that Apple figured people wouldn't like this if they're still selling the 2nd generation Shuffle for $50 (although they're trying to screw you in that you're paying $30 less for 1/4th of the capacity).



In better Apple news, they had an event last week to preview the forthcoming iPhone 3.0 software update, which includes copy/paste (it only took them 2 years, imagine that). They claim the software will support tethering, though individual carriers may not. The feature list also includes MMS (finally), voice memos, better searching (you can search all your data on your iPhone), P2P connectivity (for playing games with other iPhones), push notification for 3rd party applications, support for paid subscription services within 3rd party applications, and being able to send multiple pictures at once. Other than that, they went over a bunch of games and other apps, including health-related applications (like taking blood pressure using a peripheral) and multimedia streaming (like watching ESPN content live). They also made it clear they're not interested in supporting background processes, which is kind of disappointing but their reasoning is that it often eats too much battery life. It was a pretty long presentation overall, but I think this is actually a pretty solid release and 3rd party developers ought to be pretty thrilled. Oh, and here's a video of cut/copy/paste and some of the other new additions in action. They claim doing cut/copy/paste was hard, but the fact that they were willing to let a hard problem stretch for nearly 2 years shows their disregard for what their customers ultimately want. Anyway, it's a feature that still seems like it could use some polish. Overall, I think people will be pleased with this release.

Botnets and Trojans

If your computer gets infected as a zombie in a botnet, it basically becomes the slavish follow of some hacker living in his mother's basement. It logs on to an IRC channel, in secret, and accepts encrypted messages from its master to send spam or steal your data or help in coordinated attacks without leaving a trail to the progenitor of the evildoings. So how do you know if you're in one? If you're Internet connection seems inexplicable slow, go to the task manager and see what's hogging up your bandwidth. If you don't recognize it, you're probably in a botnet. There's also software out there to passively look for your being in a botnet, and some spyware scanners (like Spybot and Ad-aware) may be able to sniff it out depending on how you were swindled into the network. The important thing is that you stay vigilant.

If you ever wondered how a trojan virus works, Megapanzer has a great, concise write-up on the various stages of the highly popular breed of infection. In a nutshell, there's a dropper that implants the malicious code where ever the vulnerability on your system is and binds it to an entertainer file to hide the true purpose of the file, and then it tries to spread itself, and then the damage routine that the dropper planted is executed on restart. It may then delete itself once the damage is done to avoid detection. Fun stuff, huh? As sickening as some of these viruses and worms and phishing attacks are, a small part of me can't help but admire the amount of skill it requires to come up with some of these things. If only they used their power for good rather than evil.

I'm going to sneak one more thing in here: in turns out that the TV industry is losing a ton of money to satellite piracy. I never knew that it was such a big deal, but apparently it has become very damaging in Canada, among other places (on the order of 10% of satellite households in North America being illicit).

Terrible PC Hardware Support

A columnist at humor site Cracked.com did a very true, though somewhat funny, piece comparing his tech support experience with a Dell XPS (one of Dell's top computer lines) versus with a PowerBook. I actually laughed for a while after reading his short transcription from talking to the Dell support guy, who was in India (I'll let you read it rather than spoiling it). It seemed like the people he worked with on either side were incompetent, although the turnaround time was shorter for his Mac because he happened to have an Apple store near him. I'm kind of surprised at the state of customer service nowadays, especially with computers. Here's a device that is not at all intuitive right out of box and should come with a giant instruction manual and a class to use for security reasons alone. Yet, no one seems to get customer service right relying on nonsensical scripts rather than trying to enhance the customer experience.

Final Notes

Ok, I've blabbered on quite long enough. Let's get to the quickfire round, shall we?

The founder of IMDb was at South by Southwest (SXSW) and mentioned that their vision is to offer streaming for every title on the site, which is a pretty lofty goal that a lot of people took very kindly to. People at Amazon definitely think big, so I'm pretty sure he's being genuine about it.

A former Googler wrote a little blurb about his 3 years at Google working on visual design and how he hated the nit-picky discussions he ended up finding himself in. Maybe this partially explains the UI problems people have historically faulted Google for.

Gmail Labs created an undo send option, which I think is pretty cool. In fact, I think they should purposely delay sending e-mails by maybe 30 seconds for people who decide they're too jumpy on e-mails (or just hit the wrong button too often).

Nine Inch Nails, in their typical awesome fashion, released a tour pack of music for free on their site with tracks from themselves, Jane's Addiction, and Street Sweeper. Their experiment last year with Ghosts ended up earning them a lot of money, so surely they're hoping for heightened tour sales this time around.

Google recently started displaying ads based on your browsing history, so you should probably read this if you want to opt-out.

Lastly, one blogger took it upon himself to apply the psychology concept of the 4 stages of competence to programming. I'd like to think that I'm at stage 3.

Hope everyone has a fruitful week!