Paying for Hulu

Note: scroll down to yesterday's post for my impressions of the Palm Pre and review of Up. Consider this a continuation of that post - I'm not covering today's stories.

The Future of Hulu

There's not a whole lot really exciting stories from last week. just a bunch of little ones (not counting the Pre). There was a lot going on at E3, but I think too much for me to effectively condense down here. I was actually pretty impressed by G4's coverage.

What I want to start out with here is that Chief Digital Officer of Hulu has stated that he envisions premium subscription content on Hulu in the future. I guess this isn't really a huge shocker, but I find a couple of things really funny about this. It seems to somewhat parallel TV as we know it today where it started out low quality, free, and to a limited audience (black and white broadcast television vs. beta Hulu), then we got color TVs (compare to Hulu in HD), and now we're approaching what we know as cable TV today: content that costs you a bit extra.

The question is: will people pay? How deep is Hulu's market penetration? I think it's inevitable for this to happen, and I think that it's going to involve some messy interference from the cable companies. It may even result in breaking net neutrality to provide higher speed access to premium Hulu subscribers. Ultimately, if it's cheaper than what people pay for cable right now and it becomes available on more set top boxes (like Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand already are), I think it'll definitely do well. You could even rope in more subscribers by providing Hulu content readily available on multiple mobile platforms (aside from just the iPhone).

I think this is where the future of television is. Not necessarily in just Hulu, but online on-demand content. Just look at the Xbox 360. They announced a number of improvements at E3 to make your Xbox the center of your home entertainment experience, right down to having TV available on demand. Times are definitely changing, and the bar is constantly being raised as far as what entertains us - I'm excited to see what comes out of it all in the next 5 years. I mean can you imagine that just 3 years ago there was no such thing as an iPhone and now it's hard to enter a room without seeing a smartphone?

Google Wave and Squared

I briefly touched on Google Wave last week but didn't have time to watch the 60+ minute presentation that Google had put together on it. Mashable was kind enough to condense it down into its 6 key features, and it actually looks like a pretty awesome platform. I imagine that they'll try to integrate it with Android - can you imagine being away from work but still being able to collaborate in a meeting with your colleagues no matter where you are with this?

The real big Google story coming out of last week (there has to be at least one each week) was Google Squared, which allows you to get your search results in a spreadsheet format. This allows you to work with your results much like you would an Excel spreadsheet and may have been intended to help research into linked data. It's probably not a big deal to the average person, but definitely not a bad addition.

HDMI 1.4

The next version of the popular HDMI cable, 1.4, was revealed last week and should be available to device manufacturers next month so that we can start seeing cables and compatible products using them as early as next summer. I love HDMI because it's just one simple cable to handle your high definition video and audio, and it's easily affordable. 1.4 will support 3D, an audio return channel (think microphones), an ethernet channel (for Internet connectivity), higher resolution (up to 4 times that of 1080p), a system for automotive HD content delivery, and mnicro-HDMI connectors. The downside of all this is that it'll result in 5 types of cables instead of today's single type of HDMI, which gives way to manufacturers (like Monster) for confusing customers and charging higher prices for cables that don't cost more to make. I'm definitely disappointd in that decision, but I can appreciate how difficult putting together an international standard like this can be so I just hope that it ends up being as cool as it sounds right now.

Digging for Ads

Digg announced that they're planning to roll out an advertising system that takes the concepts of supply and demand further using the concept behind Digg: charging advertisers more money for ads that are dugg higher by people as being more interesting. I'm really impressed by this idea - they've taken an audience that is really anti-advertising and are trying to engage them in ads with an interface they already understand and enjoy. Facebook has played around with this, but I think that they bombard their users with changes and experiments so often that no one really cared.

The Rest

I'm running out of juice here (very exhausting day), but I have a bunch of quick stories that are worth mentioning (pared down from an even longer list!).

Dailymotion has launched a video platform to compete with Flash by allowing developers to simply use "

Conficker Drags On

New Guitar Excitement

Before I start on the post, I'm pretty excited about my new guitar so I feel compelled to share, first. You can skip this portion if you don't care.







I went to 4 shops around Seattle: Rosewood Guitar, Dusty Strings, Northwest Guitar, and A Sharp Music Co. They're all cool shops for different things, and Rosewood Guitar had the best selection of classical guitars, but I ended up getting an Orpheus Valley Fiesta F65CW guitar from Northwest Guitar, which was my favorite stop so I'm glad they had what I liked best. The Spanish luthiers are always the most famous, but I was definitely impressed by what the Bulgarians at Orpheus Valley can produce. It's got an awesome solid Red Cedar top, Indian Rosewood back, sides, and fretboard, and a Honduras Cedar neck. I took a close-up of the tuning pegs because I really love how they look.

I was pretty impressed when I started strumming on it by the dynamic and loud sounds I was able to produce, and I really fell in love with it when I plugged it into an amp at the store and it sounded perfect. I was worried that you would be able to hear my nails scratching on the strings, but the sound was ridiculously clean, so I'm really excited about the pickup and hopefully playing at the young adult mass at church soon. I wanted to get an electric to play with effects, but I'm still not a fan of nails on steel strings and I've been tinkering with a multi effects processor to see how it does with my brand new electric acoustic. It's really incredible how the right tool can totally change your perspective on things. Like getting new boxing gloves made me more excited to participate in an activity that was previously consistently hurting my hands (which went away with the new gloves), and getting a really good guitar makes me so much more excited about playing and being proud of the sound I can produce from it. Just something to think about if you have a hobby you want to delve deeper in - do you have the tools you really need to become passionate about it?

Oh, and if you find yourself shopping for an electric acoustic I know that I found this article helpful. Though if you don't know anything about acoustics, I'd start here.

Conficker, Botnets, and Hacker Want Ads

A number of outlets over-covered the Conficker story with nonsense and are now pulling back, but the issue is still an issue despite the fact that the world didn't end. Outbreaks happen all the time, they just aren't all publicized so much because the scope isn't as big. That doesn't mean that they're not dangerous, they just don't have as terrible a potential as something that Conficker does being the most widespread infection in over 6 years. It's really important to not confuse dormancy with being benign. Drawing a pretty far-fetched analogy (hey, it's late): if a country in a volatile political climate has weapons of mass destruction that they haven't used yet, that doesn't mean they don't intend to.

Anyway, some are estimating a bill of over $9 billion in terms of wasted time of governments, security companies, and other miscellaneous resources in getting patched and trying to contain the worm. It has already starting making money for its owners though by way of what I had initially guessed: a botnet for spam. Thousands of machines have already started sending out spam and downloading spyware unbeknown to their owners. It's actually a pretty smart strategy: silent but terrible. The aggressive worms unite the world against them, but, now that the initial concern has died down, Conficker is in a prime position to make its creators a lot of money over an extended period of time.

Conficker is just one part of a bigger threat though: the rise of botnets. Why are they so hard to fight? After all, weeks after we first caught wind of Conficker it's still considered a huge problem by security experts. The main problems are that they operate under the radar and often in programs and often outside of the control of most IT departments, they're getting stronger protection (like communicating only via encrypted messages), and social networking has becoming the next e-mail in terms of attack vector. It used to be that people were only warned to not open attachments in strange e-mails, but now people have to monitor even the links they're sent from known friends on social networks. You can imagine how much harder something like that is to contain. In some ways, it reflects why organized crime still exists: it's an arms race. The good guys will never win because the bad guys are getting smarter and smarter, but better user education can cut into their profits enough to make these things less appealing to them. That really is our only solid defense.

Cyber security has become such a big problem that the Department of Homeland Security is now even looking specifically for IT people who can "think like the bad guy" to help protect the country from cyber attacks. Personally, I think that a class on network security should become part of the core curriculum in Computer Science programs across the country to help facilitate the coding practices that help minimize the likelihood of vulnerabilities for attack in the software that keeps our country and our lives running every day. As far as immediate action though, the government definitely could be doing a lot more to protect itself, so it's good to see this.

Oracle Buys Sun

The CEO of Sun sent out what I thought was an honest and heartfelt e-mail to his employees last Monday telling them that he had sold the company to Oracle. To be honest though, this isn't a bad move at all for either side. Oracle lives and breathes Java, databases, and enterprise servers. I'd imagine that they're not going to try to cut a whole lot of staff from Sun because I'm pretty sure they're going to treasure some of Sun's big products (like Java and Solaris). I know I'm hoping to see more frequent updates to Java since the release date of 1.7 is still indeterminate.

Amazon Video on Demand Goes HD

I was pretty stoked when I read that Amazon VOD now offers TV shows and movies in high definition. The one problem I had with the service on my TiVo box was that the video quality was just barely on par with DVD (though definitely better than standard definition TV), but seeing a format more on par with over-the-air HD content at typically just $1 more is pretty awesome. The way I see it (and this is a popular sentiment, mind you) is that the future of movie rentals and watching television is digital distribution. There's a reason why cable companies are losing customers for cable television and Blockbuster has been a sinking ship: the writing is on the wall. The selection is pretty decent to start out with, although the movies are not available in HD on the computer - only on TiVo, Roku boxes, Sony Bravias, and Panasonic VIERA Cast TVs. I don't know why that is (honestly, I don't), but my guess would be licensing issues.

Meanwhile, Netflix customers have to pay 20% more for Blu-ray discs. Granted, this is a difference of only $1-$9 depending on how insane your plan is, but it is sad because it's definitely going to discourage people from upgrading to Blu-ray. I love the way things look in Blu-ray and I want to see the format flourish so that prices go down, but Netflix can't offer lower prices until that point. A part of me really wants to blame the studios because they have the power to lower prices on Blu-rays and make them much more successful, but ridiculous licensing fees and high prices in a down economy are hurting the format bad.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo Financials

Amazon had a strong first quarter (considering the economic climate, that is) and I'm pretty proud that we're still able to hold strong past the holiday season. I think it's a testament to awesome customers and our commitment to a better customer experience.

Unfortunately, on the other side of Lake Washington, Microsoft saw sales dip 6% - the first ever year-over-year decline. They expect the situation to stay weak at least through the next quarter, so I'm sure that the pressure is really on to get Windows 7 out the door by the end of year.

Yahoo saw revenues fall 13% prompting them to lay off nearly 700 employees (about 5% of its workforce). It looks like CEO Carol Bartz is focusing in on cutting middle management, which probably isn't the worst thing since I imagine Yahoo teams are largely self-managing.

Time Warner is Anti-competitive

I know, you're all in shock. It's not like millions of people have thought about that before, but now we have some more concrete things to back that with. Time Warner is lobbying the North Carolina state government to outlaw community-owned broadband services because they claim that they can't make a profit competing with a community-run organization selling basically at cost. I didn't make that up, that's seriously their argument. They can't handle capitalism, so they want government backing for their local monopoly. Make no mistake, Comcast and Time Warner are not one of these corporations being bullied by the masses due to biased media or anything like that, they're definitely doing the bullying.

Quick Notes

Ok, I'm fading fast but I want to play with my guitar so I'm going to really breeze through these.

Apple pulled an iPhone application that let users shake a crying baby to death to stop its incessant crying. It did end with the message to not shake babies, but it's still disgusting and it just shows that Apple is in no position to effectively police the app store if trash like this is getting through. I don't know why they insist on doing it.

YouTube has been toying around with adding social networking features to its UI, and TechCrunch got to take a look. This is, in fact, what a lot of experts thought online television should be like, but I think I have to see first hand to believe that it'll work.

Oh, and if you're a power YouTuber then you'll really like these URL tricks.

Laptop logic has 64 things every geek should know and it's awesome. It's worth scrolling through all 64 things - believe me.

I forgot to talk about this last week, but if you appreciate Daft Punk at all then you'll really love this online Daft Punk keyboard as a really cool toy.

Have a great week, everyone!

Cloud Security

How Safe is it in the Clouds?

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

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

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

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

More Security News

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

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

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

Microsoft Marketing

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

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

Executive Branch Supports RIAA Damages, EFF Fights DRM

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

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

Monster's Tactics Still at Play

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

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

Final Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Past its Prime

Random Musings

It seems like every week there's more and more stuff to talk about, even on a holiday week like last week! I hope you all survived shopping this weekend as I bought more DVD/Blu-ray discs than you can shake a stick at, but also got some useful stuff: like a small Christmas tree with decor with some new jeans (finally!). By the way, any other Seattlites notice all the cool Holiday decor around the city? I love the giant star on the Macy's that's on Pike Street. Anyway, I think I'll be getting Prince of Persia this week though, so hopefully I can post some impressions of it next week. I think I'm also going to be getting Iron Man and Wall-E on Blu-ray, my 3rd and 4th Blu-ray purchases ever, but I may delay that to two weeks from now depending on how much time I get to watch them. Without further ado though, let's get to the news.

Oh, and for the record, I really hate the BCS system. I also hate the Big 12 for subscribing to the BCS's nonsense in breaking ties. I can't believe that OU is going to play Mizzou in the Big 12 Championship Game when UT has beaten both teams before in the regular season! It's really sad that we obliterated A&M last week whereas OU struggled against Oklahoma State but we drop a spot in the rankings and they go up one. I know that Texas Tech beat us and OU beat Tech, but Texas Tech also almost lost to Baylor, a team that we beat 45-21. We only lost to Tech because we were exhausted from having to play so many ranked teams in a row, we had a much harder schedule than OU! Anyway, as great as OU is this season I still hold that Texas is a better team and would do much better in the national championship game against Alabama. Oh well, hopefully we'll get a good consolation bowl and whoop whoever we have to play with a vengeance.

Facebook Fails to Acquire Twitter

Last week, Facebook offered $500 million of stock in itself in exchange for ownership of Twitter, but Twitter's board wisely refused. First of all, this offer is probably more like $150 million given Facebook's valuation, but it would be crazy for Twitter to accept strictly stock from a company with an uncertain future that has had trouble trying to monetize its own business, let alone Twitter's. More importantly, Twitter is fairly young. I think it made sense for them to hold out for a while and try to improve and figure out a good business model.

I think that the move made Twitter look stronger and Facebook look weaker since they could not muster up a cash offer, something that Twitter supposedly inquired about and could only get $100 million. The reason I think that Facebook is a little past its expiration date though is not because of this, but because they're still experimenting with ad revenue models and not getting a lot of traction. We're in an economy where business are cutting their advertising budgets, and while they're not cutting so much from their online budgets they haven't been excited about Facebook so far. Big media companies, likes of Fox, Comedy Central, NBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and MTV, have done little more than dabble in Facebook and haven't really shown an interest to do much more. The whole "digg" concept of Facebook's right sidebar of ads is not that impressive, in my opinion. It just exposes their customers to the fact that they're not sure what advertising works, so they want to crowdsource that responsibility. Sometimes their ads are downright insulting, with divorce ads for people who are listed as being married on their profile.

Then there's the fiasco of their decision to offer the option of having your application "verified" by Facebook for an annual fee of $375 that it is trustworthy and useful. This has the effect of giving an advantage to developers with deep pockets, not those with great applications. This is on par with the concept of net neutrality: it sidles out innovation in favor of greed. I don't think that this is the way to address having a sea of applications, many of which are crappy. Of course, developers could start charging people to use their applications to help subsidize this fee, but why would anyone pay for a Facebook application anyway? Which leads to my next point: a lot of them are irritating at this point (less so than before, albeit, thanks to the UI re-design), so what was the point of creating that platform? To create an app store like the iPhone one? The only real use I could see is just keeping people on the site as their main portal for the Internet so that they garner more eyeballs for advertisers, but I can't see them realistically doing that. I only use Facebook maybe once a week nowadays whereas I used to use it all the time in college. It has started to lose its appeal to me, and if that's a trend for people who graduate from college (I've personally seen it a lot just anecdotally) then they lose the buying power of an audience with real disposable income as opposed to college students who scrounge for money to pay tuition.

I'm not saying that Facebook is done for, but I think that they're past their heyday and really need to innovate and be smart if they intend to really make money. Winning a lawsuit against a spammer is a great way to help start a war against spammers, and maybe that'll make people feel better about using Facebook if it has less spam, but that doesn't stop frightening social engineering scams involving names of someone's actual friends for a dash of false legitimacy. This economic downturn is a great time for them to step back from being the Web 2.0 darling and really figure out a game plan because what they've been doing over the past couple of years really hasn't been cutting it.

UK Doesn't Fancy the iPhone 3G Ad

Remember a while ago when I railed on the iPhone's 3G ad for being misleading regarding the speed of the actual iPhone 3G? No? Ok, well I promise I wrote it. Anyway, the Brits have also taken notice by banning the ad. A California resident noticed also and slapped a verbose $5 million lawsuit on Apple and AT&T for the misleading advertising, including the fact that 3G is only available a fraction of the time. The cornerstone of Apple is its marketing machine, so it should be no surprise that people get frustrated when they release ads fraught with lies. I don't think that anyone will sue for the "I'm a Mac" ads because they don't result in products that don't deliver, but I think it's a real concern. Apple is no longer the little guy in the corner. It's time for them to answer for these claims they continue to make to ship units quicker. I know that it may not be as unfair as some of the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft has engaged in, but they got heavily burned for that so I think it's definitely Apple's turn now.

Joost on the iPhone

While YouTube quietly rolled out a widescreen player for its content, semi-competitor Joost had something else in mind. They released a free application for the iPhone to enjoy Joost content on your iPhone as long as you're on WiFi. I know, it sucks that you can't do it on 3G but that's the fault of AT&T's rules and not of Joost, so don't blame them for it. I talked about Joost a long time ago when it was in beta and how I was excited about what it could do to marry old media and new media by providing an easy way to watch streaming TV on your own time without compromising on video quality, but the standalone application you had to use was really clunky and though they're now running out of your browser they still lacking in quality content. I think a great move is to be able to have this mobile application (and hopefully an Android one, eventually) to make their content more ubiquitous and put itself in better competition with YouTube. In an ideal situation (i.e. a city blanketed in free or cheap WiFi), I'd love to be able to start watching a movie or TV show on the bus with Joost and then come home to resume it from where I left off on my computer or home media PC. I hope that Joost continues to survive, I really am pulling for them.

Shaky Security

It looks like there's never a lack of interesting security news! This week I want to start out with airport WiFi, which is even less secure than you may have previously thought. A white hat hacker (i.e. a hacker who hacks to test the security of systems for further improvement) has visited some of the nation's biggest airports and discovered glaring flaws. For one thing, the networks on which vital airport functions were open and poorly secure. So I can't bring hair gel on my carry-on but I can log on to an airport wireless network and compromise their systems? He also logged into an American Airlines flight's WiFi and could access the data of other passengers. Then there's the fake hot spots set up in these airports by phishers hoping to find a patsy. How about the Department of Homeland Security does something useful and get cracking on this?

Another strange prospect to me is that Lenovo has a service that will allow you to disable your laptop with a single text message. My first hunch was that someone could send the message maliciously just to screw with you, but I think that more harmful is the false sense of security. While it may successfully lock down the computer, couldn't a hacker either wipe it clean for re-use or steal un-encrypted data from the hard drive if this security feature is in the BIOS (software installed directly on the processor)?

The last article I have to scare you is that anti-virus software is ineffectual against botnets. I guess this isn't really surprising, but it's still noteworthy. A botnet, as I've mentioned before, is a network of machines infected with the same worm that gives a third-party the ability to force them to execute certain commands, as in spamming or helping bring down a web server for extortion. Apparently, only 40% of current security software can detect the problem by the time it peaks in danger to the host machine and other computers. If its discovered after that point then what does it matter? The machine will be discarded and the hacker will already have moved on to new infected bots. So how can you stay safe? Anti-spyware solutions like SpyBot and Ad-Aware will help keep you clean (especially with SpyBot's immunizations), but having a hardware firewall (a router with WPA2 security enabled) and a software one (like ZoneAlarm) will really go a long way for attacks that just scan ports on random IPs to look for a way in.

The Exploding Offer

Joel Spolsky has a great post about the infamous exploding offer, and since I've come in contact with it (and fallen for it), I feel obligated to speak to it. This offer is named as such because much like the messages in the Mission: Impossible movies they are purported to disappear if you don't act fast enough. This is just like those stupid infomercials on TV except that you're playing with your career instead of Grandma's cash birthday gift. I took an offer with Texas Instruments my sophomore year of college in January because I was afraid I wasn't going to get any better offers since I had no previous technical experience, which won't get you in the door at a lot of companies and they were a big name. I didn't push them on their time line (that I remember) so I fell for the trap.

I don't think it's unethical for a company to tell you when they'd like to know your response on an offer by, but it's worse when they refuse to budge on it. Read this again and again: any company that tries to strongarm you into an offer does not truly value you. It's important to be humble while in the interviewing process with an air of confidence for selling yourself, but it's also important to realize that your career is worth much more than the commission they get for recruiting you or the feeling that you didn't disappoint them. They may sound pissed when you turn them down, or ask them for more time, but they're not your hiring manager. If they are your hiring manager, then you don't want to work for anyone who doesn't value you enough to let you make an educated decision and it shows that they're not confident that they're better than their competitors. That's a really bad sign. That means that they either can't afford you or they're just cheap and want to pay as little as possible for you.

I'm not saying you should be crazy and turn down companies left and right because they won't extend their decision deadlines, but it's not terribly unethical to turn the tables and use their weapon against them. Accept verbally and then just renege later if a better deal comes along. Yes, it does suck and you may be burning a bridge with them, but it's not a particularly good bridge if they can't give you a reasonable amount of time to explore your options. If they really had something good to offer, they'd be ethical about it and they wouldn't have to worry about other companies being better workplaces.

Holiday Shopping

I know that Black Friday is over but that only means that Holiday shopping has just begun! Read Write web has a great roundup of gift ideas for nerdy kids, and I think even nerdy adults, to be honest. I wouldn't care about brewing my own root beer or perfume, but who wouldn't want this programmable robot?



Some people may need new computers and consider buying one in the midst of deals trying to clear out inventory for next year's hottest models, but there's an important distinction to be made between notebooks and netbooks. A netbook is a small (like 8 or 10-inch small) computer designed for quick and easy Internet and e-mail usage and is not very powerful. So other than sites like YouTube, you won't be watching a whole lot of video on it. Plus, the computer will struggle to render Flash-heavy sites. However, they handle word-processing quite well with cheap or free alternatives to Microsoft Office and can be a great way to get work done without your work computer. And while you can't really edit video on a netbook, you can do your day-to-day photo editing just fine. It's a great and exciting new sector of the computer market for when you're on-the-go (maybe to a Cafe or a book store or something) or for when you're in the kitchen waiting on some water to boil, but it definitely doesn't supplement a standard notebook or desktop computer. What it lacks in processing power it makes up for in portability and price, but it probably won't meet all your needs. So keep around your normal computer if you decide to buy one and realize its shortcomings before you impulsively offer up your credit card.

Gizmodo has a really great article about gadgets you shouldn't skimp on that may be a bit pricey, but how you can save money elsewhere. For example, don't fall for crazy price cuts on third-rate GPS devices when the best ones on the market belong to the Garmin nuvi series. My nüvi 660 has its shortcomings, but it navigates like a pro even optimizing well around traffic. They also have a really excellent article explaining what the different types of HD TVs are all about and what to look for when buying one of your own. By the way, don't skimp on buying your HD TV. If you're going to buy one, go for quality and realize that its cost should be amortized over the 10+ years you use it for. I love my 40" Samsung and don't regret buying it in the face of Black Friday deals because it serves me so well. The quality is only bested by larger Samsung LCD TVs, in my opinion.

The Rest

Per usual, there's a number of articles I don't have time to talk to in depth, so I'm just going to spit them all out here real quick.

Tech Crunch questions eBay's acquisition of BillMeLater in the face of an economy reduced to shambles from a credit crisis, and I agree. The company seems to only supplant credit cards for people who have terrible credit, so this is like giving a slot machine to a gambler rather than getting him into rehab.

Virgin now has WiFi on its flights without censorship, though there is traffic shaping so that you can't hog bandwidth unless no one else is using it on your flight.

If you buy The Dark Knight from Amazon, you can watch it at Amazon Video on Demand for free! This means that you have an online streaming version of the movie that you can watch whenever, wherever. The digital copy on the 3-disc edition isn't really necessary since Video on Demand videos are hosted by Amazon and just associated with your account. This is really cool and I could totally see it being a trend with movie studios promoting pre-orders of movies with codes for free digital copies.

Computer World has a cute editorial about a Firefox man and his fling with Chrome. It's a funny read if you're like me and tried Chrome only to come running back to Firefox with arms wide open.

I usually don't post about lists of cool images, but I really enjoyed this one of optical illusions via street art and strange architecture. I mean how unbelievably cool is this one?



Time for bed (finally)! Have a great week everyone and Happy December!

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*).

Internet Freedom Preservation Lives On

Again, sorry for the massive delay of this post. I know it's long overdue, but this week was really kind of crazy. This next week should be a lot more calm so hopefully I'll be able to make another post before the end of next week.

I've been working on my Net Neutrality video for my Contemporary Issues in CS class and it's been fun. I'm trying to get various viewpoints on net neutrality and expose the truth, my personal biases aside. A few people aren't talking on camera, so that kind of sucks, but I'd rather have a video where everyone wants to speak their mind than one where I have to pull people's arms. I actually totally forgot that censorship fell under the spectrum of what neutrality is trying to fight, and I'm reeling now to cover my bases on that end. Fortunately, How Stuff Works has a really great explanation of censorship in its many forms with tangents into net neutrality if you feel like your knowledge is deficient or could use a brush-up.

There is good news though: Congress introduced a bill earlier this week called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act that I really love: it seeks to protect the neutrality of the Internet not by regulating it but rather by empowering the FCC to investigate if companies are "blocking, thwarting, or unreasonably interfering" with consumers' consumption of online content. This could be worded a little better yet because it needs to allow them to block spam and child pornography and all that stuff, but you get the picture. Would such a provision protect illegal content? Probably not, but I'd rather live with that than tiered service and censored content. The bill additionally directs the FCC to hold several broadband summits with other countries to discuss the issues of consumer choice and protection and such with regard to broadband service. It's a really interesting bill that I think could do well if people mobilized and told their representatives to support it and maybe if it was polished up just a little bit so that it doesn't become an overbearing piece of regulation.

The House of Representatives has been really busy because another interesting bill, that was introduced recently and I even brought it up here, passed easily. It's called the College Opportunity and Affordability Act and one of its very strange provisions requires universities to provide legal alternative to P2P file sharing and that it implement network filtering. Obviously, all the IT departments are pretty pissed and have been about this issue for a while now. There's a very real fear that maybe if they don't comply they'll lose federal funding even though dealing with illegal downloading isn't their priority; providing a quality education is. You think the MPAA and/or RIAA had a hand in this? I wonder. What really upsets me about this provision isn't that it discourages stealing, I'm ok with that, but rather the fact that pushes this crap onto our universities. So basically, we don't care that this country is lagging behind in math and science graduates or that other countries, like India and China, are outpacing us in churning out really smart students but rather that our universities help out greedy labels and clueless studios in their quest to stamp out piracy. Since when did our commercial society get to the point where we value this junk over securing the future of this country. I mean come on, once these kids graduate it's not like they're going to keep pirating your nonsense if they can easily afford to just buy it. It's like burning Aladdin at the stake for stealing a loaf of bread for himself and his loveable monkey.

Anonymous has come out with yet another video:



I don't know if I talked about this back when I explained my fascination with Project Chanology, but they had a flyer on their site about gatherings in various cities on February 10 at Churches of Scientology in protest of them. I'm sure it was inspired by V for Vendetta, but that's alright because it was still a good idea. What amazes me is that people still refer to them as religious bigots. I saw someone's opinion in the local paper blasting these protesters as bigots, which is crazy because they keep emphasizing that it's the Church, not the beliefs, that they're attacking. It's no wonder that we elected George W. when people are this naive. There is proof of the Church's human rights violations and there's proof that they're the bigots in that they try to silence those who speak out against them. Not only that, but they're thieves by not paying proper taxes. Christian churches get tax breaks and, lo and behold, actually give food and clothing to the poor and conduct various services for the community. Yes, they still make money, and yes they're crazy powerful, but they don't take from the community without giving back and get tax-exempt status. Oh, did I mention people who have left the Church speaking out against the Church coercing people to work for them? You can get the big picture by watching The Bridge. I'm a big supporter of this cause, and I'm glad that they sound more focused and determined now than they did before. Oh, and Tom Cruise is crazy.

Bad news for HD-DVD: Wal-mart has decided that they're not going to be stocking up on HD-DVDs after June. Is this the nail in HD-DVD's coffin? I personally think so. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but this is a pretty big blow. Wal-mart is the world's largest corporation (by revenues) and is a huge player in selling music and movies. Couple that with Best Buy pushing Blu-ray and Netflix phasing out its selection of HD-DVD movies and you have an extremely steep battle for Toshiba. Is there any hope? I honestly don't think so. It would take something pretty miraculous for everyone to all of a sudden decide to give HD-DVD another shot. Does your mom ever admit she's wrong? Probably not, so it's not like Wal-mart is going to say "Whoops, let's start carrying HD-DVDs again" and all those studios that moved away from it also changing their minds. A format war is just bad for business, I think everyone just wants it to end sooner than later.

I know I haven't talked about the iPhone much in a while (I try to not pollute the Web with more buzz about how cool it is, even though it is rather nifty), but this is big. Gear Live has very reliable sources telling them that Flash support for the iPhone is in the very near future (I assume just a software update from iTunes), which makes sense so that it would coincide with the SDK release. It seems like what was holding it back was business negotiations, not power consumption issues, but it'd really help the iPhone if it had it, regardless.

Now for some odds and ends. Google developed Google Apps Team Edition so that company employees can collaborate with Google Apps without having to go through their IT department. I don't know/understand all the details, but it seems to me like this is kind of a security breach if people use this without their IT department knowing. These guys may be part of a bureaucracy, but it shouldn't suggest that they're useless. Six Revisions has an excellent article on using the Web Developer add-on in Firefox to bolster your web development efforts. I actually didn't realize all its advantages, I only wish that I didn't have issues using it on this computer. It'll probably work on the new computer I get in May. The last thing is this bulky list of open source alternatives to popular proprietary software. Some of the alternatives aren't so exciting, but applications like Gimp, Pidgin, and Miro (I just downloaded this one because it looks so freaking cool).

Macworld Wrap-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

1. President :: Clinton (Bill ;)


2. Stare :: Glaze


3. Embrace :: Hug


4. Movie :: Theater


5. Everything :: On sale


6. Profile :: Facebook


7. Satire :: Comedy


8. Erratic :: Errata


9. Costume :: Party


10. Secretary :: of State