The Zune is Sexy?

Since I'm so behind I decided to round up just the most important/interesting stories from the past 3 weeks that I wanted to talk to, so some of this news may be a bit old. Sorry about that - life has just been busy. Next week I'll probably do a PAX round-up, but the week after that I should be back to normal.

More Zune HD Details

The real news for the Zune HD is that it comes out on September 15 at competitive price points ($220 for 16 GB and $290 for 32 GB), and it's available for pre-order right now. What's more interesting is how much press the forthcoming mp3 player has generated. It has become, dare I say, sexy.



PC Mag, for one, had some glowing hands-on impressions. To re-cap some of the high points of the device: it has an OLED screen (if you've never seen OLED, you have to prepare yourself mentally for how gorgeous it is), it can output HD to an external screen (like a TV), it plays HD radio, it has a seemingly revamped Internet Explorer Mobile browser, and the user interface is a breath of fresh air from a company that is rarely known for good user interfaces. Aside from that, the videos I've seen all show it as being surprisingly snappy, and that could be due to the nVidia Tegra chip under the cover. Yeah, nVidia designed the processor for the Zune HD - weird, huh? This bad boy has 8 cores including dedicated cores for HD video processing, audio processing, and graphics processing. This means, for one thing, that loading a song won't slow down your experience with the UI, which is pretty awesome.

Aside from this being a Microsoft product, the reason the Zune HD is turning heads is because it's the first mp3 player since the iPod Touch to really try to innovate the user experience. Apple has been resting on its laurels and while the Zune HD obviously won't dethrone them it is likely to chip away at market share if Microsoft markets it right. The integration with the Internet looks a lot tighter than with the now defunct Zune in even something as simple as browsing other music by an artist. Of course, it's September now, which means that it's time for an Apple special event related to music so Microsoft could be undercut by an Apple announcement (probably still no tablet though, so don't hold your breath), but at least they have a compelling product this year to brave the media onslaught.

Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard

There have been a lot of articles reviewing Snow Leopard and Windows 7 over the past few weeks, including a cool head-to-head at Tech Radar. Interestingly enough, they were balanced enough to say that neither is better than the other but that you should definitely upgrade to one of them. Snow Leopard is much more of an incremental upgrade than Windows 7 with a lot of things most people won't notice since Apple puts out updates to OS X so regularly, but the reception so far seems mostly positive. As for Windows 7, Gizmodo sums up a lot of the pluses and minuses you'll see around. They really sing the praises of the performance and UI improvements. When the worst parts of upgrading are the multitude of versions and a lack of innovation in the Control Panel, you know you have a winner.

If you're still not convinced about upgrading to Windows 7, here are 18 reasons to upgrade. I'm plugging another one of these article because it actually points out some stuff I didn't know about. For example, there's finally an ISO burner out of the box, and it actually has calibration tools to help you hook up your PC to that shiny new HD TV in your living room.

The Wake of the Google Voice Rejection

At the end of July, Apple rejected Google Voice from its app store and from the media coverage it was getting you'd think the world ended. I'm sure Google was even surprised by the outpouring of support for them against big bad Apple. In reality, this is business as usual for the iPhone App Store (to be fair, Google was in talks with Apple before submitting Google Voice and were expected to glide through the approval process). An underground app store has actually grown for the iPhone called Cydia for jailbroken iPhones. I'm surprised that Apple hasn't already shut down Cydia, to be honest. It's funny how the Pre community is full of home brew applications and this is totally encouraged, whereas Apple has gone on record as saying that jailbreaking your iPhone is insidious and compared it to terrorism in one instance (I don't have the citation on this handy, but it definitely happened).

Meanwhile, Microsoft is encouraging developers to charge more than a buck for their applications if they believe it's worth more. So whereas iPhone developers have taken to relying on volume of downloads, Microsoft is pushing its community to the model of driving revenue by using the price as a measure of quality. In all these situations, what's clear to me is that no one has it figured out. Isn't that crazy? Obviously, the iPhone app store is very successful financially, but to some expense of Apple's brand. Everyone has been following different strategies with regards to mobile applications, and yet in the past 7+ years of smartphones, no one has it down just right.

YouTube Extends Revenue Sharing

YouTube has tried many things over the past few years to try and bring in some dough, and they've now decided to extend revenue sharing to viral videos. I guess it was only a matter of time that they figured this out, and I think it's a promising idea. So if your video is deemed as going viral, they'll offer you the chance to serve ads with your video and get a cut of the profits. So if you're not already a YouTube Partner but your video goes big, you still have a chance to make money until you get set up with the program. I'm really interested to see if this has any impact on their bottom line.

Google Maps Adds Traffic to Roads

This is a cool idea that a company called Dash has been working on for a while but Google has added to Google Maps for major roads: figuring out traffic on roads via peer-to-peer communication. So when you turn on My Location in Google Maps on your mobile device, it will send back anonymous information on your speed back to Google, which is used to build congestion ratings on roads. It's probably going to be a while before enough people make the effort to provide their location information to make this usable, but it's a great experiment, at the very least.

Target is Flying Solo

Target has been a partner of Amazon.com for about 8 years now and has finally cut the cord. They'll be running their own e-Commerce operation in 2011. Personally, I don't understand this decision. Running your own e-Commerce site is a huge undertaking, but we still don't know if they're going to to build their new platform on any Amazon services or not.

Microsoft Clings to IE6

Last, but not least, Microsoft has responded to the push from developers to kill IE6. They basically are following the philosophy that you can't force someone to upgrade old software and you have to instead accept it and support it. Microsoft plans to support IE6 for as long as they support XP, which I'm pretty sure will be for a very long time. The problem is that designing a site that works on IE6 as well as IE7 and IE8 and competitors (like Firefox and Safari) is often daunting. I follow the camp that we should get rid of IE6 and sites should explicitly have a message for IE6 users that they need to upgrade to view the site. I know that's not the best user experience, but that browser is also even less secure than IE8, so I don't believe in coddling users who are just afraid of change. Just because some kids don't like vegetables doesn't mean you give them chocolate for dinner.

I'll try to keep down my twittering this weekend at PAX since I got a little crazy with it last year, but I'll try to post a few pictures over the weekend on my Twitter feed, and of course I'll have round-up up by Tuesday. Have a great week, everyone!

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!

Cloud Security

How Safe is it in the Clouds?

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

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

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

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

More Security News

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

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

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

Microsoft Marketing

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

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

Executive Branch Supports RIAA Damages, EFF Fights DRM

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

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

Monster's Tactics Still at Play

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

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

Final Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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!

The Disparity in Broadband

The Great Divide

It's semi-well publicized that there's a decently large disconnect between the speed of the Internet in America versus many other countries. No one ever talks about why this is though. After all, the average speed here is 5.2 Mbps - the problem is that it can get up to 16.7 Mbps in Japan. Some people ask why something like that matters. After all, do we really do anything online that really takes advantage of speeds that fast? Do we need it? The answer is: yes! We do need it! We're in a global economy where the U.S. is increasingly becoming known as a service economy, so be able to provide services online is a big win for us. How can we stay competitive with Japan though when its citizens can access the Internet at more than triple our speeds? Granted, checking e-mail doesn't require speeds that fast, but rich content does - like TV shows and movies. Let's face it, people are getting tired of bowing down to their cable television providers and going to the movie rental store - they'd much rather curl up on their couch with loved ones after a hard day of work and enjoy their multimedia without having to pay through the nose for it. I'm disappointed by the amount of HD content legally available on the Web, and part of the problem is that there's no point distributing media no one can reasonable consume on their Internet speeds. Also, when it comes to moving applications to the clouds so we can have lighter computers, the tradeoff will come in the bandwidth these sites require.

However, some people spit out numbers on how we're behind without qualifying it. You may see 20 Mbps in some European countries not because they've really got it together (though they aren't doing a bad job), but because these are in densely populated areas. Given how big the U.S. is and how far spread out our urban centers are, we can't take advantage of geographical size like to build great infrastructure for cheap. I still argue that the telcos are hording money, but to their credit it's just not as easy here as it is in like South Korea where a lot of people live in crowded apartment complexes. And they lie less than in other countries where Internet providers sometimes put usage caps in fine print and overstate average speeds that are really the max speeds (which can be a fairly sizable difference, at times).

It's just good to put all this stuff in perspective. The point is that we'll never know what we can do with everyone on super fast broadband if we don't strive for it, but we shouldn't be discouraged by reports that we're lagging behind the world. It's easier said than done, but we do need to work towards it and annoy our telcos into building up the infrastructure we so direly need to stay competitive.

The New Shuffle

There was a skit on SNL a long time ago mocking how each iPod gets smaller and smaller, and I can't believe that it predicted correctly the ridiculous race to have the smallest mp3 player. Presenting the iPod Shuffle 3G:



In choosing between the pill and the new Shuffle, you may be better off with the former. I was actually very fascinated in it at first, but the more I read about it the more I thought it was totally useless. It's cool that it has playlists now and it announces songs so that you don't have to guess anymore, but not having any buttons on it is kind of ridiculous to me. How do you control it without buttons? You have to use their crufty earbuds with the 3-button controller on the cord. So you have to memorize how to press keys in certain combinations to do things - although it is fairly easy to change the volume. What astounds me though is that this is a product that a lot of people use for working out, and it's totally un-usable for that purpose now. Using earbuds while you're jogging or upside down would probably be aggravating, and even worse would be the awkwardness of controlling it by reaching to your cord rather than a quick press on your arm. Supposedly, there will be an adapter for other headphones later on, but it should come with that in the box, to be honest. Also, I question how sturdy that clip is since it's smaller and probably more easy now to lose/break.

I'll give them credit for keeping it cheap though: $80 for 4GB isn't too shabby and it would make it ideal for listening to audio books or podcasts on the go right from your pocket - which probably has a bunch of other stuff in it because of how small this thing is. Still, I'm not really impressed.

Let me jump into two other Apple stories real quick. They've ordered 10-inch touchscreens for a mysterious product that some speculate will be announced this week. I don't like commenting on these Apple rumors, but this is fairly reliable and it could indicate a netbook, a tablet (very long rumored), a Kindle competitor (unlikely, in my opinion), or just simple a mobile Internet-enabled multimedia device focused on video since the iPhone screen is a bit small. Also interesting is their patent for a magic wand to interact with Apple TV almost the way you would use a Wiimote. I actually really would be interested in seeing something like this because I was just thinking recently about how antiquated our current remotes are and incapable for effectively typing on-screen or interacting with pictures and such.

Windows Lessons and IE's Final Release

Infoworld has an article up I really liked about lesson that Microsoft learned from Vista in creating Windows 7. The main lessons learned were that they were building for hardware that was too advanced, they didn't have enough support from hardware manufacturers for drivers early enough, the feature set changed multiple times in the product cycle, and it was released before its ready. It's already apparent that almost all of these things, and more, have been corrected for in creating Windows 7.

One thing I like that they're adding in Windows 7 is the ability to disable Media Center, Media Player, Search, and several other things. Being able to pare down your system to what you need is a great feature and something I think Vista could've benefited from.

There are strong rumors that IE8 will be the last iteration of Internet Explorer, at least the last iteration based on its current engine. Some are saying that Microsoft will be moving on to Webkit and others say Microsoft will move to a brand new engine. I'm guessing (and kind of hoping for) the latter. I think Microsoft has seen IE decay for a while and knows it needs a better approach. Webkit doesn't seem their style, I think they have an ace in the hole. I would definitely not be surprised though to hear an official announcement that IE8 will be the last IE.

The Rest

To be brutally honest, I'm exhausted (I was on call last week through this terrible morning) and I've been talking to friend about personal stuff so I'm going to have to run through these last items quickly so I can get at least 6 hours of sleep in tonight.

CNet has a really good roundup of alternatives to paying your cable bill, like a Roku box or an Xbox 360. It's pretty evenhanded and a great read. Of course, I'm going to support the TiVo, but they're all actually pretty decent options, depending on what's most important to you.

Jon Stewart has done an awesome job of going at the throats of CNBC for not being more proactive in helping Americans understand handling their finances and AppleInsider has an excellent article about it (including the uncut source videos) and Cramer's potentially illegal market manipulation when it comes to Apple stock. It's pretty shocking stuff and I'd say a must-read/see.

Sirius XM is planning to stream to the iPhone. The company is still in dire straights, but it's pretty much the last thing they can try to save themselves.

Palm is selling stock to try to raise funds so they can squeeze out the release of the Pre - a Hail Mary play in their prolonged fall from the top. Those investors will either be really lucky or get screwed if the Pre flops - it ought to be a pretty risky investment.

I'm really sorry that I couldn't talk more about Joel Spolsky's amazing article about what Program Managers do. I think it's a fantastic explanation of why they're important and what they're responsible for. Having worked with a great TPM at Amazon, I fully agree with what he says and how important they are.

Circuit City is done. They really shouldn't have swapped out their good sales people for minimum wage high school students. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them because they simply didn't offer a good customer experience.

Facebook has gotten yet another facelift, and people are getting peeved, per usual with Facebook changes. I don't understand why they don't give users the option to choose the layout they want - if they designed it properly they would've had that in mind from day one of creating a major facelift.

If you wonder what cameras will focus on now that the megapixel race is largely moot, Ars Technica has a pretty good explanation of the features you'll want to pay more attention to now.

How did Jimmy Fallon get The Roots to be his house band? Anyway, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht were on last week, and I'm interested to see how Fallon's attempt to bring technology and video games into late night will pan out. He's basically try to take what G4 does and bring it to national television, and I think that'll be a pretty big challenge.

These are some super cool bus ads.

If you're wondering what's getting the most viewership on Hulu, check this out. It's funny how much better Dr. Horrible did than established television franchises.

Have a good week, everyone! If you're in Seattle: stay dry! It looks like it'll be a wet week, I'm afraid.

Facebook on the Decline?

Mino HD Review: Next Week

I've been putting this off for far too long so I promise that I'll have a review for my Flip MinoHD next week. I've heard some interest for one and I keep putting it off, so I've already started shooting footage on it and on my Canon PowerShot SD 450 as a comparison of HD vs. SD to package with the review.

I want to do a review of my TiVo HD by the end of the month, but I still need a tripod for my camera to pull it off right. I'll keep you guys posted when I'm ready for that.

Everybody Loves Hates Facebook

I've covered this topic before, but I ran into too many good articles about it last week to not jump into it once again.

Facebook has enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth over the past 4-5 years, but is their ride on the gravy train over? Let's face it, at a certain point it has to stop growing as people run out of people to tell to join the site, and at that point it's all about keeping eyeballs on the site. As the article I just linked points out quite eloquently: it's like a pyramid scheme, in a way. At some point, dummies stop getting recruited in and the people at the top make all the dough. Of course, Facebook users aren't dummies (not all of them, at least), so their eyes are valuable for ad revenue. The only way to keep advertisers in this market is to prove that you're producing results through engagement (kind of like the Burger King ad campaign Facebook shut down last month), not brute force page views. They claim that their key demographic is people in their 30s, but this is an age group that's clearly LinkedIn, not Facebooking. It's an important group: the 30-somethings that have money to burn and are first adopters.

Nowadays though, Twitter is social networking's golden boy. They are the next Facebook, and Facebook's latest efforts to open up their platform further so that third parties can use wall information and status updates may not extinguish much in the fiery blaze Twitter has left in its path. First off: Facebook status updates are now public. Did its users really want that? If anything, I think all these changes that Facebook has made has only served to alienate its users from the site. If the user experience changes every few months, you're going to lose people at each iteration despite how many you also gain.

It's funny how the two services have grown to be such polar opposites. Facebook is trying anything and everything to bring in ad revenues, including telling your friends about the ads you click through. Talk about a disincentive: what if it's an ad for condoms or something and then everyone knows the brand you like? Can you imagine your boss seeing something like that about you on their home page? Twitter, on the other hand, isn't trying anything at all. This isn't the smartest strategy, but they haven't lost any users to anything other than any given user's lack of interest to twitter. Some have suggested engagement ads in Twitter could be subtle messages that appear in your feed, but that could be risky if users confuse it with actual status updates. Of course, Twitter could data mine your updates and those of your friends to really target the ads it shows you. It'll be interesting to see where they go and it's funny how many investors are willing to back them on the sheer size of their audience - much like investors were jumping on the Facebook boat just a couple of years ago. Has Facebook already failed though? Not really. This was bound to happen. Twitter was bound to see growth and popularity like this, and Facebook was bound to see a tremendous slowdown in their growth. If they want to survive, they need to really focus on keeping their users happy and not introducing advertising techniques that upset anyway. Conversely, Twitter needs to start experimenting - nothing too crazy, just enough to get the ball rolling.

Layoffs Go Global

The United States isn't the only country to get hit hard by layoffs - we're now in a global economy. A downturn in any of the bigger economies is a downturn for everyone else. Japan's Sharp, inc is going to be cutting 1,500 contract workers and is facing a billion dollar annual loss. Fortunately, none of their 55k full-time employees are facing the chopping block, but a number of managers and executives are facing salary cuts. They're actually the leading cell phone maker in Japan, and even their cell phone sales took a serious, partially due to Japan's weakened economy and partially due to the foreign exchange (FX) market.

Panasonic came out much worse: they're cutting 15,000 jobs and shutting down 27 plants worldwide. They're forecasting a $4.2 billion loss through the remainder of this fiscal year, which is their first annual loss in 6 years. They're still trying to reshape their business for this economy, but it's an uphill battle. Sony is also cutting 8,000 jobs worldwide and letting go of 8,000 more temporary workers.

If you get laid of at IBM stateside, they're giving you the option to have them move you to another country for less pay. I guess it's a cool opportunity if you want to see more of the world and you have no better prospect here for a couple of years, but it still seems like a raw deal. Of course, it's kind of cool that they're interested in keeping American labor even if they can't afford to stay in business and pay American wages.

If you find yourself on the receiving end of a pink slip then, first of all, my heart goes out to you. My heart goes out to anyone who works hard and gets laid off, especially if they have a family to support. I count my blessings every day that I've been fortunate enough to work at one of the few companies still seeing growth in this financial climate. Fortunately, the Internet is around to help you dust yourself off and go job hunting. Not everyone is a fan of Guy Kawasaki, but I do like his post on 10 ways to make LinkedIn work for you. Finding hiring managers and startups and getting recommendations and such is definitely a great start, and hopefully it'll lead to a happy ending.

No More Windows 7 Betas

Microsoft has announced that there will be no more beta releases for Windows 7. They've seen a lot of great press come out of the beta with many reviewers even telling people to hold on to their sluggish Vista machines for a Windows 7 speed boost. Their next step, instead of a second beta, will be a release candidate. I doubt that it'll be public though - it'll probably be an internal milestone for no more than fatal bug fixes changed in the code base. the rest of us still have a long wait ahead of us: the earliest we'll see Windows 7's final release is this coming winter, but an early 2010 release may be a more reliable time frame to look forward to.

It's not all sunshine and lollipops though: it looks like there will be six different versions of Windows 7: Starter, Home Basic (for developing nations), Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. To be honest, there should only be 3 versions: Starter, Home, and Professional. The fact that Enterprise and Ultimate are the same, just offered in different markets, is mindboggling. Also, why have Home Premium and Professional if home users who want more features are probably going to just look towards Professional anyway? And for that matter, why sell big companies Enterprise instead of "Professional"? I'm sure they have a bunch of marketing guys convinced that this is a great idea, but I think it only serves to confuse and irritate their customers.

One more bit of bad news for Redmond: IE has now dropped to 67.55% of global browser market share, which is a staggering figure when you consider the chokehold it once had on the market. Firefox is now at 21.53%, which leaves little room for Safari, Opera, Chrome, and friends.

Of Veins and Scams

Sony has unveiled a new type of really cool biometric authentication technology: vein recognition. That's right, like the ones in your fingers. Biometrics has been kind of a bastard child of security research yielding products that seem cool in movies but are often impratical due to costs or being too easy to break. The hardest to fool, at least up til now, is ocular scanning. This new technology uses a CMOS sensor to capture scattered light inside a finger, and they claim that this is fool-proof (famous last words). I don't see why someone couldn't make a fake finger that created the same light pattern as someone else's finger if they severed it. The problem with passwords that are parts of your body is that they put your life in risk if they guard something valuable enough and they sometimes don't have another key, so once you lose your valued body part you're also locked out of the car/data/house/panic room/etc. Who knows, maybe Sony has really thought this through - I just haven't seen much more detail on it.

Social engineering scams are tricky, so maybe this list of the top 5 Internet scams will open your eyes to what you should be aware of as being possible out there. As a general rule of thumb: if it's too good to be true then it probably is. Getting something great for little or nothing is probably a red flag. Instead of reading forwarded warnings of new virus outbreaks (or forwarding them yourself, for that matter) how about using your instincts and thinking hard before volunteering sensitive information to someone or clicking on a link that seems shady? We all make mistakes, they important thing is that you learn from everyone else's mistakes and take the proper precautions.

YouTube Filtering and Popularity

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is reaching out to those of you who pride yourselves on making mashups with bits of otherwise copyrighted material to talk to them and allow them to help you stake your claim against Warner Music if you've recently had a video muted or taken down even if your use of the copyrighted content is considered fair use and, hence, legal. In a world where mashups like this and pervasiveness of the music is the key to selling said content, it amazes me that Warner Music would prefer legal fees to legitimate sales.

YouTube has done something right, fortunately, in changing the home page recommendations from "Most Viewed" to "Most Popular". Popularity includes factors like how long people watch your video for after they go to it and how good the ratings are. They're hoping that this will stop the gaming of pushing videos to the front page off of sheer page views. After all, it's in YouTube's best interest to keep people coming back for more by showing them the good stuff from the get-go.

Quickies

There was so much news last week that even the following is a paring down of what I had tagged to talk about. In the end, I think this post as a whole reflects the most important and interesting news from last week.

Amazon launched a new store within the main retail site:



That's right, video game downloads. You don't have to wait for the mailman to blow off some steam. They have hundreds of games that you can try for free and then buy for $10 or less. I imagine this will appeal to children and bored businessmen. It's not quite like Gametap where you can get next-generation quality titles, but the site just launched last week so anything's possible.

Speaking of video games though, the Final Fantasy 13 trailer is online and it's spectacular. J-RPG fan, unite! You can also download it from the PlayStation Network.

Google Latitude came out last week allowing you to use your iPhone or Windows Mobile device to record your location for your friends to see where ever you are, or you can enter it in by hand. At first, I was skeptical, but you have total control over who can see where you are and how much they can see (i.e. a 1 mi. radius of where you are or just the city?). It's kind of like Twitter with GPS. I wonder if it'll take off or just be a novelty?

Intel spoke at a chip conference that the future of microchips is not in GHz but in on well integrated it is with wireless devices by including more functionality in the chip itself that would otherwise be in other parts on the motherboard. The future is definitely the increased mobility of computing, so it'll be interesting to see what Intel comes out with next after the Core i7 series.

Computerworld has a great article on why e-Books truly are the future, despite what naysayers think. People may cling to books, but they've already started shedding newspapers and how often do people buy paperbacks only to turn around and sell hem after they're done to conserve space?

The creator of MySQL has left Sun over creative differences to launch his own company. It's no secret that MySQL innovation has been kind of lagging behind competitors, and his new company will be focused on a new SQL storage engine called Maria. He's also hinted at a restaurant side project. I definitely look forward to seeing what Michael Widenius comes up with next - he's a very smart guy.

GMail added some new features like better drop downs and more auto-complete, so go check it out!

Do you know what binary is? If you don't think that 10 is equivalent to 2, then maybe this 1-minute primer will help you out. Understanding binary is one of the most fundamental concepts in computer science, and something I not only came back to again and again in school but even in industry.

The forced digital transition has been pushed back from February 17 to June 12. While I did say last time that the delay failed in the House, they re-voted with the provision that stations can turn off analog signal before June 12 if they were already planning on it, but they don't absolutely have to until June 12. This seems kind of pointless to me and just further confusing because now not everyone will have to transition and they're not going to know if they have to or not because of this optional delay of sorts.

Alright, I'm on call for one last night and this month so I want to wrap up a few things before my weekly report in the morning. Have a good week everyone and don't be too afraid of Friday being the 13th! We don't burn nearly as many witches at the stake anymore.

The Dark Knight on Blu-ray

The Dark Knight Goes Blu

Sorry, that was kind of a lame heading, but this movie definitely is not. If you're one of the five people who haven't seen it, I wrote a pretty detailed review when it came out so I won't go into too much detail about it here, but I will give a brief rundown of my thoughts on second viewing before I talk about the Blu-ray set specifically.

I'm convinced that The Dark Knight is my second favorite movie of all time, beat only by Kill Bill and probably followed by Pulp Fiction. By the way, I rank my movies on how much I enjoy them and enjoy watching them again and again. I may have seen better movies, but that doesn't mean they entertained me as much. Anyway, Batman is back to take on the Joker, who is equally as meticulous as Batman but for crime, and hopes to hand the reigns of Gotham City to ambitious District Attorney Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight. While it doesn't sound like much, the story is liable to keep you on the edge of your seat once it gets going, and the acting and writing are pretty much spot-on. Despite being as long as it is and having seen it before, I had no problem staying interested for the whole thing the second time around and was actually ready to watch it again later this week. The cinematography is not to be overlooked either with gorgeous city shots and plenty of mayhem shot in both IMAX and on standard film. It's pretty hard not to love this movie when it does so much right. I know people hate the comparisons to Heat, but I think that the on screen dynamics between Batman and The Joker are even better than between Pacino and DeNiro. Anyway, enough about the movie itself: it's superb.

Does it look every bit as good on Blu-ray as it did on the big screen? For the most part, yes. I think that when you watch a movie with as dark as palette as this one the scenes with a lot of black don't look as good as you may remember on the big screen. The IMAX scenes are pretty much breathtaking. I was a little disappointed with how they enforced the IMAX aspect ratio: the IMAX shots will take up your whole screen whereas the rest of the movie will have black bars at the top and bottom. Since my other Blu-ray movies don't do that, it makes me feel a little cheated. Still, they're fairly thin bars and the quality is pretty amazing for the rest of the movie also. The only flaws you're really going to find in the other scenes in the movie are just noise in the backgrounds occasionally, but you pretty much have to walk right up to your TV (which I hope is HD if you buy this on Blu-ray) to notice this noise. The edges are razor sharp all around and I can't recall seeing any artifacts. I think it doesn't look as good as Wall-E simply because the colors in the movie itself aren't as vivid, but they're definitely crystal clear and ensure that you won't miss a single detail in a single frame. So don't buy too much into what some critics are saying, I still think it's worth your money video quality-wise (I can't speak for the DVD version though because I haven't seen it). The sound is even better though. Even on my simulated surround sound, it never comes close to disappointing. It gives you that true movie theater experience with explosions you can almost smell and gunfire that's almost too realistic. The score shines pretty well also.

Now for the weakest part of this set, if you can even call it that: the extras. I didn't try out the digital copy, but I did try out BD Live and perused the other extras on both discs. The BD Live content is nothing particularly exciting. You can create and watch video commentary, which I think is kind of a gimmicky. You can also do live chats, and there's actually a live video chat with Christopher Nolan this Thursday that I'm going to see if I can join. The other main feature is the ability to watch movie trailers and other video content that should've been on the disc but wasn't because it wasn't good enough. There were a couple of videos that I was kind of peeved didn't make it on the Blu-ray because they were actually interesting, but the others were animated shorts that added audio to frames of a comic book that was created for the movies. I only watched a couple, and they were terrible. The artwork was just fine, but the dialogue did not sound like Batman at all (I mean the writing, not the voice acting). What's worse about this stuff is that the video size is only a quarter of your screen, are lacking in quality, and buffer terribly. It's best to start playing one, pause it immediately, and then go make yourself hot cocoa while it buffers the video so that you can actually watch it continuously. My cable Internet isn't the bad, but I can stream videos just fine on my laptop. I would've liked to have seen a trivia game or something else on BD Live.

The other features are pretty good though. There's no commentary track, which I didn't mind because I rarely listen to those, but you can trigger featurettes at various parts of the movie when you see the appropriate icon, or watch them all entirely outside of the movie. There's about 90 minutes worth of that stuff, and they're pretty fascinating overall. I had never seen an IMAX camera before watching the featurette on it, and it's incredible to imagine how they filmed any action on that thing. On disc 2 you'll find a couple of documentaries that no one has seemed to point out originally aired on the History Channel in the weeks leading up to the release of The Dark Knight: Batman Tech and Batman Unmasked. So when you read reviewers talk about how strange it was that neither of these documentaries include non-trailer scenes from The Dark Knight and only scenes from Batman Begins, you can be a smartass and correct them. I thought that they were pretty well-done and great ways to lend another level of realism to this character and world on top of what the movie has to blot out the abominations of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I especially liked the Unmasked one, a psychological analysis of Batman, because part of what I always liked about him was how dark and gritty and real he would always feel and that he was even thrown into Arkham himself once. There are also some episodes of a Gotham news program that were movie cheesy, but still useful addition in that they help ground the film in what feels like reality. They're almost like deleted scenes, in a way. The other features you have is a smattering of photographs and concept art, and all the trailers and TV spots, which I always love to have to watch long after a movie was released and I'm always bothered when DVDs don't include them. The concept art is pretty awesome, and I really wish that had taken the initiative to let you view them picture-in-picture with the film as an optional layer.

Overall, this is definitely something worth buying. Even though it's not a monstrous amalgamation of special features, it's a pretty healthy amount that will take even longer than the movie itself to go through, and the quality of everything (besides the BD Live content) was excellent.

The Security Scoop

Was there always this much security news? I don't know why they've been appearing so much lately. Anyhow, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (which is a really ambiguous name for a center, in my opinion) is proposing that Obama appoint a special office for a czar of cybersecurity. Rather than be a part of Homeland Security, which is already ripe with bureaucracy, they feel that cybersecurity is critical enough to warrant a direct line to the president. While I would agree with them, I think that this office should lie underneath the CTO he's already going to appoint, who would have the direct line to the president to talk about issues like Internet penetration and security. I think that having a Chief Cyber Security Officer would be too long of an acronym and be overkill. Still, it's a good debate to have. We are entering a world where technology can be as much a weapon as guns or nuclear physics or biology or chemistry. Except for guns, all of those have genuinely good purposes, but we have to be vigilant of when they're in the wrong hands. I'm not dissing guns, but I don't think you can use guns to cure cancer or power a city.

A random security firm called Bit9 has released a list of what it believes are the top applications with the most vulnerabilities, which I believe are ranked by popularity and number of security holes in unpatched and patched versions. The fact that Firefox and Adobe Flash top the list may be a little scary, but that's because of how many new versions they have. The lesson here is not to use a whitelist, it's to keep your systems patched and use a firewall.

One of the most creative viruses I have seen in a long while is probably one that you've now heard about: Koobface. Yeah, it's a pretty dumb name for a virus (shouldn't it be koobecaf?). Anyway, infected users post comments and send users messages that are super convincing that they're in some random video, and since you generally are interested in what your friends send you and don't think it's spam since you haven't gotten spam on Facebook, you gladly click through. It takes you to a Yuotube video that requires you to upgrade your Flash player, and this is exactly why you should always go straight to vendors' websites to get new versions of their software. Anyhow, if you agree then congratulations: you just got screwed. Your prize is a flurry of click fraud (to generate false ad revenue), phishing attacks (trying to steal your personal information), and search results will take you to shady sites. Best of all, it's the gift that keeps on giving, so you have a good shot of infecting one of your friends, as well. As much as I think these guys are pricks, I have to give props for taking social engineering to a scary and innovative new level. That being said, this is terrible. Experts would always tell people to never open e-mail from people they didn't know, but they didn't warn about opening social networking messages from your real friends with convincing text. Of course, when you click through it should be fairly obvious that the site isn't legitimate, and you shouldn't be installing random software on the Internet anyhow. How do you protect yourself? Well, Facebook has added pages that will warn you before you click a link going to an external site showing you the URL, so make sure the URL makes sense. Google the domain name if you're concerned and do a whois on the domain. More importantly, install NoScript and SpyBot, which would prevent something like this from getting very far unless you're naive enough to ignore all the warnings they give you. If something looks shady, it probably is. Just stay alert. By the way, this has also been sighted on other social networking sites.

This last one is not all that interesting, but still noteworthy. Microsoft has uncovered what almost sounds like a buffer overflow vulnerability via function pointer that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code when you close any version of Internet Explorer. Given that they don't have a fix out yet, you may want to keep with Firefox if you're an avid IE user, at least for a while (who know, you might even stick around).

Software as a Service

Before I get into the article, I should define this terribly worded term. Software as a service refers to software that provides a service to you remotely as opposed to living on your computer. In a general sense, you could consider the Internet itself as software as a service since you send URLs to your ISP (I'm abstracting a lot out here) and they provide you the service of streaming you what's on that page. More specifically though, it refers to sites like Gmail and Twitter that live in the clouds rather than your machine and provide some sort of service to you: like e-mail service or microblogging or word processing. Generally, they're "freemium" services (I know, really stupid term), so they're free unless you pay extra for the premium version, which often doesn't work out too well unless you really have a killer application or you provide ads on the free version of your site.

Anyway, there are obvious pros and cons to this. Not having to maintain the application locally means that you can use it from where ever and you can wipe your hard drive without losing it. The biggest con is the lack of control: the idea that one day the site could disappear and you'd lose everything on it. The article argues that this makes it terrible for businesses, but I have to disagree. Sorry to pimp Amazon Web Services, but I think it's a great example of well-established software to help you run your websites without having to buy and maintain your own hardware. If the price is right and the company is reputable, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If it's like a photo sharing site though, then there's obviously no telling what will happen, but something like Google Docs isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and they're not likely to pack up without an easy way for you to get your stuff back. It's better to use software as a service rather than reinvent the wheel, you just have to be smart about it.

Frostwire Promotes Artist

Frostwire is the spiritual successor to Limewire as a P2P application that's surprisingly still around and working well, and it's trying to take a stab at proving its legitimacy by promoting artists with free downloads of their music. I'm glad that someone is finally trying this out because I really want to find out how it turns out. I personally have high hopes for it. It may seem like a shot in the dark, but I think it's always a leap of faith to buy an album without hearing all of it so this is a venue that would be excellent for independent artists.

The iPhone Comes to Wal-mart

I never talked about this when it was a rumor, but it's a real story now: the iPhone is coming to Wal-mart as early as this week for $199 and $299 (8GB and 16GB, respectively), probably with an AT&T contract. I'm pretty shocked by this and wrote off the rumors as rubbish since Apple is so protective of its brand. I don't get the logic behind this. They're already selling ridiculous numbers of this thing online and through AT&T and Apple stores, so they're going to cheapen the brand by offering it at a retailer like Wal-mart? I'm not opposed to cheap Apple products, but why not sell a cheaper laptop then? Do they want the iPhone to be an everyman kind of product?

Google News Galore

I'm not sure why there was so much Google news last week, but let's see how fast I can run through it all. They've decided to start selling $400 developer G1 phones, which are unlocked and make testing easier, but man is that expensive. Still, it's a nice option to offer to those who can afford it. Also in G1 news: they've started AdWords for Android and the iPhone, which basically means that when you advertise with them you're more likely to be properly viewed on those platforms. Isn't that kind of a small subsection of the overall market? Yahoo really needs to strike in mobile ads.

You may start seeing AdWords serve up advertisements for alcohol. I guess that Google figures the best way for you to go through a recession is wasted? I wonder how we'll they'll fine tune serving these ads because it would suck if a kid searching for barbie was treated to an ad selling the Jack Daniels brand.

In case you care: their zeitgeist with the top terms of 2008 is up.

I think it's pretty cool that you can now send SMS messages straight from Google Talk in Gmail. Just enabled it in Google Labs. Just be sensitive to your friends' text messaging plans.

Google Chrome is no longer in beta, but is anyone really still using it? Other than bug fixes and supposed stability improvements, it doesn't look like there's much else separating it from the beta. I'm not saying it's a bad browser, but I'm still not convinced that it's better than Firefox.

Lastly, Google Book Search now includes magazines. I know you've been on that for a long time, so try to contain your excitement.

The Rest

I'm sick and tired, time to sum up the rest of the news in a lightning round.

Rather than release mobile applications to help you read books on your phone (albeit, in big text) or engage in book groups online, book publishers have decided to release an iPhone application to inundate you with marketing. Awesome. Why don't they just hand over more market share to Audible on a silver platter?

If you want to develop Internet applications in Java that feel like Flash or Silverlight without the cruddy aftertaste of Java applets, you may want to invest some time investigating JavaFX. It sounds like a cool framework I wish I could go into more deeply, but it's aiming to really be an integral part of not only your online experience via computer, but also via embedded platforms (like your cell phone).

Sandia has determined that 16 cores (2 to the power of 4 is where that comes from, by the way; think binary: 10000) is the maximum to which you're going to see performance improvements. Past that point, these cores on your processor die don't have the memory bandwidth to give you much of a gain, which is like having the world's strongest man help you carry your groceries rather than lift a car for someone who was in an accident. The solution: stack your chips. Didn't Texas already think of this?

You're running out of time for holiday shopping! Amazon free super saver shipping ends in a couple of days, but you can still get two-day shipping from Amazon and many other sites to suit your shopping needs. You really only need Amazon though ;)

Lastly, Gizmodo has an awesome article explaining everything you ever wanted to know about hard drives and how they work. If you were ever curious about how terrible they are, you should really ready this and watch the fun videos. The lesson to be learned from it is to backup your data constantly. You should count yourself lucky if your hard drive hasn't crashed yet, but keep in mind that it's like a ticking time bomb: there's a 99% chance that it will eventually.

Time for some TheraFlu and sack time. Seattle really knows how to bring the cold, and I'll try to snap some shots of the snow to share next week, but here's a couple of shots to remember the fall by: