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

MRT, You Are Pure Evil

That's right. I said what at least simple-minded geeks are thinking. Media Rights Technologies (MRT) is pure, unadulterated, Senator Palpatine-level evil. MRT is suing Apple, Microsoft, and RealNetworks, among others, for "actively avoiding the use" of DRM protection. While it's not likely they're going to win, it's the principle that I despise. They're literally suing these companies for not using MRT's technology, known as X1, which they believe is a foolproof solution to breaking DRM. But wait, what's the problem in the first place? Apparently, because these companies provide media players and can handle streams, they're in violation of DMCA since there's software available to steal these streams, including Windows Sound Recorder, apparently. I've read a lot of stupid lawsuits, but this may take the cake. I really do think so. Mistake number one: software is NEVER flawless. Even if you use formal methods, which no one does, it's exceedingly difficult to prove that a piece of technology does what you want it to do in all circumstances and is unbreakable. So no one can be forced to use X1 for the reason that X1 plugs some digital hole for good, because it doesn't. Secondly, under their argument, everyone must actively do everything to enforce the DMCA, even if the content providers don't care. Hence, if someone finds a flaw with X1, which will happen (see mistake #1), that means that MRT has also broken DMCA and can be taken to a federal court. And lastly, who really cares? There's no way to prove their inane figures about how much money the industry has lost to streaming, and most people won't go through that kind of trouble to steal music using otherwise legal software (like iTunes or RealPlayer), so this is clearly nothing more than a ploy to sell their X1 technology that no one seems to want (and I'm sure no one will ever want after this poor display of business ethics). MRT, I hope you have to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy so that we can all laugh at you even more.

There's an assload of news today, by the way. Let me jump right into Apple news here. MacRumors has the high points from Steve Jobs's meeting with the shareholders, and he seemed to hint at HD content coming to iTunes. Also, he actually admitted what everyone else has been griping about: .Mac sucks and needs a serious overhaul. The other item is that Disney has sold 24 million TV shows through iTunes and over a million films. I'd say that's pretty phenomenal since it was an entirely new form of revenue that was likely previously (at least in small part) lost to piracy. Piracy is still rampant, but I'd say that this helps them sleep a little better at night.

While I don't have a Mac and don't plan on buying one this year, I definitely appreciate how nifty it is when people use Expose, and I definitely think it's more that I like zoomable user interfaces. It works well in Google Maps, it's hella fun in Supreme Commander, and it makes things just feel more intuitive. Like it's another degree of control (kind of like how the idea of the Wiimote just seems to give you a totally different angle of control with the gyroscope it has inside). I just wanted to set down right now that a goal of mine before I die is now to create a piece of software someday that utilizes an intuitive zoom with the UI.

Back to DRM real quick: MySpace has come up with a new system called "Take Down Stay Down" for copyright infringements that will actually remember the digital fingerprint of content that is removed for being illicit to prevent it from ever being uploaded again. In theory, I am not opposed to this idea. They have no obligation to host content that violates the law or their TOS, so that's fine. However, I think that this move is questionable mainly because I'm not convinced of the accuracy of this technology. We've barely scratched the surface of the field of computer vision, who's to say they won't end up with a lot of false positives and keep good, legal content from being posted? If it's accuracy was over 95%, I'd probably approve of it, though.

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, they've now started experimented with putting ads in content, and it looks pretty unobtrusive. Not sure if the little video ad appears if you don't rollover the floating ad text, but if it doesn't then this system is perfect. If not, I just hope these spots aren't longer than 15 seconds. If you have to wait like a minute to watch a 3 minute video, it would be kind of silly.

It looks like there are people out there who have high hopes for Firefox supporting the Open Web and basically becoming a completely open source platform. While I think those ideas are interesting and important to push, because I'm sure many of us remember the horrors of clicking XML links before Firefox 2 rolled around and don't want to have to keep waiting for browsers to play catch-up with new technologies, a browser's main focus is always a rich user experience. Without that, a competitor is just as good, but if you make things easier, faster, and more intuitive, your fanbase will only grow, and I think that's really what Mozilla is going for with Firefox 3. And while I think Open Web is noble, I just don't see things as going in that direction. I think open source always has an uphill battle, and this is just another one. This whole "microformat" idea basically needs its own browser to demonstrate it, as I see it, so why would people flock to it when things work alright (not perfectly, but alright) the way they are now? Just go play with these Firefox tricks instead.

There's a new type of cigarette now called the eCigarette that lets you smoke all you want but just removes the carcinogens from the experience to only give you the nicotine you may be addicted to. It's $200, and while I don't support smoking in the first place, I think I'd much rather see people smoke this than the real thing. Would this really eliminate all the risks associated with smoking though? It doesn't sound like it to me.

In movie news, I'm just going to talk about trailers today. It looks like Dead or Alive, which has been out for a while on video in many regions, is coming to the big screen, and IGN has the trailer. No idea why they waited so long to release it, but from the half of it I saw on Google Video, it looked like just mindless action and gratuitous partial nudity, so take that as you will.

Yahoo Movies has the exclusive trailer, and I like it. It reminds me a lot of Syriana for some reason even though I know it'll probably have much more action. I like the idea of putting Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman together in a movie though, so I hope for the best here.

Lastly, the red-band trailer for Knocked Up is out there, but it's not really all that vulgar to be deserving a strong red-band. It looks mildly funny, but this trailer just doesn't have me quite convinced that I need to see it. Then again, I'm still being scolded for not having seen Hot Fuzz, which I do intend to watch.

Now for Friday's Feast:

Appetizer
Tell about a time when you had to be brave.
I don't know if I'm really fit to define my past actions as brave. The only thing I can think of that I'd consider brave is when I was accused of cheating and had to have a chat with the principal. A friend of mine was involved with this "scandal", but I didn't rat her out. They pressed me on it, but I stayed loyal and played dumb.

Soup
Which upcoming movie are you excited about seeing?
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix!!!

Salad
Name an item you try to always have on hand.
Chapstick. I hate having cracked lips! I also always have keys and cell phone, without fail.

Main Course
Imagine the most relaxing room you can think of. Now describe it!
School is over, it's a weekend, and I'm enjoying sunset on the beach with a certain someone without a care for what I have to get done or what I'm going to do that day.

Dessert
On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being highest), how spiritual or religious are you?
Probably a 6 or 7, I'd estimate. I'm definitely a Christian, and I'm partially a Catholic, but I'm not extremely devout. I'm quite liberal about what I believe in because I don't always like the Church's interpretation of things. I think a number of ideas were propagated to spread political agendas (church politics, that is) when they were created. I believe in God, Jesus Christ, and what I take from the Bible as how He intends for us to live.