Apple Patent Lawyers vs. the World

Apple Sues HTC

It's unfortunate that all these big negatives stories keep coming out about Apple because I'd much rather talk about other stuff. The news is what it is though.

In a way, this was bound to happen, but I guess it's been so long since Apple threatened to enforce its patents that everyone had forgotten. Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC for 20 patent infringements. The list of patents include things like swiping on a touch screen to unlock, turning off the phone screen when held near your face, and the idea that a foreground app can send off a background process to do work while the foreground remains responsive to user input. These patents would kill a lot of modern touchscreen phones, if upheld, but some of them are OS-level ideas that I'm pretty sure had prior art before being filed. Even though the lawsuit is against HTC, Google is verbally supporting HTC and some are speculating that legal advice is being provided behind closed doors. Apparently, lawsuits aren't so uncommon in the mobile phone space where it ends up in patent trading so that people can build on each other's ideas, but I think it's kind of sleazy either way.

Apple is not hard up for money and is not by any means getting killed competitively by HTC. HTC has surely cut into Apple's market share, but probably not by enough to warrant a lawsuit. Apple makes plenty of money, so they're not hard up for money. I see 3 possible motivations here (and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive): Apple wants to bankrupt HTC to eliminate them from the market, HTC has patents that Apple wants to take advantage of, or Apple wants to scare off other competitors from building on concepts that Apple has pioneered. Except for blatant ripoffs, most other big companies in tech, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, don't file lawsuits like this. Most patents filed are for purely defensive purposes. It's a little crazy to say that you can't act on an idea you have just because Apple had the same idea before you did. Not all of these patents are like that, but I think several are. If you have a touchscreen phone, it only makes sense that you need to gesture to unlock it because you have no physical buttons to do it with - why should everyone pay royalties to Apple for that? I'm all for Apple protecting themselves against people making exact iPhone copies, but I don't think HTC has done that at all. I think they've been doing their best to innovate, and lawsuits like this only hurt innovation and competition.

TiVo Premiere Announced

It's been well over two years since the TiVo HD came out and TiVo hasn't financially been doing all that hot. As I've said before, I have a TiVo HD and think that the user experience is unparalleled. My brother has AT&T Uverse and his DVR setup is the closest I've seen in quality compared to the TiVo, but it doesn't have the connectivity with external services (like Amazon VOD and Netflix) that TiVo does.

TiVo has finally revealed to the world the TiVo Premiere, which is a 320 GB HD TiVo with an all new, improved interface. What's really cool, and I was hoping would be included but will actually be extra, is the qwerty peanut remote:



I've always wanted a keyboard on my TV remote for searching, so that's a pretty killer feature. Still, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade for existing TiVo users. It's only $300 so it makes sense for new buyers to pounce on it, but it doesn't sound like the guts have changed much. I wish it would support Tru2way, but at least it supports Verizon FiOS. The new Flash interface (which will finally include a storage capacity meter) is getting rave reviews from reporters who saw it at the announcement, and it's probably the TiVo search beta currently available. Hopefully it's snappier than on the current hardware though.

Of course, I say it's not worth upgrading and I really want one. It hits a sweet spot, in my opinion, with storage capacity (at least for a single person) and I really want that new remote. It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to it.

Windows Phone 7 Game Demo

Microsoft showed off something at TechEd that has created a lot of positive buzz since about Windows Phone 7. They demoed Indiana Jones being played on the PC, then on a Windows Phone 7 device, and finally on the Xbox 360. What's unique here is that the game state is being shared between all 3 to provide a seamless gaming experience. Well, seamless except for that the graphics are drastically worse on your phone than on your Xbox 360, of course. Still, I'd be impressed with your phone having a mini-game that ties into your game progress instead of tying into exactly where you are in the main game. It's exciting that for the first time in God only knows how long, Microsoft is trying to innovate with their mobile platform instead of just replicating stuff that's already out on the market. The question now is whether or not December can come soon enough in a market as hot as the mobile OS market even with as unique a feature as this gaming experience.

Lifelock on Lockdown

You have probably by now seen an ad for Lifelock at some point. They claim that they proactively guarantee the safety of your identity for a monthly fee and even challenged that you'd get a million bucks if you could steal the identity of their CEO, given his social security number. Of course, someone did eventually withdraw money in his name but not sure if he ended up getting that reward money. Well, the FTC is investigating them for deceptive business practices and being too forceful in trying to gain new customers. Lifelock was unable to deliver on its promises because it didn't protect customers from the most common forms of identity theft, and they had almost no security for customer's private information on Lifelock's corporate network. It's ironic that their slogan is that no one else guarantees your good name because no one else can. It looks like Lifelock couldn't either.

Less interesting but more importantly, the US government has declassified part of its
cybersecurity plan, which excludes monitoring private traffic but does include deploying intrusion detection systems on federal networks, which I'm pretty happy about because that was my short-lived research interest in college. The basis of an IDS is that it tries to detect behavior that's uncharacteristic for a system and raise an alert for such behavior - it's preemptive rather than reactionary like most mainstream security software is. The plan also calls for improving the security of private critical infrastructures. With China threatening the likes of Google, we can use all the precautionary network security measures we can get.

AT&T Claims Tiered Pricing Inevitable

In the world of cell phones, we've always had tiered pricing on voice but almost always have had unlimited plans for data usage (not including text messaging, of course). Well, AT&T has already started rhetoric preparing people for tiered pricing, and it's a bunch of bologna. It shouldn't be possible for a mobile phone to use enough data to really put a heavy dent in AT&T's network, so I'm really skeptical that 3% of smartphone users could be using 40% of AT&T's network capacity. Maybe they should work on a better network - they have plenty of cash from all their iPhone users. The claim that they're in no rush to push out a 4G network, which means they want to charge people more to stay on a slower network than competitors like Sprint. It just doesn't make sense. To their credit, they claim no short-term plans of tiered pricing, but it's clear that they're not dealing well with the burden of so many iPhone users. It's just astounding that they don't believe the bigger bandwidth and reduced latency offered by 4G isn't going to help them out as much as sticking with their current infrastructure.

Hulu Loses Heavy Hitters

In the world of media conglomerates, Viacom is a pretty thirsty beast. Unfortunately, Hulu's revenues couldn't quench Viacom's thirst and so Hulu has lost their two biggest shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's odd that Viacom thinks that they can do better with these two properties than Hulu, which is a fairly established brand nowadays. It's well known in the mainstream, especially because of the recession as people cut out their cable providers. Contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, I don't think Hulu is in quite as deep of a hole as it may seem. Hulu still needs more time to grow revenues, and as other offerings gain success, I think Hulu will show that not only is having your shows available online is approaching a point of becoming vital, but no one does it more efficiently or effectively than Hulu. Of course, YouTube is probably Hulu's biggest competitor, but YouTube is definitely not as browsable for this kind of content compared to Hulu.

More Competitors to the iPad

I don't have much to say about either of these devices, but I definitely think they're worth knowing about. The HP Slate is starting to materialize by way of official video footage, and it's clearly proud of running Windows 7 and supporting Flash, which Steve Jobs is still trying to woefully will out of existence. While I can see the argument for HTML 5 being better in the long run and Flash maybe not being so vital on a small device, I think it's absolutely important on a tablet in the short term and it's definitely one of the things HP should capitalize on. More importantly though, the Slate will give you more freedom to run the applications you're used to if you're already on Windows 7 on your desktop/laptop. Whether or not people want that experience is yet to be seen though.

Meanwhile, a fresh leak has been dropped regarding the Microsoft Courier, which is a tablet that looks like a foldable booklet. The video footage revealed is similar to what we saw months ago, but still very exciting. Who knows if it'll ever become a reality - it seems more like a concept bred from a set of requirements than anything else.

Closing Stories

Ok, as much as I love my new laptop and how much easier blogging is on it, I have other things to do so I'm going to wrap this up with some quick stories I still think are worth taking notice of.

I have too much App1e negativity in this post already, so I'm not going to really talk to the heinous secret agreement Apple has its iPhone developers sign. It's so detrimental to the developer that I'm almost surprised that it's legal.

Real Networks gave up their fight for Real DVD, which aimed to legitimize DVD copying by replacing the DRM already on DVDs with their own DRM. I don't know if it kills the future of copy protection, but it could've created a major precedent so it's definitely a disappointing ending.

Gizmodo has an excellent article detailing the sordid history of Sony. I have a love-hate relationship with Sony - I love some of their products, but their vision is often misguided.

Props to YouTube for launching auto-captioning. That's an insanely awesome technology.

The Core i7 6-core Gulftown processor is finally out and I actually enjoyed reading this review. It's a fairly technical review, but it sounds like a great architecture.

The FCC has released a very capable tool for measuring your Internet speed with the added bonus that they can use your data point to help understand the status of broadband Internet speeds across the country. In addition to just down and up speeds, it even gives you latency! The URL is easy to memorize: braodband.gov.

Torrents are now legally available of free music from SXSW 2010. Check them out!

Popular Science has opened up the entirety of its 137-year archive for free!

I'm a big fan of these free, troubleshooting tools for Windows. If you only download one, definitely get the Blue Screen View one. My next vote is for WinDirStat, which is an application I've needed for years.

Last, but certainly not least, College Humor has a great video on the true use case of Google Wave: cyber sex.

Conficker Drags On

New Guitar Excitement

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







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

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

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

Conficker, Botnets, and Hacker Want Ads

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

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

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

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

Oracle Buys Sun

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

Amazon Video on Demand Goes HD

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

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

Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo Financials

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

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

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

Time Warner is Anti-competitive

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

Quick Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great week, everyone!

Q4 Earnings Reports Madness

Microsoft, Intel, Google, and Apple's Earnings

A lot of tech companies released their quarterly earnings for the holiday season last week (Amazon's will be released this week), and most of them were unimpressive. I was rather shocked to discover that Microsoft's revenues only went up by 2%, which is $900 million short of their forecast. To appease the investors and shore up their profits for Q1, they have decided to lay off 5,000 workers over the next 18 months, with over 1/4 of those jobs cut last week. They're cutting jobs in several departments, so not just in HR and R&D, but also their software engineers. In fact, the entire Flight Simulator team was let go, which is probably their oldest video game franchise. To make matters worse, Zune revenues dropped 54% year-over-year whereas the iPod gained by a few percentage points. The number is slightly more sad when you find out that 54% means about $100 million.

Steve Ballmer sent out a letter to all of Microsoft's employees about the situation, and I actually really liked the letter. Despite his public antics, I thought that it was really honest and heartfelt, and it pretty clearly laid out that they're handling this weakened economy with a good plan. I'm sure that it was not an easy choice for them to layoff any employees given how much they invest in recruiting smart people. I don't think Microsoft has ever laid off people before, but I guess it just goes to show that even they don't have enough money to save themselves when times get as bad as they are right now.

Meanwhile, Google saw a strong 18% growth in revenues year-over-year. They did see a drop in profits, but it looked like it was due to some investments and not reflective of their actual earnings. Another big article that came out last week, maybe a bit ironically, exposed an e-mail thread circulated among ex-Googlers in which they listed the things they loved and hated about life at Google. Some of the biggest complaints were incompetent managers, a ridiculous interviewing process (with 13 interviews for a single position being normal), salaries lower than competitors, and overall bureaucratic difficulties. It's a good thread that I spent far too long reading, and it's just interesting that no company is perfect. I have a lot of fun at my job, but some days aren't as fun as others and some times pager duty can be terrible. I think what's important is that you feel like you're making a difference with what you do, and I definitely get that feeling and it sounds like even some of these Googlers did. It sounded like some of them joined Google for the wrong reasons: the flashiness of the playground that is their awesome Mountain View office, but it's a lure that few can easily resist so you can't fault them for that. Anyway, if you ever wished you could work at Google maybe that article will help you appreciate some things at your workplace.

Intel saw weak PC sales with a rise instead in Netbook sales (something that hurt Microsoft, as well) causing a whopping 90% drop in profits from Q4 2007. They've decided to rethink 5,000-6,000 jobs, which is my way of saying that they're going to either transfer around or lay off that many people. AMD is cutting 9% of their workforce, about 1,100 jobs. They probably won't cut chip prices much since they're already so low, but it is sad to see so many jobs cut because I wonder how much innovation we'll see in chip-making in this down economy. I guess this would be a good time for AMD to swoop in and dominate Intel or a new player with deep pockets to enter the market.

Meanwhile, Apple's profits only dipped a bit with profits just barely surpassing the previous holiday season (a $100 million growth in revenues from $11.7bn to $11.8bn), which is something that no one scoffs at nowadays. It doesn't help that they're also being investigated by the SEC for their disclosures about Steve Jobs's health, which doesn't mean that Apple has necessarily done anything wrong but just that the SEC is doing their due diligence (possibly due to complaints from disgruntled investors). It is kind of odd that Steve Jobs's health didn't decline until just after Macworld, but it could just be coincidence.

One last thing to sneak in here: it turns out that IT workers got a raise of 4.6% overall in 2008 with an average salary of $78,035. Of course, IT managers had the highest salaries at around $111k, but nearly a quarter of those surveyed to get these figures said that they were concerned about staying valuable to their employers and almost the same number fear getting laid off. Those raises only match inflation, and it's still sad to see my fellow programmers so worried, but I think this economy has affected almost every industry. I look forward to seeing us bounce back together, and I hope that people band together and help each other out. I've been spending a decent amount of spending because of my vacation and my new TiVo, but I've definitely been cutting back on things I might've otherwise done (like weekend ski trips) to make sure I meet my target monthly savings amount.

Obama is President, Tech Stories Galore!

In the wake of Obama's awesome inauguration last week, I actually tagged 6 articles that I'm going to run through here about the start of his presidency and the inauguration. By the way, I really liked his speech. At first I didn't as much as I did some of his other speeches, but I thought he brought in some great quotes and it showed that he's very aware of the current situation and will do whatever he can do to help us bounce back. His faith in our country is just awesome.

Anyway, they had a lot of tech ready for security for the inauguration including a reconnaisance plane, tons of cameras, over a hundred intel teams, and, of course, metal detectors. Google took some pictures of the event from space, also, and the sheer number of people who showed up is pretty crazy.



Obama may be our most technologically aware president ever, and that's apparent in the fact that he asked the chairman of Sun for a white paper on how the U.S. government can benefit from open source software. The average American probably doesn't know what open source means, so the fact that he's willing to turn away money from big vendors to look into free, open-source solutions more widely is crazy. A number of government agencies already have gone open source, but the more the merrier. I personally think that the way to go is a balance of proprietary and open source software, not necessarily 100% of one or the other. His staff is so technologically advanced that they were a little peeved at their lack of communication with the outside world through their new computers. Not only that, but the computers they got were mostly desktops running old Microsoft software rather than the Mac laptops they were accustomed to, and the White House site was not very up-to-date last week. It'll be interesting to see what processes are changed and how much the White House will embrace the bigger social networking sites. They've already taken over the White House twitter account and have started updating it with daily updates.

One last Obama-related article: Read Write Web has an article linking to 7 things you can do online to help Obama "restore America", and I think it's great. Whether or not you were thrilled about Obama getting elected, everyone can agree on getting your finances together and staying informed and stuff like that.

Blu-ray Here to Stay

I've heard several techies counting Blu-ray out already because of how hot digital distribution is, but they're missing the fact that people like owning movies in a physical format. The problem with digital content is that even if you have a TiVo or Apple TV, you have to store your movies on a hard drive or something if you want to keep them, and what if the next big machine doesn't support that? Conversely, Blu-ray players are growing in popularity and the PS3 will be around for a while, and DVDs are still readily playable, so why turn away from hard formats? CNet has a great article talking about this and more as to why Blu-ray is going to succeed. It had a rough start, I know, but this time next year I would bet that things will be very different. The ridiculous growth in HD TV sales, even if they're lower-end TVs, in this economy means that people don't want to cut out entertainment from their budget, and they're going to start noticing that NBC in HD looks a lot better than any of their old DVDs do. Not only that, but Sony is very invested in the success of this format, so they're in it until the bloody end. Until like their past crazy formats, this one has become the de facto for HD video for the forseeable future, and they're going to aim to keep it that way so they can stay afloat.

The Windows 7 Taskbar Beats the Dock

Gizmodo has a controversial article up claiming that the Windows 7 taskbar has surpassed the OS X dock, and I'm sure it has already incited a vast flame war. In the end, this is really a subjective distinction. Still, the fact that it's really vying for people's love of a taskbar is an impressive feat. Whether or not it's better or not is irrelevant compared to the fact that it's giving the Mac a run for its money as far as having a beautiful and functional access bar to applications. Some of the advantages that Gizmodo cites includes Aero Peek to easily see into what the windows have, the flashing colored glass to grab your attention, the scalability to accommodate running a lot of applications at once while still having them be usable, and jump lists (quick access to the most frequently used pieces of an application). They don't overlook the shortcomings (like no text to describe windows), and they just give a great comparison with the OS X dock.

TiVo Review Coming Soon

I just wanted to note that I love my TiVo HD. It's awesome. If my TiVo could talk to me and asked me to sacrifice the Motorola DVR I've been renting to my fireplace in exchange for its continued cooperation, I'd totally do it. I literally set a high priority series recording for Lost and the stupid thing (the Motorola) totally forgot about recording it! There was no competing recording, it just didn't feel like recording it. To the contrary, I was able to set Season Pass recordings for a few shows at work a few days ago for my TiVo and they recorded that very night! I even set one recording from my cruddy Treo phone using their mobile site and had no problems. Not only does it not miss recordings, but it doesn't record every airing like my Motorola incompetently does and it even records shows it thinks I might like (and actually does a pretty good job of figuring this out, to be honest) to fill up some of my free space. While you can't manage your TiVo's recordings online, you can remotely set it to download online content (like video podcasts). There are so many things to talk about that I'm going to do a video review in late February. Why so late? For one thing, I can't get a CableCARD until February 18 because Broadstripe is ridiculous (I'm using an antenna right now, which works beautifully on TiVo for HD network television), but I'm also waiting for my brother to ship me a tripod for my Flip Mino HD so I can record and navigate the TiVo. Some of the other awesome features is that I can transfer videos super easily (and even on a schedule) to my computer, I can use my computer as a home media server to stream pictures and music and transfer videos, Netflix integration, YouTube integration, Amazon Video on Demand integration, Season Passes that work, Wish lists (that also work), great search (again, it's amazing how other DVRs can fail so terrible at this) that works, and so much more. This is one of my favorite devices ever, hands down. It's just that good. This is the kind of living room device I've always wanted - between this and the PS3 I'm completely set for home entertainment (plus my HD TV, of course). What a great time it is to come home after a hard day at work!

I'm going to piggyback on this with Engadget's rundown of all the ways you can access Netflix's HD content, including the TiVo HD, which is one of their recommended ways to access it even though the interface isn't as flashy as it is on the Xbox 360. I think it's interesting how many hardware devices Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand are on (TiVo, Roku, Xbox 360, certain TVs and Blu-ray players, etc.) as opposed to iTunes (iPods, iPhones, Apple TV). Granted, Apple probably has them beat in sheer numbers because of how many iPods and iPhones are out there, but definitely not in diversity of devices. Plus, iTunes videos aren't hosted online, so you can't stream them from where ever you want as many times as you want with Amazon Video on Demand. I wonder if they'll change their tune or even strike up more partnerships?

Final Notes

I'm seriously out of time here. Just a few last things super quick.

Two-thirds of Americans without broadband couldn't be bothered to get it, even with a stimulus package. This is kind of sad: it means that they don't understand what the Internet has to offer to them, and I hope that over the next few years they can learn how the Internet can help improve their lives (and hopefully not waste too much of their time in the process with Internet memes and social networking sites).

The Supreme Court has decided that a 1988 law against providing porn online to minors is unconstitutional. As you can guess: the law is too broad. It just didn't make sense and ended up penalizing traditional publishers who do their due diligence already.

This is a wonderful list of the top 10 Steve Jobs quotes. He was always known for saying insightful things, and even though I don't agree with all his ideas I think that he is one of the greatest visionaries the tech industry has ever seen and will be a historical figure long after his death (which I hope isn't too soon).

YouTube has started adding links for downloading some videos, but so far only on Barack Obama's channel. It's amazing how long this has taken.

Is your ISP net neutral? Test them out.

If you're curious as to how zip codes map out, this is a fun web application to find out first hand.

Enjoy your last week of January, everyone!