Windows Phone 7: It's About Time

A Windows Mobile OS You Might Actually Want

Over the past 7 or so years, Microsoft has carefully dragged the Windows Mobile brand in the mud. Of course, it started out as Pocket PC, but some of us would much rather forget those days. In any case, WinMo has had a lot of issues over the years and got pummeled by Blackberry and Apple in market share because Microsoft simply wasn't being competitive enough in innovation. As such, rumors of a Zune Phone have been around since the Zune hit the market and created a small fan base. While those rumors never quite materialized, out of their ashes has emerged Windows Phone 7, which is more or less a re-branding of Windows Mobile.



I recommend watching the videos that Engadget has posted from the announcement last week because seeing is really believing here - this UI is slick. It very much feels inspired by the same design principles that inspired the Zune, but it's still set apart a bit from the Zune UI in that it clearly looks more geared towards a mobile PC experience. It's visually dominated by clean typography and screens that seem to be horizontally very long to encourage side-to-side navigation. It also aims to plug you into the Internet more easily and automagically kind of like the live widgets familiar to Android users.

While there's no Flash support, it's gotten at least as much good press as the iPad has gotten bad press. I like Gizmodo's wording of the UI as being "function-centric". It's not centered around screens of apps, just a simple interface for exactly what you care about. Despite all this buzz though, I don't know if Microsoft will succeed here. Palm made a big splash around this time last year with webOS and Palm is arguable a more respected name in mobile phones than Microsoft. They released the Pre in the summer and they're still struggling despite critical acclaim for the Pre and Pixi. Microsoft's timeline is this winter, so do they stand a chance in a world where 9 months can mean 1-3 major mobile OS upgrades for Android, webOS, and the iPhone?

Well, I'll admit that they have an ace in the hole: Xbox Live. The way to market phones nowadays tends to be around a specific feature that it does really well. It may do other things decently well but being the biggest player in one specific feature can really help move merchandise. The strategy with Blackberry was for enterprise users and heavy texters and for Palm with webOS it was multi-tasking. I'm sure there will be little independent games on Windows Phone 7 like on other phones, but the real killer feature here would be cross-platform gaming, which is exactly what Microsoft is proposing. Being able to play a casual game on your Xbox 360 from Xbox Live Arcade against someone on their phone is an awesome idea. I can already picture the ad of a dad on a business trip playing Bomberman on his phone from LAX against his son who's at home on their Xbox 360. Past just casual games like this though would be a concept pioneered by Sega with the Dreamcast, which was way ahead of its time. Remember those VMU thingies? Where you could play little mini-games on them? What if you could play a Mass Effect 2 mini-game on your phone that integrated with the storyline from your Xbox 360 Mass Effect 2 saved game? If I had an Xbox 360, I would most definitely buy a Windows Phone 7 for an extended experience like that. Sony has tried to bring together the PS3 with the PSP and had limited success, but it requires people to buy a gaming device whereas everyone needs a cell phone these days.

While we're still in hype mode right now with Windows Phone 7 and the videos show how unpolished it is in terms of speed and bugginess, it's a very cool concept. There's no guarantee that it'll be enough to bail out Windows Mobile, but after seeing all I've seen I really hope it ends up standing a chance.

In Other Mobile News...

Hey, it was Mobile World Congress week so last week was all cell phone news.

Nokia and Intel have teamed up to create MeeGo, a new Linux-based mobile OS designed to work on all mobile devices, not just cell phones, and is basically a re-imagining of Intel's Moblin OS. I think they basically took a good look at the iPhone and Android and decided that they were in big trouble. Given that this is all we know, it's not promising. Nokia doesn't have a great track record for clean UIs, but Intel still has the power to popularize this OS at least among netbooks and tablets and it is going to be an open source OS. The official site says that the development platform will be C++, which may make it more attractive for people used to writing Objective C for the iPhone, but C++ is definitely not as popular a language as it once was.

The HTC has named its successor to the Nexus One: Desire. It's an Android 2.1 device with the same Snapdragon processor and sports a beautiful AMOLED multi-touch screen. I can't get enough of AMOLED - it's too awesome. The main difference from the Nexus one is that the trackball is gone in favor of the Sense UI, which is HTC's UI built on top of Android that was introduced with the HTC Hero. So nothing terrible new here, but it is probably the next big Android phone.

Adobe announced that Air is slated to be available on Android later this year (I think in the first half of the year), and they stated their grand plan of developers writing applications on the Flash platform to work on all phones that don't have "iPhone" in their name. As much as Apple doesn't want to admit it, Flash is big. HTML 5 isn't here yet and everyone already uses Flash for mobile video and a lot of casual online games. I think Flash may be in trouble in 2012 when HTML 5 has hopefully caught on, but for right now it's an interesting proposition that developers can put mobile video widgets on their site via Flash that will work on a lot of non-iPhone phones. It's not going to kill Apple, but it would certainly be a thorn in its side if Flash ends up being implemented well (read: stable and power-efficient). Plus, developers could just develop some applications to just be for the iPhone OS and then for Air and that could end up covering an enormous majority of the market. Like any good conference, this is all just pie in the sky talk for right now. It won't be long before we see what happens, especially with the Pre expected to get Flash support in an OS update before the end of the week.

Why You Should be Scared of Apple

This post simply wouldn't be complete without covering this article from Cracked. It grew to be quite popular. Despite all the great things that Apple has done for technology in the past 30 years, they're riddled with problems that people like to pretend don't exist. It doesn't make you a bad person if you have an iPhone just because Apple does a lot of bad stuff, but it's worth knowing the things they do behind closed doors, like run campaigns of fear against their own employees and take extreme measures to combat leaks. When an employee of an Apple contractor commits suicide because he's being tortured over a prototype he accidentally lost, that's a really bad sign.

The real issue with Apple is the amount of control they continue to wield over their products. It's hard to cheer for someone who makes massive innovations in a technology only to cripple it with restrictions that don't make sense. The app store on the iPhone is a prime example of that, but it's not much better that they use updates for programs like iTunes to sneak other unrelated software on users' computers. I think stories like this are important to know because I believe corporations should be held accountable not only by their shareholders but by their customers. Ultimately, Apple is only around because of the people who buy their products, and their lack of regard for what customers really care about kind of sucks. It'd just be nice to see that change because they clearly have a lot of talent in Cupertino and they can really pump out some impressive hardware.

Yahoo Going the Way of Alta Vista

PC World posted a fun little editorial posing the question of whether or not Yahoo is becoming another Alta Vista. I definitely had a chuckle when I read the title because I remember trying Alta Vista back in the days when people thought Yahoo was the Internet. They're really hitting heavy stagnation when it comes to innovation and a home page that's attractive at all, and it's unfortunate to see them fall like this but they're totally being undercut by Bing. Even though Bing isn't a new player under the hood, it's very telling how quickly Microsoft was able to usurp mindshare from Yahoo.

The Rest

And now the stories I have very little to say about.

Flash 10.1 will support porn mode - I mean private browsing. You have to admit that it's kind of funny how quickly the whole "private browsing" feature has caught on.

40% of US households do not have broadband, and 38% of those people aren't interested in getting it. That's really terrible. The industry and the government clearly aren't doing a good enough job helping the Internet fit in people's lives.

Google Gears is dying in favor of HTML 5. I think everyone saw that coming as soon as they heard about HTML 5.

Maximum PC has a really good roundup of useful web applications. They're not all winners, but most of them truly are really good.

Lastly, this image very aptly sums up the truth about how annoying DVDs have become nowadays. Do the studios not watch their own DVDs? How does all that crap not irritate them?

Have a great last week of February, everyone! Oh February 2010, we hardly knew thee.

Immigrants in Technology

America is Losing the Edge

I decided after much contemplation that I wanted this to be the headline topic for this week's post because it's something that people don't like to talk about enough but it's a serious problem. There's not enough American-born students with degrees in technology and yet the American government still has very stringent policies on immigration. There are arguments to be made for and against allowing more foreigners in the country to fill these positions, but the point is that we have a fundamental problem. Over half of all startups in the Valley are founded or co-founded by immigrants, and yet more immigrants aren't able to get their idea off the ground in America even if they were educated here. We're living in a world economy in our own bubble. We can't shelter American workers from the rest of the world. By turning away these great ideas, we're doing one of two things: letting them grow in other countries instead or letting them die off instead of possibly benefiting humanity. In the former case, we're reducing our influence in the world and in the latter we're doing a disservice to everyone because there are countries where starting your own company simply isn't as feasible. We can't shelter ourselves from outside pressures in the hope that we're going to continue to come up with the best ideas. Technology is growing too fast for it to be contained in a single country, the question is how big a part we want in that future.

Bing's Share Grows

I'm officially impressed by Bing. They managed to grab 10% of the search market. When they got a couple percent, you could say that they bought it with their advertising. At this point though, they're actually getting enough mindshare to maintain a pretty big piece of the pie. I think we are seeing the aftereffects of the advertising campaign and it'll be interesting to see if they can maintain this. They've definitely been working hard to differentiate themselves from Google and that's going to be key to their long-term strategy. They recently launched visual search, which allows you to browse results with pictures rather than texts. Supposedly, people can process pictures faster than text, but it's just kind of a neat feature that gets them good press coverage. It's actually clever and I think an implicit strategy in Google's arsenal since they're constantly making updates to their products and launching new ideas, which gives them free press coverage and makes them more prominent in people's minds.

Fast Flip and Chrome 3.0

Speaking of which, Google has made a few noteworthy announcements recently. The first is Fast Flip, which allows you to read newspapers and magazines digitally as if you were flipping through them on paper. They're trying to get rid of the taboo associated with reading newspapers and magazines in an electronic form that traditionalists have acquired. It allows you to browse through the articles with more words than you can currently get on Google News, but they're hoping that people will be enticed to click through and read the whole article, which will contain some more advertising. It looks like in the browsing itself the advertising will be off in a bar on the right side so that it's not too obtrusive. I don't know if these publications will accept this or if it will work out as Google hopes, but I think it's a really good idea still.

Another bit of Google news this week is that they've released version 3 of Chrome, which is faster but, more importantly, supports HTML 5. If I'm not mistaken, Chrome is the first major browser to support HTML 5, which supports embedded video, audio, and canvas tags.

Chrome Frame

There was actually one more big announcement from Google last week: Chrome Frame. This is a plug-in for Internet Explorer that allows you to render pages with Chrome from withing Internet Explorer and gives you the bonus of being able to properly render HTML 5. Why would Chrome do this? It's not simply to make the lives of web developers easier since Internet Explorer is notorious for being terrible with web standards, but rather to help increase the audience for their products that utilize additions in HTMl 5. Given that some employers are skeptical to allow employees to install Chrome, Google is probably hoping that at least this frame will be allowed. It shouldn't be too surprising that Microsoft advises against people installing the plug-in citing that it poses a security risk. They haven't really given hard proof that this is true and have instead done a lot of hand waving and proclaiming generalities.

Zune HD Faces Off With New Nano

The Zune HD is finally here, and the reviews are pretty positive overall. I feel like Engadget had the most balanced review that I read really giving a good balance between high points and lowlights rather than focusing too much on one or the other. Microsoft has definitely put a lot of care in the interface and making this a solid competitor, and I think it has succeeded in shaking things up a bit. I don't know if it'll get the popularity they'd like in light of the recent iPod releases, but it sounds like it definitely should.

One of the open questions for the Zune HD is if the app store will work out anywhere near as well as the iTunes app store. It's unlikely to ever be quite as successful, and is off to a bit of a slow start as you're faced with ads when starting up the applications available right now. I think that's a really bad model. I think it's better to say you can pay a buck or two to remove ads from an application and just have ads if someone really doesn't want to pay for an application or just wants to try it out in its full glory without having to worry about an expiring evaluation period or something like that. By having pre-roll ads though, they're really disincentivizing folks from using them.

Meanwhile, the new Nano is out there and doesn't seem all that compelling to me. It's definitely a beautiful device, and Ars Technica gave it a positive review overall, but the only really big addition is a video camera that can't take still pictures. If you really want a camcorder though, you can just get a Flip MinoHD instead. Sure, it's a separate device, but it's better quality (and easily pocketable) and that seems to be the only reason someone would upgrade their Nano to this model.

Switching to Linux

I really enjoyed this article about a guy who had been working on his development of a project solely on Windows and decided to try switching to Linux instead. Surprisingly enough, even with the initial setup he had a much easier time overall in Linux. Things were much speedier and wrestling with dependencies seemed to go easier for him. I actually switched to Linux myself a while back and haven't looked back. The command line tools you get with Linux right out of the box are invaluable and doing scripting just feels so much easier because everything you need tends to come right in the box.

CableCARDs Now Open

36% of all households in the US now have DVRs, which is a staggering percentage when you sit down and think about it. DVR adds a whole new dimension compared to VCRs, and it totally changes the dynamics of how people watch TV and advertising on TV. It's kind of ironic that most viewing still happens live with people turning to their recordings when nothing good is on TV, but that shows that people still aren't ready yet for a 100% on-demand model, which is what proponents of IP TV would be in support of.

You'll probably see DVRs become slightly more prominent now that CableCARDs (the card you use to decode the cable signal) can be acquired outside of an OEM, which makes it easier for people to build their own Home Theater PCs (HTPCs). This is an attractive option for people who have a spare PC lying around and I'm sure Windows 7 aims to make it even easier to have an HTPC. This is a pretty big victory for DIYers and overall just a great thing given how bloody the fight for DVRs and CableCARD acceptance has been over the years.

Quickies

Ok, it's getting late so it's time to race through the last stories.

There are some pretty solid rumors out there regarding a tablet from Mirosoft called Courier that has the interesting physical feature of a spine to split it in half making it feel more like a book. It looks neat, but details are still scarce.

The FCC chairman has taken a harder stance in favor of net neutrality and made it clear that inaction is not an option. That's more than refreshing to hear, and hopefully he stands by it.

After several years, the IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n wireless standard, which is is capable of much faster speeds than 802.11g (which is probably what's in your computer right now) and over longer distances. Say goodbye to routers with 802.11 draft N support and hello to full-on 802.11n support (hopefully).

Yahoo started a $100 million advertising campaign to try to salvage the Yahoo brand by bringing Yahoo back in the picture as people's choice for a web portal, but only time will tell how successful it will be. To be honest, I'm not optimistic from seeing some of the ads already:



This stick figure guide is probably the best explanation of AES I've seen and why you shouldn't use it. Ever. It's a really fun read.

Gnome 3 looks pretty.

Whether or not you've heard of the Windows 7 launch party promotion, you'll enjoy this parody of it. Trust me.

One more bit of humor: the evolution of a programmer. If you're a programmer then you're sure to love it.

Have a great week everyone (though I'm sure the change in weather will make that harder for those of you in Seattle)!

The Scheduling Dilemma

Makers vs. Managers

I'm extremely short on time this week. The parentals are still in town so that squeezes my free time. It's nice to have them around, but it also throws me off balance so I have less time to blog. Still, I wanted to highlight at least a couple of things from last week.

The best thing I read last week, by far, was an essay from Paul Graham about engineers' schedules compared to managerial schedules. They basically operate on totally different wavelengths. To an engineer: meetings suck. Engineers have set tasks to get done each day and each meeting is an interrupt and considered a time suck because it doesn't immediately drive down towards burning down a task even if it has long-term benefits. The day-to-day for an engineer is valued in the amount of work that's been done towards an eminent deliverable, not the amount of time spent in the office. This isn't to discount how managers work: they operate on schedules. They're tied to their Outlook calendars and consider a good day of work being that they get done in their allotments of time what they meant to get done. An engineer's problems aren't so easy to plan for, all an engineer knows is that a task has to get done and he can come up with a rough estimate for it at best.

It feels like a constant struggle, but the solution is really just for each side to understand one another. Planning out days with meetings is important for engineers, but it's also important for managers to understand that mid-day time is at a premium for engineers because when you're in the zone you don't want to stop for a meeting. It's really all about balance, but it wouldn't be a challenge if the balance was easy to attain.

Security Glitches Galore

There were too many security issues last week for me to not touch on them real quick. The most high-profile one was probably that Network Solution, a company that handles credit card processing for e-Commerce, had a breach that could have exposed up to 600,000 customers. Even though they were in compliance with industry standards, malicious code was somehow snuck into their system. I wish they would share more information to help other companies guard against the attack. Hopefully, the folks maintaining the PCI standards will share their findings from the case with other vendors.

In the White House, information on a Secret Service safe house for the First Family was leaked via a P2P network. It's disturbing that P2P software was allowed on a computer which such sensitive information. I hope that this leads a deeper investigation into all branches of federal government and their security protocols.

Last week was really not a great week for Apple. First, it was discovered that they had sold exploding iPod Nanos. Then, it was uncovered that a series of invisible SMS message could hijack your iPhone. A patch has fortunately been released, but they don't force updates over the air and so any unpatched iPhones are vulnerable to this attack. I find it ironic that they have tight app store policies and yet they're now powerless to definitively stop a potentially catastrophic attack. To be fair: it's unlikely that anyone will try this exploit since it's not the easiest thing in the world to figure out, but never say never.

Google Voice Rejected from iPhone

There was a surprisingly backlash last week from tech journalists regarding Apple's denial of a Google Voice application for the iPhone. The application seemed to enhance the phone's functionality but Apple claimed that it duplicated existing functionality. Supposedly, the trigger was really pulled by the folks at AT&T. I don't think any of us have the full story, but the point is that the process is clearly ridiculous. Google had been already been talking to Apple about this application and I'm sure they're not happy that they wasted all that time and money. In the meantime, an unofficial version is floating around for the Palm Pre. If it becomes official soon, I may have to jump on this Google Voice bandwagon.

Yahoo Gets in Bed With Microsoft

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal has finally come to fruition was an ice cold reception. I have to admit that the terms are pretty strange: Yahoo's official search technology will henceforth be Bing, but Yahoo will be both company's international salesforce for search. Microsoft will additionally get a 10-year exclusive license to all of Yahoo's core search technologies, and Microsoft will compensate Yahoo with revenue sharing (at an initial rate of 88%). I think Microsoft made out like bandits, and, from looking at the stock price, so do investors. It's not necessarily a bad deal for Yahoo, but it definitely throws a wrench in everyone's predictions for Yahoo's future and I think it'll be a couple of months before anyone can forecast if its to Yahoo's benefit or not.

The Small Stuff

Ok, I'm 5 minutes overdue for bed, so time to race through the remaining stories.

AT&T blocked 4chan - pwnage ensued before AT&T un-blocked them.

There's no supported upgrade route from Windows XP to Windows 7 - the only real option is a format before installing 7 (unless you want a virtual machine).

Sprint bought Virgin Mobile. Still, no cares about Sprint. (Just kidding - I do because they have great prices, but their customer service still blows)

YouTube is now allowing in-video ads with FreeWheel.

Barnes and Noble is going to be offering free WiFi nationwide in a "suck it" move to Starbucks's iPhone-only WiFi.

If your Firefox 3.5 is sluggish, try these things.

Unemployment is higher in the Silicon Valley than it was during the dot-com bust, but I think it's just because a larger portion of their economy is tech-oriented now than before and the tech industry is now part of a cross-industry economic event.

I went to a the only American-owned sakery in the US yesterday and loved it so much that I think that sake is my new favorite liquor! To commemorate this, here's a picture of a cool mural I took at the Sake One sakery (by the way, my favorites are their Momokawa Pearl and Moonstone Coconut Lemongrass - gotta love that nigori):

Watchmen

Watchmen Review



Watchmen is probably one of the most revered graphic novels of all time and even made it on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the past century (the only graphic novel on that list, in fact). Zach Snyder was rightfully hesitant to take the helm of this film adaptation, a much greater feat than 300 was. Fitting over 400 pages into a 2 1/2 hour film has been in the works for about two decades now fraught with so many problems that fans all but lost faith that it would get made. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read the novel before I saw the film, but I still definitely enjoyed it.

First of all, I have to stress that this is not a superhero movie by any means. It's a graphic novel, and you could even call it a comic book (since it was a mini-series before being compiled into one book), but it's not your typical story of good guys and bad guys. It's more of a character study, time period study, and mystery that just happens to involve masked vigilantes. I'm afraid that it'll get compared to The Dark Knight and Iron Man when it should be compared to 300 and Sin City. It's probably more similar in genre with Sin City than any other popular movie based on a graphic novel. Anyway, the premise of this movie is that it takes place in an alternate 1985 after the retirement of the second age of superheroes who call themselves "Watchmen" but are really just masked vigilantes (as only one of them have superhuman abilities). They've been ousted as protectors by the people, and the movie starts with the murder of one of them - the plot just unfolds from the mystery of this murder and where these characters are now.

Even though I haven't read the novel, I can say that the scenes in this movie are true to the text - that's how obvious they were. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's clear that the visuals and the dialogue came straight out of a comic book, so I don't imagine that fans of the novel will be disappointed. The real problem is everyone else. The greatest triumph and worst thing about this movie is the way it's presented: in a complicated, multi-layer form fraught with flashbacks, clear thematic devices, and dense characters. If movies were meals, you'd have to loosen your belt at least two notches after watching this one - it's huge. It's actually hard for me to piece together the movie from beginning to end just a few hours after seeing it because of how much happened in those 2 and a 1/2 hours (originally 3 and a 1/2 hours) to do any sort of justice to the original form. Alan Moore (the writer of the novel) refuses to watch it because he purposely wrote it to not transfer well to any media except for a comic book. I think he was right, but I don't think that anyone else could've gotten any closer than Zach Snyder. As great as the story itself is, the movie is simply too long. It either should've been cut down more or split into two films (possibly including the cut hour), but both of those options would've pissed off the fans so I can see why they didn't do that.

I have to stick with the story for just a bit more because it's really pretty powerful. At it's heart, it's truly belongs in some sort of mystery genre. The characters are fleshed out really well and the actors/actresses did a fantastic job overall. They pretty much jumped off the screen. What you have to appreciate about this movie is how well it performs as an anti-super hero movie and shows you what's wrong in a world with superheroes (somewhat like The Incredibles). It's also holds no punches in its themes and political messages. To top it all off, it's quite dark and serious. You're more likely to walk out of the theater trying to dig up your old Staind CD than go dancing. Still, it's really worth experiencing for the story alone. The only thing I didn't like was the comedy theme, which I thought was too drawn out and uninteresting.

Visually, it's great but not extremely impressive. It had powerful imagery, but they felt a little too obvious as throwbacks to the novel. We saw it in IMAX and it looks great on the big screen, but I could definitely see noise and grain, and the colors were purposely dark and dull to mesh best with the milieu. I did love the costume and set designs though - I believed the movie's world wholeheartedly. The soundtrack, on the other hand, was one of the best things about the movie. It was pretty much perfect. It was retro and always appropriate for the scene, often serving as needed comic relief. You'll probably find it pretty nostalgic, too.

The last thing I want to bring up before I wrap this up is that it's very much an R-rated film. I didn't think that The Dark Knight was appropriate for anyone not of high school age and this movie's often gratuitous violence and sex scenes never hold back. It's not saturated in either of the two, but some of the violence may have you turning your head, which I've heard wasn't in the original graphic novel. Still, I think it uses the rating well in having the freedom to tell a very dark story in a big way.

I think I've gone on long enough: this was a great film. I think I liked The Dark Knight and Sin City better in terms of dark, mystery films, but it's definitely a better movie than Sin City. It's definitely not for everyone, hence the mixed reviews, but if you can stomach the length of it I think you'll be in for a treat. I give it an A- and would say that it's probably the best thing out in theaters right now (and it's already grossed $55.7 million).

The Mobile Disincentive

A topic that I regularly end up landing on is our increasingly versatile and mobile society. We've become used to having easy and frequent access to computers and the Internet. The smartphone industry used to be a blip and now you can scarcely walk down an urban street without spotting an iPhone or Blackberry. The problem now isn't availability of devices, it's price. The data plans out there are pretty harshly anti-consumer. AT&T should not start their data plans at $60 a month, and the prices just get higher and higher. It's funny how the cell phone infrastructure becomes naturally more profitable over time with more customers and the amortized costs of having built it up, and yet we have to pay so much to send simple 140-character text messages.

In fact, they cell phone users pays $3 a minute on average. So why aren't there any all-you-can-eat plans (not counting Sprint's ripoff plan that's advertised on TV)? It's all about an industry that's well controlled by a few big companies with heavy barriers to entry. Their interests are not in the best interests of society, which is the point at which the government can legitimately be allowed to intervene. So I was pretty glad when President Obama appointed an FCC chairman sympathetic to net neutrality (see my video for more on what that means). I know that's kind of a segue from cell phones, but I'm trying to tie everything to the idea of freedom of information and access to it. He still has to be confirmed by the Senate, but hopefully he is. We've stood by and let this happen to us, and hopefully we can get things to change. Something as simple as ubiquitous access to the Internet via mobile devices can make a huge difference, and having an equal right to provide content online to anyone else is also important, so I'm always willing to plug it here.

First Apple Announcement Sans Jobs

Apple released a few new products last week, which would probably normally be announced at a small event by Steve Jobs with much fanfare and press coverage. Instead, it was a very quiet press release for an updated 24-inch iMac at under $1500, a new Mac Pro, and a new Mac Mini. The only one of those to receive much coverage was the 17" MacBook Pro which I'd argue appeals to a somewhat niche audience of individuals willing to drop a ridiculous amount of money on a large laptop. I'll admit that I'd gladly take one if they were handing them out for free because they're pretty solid, but the point is that these new products were seen for what they were: new iterations of old technology. It's just refreshing to see a change from the normal fanboy-ism.

More Data Leaks

Before I get to the juicy stuff, I have to get to a quick fun little article. The annual Pwn2Own contest is an annual event intended to expose vulnerabilities in operating systems and Internet browsers for research and patching. Last year's winner says that Safari will be the first browser to fall this year. Why? Because it's too user-friendly. It supports too many file formats and such, leaving it open to more mistakes and, hence, more vulnerabilities. He hacked an instance of Safari within two minutes last year, so I imagine he's fairly confident in his abilities. I just find the tradeoff between usability and security really fascinating.

The big security news last week was confidential information related to Marine One, President Obama's helicopter, has been leaked to someone in Iran over a peer-to-peer sharing network. This has been an argument against P2P since its creation, and it has finally happened in a big way. This actually happened last summer and has only now been discovered, and it's not the first time that private information has been leaked via a P2P network, but it is now one of the most famous of these leaks.

The FAA had a heavier data breach: the personal records of over 45,000 current and past employees. While your flights are still safe, the problem is going to be identity theft for these poor people.

The lesson to be learned here is that computers are more sophisticated that most people give them credit to be. Despite how sexy a Macbook looks, it can be quite dangerous if used improperly. People working with sensitive data, especially pertaining to national security, need better training with regard to stuff like this. It may seem dumb that this was leaked over a P2P network, but it's not as boneheaded as you make think for someone who doesn't have the proper knowledge for securing a computer, let alone a network.

Windows 7 Security Quirks and More

Meanwhile, Windows 7's User Access Control (UAC) system has had a third vulnerability discovered. From what I can gather, the problem is that you can run Windows components as administrator from programs not running under administrator permissions, which is a flaw used by Windows itself for some of its core functionality. A hacker could potentially use this to place files in locations the user can't access and then load them to do bad stuff. This basically renders UAC useless, in a way. The bottom line is that Microsoft needs to take a seriously look at its "improvements" to UAC and really weigh what they're losing in exchange for making it more user-friendly.

Another fun quirk is that you'll be able to disable Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7 by deleting the executable entirely. It's specifically intended to appease European regulators, but my assumption is that it'll apply to American Windows 7, as well.

Lastly, if you're interested in what Windows 7 features await us past the beta, you'll like Tech Radar's roundup of 12 of the more notable MIA improvements.

Kindle on the iPhone and Game Trade-Ins

Last week brought some pretty cool Amazon-related news. You can now read your Kindle books from your iPhone via a free application that will additionally stay in sync with your Kindle (so bookmarks and such). It's obviously not as satisfying as the experience on the Kindle, but it seems to be pretty cool, nonetheless.

Also Kindle-related: Slate had an article I liked explaining why computer voices are the way they are: cold and emotionless. Text-to-speech technology has been around for over 2 decades, so it's just interesting to learn about why it's not farther along.

Last, but not least, Amazon released a new part of the site: video game trade-ins. If you have video games valued at $10 or more than you can print out a free shipping label and send them in for an Amazon.com gift card to buy whatever you want on the site. It's definitely a really interesting way to compete with Gamestop in an economy that increasingly turning to online retail, and I'm really curious to see how it turns out, especially since the value of the trade-in can be applied to anything Amazon sells, not just games. People are clearly willing to rent video games and movies by mail, but are they willing to trade used games by mail?

Yahoo Reaches Out to Old Media

In the latest chapter of the ongoing Yahoo saga, they've been trying to encourage more newspapers to advertise online through them. This is kind of an old story that the New York Times is just now picking up, as is their custom with technology (which is why I almost never read their technology related articles anymore), but it kind of exemplifies Yahoo's strange decision-making. While I don't think they should cease to do business with newspapers, they've been in trouble for a long time now. I don't imagine that their financial gains from these sales have been very strong, and it's a strange business for them to have ever focused on.

Enter Carol Bartz. She was recently hired as Yahoo's CEO for being fairly aggressive and having a reputation of shoring up ailing companies. She acknowledges that Google Maps is better than Yahoo Maps and even admits that one of Yahoo's problems is neglecting products that would otherwise have been great. What I like about her is that she sounds like she's intent on focusing the company on the core user experience, which is something that I definitely believe in. She's willing to trade ads for improving the UI where it makes sense and wants Yahoo's software to integrate better with outside services. I really hope that she can make a difference because I'm still maintaining some semblance of hope for poor Yahoo.

Final Tidbits

Ok, I'm on call tomorrow and it's almost time for bed, so let me race through some quickies.

The new trailer for Star Trek is pretty spectacular. I have no real interest in Star Trek in general and even I was enticed by that trailer.

Firefox has finally overtaken IE 6 in browser share at 24%, only about 16 points behind IE7.

Tux Radar has a bookmark-worthy list of Linux tips that every Linux power user should know. I definitely got some valuable advice from it that answer questions I've had for a long time, like finding the biggest files when you're running low on disk space.

If you're wondering how to pitch Linux to your business, this is a pretty good resource. It's 25 reasons to switch, and it's pretty convincing. I'm a big fan of Linux for businesses, but it's definitely not for non-techie home users.

PC World has a short list of Microsoft web services you probably didn't know about, which I mention because it got me to start using SkyDrive as a result, which has a questionable UI but affords you 25 GB of free storage in the clouds.

I really like this video of Microsoft Office Labs's vision of technology in 2019. The comments are unsurprisingly sarcastic about Microsoft in the status quo, but I get really pumped when I see stuff like this. It's an awesome time to be involved with technology, especially since several of the things this video shows are definitely within reach in the next decade.

Lastly, Twitter has finally integrated search into the site (a long overdue feature) and now plugs featured users on the site, which is a controversial new feature but these are all fairly small and unobtrusive things, compared to Facebook's frequent deluge of new stuff.

Ok, I think that's enough for one week =) Just read a few paragraphs a day of that and have a great week, everyone!

Wall-E on Blu-ray

Wall-E Makes Blu Look Good

Surprisingly enough, I got my Black Friday goodies from Amazon on Thursday but I won't be getting Prince of Persia until Wednesday. Go figure. I'm not complaining though because I was more excited about getting Wall-E on Blu-ray, to be honest. It's actually the first movie I've bought, other than Kill Bill, for as long as I can remember that I couldn't wait until a price drop to pick up (I'm cheap so I typically only buy movies I like once they go on sale). I don't regret the $25 purchase one bit.

In case you didn't have the good fortune of catching this movie when it was in theaters, it's the story of the last robot left on Earth after the humans fled the planet on a resort spaceship while the planet was being cleaned up by robots like Wall-E that compact trash and incinerate it since we we produced way too much trash for the planet to handle. I don't want to talk too much to the story, particularly because of spoilers (I hate spoiling things, even months after a movie is out), but it's really quite impressive. After watching it again I'm convinced that it's my favorite animated movie of all time. Part of what I love about it is that it doesn't have to compromise by having something for the kids and something for adults to enjoy like a lot of animated movies tend to do, it's just a wonderful experience for everyone. It really is unique, in my opinion, in this way. Even the physical humor really isn't childishly silly, it's clever. I kind of feel like it's a modern-day geek movie on par with Tron or Real Genius. Could it be the first one since The Matrix? I think it's the best robot movie ever. Suffice to say, the always stellar folks at Pixar really outdid themselves with this movie. It's fun, beautiful, heart-warming, fascinating, nerdy, and probably much more that I'm forgetting to say here. It's just really one of those rare A+ movies, which is confirmed when 5 months later I'm chomping at the bit to see it again and feel every bit as good about it as I did when I originally saw it.

Now let's get into the Blu-ray set here. The visuals are every bit as stunning on Blu-ray as they were in the movie theater. The problem with DVDs was that the quality was always inconsistent between movies. My Stranger Than Fiction disc looks almost like 1080i, but not my Batman Begins. Not so with Blu-ray, as far as I can tell. The bigger the screen you have at your disposal the more impressed you're likely to be. I was trying to finish up my laundry as I started the movie but I could not pull my eyes away from the movie because of how jaw-dropping the visuals were. And as if that wasn't enough, the audio is equally impressive. My TV only has simulated surround sound, but it felt pretty real to me. It's funny how a movie with so little dialogue can have such powerful audio through its score and robot noises and such. I can't even imagine how incredible this set will be for those with a true Dolby setup at home.

I should really step back for a second and remark at how impressed I am by the all around presentation from Disney. They really know how to brand themselves and their intellectual property. The first thing I encountered was BD Live stuff, and so I gladly went to the Disney site to setup my account and had no troubles at all. I'm 99% sure you could go right past all of this, but I just chose not to because I was excited about BD Live. There was only 4 features available, 2 of which I couldn't use. One was movie chat, where you and other friends with the movie can watch the move at the same time while text chatting. Yes, it will synchronize your movies, so I guess this would be good for cousins in different cities or when dad is on a business trip or something. They made the smart move of only allowing this between trusted friends, not just random strangers. Another one is movie mail, in which you can splice together scenes from the movie to make messages to send to trusted friends, and also add in video of yourself (no idea how, maybe through an EyeToy for PS3 owners?). I did use the movie challenge feature though, where you can join in live trivia challenges with strangers online in 10 minute rounds of 8-15 questions. I could choose from easy or medium, and I chose easy. They were fairly simple questions and what I loved was how it would just be at the bottom of the screen while you watch the movie. So you can pause the movie, open this up, and play while resuming playback. It's actually pretty fun and you get points depending on how fast you answer. The last feature is reward points, which is confusing to me but I think you earn them through the trivia and other stuff on the Disney site and you can redeem them for avatars and other bonus features and stuff, but I think that this is still in the process of being fleshed out more.

I liked the BD Live features because I felt like they were easy to get to and integrated well, but the other stuff was even better. First of all, there are 3 ways to watch the movie, or two in addition to just watching the normal movie. One is called Cin-experience, where you get insightful director's commentary in addition to picture-in-picture pop-ups of artwork and (silent) videos of animation from the pre-visualization and design stages of the film. I usually never listen to these commentary tracks, but in a movie with as little dialogue as Wall-E, I gave it a shot and loved it. The artwork really does add a surprising amount to the experience, and I learned a lot of cool random things about the movie, like that it took them over 3 years to put it together (it sounds like they started thinking about it in the late 90s). You could also turn off the artwork from the pop-up menu, which is a standard thing with Blu-ray discs. If you watch the movie normally, you can pop-up stuff from the main menu without having to pause the movie, like choosing a scene via screen shot rather than having to do the guesswork of skipping ahead or backwards on your remote. The other way to watch the movie is kind of like Science Mystery Theater where a group of four people who helped with the film and are generally kind of geeky point out random trivia and scientific inconsistencies and such, with a silhouetted couch occasionally popping up. It really was them on the couch, or else they put an undue amount of effort into animating their arms and hands as they talked. It was a really fun spin on a commentary track and I enjoyed the little of it that I tried out (I will watch the whole movie with it eventually). The only gripe I had with these was that you couldn't just turn them off in the middle of the movie. You could fairly easily stop the movie and go back to the main movie to choose the chapter and then resume playing in normal mode, but it should've been an easy on/off switch. Despite that odd pitfall, it really does help show why Blu-ray really is better than DVD.

There's more extras than that, and what's more exciting is that they're pretty much all in high-definition, even the promotional "sneak peeks"! While I appreciate the throwback to the video cassette Disney movies where they start out with "Coming soon to video" and all that (they had the same style and everything), I still don't think I like them starting out when you put in the disc the second time. I forgive it because there were a couple of really cool ones that looked gorgeous in HD, including one for the Disney documentary Earth. That's probably going to be in every big box electronics store as a demo once it's out on Blu-ray a year from now. It was simply the most incredible thing I've seen on my TV, including Wall-E. Anyway, there are real extras here, so let me stop teasing you with these psuedo-extras. The Axiom Arcade has 4 8-bit games that look like they would've been on your NES, and I thought that they were nifty, though maybe too advanced for kids not on the tail end of elementary school. There was also an interactive storybook for kids and "Trinkets and Treasures", which seems like it was animators playing with Wall-E and Eve to do random things, like Wall-E breaking a vacuum (which was one of the early teasers for the film). For the adults there's a documentary that's over an hour long, 3-D fly throughs of the virtual sets, Buy and Large shorts, a short Geek-o-rama featurette, profiles of all the robots in the film, and deleted scenes (spliced together frames to form a rough cut) with video commentary from the director before and after the scenes. There's also the Presto short from when the movie was in theaters and a short called Burn-E, which is a deleted scene that more or less evolved into a short (there's also an option to view it with story boards). I'm probably leaving something out, but you get the idea: there's a lot here. Not counting the 3 possible viewings of the film, there's well over 2 hours of high-definition content here. Disney has no intention of douple dipping with this film because this set is packed with stuff. If you enjoyed the film, I highly recommend picking it up.

I also have Iron Man, but it'll have to wait in line. I just got Prince of Persia tonight so I'll be giving first impressions of that next week and Amazon just shipped me my copy of The Dark Knight so I'll definitely have watched that by next post. Thus far though, color me impressed with Blu-ray, which I was very skeptical about going in to the format.

Windows 7 Beats Vista on Power

The Windows 7 news of last week was that it has better power consumption than Vista. Some of the additions are opt-in, like a low power mode for hardware that supports it where Windows won't bug it if it's in idle, but others are more impressive like optimizations for spinning the hard disk, powering down applications when in idle, and buffering DVDs better. Since the power consumption of your computer is truly based on how much stuff you're running on it and what stuff you're running, they're going to collect "anonymous" usage statistics to figure out which applications are hogging power and bug the manufacturers to optimize. Whether they follow up on this promise is yet to be seen, but I'm just happy that they've been taking the time to optimize for battery life.

They plan on opening up a public beta on January 13 so count on seeing a lot more stories after that happens.

Songbird Finally 1.0

After what feels like a decade, Songbird 1.0 is finally out. It's the first absolutely free cross-platform media jukebox with an open-platform empowering it to integrate very well with social media. Besides just being a media library though, you can use it to browse the Internet to play audio online and store it to your library. It's like if you smashed together iTunes with Firefox in that it's extremely customizable through plug-ins and skins. Oh, and the user interface is actually cool. Firefox is actually directly integrated with it, other than the hobbled browser you get with Winamp, and so there are a lot of extensions for it, as well. It's feature list also includes drag-and-drop album art support, a mashTape bar to give you artist information and pictures and such, keyboard shortcuts, re-usable smart playlists, Shoutcast radio support, impressive concert information integration, and a lot more through the plug-ins available.



I played with it more now than when I first downloaded it, and it's pretty impressive. The UI is just so snappy and intuitive overall that it's hard not to love. The concert integration is really awesome in how you can add a column for artists on tour in your area, and it even has a playlist for music you have for artists that are on tour. I really like how the mash tape enhances the experience with artist news and pictures and stuff, and the browser has real use in helping you find add-ons and let you scrape audio to stream from webpages (or sites like Skreemr and The Hype Machine). In my opinion, it kind of breaks the mold for music library software in its tight integration with the community and the Web and how it really aims to make the user experience better and better. How long was it since iTunes did anything good without introducing bloat? There's a fine line between feature bloat and added value, and I think Songbird is ready to walk it. I can't jump ship to it for 3 simple reasons. One is that it doesn't do what Media Monkey does in auto-tagging from Amazon. That's really important to me since it tags album art properly for my Clix in just a few clicks (that sentence totally juts fell in my lap). The second reason is that it doesn't have advanced list manipulation features like randomization, removing duplicates, and removing songs that are inaccessible. The third reason is that I can't browse my media by location, and I have my audio in certain folders to make it easier to manage. I can see myself continuing to use it though alongside Media Monkey though. Others' gripes are that it can't watch folders for changes, it doesn't support the iPod (duh), it can't rip CDs, and the lack of better integration with music stores (although the browser has it somewhat where you stream audio from a webpage). It has a long and lustrous road map though, so I'm not overly concerned.

Scary Security News

The security news I read seems to get worse and worse every week, and last week was no exception. A scientist at an IT security firm has revealed that only 40$ of anti-virus software can identify a problematic binary within 3 days of its release in the wild, which is bad because at that point it has spread to a point at which it infects very few new machines. The reasoning makes sense: anti-virus software can only protect you from issues it knows about, and so new viruses slip right by and are even more problematic when they're polymorphic by nature (i.e. they change themselves dynamically) to avoid detection. By the time an anti-virus company has an update for you, it's already to late. The solution? I've talked about what else you can do ad nauseum, but the fix for programs is to move to the clouds so that you have accurate virus definitions in real-time.

The field of biometrics to me was a mystery because using your body to identify yourself seems so easily spoofable. The best known biometric is your eye because that's actually fairly hard to forge (for now), but using your fingerprint is not secure at all. A more recent advancement is facial recognition, but now a Vietnamese firm has proven that even that is easy to fool using just a well-crafted picture of someone's face. That's not really a shocking discovery, but I think it just proves something I wrote about a while ago: there's always a tradeoff between tradeoff and security. True security is based on information that an attacker cannot reasonably forge, and if that incorporates a truly random combination of letters, numbers, and symbols that exist only in your brain and changes regularly then they're really screwed. Of course, remembering it is then difficult. Too bad. If it's really important information, then it should be worth that tradeoff. If you're just trying to protect your music library though, there's nothing wrong with something like facial recognition, just don't expect it too keep anyone too cunning out of your business.

Trojans are nasty little buggers in that they hide away secretly waiting to do damage. A new one that masquerades as a Firefox extension leverages itself to log your personal information as you enter it in at a selection of sites it knows to look for. The lesson here is to only download Firefox extensions, and anything really, from trusted sites. Understand what you're getting before opening up Pandora's box, and scan it with an anti-virus checker just to be safe. Another terrible Trojan that has recently come to light where an infected computer's presence on a WiFi network allows it to act as a router for website requests to go to a malicious DNS server. In English, this means that if you and the infected were on the same wireless network, you could be visiting a hacker's site rather than your banking site being none the wiser of the issue because the URL looks valid. Firefox probably wouldn't give you valid identity information so that would be a red flag, but how else would you know? What's really scary here is that it affects unpatched machines and patched machines alike, so the only way to be safe is to either not be on such a dangerous wireless network or constantly check your DNS settings (use ipconfig in DOS in Windows) when on an outside network. The better bet is to just not go to sites in public that involve financial information or any other sensitive data.

Lastly, some non-scary security news. A company called Pramana is developing a captcha solution to determine if you're a human without the annoying, barely-readable images that have become commonplace now. The fix is to base your humanity on your browsing behavior. It's a good idea, but I think it's going to be easy to forge. It's going to be relying on client-side data, and how hard is that to forge? Additionally, doesn't it seem a bit intrusive to spy on what a user does simply to determine if they're human? And what use case can afford the luxury of waiting on user behavior to determine whether or not they're a bot. Then there's the people in third world countries being paid pennies to get around these sorts of things. I'm just not buying it. The image captchas are imperfect, but they're the best we have right now.

Amazon Secures the Clouds and Enters the iPhone

I covered Amazon CloudFront last week, a service to distribute online content efficiently and affordable, and O'Reilly has taken the guesswork out of how secure it is. Inherently, there are no big holes with the service, but it really all depends on how you're using it. You have to encrypt your network traffic and encrypt your traffic and all that on your end, but Amazon has its bases covered.

Amazon has finally put out an application to iTunes that gives a better browsing interface for the retail website. The real kicker is an experimental feature where you can take pictures in real life, and then Mechanical Turk (where people are paid to solve problems that computers can't solve) will give you the product page in Amazon for it within 24 hours. That obviously doesn't make sense for a copy of a video game, but what if you love a TV that you see at a sports bar and want to check it out later? Or maybe you're too shy to ask about something your friend has at a dinner party?

I do not spead for Amazon.com, its employees, or its partners. I cannot emphasize that enough before what I'm about to say.

There's one more Amazon-related item I have to briefly cover. Some students in Amsterdam created a Firefox extension that allows you to browse Amazon.com with links for pirated versions of certain content on The Pirate Bay, a well-known aggregator for pirated content on bit torrent. Of course, Amazon stepped in and had it shut down. It astonishes me how many people defending this dumb thing as a parody. Really? The people who work at Amazon work really hard on the site and margins are quite slim, so why steal from them and Amazon's suppliers? I don't get the "humor and absurdity" of this plug-in at all. I was almost outraged to read their teacher say that his students are now scared away from pursuing their art and research. Good! It's one thing in a security class to teach kids how to hack in simulated scenarios to give them an appreciate for how to design secure systems and another thing to tell them to steal money from someone's online banking site. Anyone who sees the distinction in that example should see where these kids went terribly wrong.

Terrorists Used Google Earth

When I saw this article on PC World claiming that the terrorists behind the terrible attacks in Mumbia used Google Earth to aid them, I knew I had to fire back. The Indian president has warned that Google Earth reveals location of defense installations and the like, but I don't recall Google Earth ever denying requests to hide such places before. I can't imagine that these terrorists didn't buy atlases and scout out these locations in advance, so I don't know how much help Google Earth really would've been, and they didn't hit any military bases anyway. What makes these claims more ridiculous is that India itself is rolling out a competitor for Google's Earth satellite imagery that contends to be even higher resolution. So if it's not a service from an American company then it must be alright, right?

The stance that I always support is that we cannot shirk technological advances simply because they may indirectly cause harm. Granted, you have to weigh the bad with the good, like if its use for good is very rare compared to its utility for malicious purposes, but we can't live in the past in the interest of self-preservation. There's so many exciting things going on in technology all at once right now that to write off services like Google Earth with half-baked accusations would be a terrible waset.

Yahoo Reaches a Deal With Virgin

Yahoo, fortunately, has not come to a grinding halt in the midst of all the press regarding Yang stepping down and romancing Microsoft to make another offer. They have signed an agreement with Virgin to be the exclusive pre-installed search for all of Virgin's mobile subscribers. This is exactly the kind of stuff they need if they ever want to be a true competitor to Google. The way to hurt them is to start out by stealing share from them in markets that Google isn't well-established in, like mobile search in Europe.

By the way, I was probably wrong about Google possibly planning to withdraw from its deal with Yahoo all along, a theory that I realized seemed far-fetched from the start. A prosecutor from the Justice Department warned Google that they were going to file charges before they made the announcement that they were calling off the deal, and they would've ended up filing charges just a few hours after that announcement ended up happening. So much for that mystery.

Yeah, There's More News

I think I'm done with this post, effectively. And yet, I still have more news! Ack! Ok, let's see if I can spit it out in less than 5 minutes so I can go to bed.

Apple's claim against lawsuits that its iPhone 3G ads are misleading is that "no reasonable person" would take the speeds in the ads at face value. Some argue that this is true because of the fine print in the ad, but the subtext is only that network speeds vary and not that things were sped up as they obviously were. Unless they can prove there's a network somewhere on which you can browse the web at those speeds, I don't see how they can use that defense and most people don't know what's reasonable for mobile phone speeds.

Firefox has surpassed 20% market share for the first time since 2004.

The LA Times has a good editorial urging the FCC to let parents filter content on the free wireless network Kevin Martin is proposing rolling out nationwide, but it's a really sticky issue. On one hand, parents can't be everywhere free wireless Internet is and anyone who wants unfettered Internet can afford to buy it, but, on the other hand, censorship software is often flawed in being too restrictive.

Facebook has unveiled embeddable videos that you can put up that only your friends can see, but I really don't understand it. Why post videos for only your friends to see anywhere but Facebook?

There's a new social networking gadget that I thing is only available in Europe called Poken where you can exchange social networking site links with another person by touching each other's Pokens together. It sounds weird, but I think it's a clever substitute for business cards. The only flaw here is that it requires widespread usage to be effective.

This is a really good article on recovering data from a bad hard drive. It's a more common problem than you think, so reading it would be a good investment of time.

Did you know that you can send e-mail to phones to text them?

I really regret not being able to talk about this article, but it's a look at why Google's strategy of creating services that don't appear to create revenue on the surface really isn't so crazy. I don't know if I'm convinced that they have the master plan that this article seems to believe they do, but it's still an interesting read.

Whew. That was a long one! That should last you guys at least 6 days. Enjoy the rest of your week!

Much Ado About Yahoo

I have to start out this post with a couple of random thoughts. First of all, this blog is awesome. I heard about it from a fellow UT alum on Thursday and it's apparently written by a girl who moved to NYC from Texas but missed the food so much (like we do here in Seattle) that she experimented to replicated some Southern staples in his kitchen. I checked out a couple of recipes and they looked pretty legit. I'm going to be combing the site later this week to add to my personal stash of recipes (none of which I take credit for, I just make them). The blog is just fun to read overall, so much so that I'm recommending it to anyone who likes cooking (my regulars know that I don't recommend blogs very often, but this is a gem).

The other thing I have to get off my chest is that it was fun watching OU whoop Texas Tech on Saturday. I never thought I'd ever support the Sooner, but for those 3+ hours I declared a personal, temporary truce with OU for the duration of the game since they played against us so respectfully, unlikely Tech. I felt like Tech played dirty against UT and Harrell was really arrogant coming out of the game. I always thought that Bradford was a much better QB than Harrell, as much as I dislike him, and I can't believe that so many pundits picked Tech over OU. It shows how terribly wrong the rankings are when the #2 team simply gives up in the second half when they're down 45-7. God forbid they'd learn from the first half or make some effort defending against OU's second string (yes, they did score on Tech). I'm satisfied with their loss, and implore the pollsters to please show some love for Texas because we had a stronger schedule than OU and beat them in a glorious game (for both teams). So please, don't let them jump us in the rankings!

Jerry Yang Steps Down

Trust me, I did not want to center another post around Yahoo. Unfortunately, when I looked at my long list of articles, the Yahoo ones bubbled up to the top. It's just a truly interesting story for the industry given that Yahoo is literally one of the first successful massive Internet companies ever. It garners them a soft spot in our nerdy little hearts, because I think a lot of people honestly want them to succeed.

I don't think it was a secret that neither Terry Semel nor co-founder Jerry Yang were in any position to effectively lead the company since the middle of last year, and now they're finally both out of the hot seat. Jerry Yang formally resigned early last week citing what I think a lot of tech journalists had already figured out: he was letting his emotional ties to the company keep him from making smart business decisions for it. It's ironic that he's going to be Chief Yahoo again in order to focus on "technology innovation" (among other things) because had he been doing that all this time Yahoo would not be the position it's in today. The company is not in ruin, but it's definitely not heading down a positive path though it is not beyond saving. They went down a path of unfocused products and a lack of competitive edge against Google. They've managed to hang on to being a far second place to Google as a search engine, but their revenues are not seeing real growth.

How did they get here though? Forbes has a surprisingly concise list of Yahoo's 5 biggest mistakes. It's amazing how many products Yahoo comes out with that people don't know about. I think that their terrible marketing strategy has led to projects being aborted that took a significant amount of investment and were not necessarily bad ideas. I was a beta tester for a service that allowed you to send mass text messages, and it really wasn't bad. It needed some work, but they could've made it work and instead chose to get rid of it. I have no idea why they did this and I'm sure they had good reason, but if you figure something like that after a product is developed then how much time did you spend in the design and planning stages? The next big mistake was not buying Google because it was too expensive, which is kind of funny since they didn't sell to Microsoft this year because they were offered too little money. That's irony for you. Hiring Terry Semel is not a surprise entry in the list either, he just did not drive vision for the company very well. One of the reasons I joined Amazon is because I had, and still have, faith in Jeff Bezos's vision. The next item is probably the least important on the list: they didn't beat Google to the punch to buy DoubleClick. Not that it wasn't dumb, but it's not like buying DoubleClick would make them a huge rival for Google. The last item is not accepting Microsoft's buyout offer earlier this year.

What do they do now? Get a competent leader who can inspire confidence in the company's employees and drive development for killer products. Figure out how to steal people from Google by any (legal and ethical) means necessary. Don't scoff at offers from better companies without a clear plan. Go back to simple UI designs. It's really the simple things that will bring Yahoo back on track to being an Internet superpower, and they have enough bright minds to make it happen. Good luck, Yahoo.

Amazon OLPC and CloudFront

I promise, this isn't an ad for Amazon. I just think it's great that Amazon is participating in the One Laptop Per Child program's "Give 1 Get 1" project where you buy a cheap OLPC for $400 and another one gets sent to a child in a developing country (they cost roughly $200 apiece). I've talked about OLPC before and why I think it's great in the face of people saying that giving computers to hungry kids is dumb, so I don't want to talk too much about that. However, to say something about it: it's a great inspirational and learning tool for these kids to help their communities and achieve better things in their lives than they probably had ever thought possible.

Amazon CloudFront is not so charitable, but is really cool. It's based in S3 and is an Amazon Web Service for efficiently distributing content to customers. They basically store your content (media or video games or what-have-you) in various spots geographically so that they can serve it to people near these endpoints faster and is designed to be extremely easy for you so that Amazon does all the hard work. It's still in beta, but an excellent idea. Everyone is saying that digital distribution is the future of music, movies, and games, so it only makes sense to make it easy to serve this stuff up at high speeds without increased infrastructural costs.

Windows 7 Media Center

Last week, Gizmodo posted a very brief video demo of Windows 7 Media Center, and it was pretty sweet. Please in the comments if you have found it re-posted somewhere else because Microsoft made Gizmodo take it down. It's basically Windows Media Center meets an iPhone in that it features intuitive touchscreen functionality through fluid motions that seem cool even though they can appear to be gimmicky at first. Some of the cool features are the fancy slideshows with music, well-integrated Internet channels, one-click access to TV (if you have a TV tuner card, that is), a thumbnail preview for seeking through an HD video, and other bells and whistles. The idea here is to have this OS on a small computer replace your DVR, and having attractive mainstream software for home media PCs could help spread adoption past just TV geeks (especially if sold in nice bundles).

Security Scoop

There were a couple of really interesting security stories last week. I was particularly impressed that Microsoft decided to give away their own home brew anti-virus software, Morro, aimed at developing nations. Are they being charitable? That may be a secondary goal, but that's not the primary motive here. The real goal is to provide a safe online environment for other PC users. These weakly protected machines are often early targets for viruses and worms and, as such, unknowingly become pivotal pieces of botnets. A botnet is a network of machines that can be controlled remotely and are often surreptitiously formed to bring down websites (for extortion, usually) or send out spam under the radar of most spam filters' first line of defense: blocking IPs. Anyway, Morro will replace Windows OneCare (which you probably have but don't know about) and takes a brute force stab at cleaning up the Internet. Security is an arms race and it's not like Microsoft is a security firm so don't expect this to fix everything overnight, but it's an interesting strategy and a great start to what will hopefully eventually replace Norton and McAfee, which I don't use because I don't think that they're better than free alternatives like ClamFree or AVG. You would think that Microsoft would know best how to quickly vaccinate computers for holes in Windows before they could release a patch, so if they play their cards right they can finally have a smack in the face to Apple's ads antagonize PC security by stating that Macs have security issues (they do, that's a fact) but Apple doesn't provide any free anti-virus software.

Europe recently got a new Visa card with a keypad to generate random security codes. At first, I thought it was dumb, but I actually kind of like it. It basically has a keypad on it where you enter your PIN, and it generates the 3 digit (maybe more, but on current cards it's 3 digits) security code usually found on the back of your card so you can use your card online more safely. Even if someone eavesdrop and steals your credit card number and security code, it'll be useless to them without your card's specific random number generator. There are a couple of issues with this though to keep in mind. It doesn't help in non-virtual scenarios. Your card will still swipe, from what I can tell, just fine. So if someone steals your card, they just can't shop online. It won't stop over-the-shoulder attacks, so someone can install a camera in a cyber cafe and spy on your PIN. What does this get them? If they can steal your card then they can use it online as much as they want (or until you cancel it). More importantly though, it's likely that the algorithm will be tied to your PIN so they can probably then create their own security codes as they'd probably have already spied your credit card number. I do not know how the security code is generated so maybe they'll be smart and not tie it to your PIN but rather just your account in a non-deterministic way. The biggest danger here, in my opinion, is the false sense of security it could create for people who shop in real life more than online or are still susceptible to social engineering attacks (like getting called by a charity for a donation, for example). Still, it's a noble cause so I give them props for creativity. It really isn't a bad stop-gap at all.

The last bit of security news is that those crafty Chinese pirates have cracked Blu-ray's far-from-ideal DRM to sell their own lower-resolution copies on the streets. They are ripping the content, re-encoding it as AVCHD (a compressed, 720p format), and then selling it. This is a threat to Blu-ray, but not sure if it's more of a thread to their sales than rampant DVD piracy. DRM will never keep pirates back, only slow them down a bit initially. The MPAA really should pour their efforts into stopping these syndicates rather than worrying about online piracy stateside, because I can almost guarantee that it's not nearly as detrimental as this kind of piracy is.

How Hulu is Surpassing YouTube

CrunchGear put up a very short post about Hulu's revenues being only 30% less than YouTube's this year and expected to at least match YouTube's revenues with less than a tenth of the viewership. It's worth talking about it though now that online advertising has become so important.

There's no question that the past decade has seen a complete transformation in advertising. It's no longer dominated by TV, radio, and magazines, but moving the the Web and, though somewhat in its infancy, to video games. When PC Magazine, probably the foremost print technology magazine in the world, decides that printing a magazine is no longer as profitable as its online articles, you know that the tides are changing. People's day-to-day habits are changing, and advertising is just trying to keep up. Even ad watchdog NAD (National Advertising Division) acknowledges viral marketing to be advertising that follows the same rules as other forms of marketing it that it cannot spread falsified information, like that cellphones emit enough radiation to pop popcorn. Another reason that online advertising is big is that it's measurable. When the economy is down like it is now, you want to see real results with your marketing budget, and TV don't cut it. They're expensive and cast a wide net without any accurate measurement of how many people see it or what they do with that information. With a banner ad, you can see a click. You can attach what are knowns as reftags (referrer tags) to links so that traffic can be attributed to a successful advertising campaign.

Back to Hulu and YouTube, why would advertisers favor a site with 7 million hits in a month over one with over 80 million hits? For the same reason that you won't see hardcore porn on MTV ripe with commercials: they have brand image to worry about. Do you want your detergent associated with a guy getting hit in the crotch? Or how about a Hoover vacuum ad rolling right after a cat riding a Roomba? Granted, that would be a great opportunity for Roomba, but how many of these are there and how easy are they to exploit? That's going to be the true test for YouTube. Conversely, advertisers know exactly what they're getting with Hulu because it's held to the same standards as normal television and they know what series appeal to what audiences. Yes, you could theoretically know that about a YouTube channel as well, but the content producer isn't under YouTube's thumb so they could deviate one day and post something detrimental to the advertisers or even mildly offensive (like curse words). Hulu is a much easier leap to make though since you know what you're getting and the improvement over television is that not only can people click on your ads to give you direct knowledge of how well your campaign is working, but you have accurate ratings of these programs and can get a much better picture of your audience than Nielsen can reliably offer.

YouTube can still be monetized well if Google can effectively filter out content for advertisers and reliably link tags for this content to advertisers, or even have more moderation control over certain YouTube channels to ensure the quality of its content (with a cut of the profit going to the channel owner, of course), but they have to be careful with it and they have to make sure that they don't alienate their audience. Since Hulu has had ads since it publicly launched, they had the luxury of not having to deal with this problem, but YouTube isn't so lucky.

The Remainder

To be honest, I'm a little tired from writing this post. I've spent my spare time for the past 3 nights working on it, and I think it's time for me to stop. Here's a quick wrap-up for the other article I had tagged to talk about:

Gmail now has themes! I don't think you can create your own themes yet, but I'm sure you will be able to soon enough as it appears to be powered by XML files setting variables for various images and colors. The mountains one though is especially cool though as it is dependent on your geographic location for the time so that it can show you an appropriate setting. Check out my current one:



Strangely enough, a Linux website posted a screenshot tour and little preview of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Its features include privacy mode (aka porn mode), web slices (to store away pieces of web pages for easy offline reference), Google Gears integration (for offline usage of certain web applications), and actual stability. IE8 was originally slated to be out before the end of this year but has since been delayed to sometime next year (before summer, I believe).

Intel has launched their Core i7 processors, which are purported to be 4-6 times faster than their current Core architecture, cheaper to manufacture thanks to smaller circuitry, re-introduce Hyper Threading for better parallelization of processes, and integrate a memory controller to increase processor bandwidth (the amount of stuff it can get done at once since it has this new venue for accessing memory).

Zune subscriptions can now keep 10 songs each month DRM-free. I actually never thought of this and I think it's a pretty clever way to try to save subscription-based mp3 sales.

Engadget has posted a review of the Blackberry Storm (formerly known as Thunder), including a video comparison with the Bold, and they weren't terribly impressed. Unlike the G1, it has to be compared with the iPhone and it never seemed to have a real edge over the iPhone with the list of complaints including that it's sluggish, there's a dearth of third-party applications, and that the on-screen keyboard's simulated tactile response doesn't improve it at all.

Wired put up a well-reasoned article that the reason the iPhone lacks Flash support is that it removes too much control from Apple. For example, a tethering application written for Flash could not really be held back by Apple because they can't block sites. Plus, Flash could always introduce security holes.

Gizmodo has a really great explanation of common video codecs and the difference between a codec and a container, and it's really useful for technical and non-technical users to read through. It will help explain why you may sometimes have problems playing videos you've downloaded online, or why not all videos can be played on your favorite mobile device.

Lastly, Network World's rundown of the top 12 myths about how the Internet works is a very interesting read and will likely provide useful tidbits to all but networking experts.

Alright, I'm on call this week so it's time to go to bed. I hope you all have a great holiday weekend! I'm a bit sad that I'll be unable to spend Thanksgiving with family, but Christmas is right around the corner so I definitely am looking forward to the vacation.