Can Digg Come Back?

Digg v4

Turns out that I'm doing well enough after the surgery to blog, so thought I'd put together a little post since last week was a bit light on the news.

I didn't want to talk about it until it was actually in production, but several people have gotten their eyes on the next iteration of Digg, and it's definitely a bigger change than previous upgrades. The question is, is it enough to reinvigorate Digg? Unlike a lot of other folks, I really don't think Digg is dying - not by a long shot. They still get a lot of traffic, they've just been on a decline. Despite the fact that the new Digg looks way too much like Facebook, I think it has a ton of potential and is the best direction to take the social news site in.

Currently, Digg works by just having stories voted up by its users within various categories so that you read the news that the masses deem most interesting. However, this process has proven to be flawed as the wisdom of the masses isn't always so wise and often skewed by people who you don't agree with (i.e. fanboyism is rampant). The new paradigm unashamedly takes a little from Facebook and more from Twitter in that you follow individual sites and users to get the stories that they think are valuable instead of the general rabble. This is one of the few application of social networking these days that actually makes sense. I think most of us talk to our friends about some story they saw or read about and want to share on almost a daily basis, so Digg would be ideal for that.

Another cool feature is that websites can automatically submit their newest stories to Digg. I think this can add up to a winning combination for Digg. By getting the content providers more involved and empowering the little guy, I think they can bring back a lot of people that have probably left Digg in recent years. All they have to do is make sure it gets publicized well enough. If this doesn't work though, it could potentially be the beginning of the end for Digg, but I think Digg would have a pretty long tail even then.

Twitter and e-Commerce

Twitter is trying a new way to make money, but it's a rather unoriginal idea: twitter feeds for retail deals. This has been done by Amazon and several other sites as well as a ton of small businesses already. It's not that it's a bad idea, but I think it's bad that it took them this long to put something like this together. It's not the best sign of Twitter's future if they're this behind the curve.

YouTube Leanback and 2304p

I like how often YouTube experiments with new things. Last week two cool features were revealed. One of them is called Leanback, which feels an awful lot like a precursor to Google TV. It basically lets you experience YouTube on a bigger screen, or even just on your computer screen but with minimal user interaction unlikely typical YouTube browsing. It provides better flow between videos you'd be interested in given your subscriptions and viewing history, and you can search and immediately consume videos from your search results.

Less cool, because it's less useful, is the ability for YouTube to support more than 1080p resolution: 2304p (4096 x 2304). Very few people have displays that support this and is probably more ideal for a small theater than your living room, but I do like that YouTube is thinking big.

iPad Ad Second Look

For the record: I think the iPad is really cool for what it is. I have no desire to get one because I know I'd play with it for a while and then never touch it, but it is compelling. Still, I can't resist pointing out this analysis of an ad showing a scene from Star Trek on the device in a better format than you'd see in real life. Apple did this also with Flash on the iPad - why do they keep fudging their ads like this if they already have a product that makes people piss their pants? It's just in poor taste, and it's disappointing. The one thing I've always come to expect from Apple is quality, even in their advertising. The antenna scandal with the newest iPhone and iPad chicanery like this is just unfortunate.

Other Stuff

There are a couple of stories I noted that I found interesting but have nothing to say about, really.

Java developer is now one of the most difficult positions to fill in IT. It's ironic how many more people know C/C++ than Java given how much more confusing they are, in my opinion.

Facebook has bought Nextstop, which is in the business of user-generated destination guides.

Have a sunny week, everyone!

The Buzz About Google Buzz

Google's Social Foray

Be forewarned: I have to talk about a lot of Google news today. They just dominated the media last week - there's no getting around it.

At the center of it all is Google Buzz, which has clearly attracted at least the amount of attention as the iPad from the tech community. Compared to most other Google launches, except for Wave, the amount of buzz it has gotten is kind of uncharacteristic of a new Google product. I don't think it's quite the buzz that Google wanted though.

So what is Google Buzz? Simply put, it's Google's take on social networking. It's a tab in your Gmail account that lets you connect with your friends as they interact on a number of services including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, Blogspot, Google talk, Google Reader, and Flickr. It basically gives you a feed of the people you follow ala Facebook and lets you update also kind of like on Facebook where you can say stuff or post a link or photo. You also get some finer controls on privacy. Their vision for this is a little bigger than what you see in your web browser though since you can have a Buzz layer on Google Maps to see where your friends are (I guess like Latitude but on speed?), and the mobile apps do voice recognition. If you're on webOS though you're out of luck - Google didn't show any love for Palm.

Why would you want this thing? Well, Google is selling it on the premise that it hooks into your Gmail so if you're on Gmail then you get it for free and it just gives you the stuff you care about, but I don't know how it figures out what you care about unless it strictly bases that off when you click to "like" stuff. In my opinion, it's kind of silly and unnecessary. And I'm definitely not alone in that camp. For one thing, it doesn't really add any value except for the Google Maps layer, which I can't vouch for and is something you can kind of already do with Latitude and Foursquare. I can understand that Google doesn't want to get left in the dust with social networking (as they've already shown with domestic failures Orkut and Dodgeball), but this isn't really great timing for it. My running opinion of technology is that it should solve a problem or fill a need, but I don't think this does either.

To make matters worse, there have been serious privacy concerns called to attention. For example, the default when it launched was that the people you followed was public and you were auto-following a bunch of people from your Gmail contact list, so this was basically revealing part of your address book to the world. They've fixed that, but as CNet aptly puts it, using Buzz is still kind of awkward and not compelling.

The most insightful thoughts on Buzz though, in my opinion, have come from Digg co-founder and Internet celebrity Kevin Rose. In a nutshell, he believes part of the intent of Google Buzz is to hook directly into Google Search and provide real-time relevancy for up-and-coming sites and news articles. While Digg already does a great job of people-driven news promotion, Google Buzz is a wider base, is intended to be as easy to interact with as Twitter, and provides data that other sites can farm to improve what they do, assuming your feed on Buzz is public. This theory is actually further supported but Google's acquisition of social search service Aardvark, which lets you pose natural questions to real people in your social network so you can get real answers instead of having to search for information yourself. In the end, it all ends in beefing up Google Search. Of course, that's just one theory though.

I don't think it's fair to write off Google Buzz already. It's not that exciting right now, but this is Google we're talking about. They tend to not settle for developing mediocre products. Plus, sometimes these things just take a while to catch on. Facebook and Twitter didn't get so big overnight.

Google Broadband

While we're talking about Google let's move on to something that's actually much cooler than Buzz. They're planning on building an ultra high speed broadband network with speeds up to 1Gbps (which is probably 150x faster than what you have right now) at competitive prices. I'm totally salivating at this idea. They're only going to test it out in a few markets to start out with for 50,000 to 500,000 people. Google claims that their interest in doing this is to test out applications that would need lots of bandwidth to perform well. Still no idea what markets they're looking into, but this is the kind of competition we really need in the broadband market. Verizon is the only company out there really pushing the envelope on a large scale and it's all kinds of exciting that Google is taking an interest simply because they have enough resources to actually compete. Even if they end up canning the program, if they get Comcast and Time Warner to wake up and try to provide better products then it'll be a success in and of itself.

Is Google Killing Startups?

This is a really interesting story that I'm really at odds with. Business Insider has an editorial up claiming that every engineer Google snatches up is a missed opportunity for a startup. They would probably include a couple of other companies hypothetically, but the most obvious example is Google. Ultimately, the security blanket of these larger companies is bringing in top talent rather than a market where people have to be entrepreneurs and create their own jobs.

The thing is, most startups don't succeed. It's an extremely risky venture and I vehemently protest that idea that any developer has the chops to start their own company. It's like when the government said that anyone is entitled to a house even if they can't afford it. Starting a company is hard work and requires a certain type of person, and not every developer that goes to Google has that even though they're really smart and work great as a cog in a much larger machine. I love that the US is a place that encourages entrepreneurial spirit and I'm not disputing the value of startups at all, but I don't think Google is killing them. I've heard plenty of stories of people leaving places like Google and Microsoft to start their own company. The experience they got in a larger company ends up being invaluable to their venture. Not everyone can come out of school and go straight into creating a startup because not everyone is Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but more people definitely can after being in the industry for a while and learning from the brilliant people out there, who have tremendous influence on the industry by impacting these individuals at places like Google.

If you want to blame anyone blame our country's educational system for its failings in properly promoting science and technology, and cutting back on scholarships. I don't know who this guy has been talking to, but the talent pool is definitely limited out there compared to the positions available within computer science. I do think it makes sense, however, having entrepreneurs go to schools and teach them about starting a company so that they have that option, but I don't think it's productive to call Google the bad guy in this situation.

Google Stands Up to Australian Censorship

See? I told you it was a ton of Google news. It happens sometimes.

Let me sneak in an only slightly related piece of YouTube news: they've created a safety mode to help filter out objectionable content, presumably so YouTube can be whitelisted for educational uses and even children's use at home (or adults' use in the office).

The real provocative story is that Google is refusing requests for censorship on YouTube from the Australian government. This may be part of the motivation behind their threat to pull out of China: their censorship cessions have opened a Pandora's box of requests for them to censor elsewhere. What you really have to consider is what an impact Google can make in these countries. I'm not a Google fanboy, mind you, but I think they could have the power to change things in some of these countries. Right now, the requests that the Australian government are making are due to their self-interest rather than law, and Google has pledged to abide by the laws in the countries it's in. If Australia decides to change their law and Google refuses, what happens? If Google pulls out, will people get really upset and question their government's censorship? I'd hope so, but it's a hard thing to measure.

The Last Bits

What a terrible pun. Wow. Anyway, just a few quick stories before I sign off and get back to playing some guitar - my V-day treat to me.

A new Russian crimeware called Spy Eye has an option to remove competitor Zeus software from the users machine, along with stealing banking credentials. The intent of the program is to create Trojan horses so the person who installed it had it coming, but just a funny way to try to kill off a rival.

AOL has integrated Facebook Chat with AIM. Do people really use Facebook Chat on a regular basis?

Google Maps has added 9 new experimental features including rotatable maps and aerial imagery. Very nifty stuff!

The founder of 4chan, the least well-known gigantic cultural influence in the world, spoke at TED. Very interesting talk about privacy.

Google Street View did Whistler! Check out this sucker:



Have a great week everyone!

Apple Undercuts the Zune

Apple's Rock and Roll Event

I hate to say it, but the biggest news from the past couple of weeks is Apple's event. This isn't unfortunate because I have a vendetta with Apple products (I think they're very high quality, in fact), but it wasn't a very exciting event. Not every year can be an iPhone year, but it sounds like it was still a good event. You can get all the juicy details here but the gist of it is: new iTunes, new Nano, and new Shuffle. The new iTunes 9 allows you to share music across multiple machines, has a re-designed store (geared more towards sharing than before, in a legal way), features endless genius mixes, and adds iTunes LP for enhanced liner notes. The only brand new feature here really is the home sharing thing, but this doesn't seem very different from what Windows Media Player already does. The new Nano is kind of nifty, I have to admit.



It comes in some beautiful colors, features a camera (for pictures and video), has a larger display, includes a pedometer, and allows you to pause live radio. Interestingly enough, it also has a mic and a speaker. More than ever, the Nano feels like just a small iPod. It's not a mind-blowing update to the Nano series, but it does look great overall.

The Shuffle update was much less eventful: it supports normal headphones (like it always should've) and comes in 5 colors, plus a limited edition stainless steel.

What I really wanted to get to were the prices: they're lower and come at an inopportune time for Microsoft with the Zune HD looming in the very near future (as in, tomorrow). The Shuffle is $60 for 2 GB and $80 for 4 GB, the new Nano is $180 for 16 GB and $150 for 8 GB, and the iPod Touch was dropped down to $200 for 8 GB, $300 for 32 GB, and now there's a 64 GB flavor for $400. Comparatively, the Zune HD is $290 for 32 GB and $220 for 16 GB. This definitely takes away some of Microsoft's thunder, and Apple may have timed this event for the purpose of undercutting the Zune HD's great price points. In the end, this is all great for consumers, but I hope that Microsoft doesn't get sidled out of the market by an event proclaiming only incremental updates. I'd like to see some real competition for Apple aside from just Sansa, which has a pitiful share of the market compared to Apple's more than 75% share, which leaves Microsoft with a single digit share of the pie. I'm not a fan of Sansa's showings and I'm a little afraid that if the Zune HD fails that we won't see innovation in portable audio for years. So here's to hoping for a clean fight!

Palm Pixi

Who is this guy that Palm is hiring to name their products nowadays? I mean seriously, is this guy high out of his mind? Treo and Centro were good names, I thought, but the Pre and Pixi are really bad names. It's pretty emasculating for a guy to carry around a phone named 'Pixi'. Anyway, it's official now and it's what we suspected: a candybar webOS phone akin to what Centro was to the Treo. Unfortunately, it'll be exclusive to Sprint, but it will be out this holiday season. To be fair, I'm on Sprint and don't think it's as bad as people say: my coverage, especially 3G, is excellent, the pricing is fair, and I love the new Any Mobile feature (free calls to any mobile phone in the country with an Everything Plan), but their customer service sucks. Still, I was hoping that Palm would expand to other carriers in the spring with webOS. They still can, but I don't think Pixi is going to do a whole lot for Palm or Sprint.



The software is pretty much what you'd expect from seeing the Pre; the only major difference is that it now adds LinkedIn and Yahoo to the list of sites it can sync contacts from, and will include a Facebook app that looks better than the terrible website Facebook has for webOS. On the outside, it definitely looks slick. It's even slimmer than the iPhone 3GS, has the nice back plate that you normally only get with the touchstone for the Pre, and keys on the keyboard are higher so they're supposedly easier to type on than the Pre (mind you, I'm quite comfortable typing on my Pre so I have high hopes for the Pixi keyboard). Under the hood, it's less powerful than the Pre but looks like it performs quite well from Engadget's videos.

I know I started out negative on the Pixi, and while I don't think it'll be groundbreaking (since it's staying on Sprint), I think it's going to turn more heads and bring more people into webOS who were turned off by the Pre's slider or keyboard or the fact that it was first generation. I'm really concerned that Palm won't make it to Verizon with webOS before the iPhone, or that it'll never be a success on AT&T because of the iPhone, but I do hope it flourishes because I'm really loving it. I still haven't had time to play with the SDK, but I'm liking the apps on it so far (new ones every Friday) and all the basics of the phone have worked out great for me with very few glitches compared to my old Treo 650. Plus, it looks like the app store really isn't going to be crazy strict like Apple's despite a media player being turned away. Palm reached out stating that it was only rejected for use of unsupported APIs and they'd like to find a way for the application to get released but have nothing against it being a homebrew application freely available outside of the app store. Now that's how you're supposed reject an application, not with smoke and mirrors like Apple does.

Government Control of the Internet

A cybersecurity bill has been proposed that gives the government the power to control the Internet (e.g. cut people off) in an emergency situation, and the Internet was not pleased. I agree with them: this bill is flat out stupid. I'm not a big proponent of big government, and I don't think the government has the technical expertise to manage the Internet in a time of crisis. Does it really need to, anyway? The Internet is bigger than the power of the U.S. government, and it's not really clear, as far as I can tell, what the use case for this really is. I feel like it gives too much power in the case of a situation that's hypothetical. There are cyber security threats all the time that are handled by private companies, and of course the military handles cybersecurity threats against them, but I can't envision a situation where the government would need to be involved, especially since the Internet isn't a public utility.

Best Buy Employees Spread Misinformation

This story was too crazy for me to not talk about it briefly. It's been confirmed that Microsoft has provided training documentation to Best Buy employees that attacks Linux and, by most Linux users' account, slanders Linux. Like the "I'm a Mac" ads, the information provided wasn't full of outright lies, but anyone familiar with Linux would be able to explain why the claims aren't true. It's disappointing that Microsoft is standing on the cusp of their best product release since XP and yet they're doing crap like this. This came to light a couple of weeks ago when a Best Buy employee leaked the training documentation, and Daily Finance then followed up and got an official statement from Microsoft on it.

I have two points I'd like to make. First of all, this shows that Microsoft is scared of Linux. If they didn't feel threatened they wouldn't bother with this. 5 years ago they scoffed at the mention of Linux, but with the popularity of the open-source operation system growing every year (albeit, not to a mainstream size yet) I guess they decided that it had reached a critical mass. I think Linux contributors should take this as a compliment, to be honest. The second point is that this shows why brick and mortar stores are losing business. Retail is a crazy industry and if you're not going to raise the bar and you're going to choose to provide a bad customer experience by spreading questionable information then you deserve to lose business. I haven't been to a big box electronics store in months and since I joined Amazon Prime I literally have had no desire to do so, especially since (as I mentioned a while ago) a Fry's employee try to pimp Monster cables to me with bullshit. Ok, time to get off my soapbox.

Quickies

I have a few more stories I'd like to cover before I start preparing for my recruiting trip this weekend (Longhorn CS majors should stop by the Amazon booth next Monday at the career fair, for sure - I've got some fun questions lined up for people).

Google has announced a plan to develop a syncing service for the Chrome browser to sync bookmarks and other browser data to the clouds. Clearly, they're gearing up for Chrome OS.

YouTube is looking into movie rentals, which is just one more avenue Google is investigating in its longstanding hunt to monetize YouTube. It doesn't seem unreasonable that we could see movie rentals on YouTube next year given that you can already rent movies digitally from the Playstation 3, Netflix, and Amazon Video on Demand, among others.

More solid rumors surfaced regarding an Apple Tablet and the possibility of it coming out as soon as November. It seriously does sound real this time, but only time will tell.

Tech Radar has a really cool article up about OLED highlighting its advantages and disadvantages. If only it was cheaper to produce!

Sony pushed out version 3.0 of the PS3 firmware (aka XMB, the Cross Media Bar), and it may be the most drastic change yet with animated themes, a fancier default theme, a better notification area in the top right corner, improvements to the friends list and trophy section, simultaneous output across audio connectors (still not sure what that means), more avatars, and a What's New that the PS3 boots up to that features new updates in the store and the games you recently played. Very cool stuff (I'm a fan of the simple elegance of XMB).

I don't know if I'll be able to post next week since I'll be in Austin Friday through Tuesday morning, but I'll do my best to get something up here next week.

The Zune is Sexy?

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

More Zune HD Details

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



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

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

Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard

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

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

The Wake of the Google Voice Rejection

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

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

YouTube Extends Revenue Sharing

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

Google Maps Adds Traffic to Roads

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

Target is Flying Solo

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

Microsoft Clings to IE6

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

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

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):

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!

The State of Internet Piracy

The Pirate Bay Ruling

I think that this whole hearing with The Pirate Bay has created the most buzz about online piracy since back when Napster got busted. It's considered by many people the largest site to get illegal torrents in terms of number of visitors. They probably have some legitimate content but let's not kid ourselves: it's a haven for illegal content. You can make all the arguments in the world about how they're only hosting the torrent files, the fact of the matter is that they host a ridiculous amount of torrents for copyrighted material.

In Sweden, copyright laws have typically been laxed, but under pressure the government eventually had to go after the Pirate Bay, and the founders were sentenced to a year in jail $3.6 million in damages. The Pirate Bay has been pretty cocky about turning down takedown notices for years now (and to the entertainment of everyone), so you can imagine that this news was probably shocking to a lot of people. The site is still up though and the founders are still adamant that what they're doing isn't illegal. The Pirate Bay is living in a gray area if I ever saw one. Google readily links to sites that host illegal content and we think nothing of it, so why not shut down Google? You could say that Google doesn't specialize in illegal content, but theoretically neither does The Pirate Bay (you have to forget their title entirely to truly believe this). People can post whatever torrents they want and having to police them would be as hard a burden on them as it would be on Google. I have to admit that the site has grown a lot since I first encountered it one fine day in high school and provides recommendations and all kinds of supplemental content with the torrents. This could either help or hurt their case. They're refusing to pay the fine and are planning to drag this on for years in appeals courts while they continue to replicate the site across the globe so that getting rid of it will be harder than quelling a fruit fly infestation.

What's really interesting is that the Pirate Party (yes, they seriously have one of those) in Sweden has swelled with supporters in the wake of the ruling. There's even been a major demonstration in Stockholm. You have to love the irony that in signing this sentence the court has essentially given rise to a movement that is far bigger than just piracy. It's not quite that these people all support piracy, but rather that they don't think their government has any clout to stand up to other nations in the interests of its people and that this could lead to a slippery slope of sites getting shut down with tons of perfectly legitimate content but a certain amount of copyrighted content that they don't own and can't afford to police. YouTube has been trying really hard to police itself and yet they're never going to succeed because there are more people uploading copyrighted content than YouTube police.

I have no idea how this is going to play out, but I can't help but be fascinated by what this means for the future of piracy and torrents. I mean there are even ISPs out there now that are trying to optimize themselves to speed up torrent downloads! Things like this would've seemed unthinkable a couple of years ago. It has brought these issues to the forefront of the attention of a much larger audience than it had been before, and that's what changes things.

The Wolverine Leak

I'm sure you've heard by now that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked on the Internet recently, over a month before its theatrical release. As such, it's an unfinished cut of the film, but it's causing a lot of mixed reactions. Some are just excited to see it early while others are condemning the like and there was even a reporter who got fired for blogging his review and that he saw it illegally. What's really crazy is that there are more people condemning it than anything else. Popular blogs are agreeing with the MPAA's campaign that this costs the jobs of the crew members who aren't filthy rich and really need the money they get from these films. This is one of the biggest movie leaks ever in terms of how far in advance of the release it is and how high profile the movie is. What a crazy time to be an online pirate - some Swedish guys just got arrested and people don't want to see a leaked movie.

To add to all this: Miramax is apparently keeping an eye on Twitter and offering free movie tickets to people who are considering pirating a movie and end up not doing it. I don't think that this will accomplish anything other than boosting their PR though - though I do think it's a smart PR move if more people notice it.

Time Warner Backs Down

If you don't know about Time Warner's plan to tier their services based on bandwidth usage in select cities then just pick a post I've made in the past month and start reading it. It's kind of been a big deal.

Time Warner has received a lot of heat about it from angry customers, impassioned bloggers, and even the press at large. It got to the point that a New York congressman wanted to ban download caps entirely. Then things really came to a head when Time Warner asked the FCC to stop talking about net neutrality because (I kid you not) "now is not the time." They just wanted the government to hand them money as part of Obama's recovery plan before they're antagonized by the FCC in an issue that could choke online innovation in this country and possibly have a worse ripple effect on the rest of the world. As far as I understand what Time Warner intended to tell the FCC: they're concerned with the definition of "non-discrimination" in the FCC's advisory.

Anyway, Time Warner decided to finally put a halt to these tiering plans, at least for now. They think that the public is mis-informed about this issue, and I'm sure many are, but their prices for their caps is still unfair and needs to be tweaked. To be honest, if I could get 250 GB of bandwidth for $60 a month with a fast speed (like no less than 6 megabits per second, at its worst), I'd be fine with it, but $75 for 100 GB is really pushing it. What they probably ideally want is for everyone to meter their usage and see how little they may be using right now, but that's not going to happen because people aren't going to put forth the effort just to prove Time Warner right (potentially). In areas where Time Warner is the only game in town, this tiering is a huge issue and I hope that Time Warner reconsiders it carefully and actually improves their plan.

I don't know what they thought was going to happen though when they quietly announced the expansion of the bandwidth cap program. For an Internet Service Provider, they don't know the Internet at all.

Final Notes

Ok, it's past my bedtime and I'm exhausted. Let's wrap this up, shall we?

ReadWriteWeb has a little article with links to videos and more information about Ubiquity - a Firefox project to try to re-think how we browse the web. The demo actually kind of blew me away in how simple it was and conformed to how we actually use the Internet.

Popular Mechanics has a great article about how to cut your cable bill without giving up television. In the end, the tradeoff (as is often the case in life) is price versus the convenience of always-on TV and DVRs.

YouTube has started hosting full-length movies including Fast Food Nation, Carrie, and even Heri Pheri. Yep, it has Bollywood films, old films, and movies that people never saw, but there are some gems hidden in there. The movies seem to be in High Quality but not High Def, and they automatically start out in a big size.

Apple has bought a bunch of 16 GB NAND Flash memory chips from its main iPhone supplier indicating that they could be preparing for a 32 GB iPhone. It's a pretty strong likelihood at this point.

Function has an incredible article on how to spot good web design. It's a total joy to read and I highly recommend it for people who appreciate good visual design.

Slumdog Millionaire on Blu-ray

Slumdog Millionaire

I promised last week that I'd review the Slumdog Millionaire Blu-ray I got and now that I've watched it and gone through the special features and everything I feel like it'll be a more fair evaluation.



I don't want to talk too much about the movie itself since I already wrote a review of it. At this point, the hype for it is way more than it was before, but I want to say that even if it wasn't necessarily the best movie that came out last year it's still a very good movie. It's not the best movie ever, but I felt like it broke the mold in a lot of ways and was a really creative suspense and love story. It's the kind of love story I like to watch rather than what a lot of romance movies are nowadays. It really keeps you engaged for its two hour running time and the acting all around is definitely better than you'd expect from no-name actors and actresses. They did the three stages in the lives of the three main characters surprisingly well and it made the movie feel very cohesive as you flashback into the lives of these slumdogs and how one of them ends up going very high in the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Let me start of with a couple of things that I didn't like about the Blu-ray presentation. I was really pissed when I put in the disk and after the usual long Blu-ray load time was forced to watch 4 trailers about movies I don't care about. You can skip through them, granted, but you shouldn't have to. If it was a lesser movie I probably would've returned it. It's just appalling after paying $26 for something to have to watch ads like that. Anyway, the other concern I had may not be a concern for everyone. I felt like in the theater the visuals were incredible and the color really jumped out at me, but I didn't feel that way watching it on Blu-ray. It could've been that I just remembered incorrectly. The movie definitely doesn't look bad on Blu-ray, but I felt like the colors were sometimes washed out and I didn't have the sharpness I hoped for. It's definitely my worst looking Blu-ray. However, it still looks great. People who hate the vivid colors in high definition because they feel it's so real that it seems fake will really like this. One thing you definitely get is the dirt in the air in Mumbai - I thought that was kind of cool. There was definitely no fuzziness around edges though, and the picture was definitely quite clear. It's on par with Blu-ray, it's just nothing that'll blow you away. I've heard that the DVD video transfer isn't bad so you could try out DVD, but some of the special features were in standard definition and if they're any indication of the DVD quality then Blu-ray is really the way to go.

Audio sounds great. Definitely no complaints there. The soundtrack sounds just as wonderful as it did in theaters, but it wasn't really a movie with heavy sound mixing or effects like The Dark Knight was. As far as special features, there were a handful of things: several deleted scenes, two commentary tracks, a 20-minute behind the scenes documentary, a short look at how they did the scene at the outhouses, a compilation of scenes set to "Jai Ho", a compilation of scenes set to "Liquid Dance", and the European and American trailers. All of them were in terrible video quality except for the "Jai Ho" video and the American trailer, which were in high definition. Still, I thought it was a respectable set of special features. I think some people were expecting a lot of stuff and think they're going to double dip, but it felt like they gave us all they had. The deleted scenes aren't bad and include a 10th question that was cut. Some of the deleted scenes do make sense of scenes that made the final cut but where it felt like the transition was odd, but it's obvious that they were cut for time. The commentary track that has Danny Boyle and Dev Patel was really cool, I thought. It was fun to listen to and you get a lot of random facts from it, like that the chase in the train station was filmed in the middle of the day while the station was in operation, so the people actually at the station thought they were crazy and kept offering Frieda Pinto help. Oh, and you also get a digital copy, which is a nice touch. Granted, it's a single download and it'll probably expire if you don't use it in a year or some period of time, but I don't think it really added to the cost of the Blu-ray.

Overall, I'm definitely pleased with the Blu-ray edition. I'm not as impressed as I hoped I'd be, but there's no doubt that it looks nice and I actually thought the pop-up menu was really cool. It feels very fluid and simple and, unlike for my other movies, doesn't shrink the running movie for the sake of showing you the menu. If you have a Blu-ray player and you loved this film, I'd say go for the Blu-ray. If you liked it and just want to see it again, it doesn't hurt to get it on DVD. The gain from DVD probably isn't as big as with some other films, but it's only a few bucks more.

Time Warner Still Sucks

Time Warner is still suffering the fallout from the revelation that a few cities will soon have tiered broadband services ending at a ridiculous 40 GB for $50. A lot of articles came out last week about it and the New York Times had one mentioning that the fastest broadband provider in the world only had to invest $20 per home in its network to upgrade to 160 megabits-per-second. Granted, Japan is more densely populated than we are, but it certainly doesn't sound like upgrading their networks would cost what Time Warner is trying to charge some of its customers. Verizon spends something like $800 per home for FiOs, but even that's no terrible for 50 megabits-per-second Internet when amortized over the long run. The problem with the cable providers jumping in on this is that it cannibalizes their antiquated cable television market, which they're hanging on to for dear life even though it's clearly not sustainable in the face of the Internet and online video. It's ridiculous for any of them to think they can honestly stop it.

Ars Technica did some math and found out that most people with Comcast who have to deal with their 250 GB cap pay about $0.17 per GB of bandwidth, whereas Time Warner is proposing to charge people $1.38 per GB, which is literally 8 times as much for the exact same service. They pretend this is necessary to cover the costs of upgrading their network to DOCSIS 3.0, but this is simply not true - they're price gouging.

Time Warner is fighting back by saying that the press is telling the story wrong, but they can't dispute the fact that their operating costs for their network went down last year while revenues went up. They claim that Internet usage will outpace capacity, which is a theory that has never been substantiated. They should just be honest: they're trying to squeeze money out of people in a bad economy to help promote cable television and discourage online innovation since that doesn't really drive more money to them it just gives more power and more jobs to hardworking citizens. It's one thing to think like a corporation, and a totally different thing to become an evil monopoly. I really hope they don't get away with all this garbage.

YouTube Dabbles In Ads

Well, YouTube has technically been dabbling in ads for a while now, but they've recently started testing out pre- and post-rolls. This has not gone well. As you can imagine, having to watch a 30-second ad before a 3 minute video of a guy falling off his skateboard isn't a great user experience. It's ok on Hulu because watching 10 minutes of a TV show usually comes with ads on TV anyway, but it hinders browsing the shortform video you see on YouTube if they're polluted with this kind of advertising. In my opinion, these kinds of ads should only be on longform content and it should be clear when it's going to happen like it is on YouTube. The lower 1/3s they do are already kind of annoying, but having ads to the left of shorter videos I think works better. It'll be interesting to see how far they go with pre-rolls and post-rolls before they realize how many people get pissed off by it.

CompUSA Returns

CompUSA probably isn't a store you've heard about in quite a while since they went bankrupt not too long ago, but they're now trying to make a comeback. So if they failed before why wouldn't they fail now? They're trying to embrace the Internet by connecting each screen in the store to it so that they can use online sources to help them make informed buying decisions live in the store. They claim the access is unrestricted, but I somehow doubt that. They've also re-organized their stores to provide a better customer experience. It's an interesting concept overall, but I think the big flaw is that people will probably test our products in the store, look at them online from these Internet-enabled machines at competitor stores, and then just go elsewhere or order them online. In fact, in this age of smartphones it's likely that people are doing this already. What they need to focus on is the organizational aspects they've already discovered is an issue and providing live quality customer service. It's the only possible advantage they can have over online retailers.

Securing Your Computer

I like to promote good practices for using your computer securely as much as I can, so I was glad to see this article from TechRadar with 10 ways to boost your online security. I think the most valuable pieces of advice are to check out the websites with in-browser features before you go to them and to not click on everything you get in your inbox.

While we're on security, a 17 year-old twerp created a Twitter worm that's basically a glorified XSS exploit. It's nothing fancy, it just did what we knew Twitter could be used for and I find it repulsive. Just because you can exploit something doesn't mean you should.

The Other Stuff

There's a lot of pretty quick news so let me just breeze through them so I can get to bed.

Coding Horror has a fun post about the 8 Levels of Programmers based on a concept you may remember from PSY 301. I'd like to think that I'm the Working Programmer.

iTunes started variable pricing, which means that some of their top selling MP3s are now $1.29 whereas they're $1 or less on Amazon.com. I knew that Apple would cave eventually.

Intel has started providing star ratings for their chips, which I think is just their way to get people out of the megahertz stigma. It's actually not a terrible idea if they handle it right.

You now insert images directly in your GMail e-mails!

Google's App Engine now supports Java applications, which I think is a pretty big step forward since Java has become almost an industry standard now whereas Python is often a hobby language or for writing quick scripts where efficiency isn't an issue.

The newspaper industry is still not happy with sites like Google News showing snippets from their articles, which is a sign that they're still not up with the times. This is another industry (like cable television) on the brink of extinction because they're stuck to the old ways of the thinking. Blaming Google isn't going to help them.

I hope everyone had a great Easter and has a good week!

The Weather is Nice Outside

Summer Came Early?

Winter hasn't really ended yet in Seattle - evident in that it was snowing last Thursday. I'm going to use today's incredible weather as my excuse for not reviewing the Slumdog Millionaire Blu-ray. I do have it though (Amazon's magical ways somehow got it to me the day after release). For now, I'll say that I was disappointed with the Blu-ray but I'm still happy with it overall. I just don't have to time right now to go into details so you'll have to come back next week to learn more!

The time I would've spent going through all the special features and writing the review went instead to walking around outside today and putting together this short video from it, which is half just huge flowers and half cityscape (please click on the 'HD' in the lower right corner once it starts playing to see it in HD, or just click through to the YouTube page and watch it in HD there):



It was shocking how perfect the weather was. I used to consider T-shirt and shorts weather to be weather where you'd sweat too much wearing pants and shoes, but it didn't feel too warm at all out. It's funny how not only was the market packed but there were even more cars than usual going through Belltown. Not to get too religious here and divert from my typical tech focus, but it's really humbling to be one person witnessing such beauty from a higher being. I didn't think I'd enjoy it so much since I couldn't find anyone else free to go with me to the BBQ competition in the market, but it was nice and relaxing. I'm not even usually a big flower guy but when you see so many huge, colorful flowers it's hard to not stop and notice them.

Time Warner Screws 4 More Cities

Most of the nation already has a well-developed hatred for Comcast, and the rest turn their anger towards Time Warner Cable - the other massive cable monopoly. A while ago they tried out a tiered Internet program that charged customers by how much bandwidth they used, and now they're rolling it out to Austin (*tear*), San Antonio, Rochester, and Greensboro. I suppose this is better than it going out to all their markets, but it's not a good sign if they're pleased enough to expand this trainwreck. Having to pay $55 a month for 40 GB of bandwidth is an enormous price jump, especially in a place like Austin or San Antonio where salaries aren't as high as other parts of the nation to cover such a price gouge and may have people turning to DSL instead. I can see it doing one or more of a few things. People could cut out cable TV to get a beefier Internet plan, especially families with teenage kids and tech geeks. People could use the Internet less and less for rich content ending in a big lose for online on demand video services, Netflix streaming, YouTube and Hulu, and any other beefy sites. People may look into alternatives like WiMax (or, as I mentioned earlier, DSL).

People are definitely getting pissed about it whom are soon to be affected. If enough people get through to local government and complain to Time Warner, it's possible that they can nip this in the bud. It's sad that we have to encourage grassroots movements to get companies that provide major utilities to not spit in the faces of their customers. I don't know what's more reviling to me, their discouragement of the expansion of the Internet in our homes or the fact that they're trying to profit off the naivete of the average person who has no clue that Internet infrastructure costs are only going down with time and extra bandwidth doesn't really cost them extra money. If they want to start their lowest bandwidth plan for $30 at 100 GB and then charge $50 for like 250 GB, that I can understand. The rates they're intending to charge though are basically highway robbery. If you're going to be affected by these changes, please fight back. You're not just fighting back for yourself, but the other cities they may expand to if you accept it willingly.

YouTube's Upcoming Re-design

I don't like to usually talk about features and re-designs that haven't happened yet, but I just found it interesting that YouTube is planning on changing its navigation to focus on "Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos". What does this mean? It looks like they're feeling the pinch of not having had a lot of success with monetizing their content. While one side of that coin is keeping their number of unique visitors strong and engaged the other side is attracting advertisers to trust them and to display their advertisement with the desired brand image. With the first three tabs clearly delineated as premium outside content, advertisers may feel more secure not being mixed in with people hurting themselves and strange clips from other countries.

In my opinion, this is an extremely risky move for YouTube. I don't see it ending well, but it's really hard to predict how it'll turn out. I don't want to say it's a stupid movie because Hulu being locked up (to the point of the HTML being encrypted) has really painted them in a corner. Their PR has been really terrible since they denied Boxee the ability to stream their content, and plus there's the fact that they only have the last few episodes of any given shows. I don't know if YouTube can strike up much better deals than Hulu since Hulu is backed by NBC Universal, but they may be able to differentiate enough from Hulu while keeping a good reputation with advertisers to attract more content, money, and happy customers. I think this is the right time for YouTube to give it a try, but I definitely worry for them. They were built on user-generated content, and branching out in the online world is never as easy as it looks.

Microsoft's Brand Image

Typically, I'm not a fan of John C. Dvorak's columns. I feel like he often says crazy stuff just to get people talking about something. I guess that's not so bad, but I feel like I can't believe him half the time. Anyway, I still think he's a smart guy and occasionally agree with him, like regarding his article about Microsoft's brand image getting worse. When Songsmith came out, everyone was railing on how stupid it was. If it was some Silicon Valley startup though, you know everyone would be praising its creativity. Let's take a bad Microsoft product: Internet Explorer. If Safari was the same thing as Internet Explorer, Mac users would still claim that it's the best browser out there because they think it came from Apple. It's amazing how many ridiculous features Apple releases for the iPod and iPhone that no one uses and yet everyone seems to love. Who really uses cover flow? Come on.

I feel bad for Microsoft. They're really trying hard to improve their image, and I think Windows 7 is a big step in the right direction. I never thought before about how much the company who makes a product matters in its reception and popularity. I guess it's always existed in things like cereal and detergent and products like that, but I never thought about it really in software.

Ton of Quickies

Ok, I'm seriously about to cough up a lung here, so I need to wrap this up and get to bed.

Wikileaks put up some fun facts about Western countries that are censoring their people, like that Norway, Denmark, and Finland have an unregulated censorship agreement with their ISPs.

PC World has a really great article about old pieces of technology that used to be very popular but are now almost never heard of. A lot of them are actually still available, it turns out. Like did you know that MiniDisc got upgraded to Hi-MD? Or that Iomega still sells Zip disks? I thought it was funny that Circuit City made their list.

Palm Pre demos have been fed to us to keep us interested in the device with no release date yet, but some of the 3rd party developers are clearly taking advantage of the background processing ability that Apple refuses to put into the iPhone API. Taking a stance on development opposite of Apple is what's going to save Palm, if they handle it properly.

What are the 10 skills developers need in the next 5 years? The list is debatable, but I think soft skills, web development, and "development hygiene" will definitely be key.

Digg launched the Digg Bar. It never works for me in Firefox because my Firefox seems to have a huge bug where it can't load Digg at all, but I'm sure the Digg Bar is peachy. It gives you short URLs with a little toolbar to make sharing easier - no special add-ons necessary.

Conficker didn't destroy the world yet, but it has create an enormous botnet. Fun fun.

Samsung announced the world's first WiMax mobile Internet device: Mondi. WiMax will get you faster speeds than 3G (probably on par with DSL, I'd imagine) and probably better rates than normal phone data plans, but WiMax isn't available everywhere.

A friend of mine released a really cool add-on for Firefox last week that lets you check movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes really easily. Check it out! More cool add-ons here.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 could give the president the power to nearly shut down the Internet. Basically, he would be able to designate some private networks as "critical" and order the limitation of traffic to these networks in an emergency situation. The bottom line is that it's too broad and needs better language to keep from giving up too much power.