I know, this post is way overdue. I'm going to try my best to hit the high points on what I've missed over the past couple of weeks, including a couple of movies that I saw. Things have just been crazy with wrapping up the semester, plus I got sick (and now I'm sick again thanks to trips to the lake, though I had a lot of fun). I'm going to try a slightly new format where I put bold headings in front of what I talk about to make my posts easier to navigate.
Harold and Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay Unlike most people, I was not introduced to John Cho by American Pie. Instead, a friend of mine was hyping up a little known movie that really hit it off at Sundance called Better Luck Tomorrow where he also played a jerk. I liked most of the actors in this movie (I was one of the few people who thoroughly enjoyed this movie) but I definitely felt like he was the best because he played this antagonist who you had to hate and feel sorry for at the same time so well. Then Harold and Kumar came out and comedy suited him really well. I think that's a testament to how versatile he is as an actor, and he shines just as well in the sequel. Don't get me wrong, I love Kal Penn, I just didn't see The Namesake so I'm not sure how he does in a serious role (he could've been better on "24", which I miss dearly, by the way).
Ok, enough of the drawn-out introduction, let me give you the premise in a sentence in case you haven't seen any of the trailers. It picks up at the very end of the first one (which I recommend seeing first for the funny subtle references to it, but it's not necessary), and so they're trying to get to Amsterdam to find Harold's crush while she's away there for 10 days but Kumar lights a bong on the airplane there. As you can imagine, stupidity ensues and they get thrown into Guantanamo Bay's military prison for being terrorists. As you can tell from that introduction, this is definitely a stoner movie. That being said, it's still a lot more fun than most, if not all, stoner movies out there. You don't have to be high to enjoy the humor or keep up with the story, you just have to have a really forgiving sense of humor (i.e. suspended disbelief). It features a little more gutter humor than the first movie and some improvements in the production quality due to a larger budget, but it still largely feels the same as the first in terms of humor, writing, acting, directing, etc.
To put it plainly: you will not like this movie at all if you didn't like the original. If you haven't seen the original, I think you should see it first just to get a feel for it before you do check out this one. If you don't catch it in theaters, it's really not a big deal because the same friend you borrow the original from will likely buy this one the day it gets released on DVD, and the big screen doesn't add anything incredible to the movie. If you love Sotuhpark, then I venture that you should also definitely see this one. I give this movie a B+ and personally rate it as the same as the original rather than better or worse. It's hard for me to rate a comedy movie as an A unless it's like Stranger Than Fiction or Little Miss Sunshine. This movie is hilarious and a fun ride, but it has its fair share of gross, racist, inappropriate, awkward, and sometimes offensive moments. It's by no means for everyone. If you can loosen up though and not get offended by its pokes at racism using racism or its subtle jabs at male chauvinism by a demonstration, then I think you'll have a good time. I'm personally going to be picking this one up when it comes out on DVD because every time I see the first it gets funnier, and I can easily see the same happening with this one.
Iron Man This movie completely caught me off guard and just amazed me on all levels. Let me preface the rest of this review with a couple of things though. I was never a fan of Iron Man at all. I thought he was kind of cool, but other than Batman I didn't really get into superheroes without actual special abilities. I was also skeptical about this movie because the trailer was great but it could've easily been doctored to make a bad movie with great visuals look great, and I wasn't sure about Robert Downey, Jr. because I hadn't seen him in a movie in a while. Plus, director Jon Favreau was also responsible for Batman Forever and Daredevil (which wasn't bad but was underwhelming).
Hence, I think what impressed me most about this movie is the fact that it could pull in people who could care less about Tony Stark or Iron Man and keep them clamoring for more. The basic premise (which is revealed in the trailer) is that billionaire CEO of Stark Industries, Tony Stark, is captured by terrorists and when forced to build them one of his own weapons he creates an armored suit so that he can bust out, and returns home to improve it. Then the rest of the movie ensues. While the movie does start out kind of slow after the initial raid to capture Stark (since it goes back in time to give a little more back story on Stark from just before he gets captured), I thought it was completely necessary much like the plot development early in Batman Begins to really establish who Bruce Wayne is. Also like Batman Begins, the movie somehow knows how to give you the perfect dosage of action. It's not so much that you're bored by it (e.g. Matrix Reloaded) and it's not so little that you feel that you've been misled into watching a drama. Unlike Batman though, Tony Stark is really the main attraction since he is Iron Man rather than Bruce Wayne transforming into Batman. The CG is all very nice, but, more importantly, the acting is consistently spot-on. This seriously is the part that Robert Downing, Jr was born to play: an alcoholic, ostentatious playboy who is secretly very talented. In fact, this movie made more in 3 days than any one of his other movies have made in their entire run in theaters. Terrence Howard is great as always, Gwnyth Paltrow does a nice loyal assistant, and I don't want to spoil information about other characters but they all do well. The directing is almost flawless, the cinematography never lets you down, and the writing feels tight.
To cut to the chase here: there's no reason to not see this movie. It's impressive not only as a superhero movie but as an actual movie. It's probably the best movie to be in theaters in quite a while (likely the best until The Dark Knight comes out in July), and it deserves big screen treatment. So please, hold close to your heart my A rating of this movie and run out and see it. When you do see it, be sure to stay after the credits for something special. They're going to try and converge this movie, Thor, The Incre, and Captain America into a master sequel.
Oh, and you need to see the new Dark Knight trailer. It's pretty incredible. It rolls before Iron Man.
Back Soon I'm disappointed that I was unable to talk about all the great tech news from the past couple of weeks, but I'm sick and need my rest. I'll do my best to post again on Thursday or Friday after my finals are all done. Until then, here are a couple of pictures from today:
EDIT: I miscalculated, it will be available at 6:15 AM tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. I thought it was 12:15 AM BST, not 12:15 PM. Sorry ;)
Maybe I'm just really behind, but I heard a while ago that Coldplay was having issues and was taking a break, so I assumed that the band was on the verge of breaking up and was very sad. I was shocked to receive this in my inbox from Coldplay.com:
We're very pleased to announce that Coldplay's new single, 'Violet Hill', will be available as a free download exclusively from Coldplay.com for one week starting tomorrow, Tuesday April 29th, at 12.15pm UK time. This is a full week ahead of the single's conventional paid-for digital release, on Tuesday May 6th.
Then, on Wednesday May 7th, there will be a free limited edition 7-inch vinyl of 'Violet Hill' on the cover of NME magazine, backed by the exclusive B-side, 'A Spell A Rebel Yell'.
That would be 6:15 PM CST, I believe, today (Monday)! I'm stoked! Check out the new album cover:
I saw Harold and Kumar: Escape from Amsterdam and would love to review it and do a post right now, but I have work to do and I'm sick, so I can't waste any more time than I already have. I'm going to try really hard to post on Tuesday. My score for the movie will probably end up being B+ (go see it if you liked the first, but just put aside high expectations of it being another comedy classic and realize it's another stoner comedy).
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
I don't quote the bible much here because this isn't that kind of blog, but I really like that quote. For some reason, every time I read it feels like the first time I've ever read it.
Getting to the point though, we set out in February to create a video about network neutrality. Why? For our grade in Contemporary Issues in CS, mainly, but any of my regular visitors probably see me posting about net neutrality quite a bit so would know how strongly I feel about it. The problem right now, in my opinion, is exposure. If legislators don't think their constituents care about the issue then it's too easy for lobbyists and telcos to fill their heads with whatever benefits the shareholders of these companies. The videos that are out there right now are often either misinformed (even Rocketboom 's take goes past the strict boundaries of what net neutrality means) or completely one-sided (whether for or against it). How likely are you to believe a biased video that only tells you one side of the story? It's like watching Zeitgeist and believing everything it tells you without reproach (for the record, going back to the gold standard is completely absurd and illogical).
So my video aims to present a clear and truthful definition of the issue, and then present the major arguments on both sides with an obvious lean towards net neutrality. We spent well over 50 hours putting it together (at least 20 hours in editing alone), so I hope that it entertains and educates you:
If you'd rather see it on YouTube, part 1 is here and part 2 is here. Apparently, I uploaded at a high enough quality for it to be viewable in "higher quality", so YouTube is not a bad option for viewing it. I encourage you to pass it along to friends if you enjoyed it and spread the word on this important issue. I did not distort anyone's interview in this video, nor did I distort the arguments against net neutrality. I really was trying to be as unbiased as possible in putting this together.
I'll try to make a real post this weekend, but I have to get a lot of work done between now and then (code generator, prepare for management exam, final music composition, 3000 words for our net neutrality paper, research stuff). Just one week left!
For my last semester in Texas Latin Dance I actually participated in a dance company! This means that you create/learn a choreography (though all I personally contributed to the dance I was in was the song selection) and then perform it at TLD's show at the end of that semester as well as events around campus and possibly around Austin. Since I'm graduating I won't get to perform this one again with the group, but it was a lot of fun learning it and something that I always wanted to do (dance on stage). Next hurdle: perform classical guitar on stage. I have performed it in front of medium sized audiences, but not in a recital/concert setting.
Anyway, one of the officers filmed the show on a half-way decent camera so I took it into the DMS lab in the business school for some light editing and encodings that took forever (for the Web and for the DVD). Here's the compressed version of the entire show, for the Web:
I think it was one of our best, if not the best, show we've had in the 2 years I've been in TLD! Though my personal favorites were probably Texas Revue, Bachata, and Mezcla.
If you turn to 26:05 you can see the dance I'm in, or you can just watch the even lower quality YouTube cut. I'm the last guy on the front row in the formation.
I'll return on Thursday with the public release of my short film "The Truth About Net Neutrality". Then, I hope to write a full blog post this weekend with a recap of this week's news. I've already been accumulating a pretty decent amount of news so there will be much to talk about.
So I know I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks, but I've been busy. After honors weekend was over I had to bust my ass to work on my parser and then spent the rest of the recovering in my other classes. Since my last post, the limelight has fallen clearly on two issues from what I've been reading: Microsoft's fight to acquire Yahoo and a surge of articles related to net neutrality. Speaking of which, my video "The Truth About Net Neutrality" is ready and will be made public after it is shown in class. So expect a post about this on Tuesday or on Thursday (more likely Thursday). I think that everyone will enjoy it and learn a lot from it. I have a couple of real quick personal things though. I'm performing in a dance tomorrow night, so you should come see it if you're in Austin (Union Ballroom, 8:30 PM). I caved and decided to join Twitter, we'll see how that goes (it's also somewhere on the right side here). Lastly, I got a shiny new laptop and a new mouse. I hate to say it: but HP's mantra of "the computer is personal again" really does apply here for me. It's exactly what I wanted: it's super fast, I can multi-task to an extreme without slowdowns, it's precisely the media powerhouse I want for high-definition video and my music and pictures, it has a built in webcam and bluetooth, and it even has S-video output. Very impressive, HP. Plus, this screen clobbers my old 19" CRT even though it's only 15.4" (it's just a little shorter than the 19"). The mouse is just really precise and the buttons on it are great. Wanna see?
Let's start off with Yahoo's response to Microsoft's ultimatum: give us more money. They claim that they'd be more amicable to the takeover if the offer was larger, which at this point may actually be true because they have to be starting to become afraid of Microsoft taking action by way of a proxy fight. I love the open letter they sent because it was like a verbal bitchslap aimed at Steve Ballmer. Were they being jerks in their diction? I don't think so, because I can see Ballmer being a jerk himself in trying to push this whole thing forward. The last I heard since that letter was sent is that they met earlier this week to open up negotiations again. We have no idea what's happening here behind closed doors (maybe in a year it'll be a made-for-TV movie), but I think we're all hoping that it won't end in a proxy fight. Oh, and a proxy fight does not guarantee anything for Microsoft since stockholders have to be willing to sell their shares so that's a big reason why Ballmer is going to want to negotiate more here. What we do know is that Microsoft hired a lobbyist group to start greasing the wheels in terms of making sure that an acquisition of Microsoft would not be questioned by the suits in the other Washington.
As if that wasn't already enough drama for Redmond (which could be the title of yet another reality show for MTV, I'm sure), analysts are painting a bleak picture for Microsoft unless they rethink how they deal with Windows. I have to say that I agree with them, and it sounds like Microsoft may already be on that path. Last time I blogged, I believe I cited an article saying that Windows looks like it'll become more modular, and so I think the Windows 7 team wants it to be easier to upgrade. Of course, if someone with the hardware to run Vista can't run Windows 7, then they're really hosed because that's unacceptable. Increasing virtualization seems interesting, but I don't personally have much experience in how virtualization works. I wonder if it's at all feasible to remedy their problem of a huge legacy codebase with a virtual machine to run programs that require Vista/XP to run? That way they could start fresh. They're probably not going to do this, it's just something I'm pondering here. Fortunately, Microsoft is actually getting some praise in its improvements to Live Maps, which seem pretty sweet. Even though I regularly use Google Maps, I can appreciate how nice the Bird's Eye viewing angle can be, and these 3-D rendered builds right in your browser are pretty neat. You can see my old place in Seattle here (I lived in the triangular building) and this is where I worked.
Facebook has launched its in-browser chat for select networks and it seems to be pretty neat and an excellent idea. I think that enough people stay logged into Facebook for an extended period time to make this actually useful. It looks to be pretty well integrated with your news feed and easy to deal with as an addition to your normal Facebook browsing experience. What does this mean for traditional IM clients? Are they to go the way of the dodo with the rise of Google Chat and Meebo and now this Facebook chat? Probably not. I think that enterprise users will still value their functionality in helping teams communicate, but we'll see what happens.
I mentioned last time that it's ridiculous that Google would take on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I guess that their Google Apps Engine heads toward that goal. I have to admit that this is really cool, but it's kind of different from anything AWS does, which is good. It's an entire platform rooted in Python and hosted by Google for launching your own web applications. So it's less flexible but more tightly integrated than the kind of stuff you'd be buying from AWS. I think it's interesting for a niche market, but appeals to a slightly different market than AWS, one that I believe is probably smaller but not negligible. If you want Google Apps Engine, then you're probably a student or a smal player, whereas companies that want to use AWS have a clearer direction and a better understanding of what they need and how they plan to use it. It's definitely interesting and I think it's a great concept. It has its limitations and I don't know if it'll ever grow to be really big (most platforms take a while to catch on anyhow), but it's definitely not a bad idea. I stand by saying that Google can't directly compete with AWS in its segment of the market, which is further confirmed by Jeff Bezos's remarks at Startup School as intimated by my friend, Juan, that include something like this.
Ok, now for the slew of net neutrality articles. Virgin Media's CEO has blasted net neutrality as being bullshit and has already started establishing contracts to deliver the content of certain providers faster than others. The audacity of people like this truly amaze me. I don't understand how people can desire more money at the expense of society and the very definition of what the Internet has always been. Of course, they then turn around and say that we don't really need faster Internet access. Why is an enraged American public not putting he pieces together? They want to charge more money to certain providers to make more money without actually giving you a better Internet experience. They're too lazy to rebuild their networks and wire this country with fiber so they instead go for cheap solutions that don't really make anything better.
Comcast re-did their hearing at Stanford last week for throttling people using BitTorrent since last time they paid people to fill seats so that real people couldn't sit in and be a part of it, and they really want to de-prioritize heavy Internet users. This is not a violation of net neutrality, this is a violation of what most of their clients signed in their terms of service and is ridiculous. Net neutrality specifically deals with neutrality on the content provider side, it's a totally different issue for the consumer side. Providers like Comcast have long forgotten what it means to care about their customers and have turned to self-serving "bills of rights" and slinging mud at any threat to keeping the Internet a communications medium that is driven by and freely available to the people at large. I hope all of you will write to your congressmen and help be a part of the solution.
I'm running late here so let me cover just a few things real quick. Joel Spolsky wrote another article for Inc.com about the strategy of "Fire and Motion" where you stun your opponents with something big (the "fire") and then move forward so that you're always one step ahead of them. It's a fun read and a great strategy for all you budding entrepreneurs. PS3 users may soon see television and movie content come straight to their PS3s via the Playstation Network. I'm not sure if they'd have ad-supported TV like Hulu or pay-per-view like iTunes/Unbox, but hopefully it'll help the PS3 stand up against its loses to the Xbox 360 and Wii in this generation's console war. Clearly, Sony wants the PS3 to be your one-stop entertainment center. Lastly, if you're a Mac user who doesn't even consider security, you need to read this. I'm currently playing with vulnerabilities in my research that affect Macs, so believe me when I tell you to be careful out there. The Internet is a dangerous place.
Like I said, by Thursday I'll be making another post with my net neutrality documentary, so I hope you'll come visit again very soon!
**UPDATE** The Daily Texan actually has a great article reviewing the concert as well that acts as a nice supplement to what I say below.
NOTE: below the embedded video, you'll see your dosage of tech news to cover the past 2 weeks.
I have to say that Austin has had a pretty fortunate Spring. The weather is still pretty nice outside, despite being April, Barack Obama has come to speak here at least 3 times, we hosted the latest Clinton-Obama debate, Bill Gates visited us, Bill and Hillary Clinton both spoke here, we're home to the current Turing Award winner, and The Roots blasted their incredible fusion of rock and hip hop from Main Mall throughout the lower half of campus.
They were the very definition of indie Austin rock, in my opinion: weird, intense, but always fun. I was disappointed that they didn't acknowledge The Roots at all, but I forgive them. If you looked close enough, you could spot Captain Kirk, Owen Biddle, and I think Tuba Gooding, Jr. Feel free to comment if you can spot more of them (it's like "Where's Waldo"):
I tried to keep track of the songs they played, so here's the best set list I could come up with, in roughly the order they were played:
Star Unknown song from Game Theory (I think) Quills Step Into the Realm Act Too (Love of My Life) 1-minute covers: In a Gadda Da Vida (Iron Butterfly), Jump On It (Sugarhill Gang), Roc Boys (Jay-Z), Get By (Talib Kweli), Just a Friend (Biz Markie), a Wu-Tang song I didn't know, Who Am I (Snoop Dogg), This is Why I'm Hot (Mims), Snap Yo Fingers (Lil Jon and Sean Paul), Sexy Back (Justin Timberlake), Push It (Salt N Peppa) Extended cover: Masters of War (Bob Dylan) I Will Not Apologize (off of Rising Down) You Got Me Here I Come cover of Jungle Boogie (Kool & The Gang) Don't Feel Right The Next Movement Web Encore: The Seed and some song I didn't know (it sounded like the hook was "Men at Work", it was not Thought @ Work)
And again, that doesn't even cover all the songs they actually played, it's just the ones I knew. It made for a great set that covered over 2 hours. They came on stage one-by-one starting off with a song I didn't know, but as always The Roots crew started building up the crowd's energy until the crowd got wild and excited after the Masters of War cover. Speaking of which, you can see a video of it on YouTube from another concert. So picture that but with an insane guitar solo and a longer drum solo. It was seriously worth waiting 2 hours just to see that cover: it was absolutely incredible. The buildup in the show's energy was definitely noticeable though as Black Thought periodically introduced each member of the band giving them a short solo, especially as they went through that long slew of covers that the crowd went crazy over. I don't even like Jungle Boogie and I thought it was amazing when they played it.
What was interesting is that even though The Roots and Common are both hip hop, and have both blazed the stage that is Main Mall, there's something fundamentally different in their music that really fascinates. Common is more reflective, soulful, bare bones hip hop whereas The Roots is this rock-driven hip hop experience that revitalizes ever song they play as well as any covers they play. I had seen them live before back after the release of Phrenology, and so some of the band members have changed since then, but the show stayed true to being really high quality. Hell, they even put up these poles where the flag poles are that did something crazy with the sound echoing at some points. I've never seen so many white people go so nuts over 6 black dudes (+ a white guy) taking a stage; I thought it was interesting. I had no idea how cross-cultural The Roots' pull was. It's not hard to see why though when they put together a live show that you'd think was choreographed to the second with perfect harmonies but remixes of songs that most people there had never heard before. Anyhow, the concert was so mind-blowing that I pre-ordered Rising Down so I can give you guys the full review when I get that at the end of the month. In the meantime, here's a video that I took at the concert of the guys dancing on stage, which was started by F Knuckles:
Ok, so it's time for some tech news! Amazingly, they flow pretty well into each other, so I'll start on the musical track since we started out talking about The Roots. PC World recently updated its list of top 10 Flash-based mp3 players, and I think the order is debatable but from my experience of shopping for one I'd agree that those are pretty much the top 10 out there right now except for the Cowon D2. My lesser known Clix2 (see yesterday's post) made the #5 spot just below the iPod Touch but above SanDisk or the Zune.
Where do you shop to load up these fine mp3 players though? USA Today had a refreshing article pointing out that Amazon's mp3 download service is now number 2 in digital music sales right behind iTunes. They're also tied for the number 4 spot in top U.S. music retailers with Target behind Best Buy, Wal-mart, and iTunes, which is number 1 now (on both charts). I'd say that given that Amazon MP3 was just a whisper a year ago, it's incredible that it has grown to be so popular and I'm excited to see if its greater selection of DRM-free music than iTunes will allow it to overtake Apple's FairPlay-controlled service. I personally have grown weary of iTunes and have switched to MediaMonkey for organizing my music and Amazon for digital downloads because it's just better overall.
(Note: I have no non-public knowledge of the AWS group,=; I did not work in that group.) Amazon also garnered a bit of negative press that I'm almost afraid to link to because I think it's kind of ridiculous. Basically, GigaOM put up a commentary on a thought from Dave Winer that gained popularity (probably more than the Winer original did). No doubt that both guys are smart and know what they're talking about in general, but I don't think there are enough companies that would want EC2 and S3 and such for free like this. Consumers are cheap and love free stuff, but enterprise-level software is all about support. So there's two ways Google could go about this: supporting it with ads or just hoping that one of the companies they back strike it big and Google can acquire them. For the former, I can't imagine that there are a lot of companies who would want to be forced to have big parts of their infrastructure supported by advertising. For the latter, I don't see how the fruits of this would be good enough to warrant providing these services. It's not like the AWS prices are insane anyway. I'm going to be bold enough to say that Google would be stupid to try to compete with AWS with a free model. AWS does pretty well as it is, and Google's style and past success are based in investing in growing markets without a clear leader.
Of course, a well-established leader is no obstacle to Microsoft who took on Sony in the console wars for the past couple of generations and is still trying to buy Yahoo in its war with Google. They've become so impatient that they're giving Yahoo 3 weeks to surrender before they take the fight directly to the stockholders. This could get real messy real fast. As I've mentioned before, Microsoft really does not want a proxy fight here because Yahoo's talent base is very important to them and a proxy fights typically result in casualties and lowered employee morale, but Ballmer has made it abundantly clear several times before that they will stop at nothing to takeover Yahoo, so I'm still appalled that Yahoo is still fighting this so irresponsibly. My opinion is that they told Microsoft they wanted more money because they wanted to stall for time from their shareholders because they knew that Microsoft wouldn't pay up. Either that, or they're delusional (which I also mentioned before).
I have a friend working on the Windows 7 team so I'm always excited to get news on that front because he's a smart guy and I think that he'll help guide Windows back on the right path. There's already rumors that Windows 7 will be modular, meaning that it'll come out in pieces so that it can be developed monolithically while providing the flexibility of a highly customizable OS (this is a similar idea to people who use Linux so that they can tinker with it). Also, Bill Gates let slip that Windows 7 will be out next year, but he didn't say much other than that. It's likely a beta that will be ready late next year since the release timeline for 2010 hasn't changed, but I hope that they are trying to pick up the pieces of Windows Vista and build something truer to what people really want.
Alas, I have one more piece of news from Redmond: the Microsoft Surface will be in AT&T stores in a few select cities to show off cell phone models by just placing them on the device to help sell the phones. It's an interesting application for the product, though I'm sure quite expensive. I wonder if AT&T bought them outright or if they're on loan? We have no idea whether it'll only work on the demo models or if your own phone could be placed on the Surface to be played around with, but it's launching April 17 so we'll know soon enough. Despite my initial skepticism, I think that the Surface could be really cool in retail stores and bars and restaurants.
The CEO of the Mozilla Foundation is leading the herds of people who are disgruntled that the Apple Software Update application, which PC users typically use to get updates to iTunes but Apple users use for other applications, automatically puts Safari on the list of updates it will provide to you and check the box by default so that if you just click "Install" whenever it bugs you about upgrading you'll have one more browser that you may not want (I certainly wouldn't want it). While I think it shouldn't be checked by default, I think that John Lilly is getting too worked about it. People shouldn't be clicking on things they haven't read or don't understand, anyway, because it could be a virus. That's why people should use ZoneAlarm and SpyBot. I personally think that anything that auto-updates is evil and should always ask you first, but nagging you can also be problematic. Still, it's the lesser of two evils, and so at least Safari doesn't actually install itself without asking you. Of course, what Lilly should keep in mind that if Safari is worse than Firefox (which it is) then he has nothing to worry about. The only helpful feature I ever found in it was the Activity window, which is like Down Them All but not as good. Oh, and Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out for all you hardcore nerds and developers out there.
Azureus, creators of the famed torrent application of the same name, have released a plug-in that will allow you to determine if your ISP is throttling your connection for using torrents. It may sound useless because you'd know if you were being throttled, but it will then send that information to Azureus to help compile a list of such terrible ISPs and I presume help your case in suing them.
Now, I have several high points I'd like to hit real quick because this post is taking way too long and I have other things to attend to. GigaOM put up something more enlightening than what I mentioned above: a guide to what makes a good mobile application great. Having dealt with horrible ones, I can attest to this list's validity. The New York Times had an excellent editorial about how Hillary Clinton is dragging along this battle because she feels like she politically deserves the nomination and will drag the party through the mud to get it. Clinton supporters: don't fight me here, there are field reporters attesting to shady tactics at conventions here in Texas alone. I'd vote for her if Obama loses, but I don't think it will come to that and she needs to start to realize that before we lose people to McCain and the arguably more decisive Republican Party. The SciFi channel put up a really neat recap of the first 3 seasons of Battlestar Galatica for those who want to get into the show but haven't been keeping up. It makes me want to go out and rent these first seasons, but unfortunately it's down momentarily. I'm sure it'll be back soon (it's called 'What the Frak is Going On?'). Lastly, in my hunt for Seattle apartment I came across HousingMaps, a Craigslist/Google Maps mashup that will map out housing ads in various big cities. I love it and am using it constantly so I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a new place.
Hopefully I'll have another post up early next week, but until then I have much work ahead of me this week so wish me luck!
**EDIT** I mention that you can't listen to music while playing Flash games, which was true when the product was released. However, the new firmware update fixes that problem, so I apologize for not checking that out.
I got a new mp3 player a couple of weeks ago and I love it so much that I've been dying to review it. It came out last Spring (though my model came out later in the year since it's 8GB), but since I didn't find a video review that had audio and video I thought I'd fill the gap. You don't have to watch the video to enjoy my written review, but I think the visual will help (just turn down the volume if you hate my dorky voice; I apologize for the cluttering).
I hope that wasn't too tough to watch: it was my first try at a video review. I recommend at least skimming it just to get a feel for the navigation (again, turn the volume down if you want).
Given that my iPod Shuffle barely stays on my armband anymore (I had to glue back the USB part because it so easily snapped off at the gym one day), I tried to replace it last Spring with the Sansa c250 and miserably failed. After that, I decided to pay attention to quality, not so much price, in searching for a small, flash-based mp3 player with a screen so that I could not only play music at the gym (from a playlist created on my computer), but also listen to podcasts on the bus and possibly even watch video podcasts. After doing a lot of research, I narrowed it down to the Cowon D2, the iRiver Clix, the Creative Zen, and the iPod Nano. After reading the reviews and deciding the features I wanted that they had issues with (the Zen's expansion slot is actually almost useless), I decided that it was either the Nano or the Clix, and when iRiver offered a $40 rebate it was pretty much a no-brainer. I have to say that it was a surprisingly smart decision: this is, without a doubt, the best mp3 player I've ever interacted with aside from the iPod Touch.
Let's start with size, style, and navigation. This device is pretty much as small as you really need to be. It's definitely a little bigger than a Nano and a little thicker, but I never jumped on the "I want the thinnest mp3 player in the world" bandwagon so it's pretty reasonably thin to me. It easily slides into one's pocket. It's not even that heavy because I don't really notice it at the gym except for when I have to rotate the armband on my arm occasionally (I bought a silicone case and armband from the iriver store). I think it gets big points on style for just being really sleek, smooth, and black. It's not adulterated with any symbols on the face, and the information on the back is quite reserved. Even the side button labels aren't too big (after playing with it for just a bit, you won't need them). What's really impressive is the navigation though. I was a little skeptical about the d-click navigation, but it's more intuitive to me than the iPod wheel. I love that rather than copy the iPod or the Zune, they went for something fairly original here in just having these 4 giant buttons on the edges of the device. It's pretty easy to use with just one hand if you're wearing a jacket and don't want to have to look at the screen, and there's never any confusion with icons on the screen to help you navigate. Holding the right button always brings up a side menu, and that's the most complicated thing you need to understand. I had the hardest time navigating my old Sansa, so this was a breath of fresh air for me. The only other buttons are power, volume, hold, and the smart key. I'll admit that the hold button can be a little tricky to get to, but I think you'll get used to it. Also, the volume buttons may seem backwards if you're looking at it from the wrong angle, but I got used to that pretty quickly. The smart key is excellent: it can turn the screen on/off, change the orientation, play/pause, go to the home screen, start/stop recording, shuffle, or do a/b repeat. You just change a quick setting and that's it! I think that key was a stroke of genius, because I may care more about easy of play/pause than battery life so I may want it to play/pause rather than turn the screen off, etc.
The next thing I want to cover is music. It supports all the most popular music file types and any Windows Media Player-based subscription services (including Rhapsody with free firmware update). The sound quality is very nice, in my opinion. I'm far from an audiophile, but I noticed a difference immediately from the sound I'm used to hearing out of my Shuffle. You get a full stereo effect, and you can really get immersed in your music, even at the gym (because I bought this thing primarly for the gym, I may keep referencing that) where it's relatively noisy. You can create however many playlists as you want on the computer, which I've only managed to get working on the iRiver Plus 3 software. That's the software that came with the device, and it's not bad though I wouldn't make it your new music management program. I've decided to betray the memory-hungry iTunes for Media Monkey, which does an excellent job of letting you auto-tag your songs from Amazon. Plus, when it tags your album art, it puts it in the tag (iTunes just dumps them in a folder), and the Clix will only show album art from the mp3's tag. I recommend adding all your music folders to iRiver Plus 3, and then just create playlists with the songs you want in your favorite music program and drag them into a playlist in iRiver Plus 3. Then, just load them onto the device this way (you don't even need to actually use this playlist on the device, it' s just to keep the songs in one place). This way, it'll automatically be organized on the device. Otherwise, if you just drag-and-drop, you have to rebuild the database on the device. By the way, file transfers are quite fast. Anyway, it does support MTP mode if you really like Windows Media Player, but I like UMS/MSC for loading videos and pictures easily in Xplorer2 and using iRiver Plus 3, which is quite lite. I don't even know how to load themes (see below) and Flash games on there in MTP mode (I haven't tried MTP). In addition to the album art and song information, you get the progress bar and what song is coming up next, which really comes in handy. You can also set the equalizer settings, change the playback speed, change the scan speed (very handy for long podcasts), show lyrics, rate it, and change the playback mode (e.g. shuffle, repeat once). You can also build-up a quick list on the device just by holding the right button when showing songs to get to that menu with all those options and adding a song to the quick list. You only create one of these, but I can't imagine that you'll need more than one of them.
It also supports podcasts and Audible, though Audible books are only usable in MTP. You can choose MTP or UMS/MSC mode, but you have to format in between changes so make sure you back-up the device before doing so. It claims that podcast support is only in MSC/UMS mode, but if they're just .mp3s then I can't see why you can't use them in both modes. I think it means for mypodder support, which comes on the device by default. You don't need mypodder though: all you really need to do is drag and drop songs into a 'Podcasts' folder in 'Music' and you can get to them straight from 'Podcasts' on the device rather than searching artist or genre or anything (though in MTP mode, you may need to). I really wish you could bookmark in podcasts, but I heard that you can in Audible books. Oh, and one thing about UMS/MSC mode: unlike the iPod you can drag your content to and from the device. So it doubles as a flash drive (on the iPod, you can't take your music from it, only put it on).
The FM Radio it sports is quite nice. It does an excellent job of auto-presets, and I only have trouble with reception where I have trouble with cell phone reception. My radio on my Sansa never worked, so believe in this device having a real radio, which you can record from. You can also record your voice (apart from the radio) because it has a mic built-in, and you can turn on a setting that will ignore all noise except for your voice. This works surprisingly well: the recording is nice and crisp, and you can even choose the quality.
I should probably mention that the AMOLED screen it supports is incredible. It also packs a Lithiom-ion polymer battery, which is just the next generation of Li-on. It has the same problems, but it's cheaper to make and more robust to damage. Anyway, the AMOLED screen has no backlight: it's just ridiculously bright on its own because it holds its charge so well, and it has a 180 degree viewing angle. Plus, since it requires less power (made of organic material) you can get 5 hours of battery life on just video and 25 of just audio. You can completely charge the device in just 2 hours (via mini-USB, or the cradle accessory that no one seems to like). I can attest to this being pretty accurate, though I haven't worn it totally down. Like any Li-on, it'll degrade over time, but I imagine it'll take a long time for most users.
This screen does a very nice job with your pictures and videos. You can create playlists with your pictures and play them in slideshow mode with music playing in the background. It really shines on video playback though: it's like you're watching video on a nice LCD TV except that it's been shrunk to 2.2". If you get the silicone case then you can even use the belt clip as a kickstand to place it on the table while you watch your video. I've managed to watch a 40-minute TV show with no problems, and the audio even came out quite well. It's really ideal for video podcasts (e.g. Revision 3), but I've put a couple of DVD movies on mine. Sure, it's a little smaller because the letter boxing is more on widescreen films (I haven't tried a full screen because I don't own any), but still watchable in pieces. I've been converting my movies to .avi using iRiverter because it only supports OpenXvid .avi (and some strain of .wmv), and I've found iRiverter to be the easiest (plus, it runs nicely in the background without disrupting the speed of your computer much at all). iRiver includes media conversion software on the software disc, but you can see all your options here. I managed to convert a DVD in about 80 minutes and a TV show in under 20 minutes on my old school P4. I like that it will remember your place in your videos (this can be turned off), too, and you can set the scan speed.
My absolute favorite part of this device though is how customizable it is. Because it's running Flash Lite, you can create your own themes (with animated backgrounds and a different background for each day of the week) or download them online. The Korean iRiver site had a contest last year so there's a ton of really nice ones floating around (just check the ClixHere forums for them). These are some stills from one of my favorites:
You can also add whatever fonts you want (as long as they're true type) to be used pretty much everywhere text is displayed on the device, which includes foreign language fonts. Not only is one unique in having this device since a lot of stores don't seem to carry it, but you can be unique from other Clix users in your theme and font, and you can change it as often as you'd like to keep you from getting bored with it. How many other mp3 players let you do that? Since they're small in size, you can put a lot on there and still keep your mp3s and videos even if you have a 2GB model (it comes in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB). Oh, and you can change the screen orientation (configurable to that smart key button, if you'd like) in case you don't like it being in landscape mode. It feels natural in any orientation, though I always use landscape just as a personal preference.
The last thing to talk about are the extras. If you have any text files with maybe a todo list or something, you can drag them right onto to the device and read them. It also has a handy alarm clock with a nice quick alarm option (e.g. 10 minutes from now). The best extra is the flash games: they provide you with a bunch of games already and I've found more free ones from browsing the ClixHere forums. They're really fun and include a frogger clone, blackjack, sudoku, a tetris clone, pacman, and many others (plus applications like a calculator or memo pad). Anyone who develops in Flash Lite is free to create content for it! There's also a bunch of other settings including sleep timer (can sleep or power-off) and screen brightness.
I think that about covers it. You probably think I'm a little nuts for writing such a detailed review, but I wanted to be thorough because there's just so much to talk about in this tiny little thing (and iRiver has no idea how to advertise it, clearly). As you can tell, I'm thrilled with it and I had to really think hard to find any bad points. Just to give you a quick summary...
Pros: -Very nice battery life (Li-py) -Extremely bright, high quality AMOLED screen -Intuitive navigation (D-click and smart key work great) -Fast! It's quick to charge, load content onto, and skimming pictures and videos and such on the device. -Not intrusive at all at the gym (lightweight, nice form factor, good with the misticaudio silicone case) -Impressive sound quality (even on low-end headphones) and video quality -Completely customizable (theme and font) -Actually usable FM radio -Flash games! -You can create playlists on the computer (my Sansa couldn't) or a quick list onthe device -Voice/FM radio recorder (can filter out noise for the mic) -Stylish (and unique) -Fun to use (I still haven't gotten bored with it) -It actually has a very customizable equalizer
Cons: -Expensive ($240 retail for the 8GB red line, but you can find it cheaper at Amazon) -Hold button can be hard to get to -You have to get used to the volume keys' orientation -No bookmarking on podcasts -The iRiver Plus 3 software is nothing special, but if you drag-and-drop music you have to rebuild the database on the device -An output to TV would've been nice -If you really want to be nit-picky, the screen could be a tad bigger, but then you'd lose some of the nice form factor and big easy-to-find buttons
If you want other opinions, I love the Pocketables one, and the Anything But iPod one isn't too shabby either. I highly recommend this device if you're looking for something in the iPod Nano market but with a bigger screen and more features.
I have plenty of news to talk about that hopefully I'll get to later this weekend. Tomorrow is the Travis County Democratic Convention though, so I'm going to bed!
Sorry to be so tardy in writing this post, but this week has been absolutely ridiculous granting me no more than 4 hours of sleep a night for half the week. I think that things will be better now, and I'm real excited about my new iRiver Clix mp3 player. I'm planning on reviewing here, hopefully with video footage as well, as early as next week because I feel that it never got the attention it deserves. You'll find out why right here, so stay tuned.
What I want to talk about first of all today though is one of the best Joel essays I've read: Martian Headsets. He never disappoints me, and I someday aspire to be able to elicit the kind of nuggets of wisdom on my blog that he does, but until then I'm going to explain why this essay is so important. Developing the NSC site for me was fun and not really that bad until I started a part of the site where I allow members to review their professors and I turned to ext-js. I love ext-js, don't get me wrong, but Javascript is a complete pain to deal with for cross-browser compatibility. It wasn't long before Safari purists complained to me, and so I complained back asking why anyone would use Safari. In any case, I ended up just worrying about IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox, and even then one of the pages screws with the layout in IE 7. Getting it to work simultaneously on all 3 browsers was grueling, and people sometimes don't understand why I praise Firefox and tell them to use it. From my perspective, I've had so much more success writing code in CSS and Javascript and just working in Firefox as opposed to any IE browser. People also don't understand why certain sites don't work in IE or don't work in Firefox. These are both reasonable concerns, and that's why I feel that it's important to read this essay.
Something I really took from it that I really didn't quite grasp before is that these specifications for "web standards" and how browsers should be rendering pages aren't as glorious as people like to claim they are. I've probably been guilty of putting a little too much stock in them, and I apologize for that. With a concept as complicated as the Internet, I think that the current state of affairs with the browser wars was pretty much inevitable. There's this many-to-many mapping now between the browsers out there and the sites that they support because each version of IE, and some other browsers, add compatibility quirks with regard to how their interpret code. So we face a stalemate between browser compatibilities now. People have to write hacks to get their sites to work in certain browsers and walk on pins and needles. The only solution is a little far-fetched, but I like to think (when I'm in my happy place) that it's someday possible: all the browsers actually agree on the same set of standards in mind-numbing detail and focus instead on security and the user experience. In any case, IE8 now is facing the very real war of pragmatists versus idealists. The idealistic perspective is what I just mentioned: stick strong to standards and force everyone to conform to the them. The former is to focus on backwards-compatibility with the older version of IE. Currently, the idealists are winning, and it will definitely cost Microsoft dearly if they do win. If Vista has taught them anything, I hope that that it's to temper this idealism with pragmatism and try not to screw your market share. We'll see what prevails in the end.
The FCC's 700 MHz spectrum auction is almost complete with the Verizon and AT&T coming out on top. They took the C and D blocks for $9.4 and $6.6 billion, respectively. Apparently, Google only bid to reach the reserve and force open standards. Will this mean better cell phone coverage? I hope so, but only time will tell.
Yahoo has decided to release a very positive outlook for 2009 and 2010. It's so positive, in fact, that it surpasses the predictions made by pretty much any of the analysts forecasting their revenues. Whether or not Yahoo believes this prediction, which I'm sure they do, I believe that the real purpose is two-fold: to put confidence in the investors that they're in control and to try to raise Microsoft's bid in case they can't get out of being taken over. Relations between Microsoft and Yahoo seem to be a little calmer, but Microsoft still hasn't budged on its offer and investors don't sound like this new outlook gives them much more faith in Jerry Yang. Meanwhile, Microsoft has snatched up web analysis company Rapt, Inc. I imagine that they're trying to compete with Google Analytics here. I think that Microsoft strategy needs some work because they're falling into the Yahoo trap of competing with specific Google services rather than offering something out-of-the-ordinary that will bring them users. While I've said before that they do both have some great applications (Yahoo and Microsoft, I mean) they're lacking in user bases, and that's another thing for them to work on (hopefully together). You think they'll create an online university to compete with Google Code University (which, for the record, I think was a pretty neat idea)?
In the meantime, AOL has decided to buy social networking site Bebo for $850 million. I definitely got the feeling that this was under-covered, probably because AOL isn't as sexy as they once were. You may not have heard of Bebo because it's huge in Europe but not so much in the U.S., so maybe AOL is trying to expand Bebo's prowess to the U.S.? If it integrates well enough with AIM, it's not impossible. Now that you can do remote desktop in AIM, its professional user base is probably growing. Facebook had a response, that perhaps wasn't planned with this in mind: IM on Facebook. We're not sure yet if it will be built on Jabber or if they'll provide an API for it, so for now it'll be only for Facebook. I'm guessing that it will work similarly to GTalk as far as just pure functionality and I believe their goal is to keep people on Facebook longer so that it can continue to evolve into this web desktop that people often buzz about.
This is pretty neat news: Mininova is launching a closed beta to test out video streaming researched at Harvard with the Tribler team involved, as well. It sounds like it will work similar to how current torrents work: as you receive packets for the video stream you'll serve it to others trying to stream the video and use the "Give-to-Get" algorithm to ensure that the video becomes truly on-demand. I'm really excited to see what comes out from the other end of the beta and I have high hopes because I've always been fascinated by torrents and I'd love to see that technology applied in a more widespread legitimate way, even if it's directly through torrents. Video streaming, after all, has really exploded in the past few years.
Last, but not least: Miro has released a new update to Miro with plenty of performance improvements and bug fixes. Miro is a heavy application, but really awesome if you can afford the RAM.
I'll leave you with the new Wall-E trailer, which is really cute and very entertaining.
No, I'm not referring to a new site. I'm talking about an interview that TorrentFreak had with the creators of The Pirate Bay, who have been in the lime light because of their upcoming trial. Anyway, one of the big quotes from that interview is their advice to the movie and music industry to start their own torrent site and put The Pirate Bay out of business. Would this ever happen? I kind of doubt it. Yes, there are several popular movies on BitTorrent, but how many people do you know who have tried it? Why would you pay $20 for a digital copy of a movie that you can only watch on 2 computers? The over-arching issue here really is DRM. Releasing DRM-laden movies on BitTorrent is like if someone orders a hamburger and you only give them half of it. How many years did it take the music industry to turn to DRM-free mp3s? It will take at least that long for the movie industry to come along. I have a feeling that they eventually will come around, I just don't know when. So if I believe they're guaranteed to eventually ditch the DRM why don't I think they're likely to use torrents for distribution? Simple: control. These companies like to have a lot of control, hence DRM. Getting rid of DRM will be losing a lot of control for them, and I think it'll be a while longer before they lose control of distribution to a peer network, despite how well-constructed BitTorrent DNA is. I'll admit that it's possible though, but getting studios to come together on a torrent site won't be much easier than getting the labels together (I have no idea how Amazon MP3 pulled this off). I think they'll associate torrents with the enemy for a long time, and not be trusting of it. But I'll be optimistic and say that it's possible, just not in the near future.
The more content that Hulu has been getting, the more street cred it has been receiving. In case you don't remember, this site's goal is to provide television shows on-demand (current and past) for free. You can think of it as a competitor to Joost, only it's not hard to use and has popular TV shows. NBC's defection from iTunes was a pretty bold statement, I think. I've been using it to watch Firefly and other stuff since the writer's strike began and I never missed my television set during that time (though I did use it to watch DVDs). That article makes a good point that they should advance television to the next level with this with more interactive features and discussion, which I definitely agree with. I think that it should become an integral part of IP TV, as time progress. I've been reliant on Hulu and Miro for the past 3 months, to be honest, so I can see these two ideas combining later on. Anyway, the big news is that Hulu is public now. That means that you can see my favorite Superbowl ad and much more at Hulu; you won't be disappointed:
Mozilla released Firefox 3 Beta 4 just a couple of days ago and apparently the GUI has been retooled to play nicer with the Vista UI experience. In fact, it's designed to look native to the OS you're in and integrate more tightly with OS X, Windows, and Linux. I actually haven't played around with the new Beta much myself, but so far so good (I don't have Vista anyway, so I wouldn't be able to attest to the above claim). Apparently, they've been putting a lot of effort into improving their memory usage. Reading that post was really cool to me, but if you haven't had a course in Operating Systems then it'll probably bore you to tears. I just thought it was cool because you can tell that they've really been digging deep to improve complaints about crashes and memory leaks. I just love it when developers are so responsive to the concerns of their customers. I think IE has been gradually learning lessons like this from the Firefox team. If you look at the development of IE 6 as opposed to 7 or 8, you can see how radically different they are.
I just want to make a quick note about Dropbox because I think it's really cool. You can see a tour of it here, and it's basically an online back-up and synchronization service that is still in beta. I think the concept is phenomenal: it will synch your data across multiple computers and with the online backup of your data. It kind of reminds me of Drobo. It works without inundating you with details but providing you with data integrity (an underrated issue nowadays in the mainstream) and and synchronization. I worry about its speed as you work with larger files, but I'm sure that they've been designing it with scalability in mind. I'll let you guys know if I get in the private beta.
I've never been a big fan of Nine Inch Nails (I liked the crazy video for "Closer"), but I've always retained a certain degree of respect for Trent Reznor. Since they're no longer tied to a record label they decided to release an instrumental album called Ghosts, and I really dig it. They've followed in the footsteps of Radiohead and released the first 9 tracks for free. What's really awesome is that each track is associated with a picture that helps convey the mood of the song, and I don't think I've ever heard of a band doing that before. If you decide you like it, you can buy the whole album (36 tracks) for just $5. The first 9 tracks are actually pretty good, I recommend trying it out. They're also selling hard copies in different editions with DVDs and vinyls and such for more money. What's great is that all that money goes to them, and none of it to a record label.
Before I close out here, I have to say that I find Hillary Clinton's recent antics ridiculous and unacceptable. She is supporting John McCain over Barack Obama! If you're a Republican and you support McCain, then that's fine. I respect that you believe his policies and you can vote for him, that's cool. However, it's ridiculous if you're a Democratic nominee for the candidacy of President of the United States and you betray your party for someone whose beliefs are completely contrary to that of the Democratic Party. Obama has a lot of experience as a community organizer, Illinois legislator, and Senator. Being a first lady does not count as experience. She was a Senator for a few more years, but how much more did she get done than Obama? Her negative campaigning just aggravates me. I'm trying so hard to respect her and what she has accomplished in her career, but the mudslinging does not help, especially when you antagonize what may be the only hope for your party to regain control of the White House. Even some of her front-line supporters are defecting. She's being hypocritical in her attacks, and if she didn't make these ridiculous claims then people wouldn't be so harsh on her and she'd have a much better chance of winning. Can't she see that? She's only going to hurt this Party's resurgence by giving material to McCain if Obama wins (which is becoming more and more likely now that he's erased her gains last Tuesday in just one week). Ok *sigh*, I'm off my soapbox.
This post is long overdue, so I'll be talking about some old news. I've just been so busy lately, and dealing with election stuff all night on Tuesday while having a midterm this morning didn't help things. Before I get to the news, I want to get on my soapbox real quick. I want to encourage the few of you who actually read my blog, as well as any transients, to speak your mind whenever possible except when it's intentionally offensive or slanderous. Someone made a ridiculous comment on my last post and I feel that now is as good a time as any to say that I blog because I think I have useful commentaries about what's going on in technology. I'm fairly young to this industry though I've been keeping up with it for a long time, and despite my rudimentary knowledge of politics I think my viewpoint is sometimes useful there in helping others understand my demographic. Don't let anyone make you believe that your opinions are trash. Stick to what you believe in and don't allow yourself to be censored or bullied into silence. Opinionated people make the world go round.
Ok, I'm off my soapbox now. I drove way out to Slaughter Lane last weekend to see The Other Boleyn Girl since it appears to be the only theater in Austin showing it. When a movie has Natalie Portman, Eric Bana, and Scarlett Johansson, it's probably worth seeing. The movie is intended to be a historical drama (based on the book of the same name) that takes place under the rule of King Henry VIII when he has an affair with the Boleyn sisters and breaks from the Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church. The book is known for drawing a lot of criticism on the historical bits and pieces that it pulls together, and the movie distorts the book further probably moving it to be even less historically accurate. So when it says "based on a true story", you should probably insert "loosely" in there. You have to come to this movie knowing to expect a twisted, dramatic romance movie that really falls under historical fiction.
Maybe I was naive to think well of this movie, because it got pretty bad reviews. I would say that I "enjoyed" it, except for that it was pretty depressing for the last hour or so. It's a pretty bleak picture of the greed of their father distorts the lives of these sisters and ultimately turns one harshly against the other. A number of critics disagree with me, but I thought that the acting was great. I definitely believe the female leads, though the King could've definitely been more kingly at times. Still, that's more a fault of the screenplay than the acting. The sets are incredible, as are the costumes. You definitely get the feeling that you're in 16th century England in the House of Tudor. The movie definitely comes to a halt in a particularly graphic rape scene. It's graphic aurally, not visually. So the climax of the movie ends up being, in a way, its lowest point. I just found that kind of interesting. I thought the dialogue was appropriate without being too haughty or annoying. I really believed what the movie was telling me, even if it was fictional, and I felt like it did a good job of turning a tale we don't know a whole lot about into a sordid tale of sex, love and betrayal. If you're feeling adventurous, give it a shot. I give it a B+, personally. That having been said, I can't see it again for a long while much like I can't see Brokeback Mountain again like ever (though Brokeback was considerably more depressing).
I'm definitely glad to finally say that the format war is over! Blu-ray has officially won as Toshiba announced that it will no longer produce HD-DVD players or recorders by the end of the month, though it will still keep a stockpile of media for those who already bought a player. This isn't to say that studios won't still release movies in HD-DVD or sell them in that format, but that's not likely to last long. If you bought an HD-DVD player: sorry. Don't say you hadn't been warned though if you bought one this year since I've been talking about studios focusing more on Blu-ray. One Japanese store is actually letting customers who bought an HD-DVD player from them trade it in for a Blu-ray player. I'm amazed at this act of kindness and customer loyalty, and don't imagine that anyone will be doing that stateside.
Maybe no one cares about this but me, but Stage 6 has finally closed up shop. I personally liked the site and felt like it was a great idea because it was trying to be a high-quality YouTube by encoding videos in DivX. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever gained the popularity in needed to sustain itself, and so on goes YouTube's monopoly over user-created videos.
Ready for your daily dose of net neutrality news? Sandvine, a company that sells the technology to ISPs used to throttle BitTorrents, has seen its sales drop 88% in the past year. Why? Maybe ISPs started to realize that this stuff is more trouble than it's worth. Comcast is actually being sued by a number of people in D.C. who are outraged by the throttling and are claiming false advertising of "unfettered access" to the Internet. Sandvine's "technology" is actually pretty shady, in my opinion: it injects RST packets over your connection that reset the flow of data prohibiting seeding of torrents. The FCC is siding with the plaintiffs: they acknowledge that disrupting the flow of data over the Internet to their users shouldn't be allowed and are calling for transparency in how ISPs are running their networks. Does it burn, Comcast? It's like when a boy punches his little sister and she complains to their mother, but when the boy promises that he didn't do anything the mom believes the sister and starts to crack down. Comcast claims that they're not throttling, though they clearly are. This should be interesting.
If you're a Democrat then odds are good that you've been watching the national news networks lately more than usual. I never watch CNN but I've been finding myself trying to get to a TV with cable for the live election coverage. In any case, I think that Fox News is infamous for being the worst of all these networks in the quality and right-wing skew of their reporting overall. I thought it was pretty cool that one comedian they had brought on to tell Huckabee jokes went on a really short rant live on Fox News against them before they interviewed some scantily clad Star Trek girls. Like I said last week, something is wrong when the crap we're being fed is about Britney Spears and Star Trek girls rather than our deteriorating health care system, or net neutrality, or even the long-term effects of deficit spending. I'm glad someone took a small step in the right direction.
And now, we find ourselves back at Yahoo. I apparently missed that a few weeks ago they fired their whole design innovation team. This was especially funny because of how uninspired their designs often are. Yahoo Live alone is enough proof of this, but there's also their ever-retro homepage and ailing mail interface. It's not going to help them much, but maybe now they can try to redesign themselves to help out their stockholders. More importantly though, they're seeking protection from Microsoft under Time Warner. I briefly mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but now they're really pushing hard on this. The deal would be that they'd control AOL and Time Warner would get a stake in Yahoo. Similarly, they'd be satisfied with control of MySpace in exchange for giving a stake of themselves to News Corp. To make matters worse for Microsoft, they don't have to hold another shareholders meeting until July, which could further delay a proxy fight and give Yahoo more time to seek an alternate route to the takeover.
Let me reiterate that this dance they're doing is ridiculous. Steve Ballmer is deadset on acquiring them, and he *gasp* actually has ideas for how to effectively integrating their services with competing (or similar) Microsoft products. AOL is not the best brand for Yahoo to take on and I honestly do not think that MySpace has legs on it. It's going to burn out sooner than later as bad press for it grows and its young user base outgrows it. Besides, I don't even know how likely Time Warner or News Corp is to go for these deals (I can't find information on if they suggested these deals, but I imagine that Yahoo did); they seem to be kind of one-sided. I will give credit to Yahoo for this onePlace thing they've unveiled. It's meant to be your mobile hub for online content and services, and it looks nifty, but I hope they're planning on porting it to the iPhone SDK and I hope that they'll port it to Android also. I see those two platforms as being big within a year from now. Anyway, at least Yahoo isn't letting this stuff get in the way of their businesses.
Going back to Microsoft real quick: they've made Internet Explorer 8 available to test drive (hmmm, you think this is because of the early release of Firefox 3's beta?) while admitting that it's not feature-complete. Some of the improvements they boast are better standards-compliance, integration with eBay and Facebook, and better functionality with AJAX pages (I'm really not sure what this means). The only thing on that list I'm impressed with is the standards-compliance thing, because they're making a better effort this time than IE7, but we'll see how it ends up. Meanwhile, Firefox has hit 500 million downloads, which I think is pretty awesome. I love seeing underdogs do better.
Joel Spolsky published a couple of articles on Inc.com about entrepreneurship that I recommend reading. One of them is about how it's important for top leadership in the company to not lose sight of what the lives of their employees is like and the other is about how to not write off ideas that may seem crazy without trying to believe in it first. I'm a firm believer in the latter, and I think you kind of have to be in this industry. Who would've thought that Facebook would've taken off the way it has? Or even YouTube, for that matter. It's an ever-challenging field that requires extreme optimism, at times.
Since I haven't done the Saturday 9 in a while, I'm going to give last week's a shot:
1. Did your mother go to college, if so where? Nope, I don't think she had the chance to India (though she always wanted to).
2. Do you have a relative that is a lawyer? I'm pretty sure I have a cousin whose husband is a lawyer, but we don't keep in touch with them much at all.
3. Do you have a relative that is a doctor? Yes, but not an MD, just a PhD ;)
4. Did you take music lessons as a child? If yes, do you still play? No, but I took guitar lessons in high school (just a class at school, actually) and I've been playing classical guitar off and on for about 5 years now.
5. Did you go to summer camp? If so would you send your child? I think I did, but it wasn't very good. I think I'd send my child if I really liked the program and they enjoyed it and learned from it as well.
6. Do you believe that alcohol relieves stress? To a certain extent, definitely. It's a nice, easy, short-term solution to stress. It's not healthy to always depend on alcohol to relieve stress, obviously, but it's nice for a lazy Friday night.
7. Have you ever performed on stage? If so tell us about it. Not quite, though I have played guitar in front of a pretty big group of strangers in my high school's courtyard. I've also sung at a karaoke club if that counts.
8. What things do you find easy to remember ? Things that I enjoy learning about (often techie stuff).
9. What things do you find easy to forget ? Things that are way too complicated for me to understand or really boring/useless (*cough*DigitalLogicDesign*cough*).
Unlike most people, I was not introduced to John Cho by American Pie. Instead, a friend of mine was hyping up a little known movie that really hit it off at Sundance called Better Luck Tomorrow where he also played a jerk. I liked most of the actors in this movie (I was one of the few people who thoroughly enjoyed this movie) but I definitely felt like he was the best because he played this antagonist who you had to hate and feel sorry for at the same time so well. Then Harold and Kumar came out and comedy suited him really well. I think that's a testament to how versatile he is as an actor, and he shines just as well in the sequel. Don't get me wrong, I love Kal Penn, I just didn't see The Namesake so I'm not sure how he does in a serious role (he could've been better on "24", which I miss dearly, by the way). 
This movie completely caught me off guard and just amazed me on all levels. Let me preface the rest of this review with a couple of things though. I was never a fan of Iron Man at all. I thought he was kind of cool, but other than Batman I didn't really get into superheroes without actual special abilities. I was also skeptical about this movie because the trailer was great but it could've easily been doctored to make a bad movie with great visuals look great, and I wasn't sure about Robert Downey, Jr. because I hadn't seen him in a movie in a while. Plus, director Jon Favreau was also responsible for Batman Forever and Daredevil (which wasn't bad but was underwhelming).
barely stays on my armband anymore (I had to glue back the USB part because it so easily snapped off at the gym one day), I tried to replace it last Spring with the Sansa c250 and miserably failed. After that, I decided to pay attention to quality, not so much price, in searching for a small, flash-based mp3 player with a screen so that I could not only play music at the gym (from a playlist created on my computer), but also listen to podcasts on the bus and possibly even watch video podcasts. After doing a lot of research, I narrowed it down to the 
