Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
International Underwater Cable Cuts
I was suspicious when we had 3 underwater cables cut adversely affecting Internet connectivity for several Middle East countries but now we're up to five cables with India, Pakistan, Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and especially Iran with moderate to severely curtailed Internet connectivity. Seems very suspicious to have so many problems on these systems simultaneously, but it's possible that the original perfect storm of anchor accidents led to load on the rest of the system exposing reliability problems with the rest of the infrastructure. Noted security expert Bruce Schneier is watching this too…
I won't add the “terrorism” tag to this article until our suspicions are confirmed. The first break is supposed to repaired in the next few days. We'll see what they find.
Warner has decided to go exclusively to the Blu-Ray camp. Since I bought Playstation 3 systems for Blu-Ray movie support, I'm hoping this signals the coming end of the high-definition disc format war.
Now we need Paramount and Universal to come over to the Blu side, and we want New Line to put The Lord of the Rings out.
Paging SG-1—Colonel O'Neil, we need to you kill Apophis again!
An 690-1080 foot wide asteroid named 99942 Apophis will narrowly miss the Earth in 2029 but could collide with our planet in 2036, according to this science article I found on Fox News. We won't know the chance of Apophis hitting us in 2036 until we fully understand the orbital effects of the near miss in 2029. With how little we know about Apophis and exact measurements of its size and mass, let alone the margin of error in understanding the size, mass, and velocity of Earth and the other planets, we'll have a hard time of judging anything but probabilities for many years to come.
Why the Stargate SG-1 reference? Because Apophis is also the name of the Goa'uld the SG-1 team fought (off and on) from the pilot episode to the first episode of Season 5.
This past weekend Misty gave me an iPod Touch for our anniversary and my birthday and it has easily replaced my aged iPod mini. I quickly dropped TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and music on it from my collection. I haven't had a chance to watch many videos on it other than the occasional GeekBrief.TV episode, a few episodes of Star Trek Remastered, and two videos from the Manager Tools Podcast, but what I saw was beautiful on the large touchscreen that fits in my pocket.
I've been getting heaviest use out of podcasts. I listen to a few now that I'm driving into work three or four days a week (which means two or three hours trapped in the car). I like the Wall Street Journal daily podcast, which is about 40-50 minutes long and is arranged into chapters so I can skip articles I don't like. I get it free with my Audible.com subscription. Most podcasts aren't arranged like that, which is a pity, but I suspect they pick audio formats that work with the widest variety of devices.
Music quality is as good as always but the real surprise is how good the web browsing has been over my home's WiFi connection. I've even found a few applications specifically made for the iPhone and iPod Touch that work pretty well, like Gmail and Shredder Chess. I haven't had a chance to try it in a Starbucks yet, or try an iTunes download there.
I've already ordered a sleeve for it, and I have heard recommendations that eyeglass cleaning solutions work well for the touch screen. So far I really like it, it was a great gift!
Extending the great first run of DB2 Viper (version 9), IBM released DB2 9.5 today. I'm already downloading it, and I suspect the users of the free Express-C version have some updating to do to take advantage of new features. I'll probably go play with the warehousing features first, but others may want to try out XML transactions.
From Slashdot we learn that Microsoft Excel 2007 has a serious multiplication bug. Drop “=850*77.1” into a cell and watch it turn into 100,000 instead of 65,535. In fact, a lot of the results that end up all 1's in binary have problems discovered by alert readers. Previous versions of Excel don't have this problem.
We'll see if this has something to do with all the under-the-cover work to handle their new XML-based file formats…
Update: Nope, just tried putting the formula in the previous version's format and loaded it into Excel 2007 and it's still makes the error. This probably has more to do with performance tweaking than supporting new formats.
Paramount, Dreamworks, Universal Drop Blu-Ray, Gather Payola
Paramount Pictures, Universal, and Dreamworks, who had previously announced they would support both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, have announced they will exclusively release movies on HD-DVD. In related news, the HD-DVD consortium has paid those studios 150 million dollars for “promotional consideration.”
I've been firmly in the Blu-Ray camp ever since the Playstation 3, especially since the latest patches to its firmware have made it the DVD player of choice in the household. However, with New Line Cinema (Lord of the Rings, Paramount (Star Trek), Dreamworks (Shrek) and Universal (Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) things are a little rough on a geek.
What's holding me back? I feel that Blu-Ray makes better use of its bandwidth, and does not live under the thumb of the standards-flouting Microsoft. Hopefully these movie houses will see the light and come back to Blu-Ray soon.
Misty didn't believe you could cook a hot with with a battery and a couple forks but I set her straight. What I didn't know is that you could stick some LEDs in it while it was cooking, but these folks did:
Some high school students in Boston have taken a picture of the space station from a telescope here on Earth. Usually shots like these are so distorted that one cannot discern anything, but this picture is great!
I downloaded and played with Apple Safari, yet another web browser, to see what Mac lovers liked about it. Within minutes I saw that people had found security problems with it so I'm not going to surf all over the place with it, but I did notice it brought decent font rendering to Windows 2000 where ClearType is not available. It's still in beta and has security holes galore, so I won't recommend it, but perhaps when the beta is over it will be nice.
The judge in the patent infringement case against Vonage has ruled that Vonage cannot seek new customers until it stops infringing on Verizon's patents. I'm already looking at dropping my Vonage service for something else and this may be it for poor Vonage. Boy am I glad I did not participate in the Vonage IPO for its customers.
Update: Court of Appeals gave an emergency stay. Vonage can still get customers. But how successful will that be?
At a time when negative reviews about Office 2007 appear to be common, I only have this observation: Excel 2007 made data filtering a lot easier for me, but Word 2007 chapter and section numbering was (and is) a serious pain to figure out. I don't use Outlook 2007 (I use gmail for my mail at home, and Lotus Notes for work) so I have no opinion about it. I really haven't had a chance to experiment with Access or Project, and so far Powerpoint hasn't been all that special for me.
I will probably upgrade to Office 2007 here at home when my trial runs out, but I'm not sure about continuing to use Visio, let alone upgrade. I'll only upgrade Project if I need to for work (which is highly unlikely right now).
Jakob Neilsen touches on computer usability in the movies and finds a lot of bloopers. I remember laughing out loud at Jurassic Park's security system supposedly analyzed instantly by a Unix-aware 12-year-old.
Beyond Jakob's article, I am continually amused by the disparity between what problems are easy or hard to solve with the computers on Star Trek. Of course, that's not a usability issue, but rather a believability one.
Jakob's predicts two problems from the spew of bad information on the use and capabilities of computers from the movies: too much focus and funding of bad user interface ideas, and users that blame themselves when they encounter problems making computers work for them. Add to this the already known problem of people that buy computers with no idea what they can or cannot do, what is easy or hard, and what one should cost.
Why is this keyboard interesting? Because each key has a tiny display in it that can be changed via software. This makes for a keyboard that easily supports foreign languages, games, or just plain context sensitivity. Imagine what it would be like if you held down Ctrl and all the keys showed what function they did. If the function keys said what they did. Etc. It has great potential.
Isn't it odd that the term “quality standards” is common? A “standard” is voluntary by its very nature (ANSI goes so far as to say “voluntary consensus standard”) and is generally developed by mutual agreement. One does not have to comply with a standard but it is strongly encouraged. One hopes that complying with a standard would make a product compatible with another, but that's not always the case. I'll avoid the usual discussion of the “embrace and extend” strategy for now.
So, when it comes to specifying quality, one shouldn't call it a “quality standard” one should call it a “quality requirement.” A product or project must meet a specified level of quality to be acceptable. It's no wonder people often forget that quality is part of a project's constraints when changes have to be made.
I have to agree with Walt Mossberg's column reviewing Internet Explorer version 7:
If you are a confirmed IE user, upgrading to this new version makes perfect sense, because it is likely to be more secure and its new features make Web browsing better. But if you are already using Firefox, IE's main competitor, I see nothing in IE 7 that should make you switch. It's mostly a catch-up release, adding to IE some features long present in Firefox and other browsers.
The only thing that prevents me from trying to excise Internet Explorer from every machine in my house is the stubborn insistence a small but diminishing number of web sites have for IE-only web browsing.
What's worse than IE's security is its standards support and at least that has been brought up to par with version 7. I hope people will upgrade so I don't have to keep putting cheap hacks into my web pages.
The Sony Reader with its long battery life looked cool, but with limited books available for it my only hope was PDF support. I have tons of files in this format (standards, specifications, etc.) I'd like to read in a reader. But Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journaldrives a nail into that coffin:
But the Reader's claim to display PDF documents proved hollow. In every PDF document I tried, the text was nearly unreadable and the text resizing feature of the Reader didn't help. Sony concedes that PDF documents work well on the Reader only if they are created for the Reader's screen size and resolution.
He calls it a good first draft. Sounds to me like resolution and color need to be dramatically enhanced and perhaps then the PDFs that inundate the web will be readable on it.
A Google executive claims that the Internet is no rival for TV. The focus on the article is that amateur videography is good enough to pull viewers away from the expensive production values of traditional television shows.
That's pretty misleading! When TV shows are showing up the day after they are broadcast on iTunes for $2 without commercial interruption and downloadable any time of day it's obvious that as the catalog increases people are going to stop watching TV. These viewers will start downloading what they want from the “infinite choice” back catalog of all the shows that can be digitized. The question is only how long it will take and how much it will cost. If the studios are too greedy, or if the shows aren't as good as they thought, they won't make enough money to justify making it.
However, there will always need to be content creation, but there's nothing that says that traditional television has to be the means to fund that creation. It also doesn't mean traditional television is the best way to produce content. Heck, how much would Frito-Lay pay for a massive popular viral video prominently featuring Doritos?
There have been efforts to revive Firefly as an Internet or direct-to-DVD enterprise. Some of Disney's sequels are so miserable they never go to theaters but straight to video. The baby step from there to video over Internet is trivial. iTunes has figured out how to monetize it, why does content creation have to be any different?
I think that were are a few short years away from the death of satellite and cable as TV show channels and the rise of on-demand video from the Internet. I also think the intermediate step of on-demand video through the cable box will be short-lived. People always move to where there is more choice. Using the bandwidth to download whatever they want will always trump any limited catalog and delivery mechanism.
Yesterday I got LASIK surgery, almost entirely by surprise. My glasses broke last week and I was able to repair them. My disposable contacts are no longer refillable without another appointment, I looked at all of my options.
Because of my membership in Eye-Care Plan of America (ECPA) I had a significant discount from the LasikPlus+ folks in Portland, and I made an appointment Thursday. Friday I went in and they had the option of a same-day surgery. So, last evening, my eyes were modified by a Alcon laser. This morning I'm already able to see well enough to read and type, although I'm quite far-sighted.
The actual procedure took less than 20 minutes (The laser was only used for 93 seconds per eye) and Misty drove me home. She has a picture of my baleful eye somewhere that perhaps she'll post.
Today I'm listening to audio books and resting. Back to Adventure of English for me.
Audio/Video Revolution has an article up about the troubles professional installers are having with the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc players, destined to bring us high resolution movies at home. One would expect some pains introducing a new product, but the warts are pretty bad on these new items.
In particular, I would never by a product with the following problems:
Back at the HD DVD camp, things get worse when you try to seamlessly switch from an HD DVD player to another HDMI source and then back. Currently, in my reference system, once you get a movie going, you are best suited sticking with the movie. God forbid you might want to pause it to check the scores on ESPN HD via another HDMI source (for example, an HD-TiVo). The system will switch to the HD-TiVo, no problem, but getting back to the HD DVD player, nine times out of 10, will require a full restart of the Intel-based Windows computer known as my HD DVD player. Moreover, an actual computer could remember where I was in the movie and thus wouldn’t require me to hunt down the chapter and try to get back into the film.
These sorts of synchronization issues should have been worked out before a product made it to market, no matter how critical it was just to ship something. If you launch a product so buggy that the user experience is poor, you could scuttle the whole format. Early review like this one have put me firmly in the Blu-Ray camp.
The other issue is that standards are still discovering and correcting problems. How many purchasers of either product will look for the elusive HDMI 1.3 version stamp?
With the release of HDMI 1.3, one would have to hope that the connectivity of these players in both formats will improve. Certainly, the audio and video performance will improve, but with the clunkiness of the players at this point, one can certainly understand why custom installers and many retailers are sitting on the sidelines, waiting for better players. It’s just too dangerous right now on the cutting edge.
HDMI 1.3 specifies the signals and cable required to transmit a full 1920x1080 progressive image from a source to other devices. It is a fully digital format with all the attendant copyright flags and so on. It may even bring us the final convergence between TVs and computer monitors. You wouldn't believe how annoyed I was a few years ago to have a computer with DVI outputs and a nice monitor with DVI inputs, yet I had to use the analog signal to get 1600x1200. All the devices in the chain were capable of the resolution, but the interface was not.
In software poor interfaces will ruin your market share. One wonders if consumer electronics makers understand this as well.
MacBook HD Accelerometer + Window Manager = Great Hack
While this hack is currently available for MacBooks, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone implementing the idea in Linux or Windows. It's a cute trick to use the accelerometer used to protect laptop hard drives from sudden movement as a human interface, although I wonder if some game manufacturer has a previous patent for this.
Of course, desktops don't have accelerometers, but how long before some monitor maker adds one?
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