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While internet TV like Hulu is terrific for consumers, it is much more significant than just a new way to be a couch potato.

Broadcasting and Television are in trouble. They have been living high on the hog for decades and like San Francisco's Bay Bridge, the media empires are showing cracks.

Internet TV is surviving and it totally changes the game.

First off, it allows content owners to reach viewers directly. They no longer need intermediaries like Comcast and possibly even broadcasters like the major networks.

The problem for content producers is finding money. Eventually, small content producers (who dont need much to survive) will start making money with direct-to-consumer fair.

The problem for traditionally media companies is keeping enough money flowing to support their massive overhead. (Prognosis - cloudy.)

Internet TV fundamentally breaks up the business structures that have made companies fat, dumb and happy. For decades.

ipTV is to TV what Google is to newspapers. A new technology that requires new business models.

There is are actually a lot of similarities with Google so I think there should also be some money in this for someone who can think in the new model and get the content contracts to make it work. That is the big problem right now holding everything back - restrictive legal contracts held by monopolies that want to stay that way.

Content delivery companies like Comcast get money from users for putting a pipe in every house. The content itself is largely paid for by advertisers though.

And ipTV is MUCH better for advertisers.

I create an account with Hulu (or whoever). They know my name, my address, my email. (Never had that before.)

I gladly tell them what shows I like to watch and which episodes of those shows I enjoy. I can select, rate, post comments, and share. (Definitely never had that before. Advertisers can direct-message customers of specific shows.)

They can then observe the hell out of me. They already have a name and address. They can then see how much I actually watch. When I watch. How many sittings it takes to get through an episode or a series. Do I pause or watch straight through? Do I channel flip? Do I watch kids TV during the day and porn at night? Am I 100% cooking shows? Or dancing shows? or sci-fi?

For decades, advertisers have had to totally guess about TV audiences. Ridiculous monopolies like Neilsen's exists (and profit handsomely) just to "inform" advertisers about user behavior using lame survey techniques. The resulting guesses drive billions of dollars of advertising and TV content decisions even though the data is so shallow you couldn't wash a bird in it.

Quite frankly, our media system is retarded and due for a tumultuous change. Which will probably be good for everyone but the traditional players.

If the Internet gets sports, game over.

If Comcast buys NBC, and shuts down Hulu, we will have to wait longer. But that only puts more pressure on illegal providers of bittorrent to give the people what they want - free content.

Free is a painful product to fight but internet TV is just a better product for customers and eventually companies will have to adjust, one way or another.

It has been a few months since we cancelled Comcast. And I am enjoying TV more than ever.

At first we just tried to live with the free broadcast HD channels from the basic networks. This content is free and I can record it with our DVR but it is filled with commercials and there are some niggles with the antenna.

Then I started to really use Hulu. Much like Amazon's MP3 store, when Hulu first launched it was lame because they did not have much content. Now they have a great catalog.

Stargate Universe (syfy), Fringe (Fox), Modern Family (ABC), 30 Rock (NBC), Everything is Sunny in Philadelphia (USA)... All the major networks and some cable channels are showing full episodes on Hulu for free.

Forget the overpriced, crappy "on demand" stuff Comcast (and Apple and Amazon) wants you to purchase. Internet TV on Hulu is what you really want.

You create an account and add subscriptions to shows you want. When a new episode comes out, it shows up in your queue. Watch what you want when you want where you want. It works from a browser on any computer. It is a true on-demand system.

But wait! There is more to love...

The shows have commercial breaks but there is only 1 commercial. ONE!!! It is such a trip to stop the show for just 15 seconds. I love it and it really makes you aware of how much crap you are used to paying to see on cable TV.

The commercials are really different. First off, they are short. The longest I have seen is 30 seconds; the shortest is 5 seconds. Each show has very different types of commercials. SyFy was only showing me adverts for Google's Chrome browsers. The other channels often show public service announcements. The selections is pretty ghetto now but that adds to its charm.

The only complaint I have with Hulu as a user is that it relies on Adobe Flash and Adobe Flash kind of sucks. The image quality is good and the player interface is fine but it requires a powerful PC to show properly, especially HD.

Even though I have a nice video card with hardware acceleration for movies, Flash does not support hardware acceleration. (Adobe says "maybe next year" which is rather insulting at this point. What the fuck have you been doing all this time, Adobe?)

Hulu looks good on all of our Mac's but, ironically, my 3-year old HTPC (which is only for movies like this) cannot handle it without lots of annoying skipping. (By comparison, Netflix uses Silverlight and it works flawlessly on all our machines.)

If you arent yet, you should check out Hulu and show the market that you are tired of paying Comcast thousands of dollars a year for commercial-laden content that you dont really want anyway.

As I have said for a while, the only reason to pay Comcast is for sports. Sports over the Internet, especially for college, is an enormous untapped market. I still cannot believe that no company is out there making that work yet. Seriously.

I have been astounded by how cheap computer memory has gotten.

A stick of 2GB DDR3 memory is only $45. That is amazing. A few years ago that much memory would have cost hundreds of bucks.

If you want to put 4 GB in your iMac, you can get 2 sticks for $90.

But the iMac only has 2 memory slots. If you want more than 4GB, then you need to get a larger stick. The next size up from 2GB is 4GB.

And it costs?

A minimum of $240. Ouch! That is a price I am more used to. Looks like it will be a while before we upgrade our Macs with more than 4 GB...

In business school, I did a summer project. Our task was to take a technology patent from the University and create a business plan around it.

Our plan was to take gold nanocubes and use them to treat cancer.

The nanocubes are small, like 40 nanometers per side. They are so small, they can easily float through the cell membranes of your body and go just about anywhere in you. Gold is inert, so it wont make you sick and your body will quickly flush them out naturally.

The most important thing is that gold is metal and metal resonates with radiation. Using a harmless UV light of the correct frequency, you can heat the gold cubes up. As in really, blistering hot.

To make the treatment work, you attach the gold nanocubes to a targeting agent like a protein which will attach itself to your target, a cancerous tumor. You inject the particles into a person, give them time to find the cancer, and then you apply the UV light to the area of treatment. The light is harmless to you but those nanocubes melt and in the process they burn tiny holes in the cell membranes of the tumor.

Chemotherapy injects a poison into your body that kills cells, healthy ones and cancerous ones, all over your body. It is incredibly destructive and painful.

Radiotherapy uses lethal radiation to kill cancerous cells and it too generates a lot of collateral damage to your body.

In comparison, nanocube therapy is like magic. It is lethal to the target and harmless to the rest of your body. It is painless with no side-effects.

Nanocube therapy is a miracle.

Al least that is what I wrote in our business plan for "Nano Therapeutics" and that is what I still believe. Unfortunately, we had no way to implement or benefit from the idea. We wrote our plan and all moved on to other jobs.

So imagine my surprise to see nanocube therapy on 60 Minutes last night.

Kanzius Machine

Lesley Stahl reports

Sunday, Oct. 18, 7 p.m. ET/PT.

John Kanzius fought his leukemia by inventing a machine that may someday offer effective treatment for cancers without side effects.

The story itself is rather sad and they give less detail on the treatment than I just did but it is some measure of personal validation. I have no doubt these treatments will come to pass. It was my brush with fame to have learned about them so early.

Every day I drive myself to work. Its about a 15 mile round trip. As I sit in traffic and at lights, I look at the other, newer cars longingly.

You see, I am cursed. In 1996, when I bought my last new car, I chose a Toyota. 12 years and 100,000 miles later, I have the same car. And there is nothing wrong with it. All I do to it is oil changes and routine maintenance, and it runs tirelessly for me. Unlike our VW, which needs a repair and/or a recall every year we have had it, the Toyota is simple but flawless.

Which is to say, I have no real argument for getting a new car. Mine still runs fine. There are conveniences it doesnt have but those are, well, conveniences not necessities. The only significant problem with it is that it does not have the LATCH system for child seats. Something that has only recently become an issue.

All the same, I periodically dream and shop for a new car. But even that has become increasingly hard to do.

If you have read my blog, you already know that I think science is real and so is global climate change. Pollution from billions of human beings is affecting the planet and those changes are enormous.

As the years have gone by, I have found it increasingly unconscionable to buy a car that gets less than 25 MPG. On some days I think traditional cars at all are a crime but even I am not at the point of giving up my personal transportation.

So I look at fancy new cars from BMW and VW and Audi and Lexus. I check out the stats and prices and then I get to the MPG...

18 MPG? That is a crime.

My Toyota from a decade ago gets 25. Even if I had the money, I dont think I could allow myself to purchase a new luxury car because of the MPG. Cars have gotten too darn heavy. It makes me angry.

Then I start to think about what my alternatives are and I get even more angry. As a kid, I watched the Jetson's skim around in flying cars. This is a new millennia and we still have two basic choices: car or motorcycle using gasoline or diesel fuel.

Go to KBB.com and you will see 10 categories of cars. That is it. All cars fit into 10 buckets. Pick any car and you will then find 3 or 4 vehicles that are virtually identical. Capitalism has brought us superficial choices in brand, color, style but no real choice.

Where are the 1-person vehicles that fit between a motorcycle and car? Where are the funky, space-ship vehicles? The alternative fuel vehicles? The plug-in electric vehicles?

Where is the fucking human ingenuity? Where are vehicles like this?

What we have is the confluence of capitalism and manufacturing to produce the most similar, cost effect vehicles for the market.
What we dont have is any real choice or anything that deals with global climate change.

The more I think about it the more it annoys me. I want a $15,000 emission-free vehicle for my 15 miles commute. Where is it?

A hint comes in recent articles like this one.

Debate Arises on 3 Wheeler

By STEPHEN POWER

Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Is a three-wheeled vehicle an automobile? That question is at the center of a vigorous lobbying effort in Washington.

The vehicle in question is the Aptera 2e, a machine that looks like a cross between a Cessna plane and a tricycle. It's the brainchild of Aptera Motors Inc., a three-year-old, closely held car company in Vista, Calif.

The DOE ruled last year that the electric 2e didn't qualify under the $25 billion loan program. A three-wheeled vehicle doesn't meet the definition of an automobile under federal law as being "any 4-wheeled vehicle," according to a letter to Aptera last December from Lachlan Seward, the loan program's director.

The government set aside research money for alternate fuel vehicles but the law is written is such a way that only traditional incompetents like GM can get the money. Even when we throw money at a problem, we do so in a way that prevents any real change.

I know things will get worse and change will come. But I am tired of waiting.

Last week I attended a lecture by Scott Rosenberg about his new book, “Say Everything.”

"Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" (Scott Rosenberg)

While I have not read the book, I was a little disappointed with the lecture. His history of the technology was interesting but he missed what I consider to be the most important aspect of blogging.

Throughout history, information has been restricted. Imagine an upside-down funnel. The small end represents a small set of individuals and groups that decide what everyone else hears about. The big end is everyone else. That is pretty much how it has always been. The means of reaching large groups has been controlled by small groups, whether it was the printing press or Television.

Some groups publish information because they make money from it. Some groups want to maintain political control or power and they publish information for that purpose. Whatever the motivation, there is always a small group that controls what gets published and what the large groups ever hear about.

Blogging is about inverting that funnel and it completely disrupts the historical model of information control. Blogging is about self-publishing.

If I have something to say, I no longer need to get someone else to share it for me. I don’t need to get their approval or permission. I don’t even need to tell them about it.

The Internet and information technology has lowered the bar to publishing and that is rapidly destroying the ability of small groups to control information.

In this country, that has meant a lot of websites about what people ate for lunch or what their cat did today. Stuff that would never be published in traditional media but can be self-published. This country is politically open and mostly concerned with entertainment. However there are also blogs about company and government behavior that have brought misbehavior to the attention of others.

In other countries, blogging is attacking political control of information. What is daily life really like in Iraq or Palestine or China? Blogs are going to give you a personal and possibly more accurate view of issues than any newspaper or government-run media bureau ever will.

The impact of self publishing is enormous and still evolving. That's the real story.

It's just data, right? Data is immortal. Make identical copies of it. Your digital items can live and last forever. They never wear out...

Such is the promise of information technology. Except that I find the experience often the opposite.

First off, I am now paranoid about losing stuff. I often ask myself questions like: Do I have copies of that? Is that backed up?

I back up all our computers but I have yet to actually install the data after a drive crash... Are my backups working? Is my faith misplaced? It nags at me.

I recently bought a new computer and moved all my data from my old laptop to my new one. Or did I? Did I miss anything important? My old PC sat here for 4 months without me turning it on yet I am nervous as I reformat the drive...

The fear of loss in a digital age.

I still buy physical CD's because I feel confident I wont lose a CD even as I feel its likely to lose the MP3 files from said CD. I still have the very first CD I bought in 1987, but when I move MP3s I am never sure if I got them all. How would you know if you missed it? Its just a few files in a folder... When you have hundreds or thousands of files and folders, it would be easy to miss one.

My gut tells me that lots of people buy and lose digital stuff all the time. Unlike physical media, downloadable media is ephemeral. Here today and gone tomorrow for a generation born and bought into plenty.

W hile I dont know if I have lost any digital data, I do know about another kind of loss: software I cannot use anymore. And it pains me.

As a college student I paid $250 for a student license of Adobe CS2. $250!! That is a ton of money -- for PowerPC Mac software. Now that Apple is all Intel and Adobe has dropped their support, I am unable to use that $250 investment. Do I upgrade or write off my purchase? For now its a write-off.

While the bits never wear out they do kind of depreciate.

I paid NVIDIA $50 for decoder software to play MPEG2 movies on my PC. They worked fine until this weekend when I upgraded my HTPC to Windows 7. Now they wont install. Should I be fine that I got my money's worth or annoyed that I cant use them anymore?

There are a lot of little software products I have bought and stopped using. Or software I cannot use anymore because I lost the account and password or it uses an email address that doesn't exist anymore. And they dont have tech support.

Since software is immortal, it creates the expectation that the software should last forever. A car wears out but how long should we get enjoyment from digital products? A year? 5 years? 10 years?

Is the very fact that I feel angst about this issue a sign that I am old and experiencing a generational shift? Live for the moment; If you need it later, buy and download it again?

Just dont lose the password -- or the email to reclaim the password.

Over the years there has been a steady progression of new technology designed to improve communications.

• Postal mail, now called snail mail
• Telephone
• Email
• Facsimile, aka fax
• Text IM
• P2P file transfer
• Audio calls, aka VOIP
• Video calls
• web pages or sharepoint
• SMS messages
• video conferencing

By improving communications, we increase cooperation, coordination and productivity in the work place. Each tool is used in work and social situations but these days I focus on business applications of communications technology.

This is a fascinating space that continues to evolve because the basic problem, sharing information, is so difficult.

Each technology addresses three basic problems:

• the type of information being transfered, such as ideas or images;
• the different physical limitations of the parties, in the same office or across the planet, 1-on-1 or 1-to-many;
• and different information contexts, a recommendation, a problem, a task, a promotion, a reprimand or firing.

For instance, you want to explain a problem to someone. That is the basic information which could go in a letter, or a phone call or an email. But there is also a lot of contextual information, such as body language or attitude which are best transfered face to face, a phone call or a video call.

These days people are in love (and overwhelmed) with email but a lot of momentum is moving to faster mediums like text IM and SMS messages. This brings up another issue in this space: adoption.

Each tool lends itself to one type of communication over another but people tend to learn one tool and then lean on it for every task. A prime example is email. People send 1-line emails with <eom> in the subject; most of these emails are better handled as a text IM. People attach files and documents in emails; the attachments should be send as p2p file transfers or stored on a central website.

Adoption rates for each technology generally revolve around age. The oldest workers rely on telephone calls and fax. the next oldest rely on email for all tasks. Then there is a group that uses p2p file transfer and websites instead of email attachments. the youngest workers rely on telephone SMS messages and text IM because it is so much more immediate than email. There are also technologies that everyone seems to struggle with using like video conferencing.

The reason for this adoption behavior is that learning a tool and incorporating it into your personal work habits is easier than learning a tool, unlearning it, and learning a new tool. Younger people dont have to unlearn anything so they gravitate towards the newest technology.

With all these tools available, business and employees seem to be right in the middle of adopting work behaviors that use them efficiently. The present state is kind of a mess as each technology develops independently and workers use a mixed up combination of tools at different contexts.

At the same time, we are seeing newer technologies particularly around the web. Social networking sites are adopting and adapting pre-existing technology models like text IM and video to be used in a web context and applied in new ways.

One factor that used to be significant is quickly going away: connectivity. For a long time this was an overriding fact. Can I phone them? Do you have a fax? Are you online? Broadband access through a desktop or cell phone is quickly becoming a non-issue which means solutions will coalesce around a standard of immediate connectivity.

It will be interesting to see if any company can rethink the basic idea of communications and refactor the plethora of existing technologies into something seemless, usable, and clearly superior.

I guess I have complained enough about my Windows PC's that it was time for some Mac problems.

I bought a new 20" iMac. Yay!

But when I got it home, I ran into a lot of problems.

The new Mac does not include any cables. While this may save Apple a few bucks, it is proving to a big issue.

When I tried to connect my firewire cable from my old mac to my new mac, I found that the new mac has a different connector. My trusty FireWire cable wont work. Hmm.

Happily I saw that the Migration Assistant (v1.2.3) includes a nice button for 'Use Network'. However it never actually finds my old mac (Migration Assistant v1.0.6). Perhaps there is a version conflict with Migration Assistant but there is no mention of it at Apple.com.

So no firewire connection and no network connection = no data transfer. Crap.

Then I tried to hook up my external monitor to my new mac. I was excited because these macs come with DisplayPort connectors which I have on my fancy new HP LP2475w monitor.

Hmm, the iMac uses a MINI DisplayPort adapter - apparently something ONLY Apple makes. Apple does not include an adapter in the box; Apple does not actually sell a DisplayPort cable; Nor does Apple sell a Mini-to-regular-DisplayPort adapter. ?!?!

For $30 you can purchase a mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter but it appears that you cannot actually use the DisplayPort plug with DisplayPort!!! OMG. If Apple had just included a normal DisplayPort adapter (there is PLENTY of room for it), I would be able to get a cable from Newegg but now Im screwed. I have to spend $30 AND I have to use DVI instead of DisplayPort.

I sure hope I missed something but these issues have already wasted a lot of my time. While I still feel Apple makes the best personal computers, there are a still problems in paradise.

In the USA, we are well on the way to a personal computer in every household. At first that meant a desktop, now it often means a laptop.

But it seems pretty clear that the "PC" for the other 6 billion people on Earth is going to be a cellphone. Or perhaps a netbook.

Take the netbook form-factor -- portable like a phone but much larger screen and keyboard.
Add always-on Internet access through a cell phone carrier.
Add a very low-power CPU like VIA's EDEN line for super-long battery life (as in days not hours).
Add a Linux OS in firmware with a decent window manager and support for a web browser.
Add web-applications for common tasks from Yahoo, Google, and startups.
Add an offline-web technology like Google Gears.

The result?

Email, instant messaging, voice and video calls, watch photos and videos, shop, create basic documents and spreadsheets... You get a system that does almost everything people want to do without buying a single piece of software.

The result could be a system that satisfies basic computing needs at a really low price. Sell 300 million of them in the BRIC countries.

A win for hardware companies who make hardware cheaper every year and need volume.

A win for web companies that need users (eye-balls) and continue to add power to browser-based software.

A loss for OS and desktop application companies like Microsoft.

It goes without saying that this is not a new idea. The threat has been quashed by Intel and Microsoft for years but it keeps... coming... back...

Eventually it might actually take off. Or the same thing might just happen on cell phones.

Back in 2006, I commented on how much spam I was getting. Until recently.

A few weeks ago I noticed that I was hardly getting any spam at all. Let's call it 10x less than before. Instead of getting 60 spams a day I was getting 60 a week. Such a dramatic change I was curious what happened. Was my ISP blocking stuff for me?

On a recent episode of TWIT I heard the answer:

Spam plunges after McColo is taken off line

It looks as though one company in California was the base for "coordinating the sending of roughly 75% of all spam each day"

The efforts of Brian Krebs and other security researchers have resulted in McColo's hosting service being stopped, and this has resulted in far less spam being sent. However, it won't last long: within a week, you can expect spam levels to be higher than ever.

Krebs writes the Security Fix blog at the Washington Post, and he's written a series of items about the event. These include Host of Internet Spam Groups is Cut Off (free registration required), and on the blog: Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline and Spam Volumes Drop by Two-Thirds After Firm Goes Offline.

Krebs contacted the companies that provided more than 90% of McColo's connection to the larger Internet, and explained what they were doing. Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric then closed McColo's connections. Hurricane's Benny Ng said:

It looks as though the bulk of the spam was being sent via botnets of PCs, but McColo customers were running them. Anyway, the effect was noticeable:

Nilesh Bhandari, product manager with IronPort, said the company sees an average of about 190 billion spam e-mails each day. Then, at around 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday, IronPort saw a huge decline in spam levels. For the 24 hour period ending Tuesday, the company tracked about 112 billion spam messages.

LINK

Amazing. 60% of the spam was coming from a single company AND that company was in Silicon Valley, not some pirate haven in Estonia.

At first I thought it should have been obvious what they were doing. That amount of spam traffic should have been caught by their ISP immediately but it looks like they were using a botnet.

There are hundreds of millions of PCs out there running Windows and connected to the Internet. Windows is notoriously insecure, so is the Internet and this is just beginning.

Last week Microsoft announced a vulnerability in all versions of Internet Explorer that would allow PCs to be used in a botnet. The problem was so bad they apparently told users to use ANOTHER browser. Shocking.

On To The Point today I heard a discussion on network security and cyber weaponization. Spam is a nuisance but its also a canary. Most of us depend on the Internet for our information and daily work yet it was never designed for that purpose. We all experience the vulnerability of email but the entire system is vulnerable. These massive botnets are a case in point.

What will the Internet be like in 10 or 20 years? Take the spam, the porn, the botnets, the viruses and extrapolate out a few years. It's not a pretty sight.

Yay me! I got a big box of toys last week from Newegg and I was pretty excited to get my new game computer.

How quickly the excitement of a new PC turns into the realization that putting it together is a shitload of tedious, cut-your-fingers, drop-little-screws, my-fat-hands-will-never-fit-in-there work.

This was not a new PC so much as a major PC shuffle.

1) Replace the drive in our HTPC with a larger one and replace XP with Vista
2) Build a new PC for gaming and install Vista
3) Take my old game PC and put it into another case
4) Assemble a 4th PC from leftover parts

By midnight on Sunday, after three entire days of work, the HTPC was finished except the remote didnt work and the sound only worked sometimes; my game PC was working but only with XP; my old game PC was working in a new case and I hadnt even started the 4th PC.

At no time over the weekend did I get to relax and actually play any games - the whole point of this exercise.

I may do follow up posts on the HTPC and Game PC details but here is an overview.

Let me start by saying that the highlight of this change was to finally move to Vista and DirectX10.

I have been using Vista for almost 6 months at work and like it just fine. That seems to have been the highpoint. My impression of Vista has dropped steadily all weekend.

It turns out Vista is that gorgeous person who blows you away when you meet them. Then you spend time with them, spend money on them, and you realize what a pain in the ass they are. You suddenly start to appreciate your previous significant other a lot more...

#1 HTPC

We first started using an HTPC as a home-brew TIVO back in 2004. Recording HDTV really fills up the hard drive so I finally got tired of having to delete stuff (make decisions) and I bought a new, cheaper and much larger drive.

The goal was to replace my two 160GB drives with a single $60 640GB drive. At the same time I planned to switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista Home and to a video card that supported audio on HDMI cables.

After making lists of all the important software and license codes, the hardware changes were pretty easy. The Vista installer was what one would expect; totally easy. It detected the new SATA drive with no problems and installed quickly.

There were no questions about floppy drives or driver disks. It formatted the new drive amazingly fast - as in so fast, I wondered what it did. This is older hardware and Vista detected and installed the network driver and sound drivers itself. Sweet.

What did surprise me was that Vista itself took over 10GB of the drive and 400MB of the memory just to run itself. The drive space is ok I guess but this machine only had 512MB of memory so using it ALL for Vista was a concern. How do you tell your new friend Vista it is a fat cow?

After this clean install, Vista needed an immediate 29 updates followed by a reboot and another 19 updates.

It was at this point that the problems began.

SageTV

I installed our awesome TV software, SageTV, and struggled for hours trying to get it work right. It wouldnt recognize our old recordings, the remote, or get channel data even though I followed these precise directions.

On Sunday I tried again and found my problem. Vista does not install files in the same place as XP.

I started to feel that Vista is your friend who is so smart, he is a dumbass. With this understanding, I was able to restore our favorites and recordings and I even fixed the TV guide. Later I found that I had missed this important line which would have saved me some frustration:

Usually, wiz.bin and sage.properties can be found in the same directory where your SageTV server is installed. For Windows Vista, see this FAQ: Where to find Sage properties files in Vista.

HDMI audio

Unfortunately, the HDMI audio was still not working. In order to hear TV, we have had to use our stereo and send SPDIF data to it. This works but the extra remote and steps had bothered me so I wanted to use ATI's HDMI audio feature to send video AND sound to the TV and only use the TV remote. I struggled with this for a long time.

In the end, I think the issue was a cable one. The only way I got it to work was using the DVI-HDMI converter provided with my video card with an HDMI cable. Using a DVI-HDMI cable without the dongle did not pass sound. Grrr. Later I found that some of the recordings I had would not work even with the dongle so I had to revert to the stereo. Double Grrr.

Hauppauge remote control

By Sunday night, things looked pretty good. SageTV ran fine even with the meager memory left by Vista and we could watch new TV and our old recordings.

The only problem left was the remote control. Cant relax on the couch when you have to get up to change the channel. No matter what I tried, Sage just did not see the remote. I tried the latest drivers, I tried the oldest drivers, I uninstalled and reinstalled, I cursed. Nothing.

I did learn that the remote was actually working though. It sends half of the commands to Sage and the other half of the commands to Windows Vista Media Center. Again Vista is trying to be too smart and pissing me off. I dont want to launch Media Center when I am running SageTV...

This is still unresolved but I hope the fix is simple.

#2 Gaming PC

My new Game PC was a totally new build. The only things I kept were my case, aging Audigy2 soundcard, keyboard and mouse. The hardware assembly went smoothly and I was reminded how much I love this case, the discontinued Antec Lanboy.

This time I tried a SATA DVD drive so I had no IDE cables in the box except for the floppy. I was dreading the F6-floppy-with-SATA-driver ritual and was thrilled to see it never happened. Vista Ultimate installed like a charm. Again, it went so fast and smoothly I wondered what it actually did. How did it format the drive? What drivers did it install?

Sadly, it did not install a network driver for me but that was easily solved with the DVD from ASUS that came with the P5Q PRO motherboard. Then I did the 33 Vista patches, installed the video drivers and all the rest of the hardware drivers.

Pretty exciting! The Vista UI looks terrific. I went about installing all my games and the saved games. Again, no problems. Steam looks like ass but it installed fine as did Fallout 3.

If you suspect this is the peaceful moment before the tsunami wipes out your village....

DDO no go

My first hint of problem was installing DDO, the only MMO I am playing these days. I could not find a network installer so I used my original game CD's from 2006. The game tried to then apply 14,000 patches. Woah. Worse, they took a LONG time. After hours, it wasnt close so I had to quit. When I restarted it later, there were only 2,000 patches. Hmmm.

I had hard that DDO looked even better with DX10 so I know it works in Vista but after the patching, I could not get it to run. The patcher would start but launching the game gave some weird error.

Fallout falls down

Then I tried Fallout 3. The game installed fine and launched fine - and much faster. It detected my hardware and set itself for warp speed: ultra-high details.

But every time I loaded an outdoor area (as in most of the game) two things happened: 100% memory got used up and the game would hang or crash or reboot the PC. Indoor areas were playable but outside was death. Maybe the game was trying to tell me it was safer inside?

So the joke is on me. The main justification I had to myself for getting a new PC was F3. In order to enjoy the game, I needed a faster PC, I reasoned. Well now that I have a faster PC, with Windows Vista Ultimate, brand new hardware, the latest drivers for everything -- I cannot get F3 to run for more than a few seconds.

On my old Windows XP PC, the game was slow. Now it is completely unplayable. It would appear that the devs at Bethesda couldn't afford shiny new $700 Vista PC's like I could because they apparently never tried to run the game with it.

plan B

So it is late on Sunday. I see my weekend slipping away and feel that Monday-morning, the weekend-is-over! panic rising. I briefly think about setting up my old PC and playing something for a few hours with it but I rule that out.

Time for the backup plan: put a 2nd drive in the PC and install Windows XP. Ugh.

Looking at the great guides [guide 1, guide 2], I could only roll my eyes. Dual-booting has been around since Windows 2000!! and Microsoft does not have an easy solution to dual-boot their own products? Good grief.

Since I still had the fantasy of having an actual play-a-game weekend, I opted for a simpler route. Install the two OS's on two drives and use BIOS to determine which drive boots first.

Then I braced myself for the F6-floppy routine installing XP -- but it didnt happen. Curious.

Here I was giving Vista credit for handling SATA drives and it looks like the motherboard was actually doing this for me! Not only that but the motherboard would boot a SATA DVD without drivers and it came with a bootable DVD that creates a driver floppy for you if you need it. WOW! Three cheers for ASUS. Stern looks for Vista and XP.

XP installed like XP although the SATA driver thing is fixed which was a huge improvement. All the drivers had to be installed by hand and I had to install Windows XP SP3 followed by more patches. (I also became even more curious about Vista's speedy drive formatting after I accidentally told XP to format my drive the normal, not fast, way - and it took an HOUR! just to format.)

By Sunday night at Midnight I had Fallout 3 installed and... it ran wonderfully. The game looked fantastic. XP only used 200MB of memory (unlike Vista's 400MB+) and the game zipped along using only half of the 2GB installed.

vista - how I love thee - let me count the ways

So Vista looks nice and is completely unusable. Oh brother. Of course I had heard that Vista had problems but its been TWO YEARS! What was the point of all those patches?

I didnt get to try Steam in Vista but with a working XP box, Im not sure how eager I am to invest more time getting Vista to work. I suspect the problems have to do with the "confirm or deny?" security model in Vista but whatever the reason, I am greatly disappointed.

But I am sure that will fade with time. I have a zippy new PC and I can enjoy some XP gaming in the weekends to come.

Happy holidays to all and merry christmas come early to me.

Want to watch a video in your home by downloading it? With this week's announcements from Sony and Microsoft, there is now a whole suite of video download products to choose from.

For years we have had iTunes and the ability to pay $2 to watch a streaming episode of TV on our favorite Mac or PC. Apple has also offered AppleTV, a piece of hardware that lets you watch iTunes content on your TV without using a laptop or computer.

Amazon's Unbox offers a video service which uses downloads rather than streaming. It allows purchases but only on PC's. This year they will add a streaming version that works on Mac or PC.

A year ago, Netflix announced a download service as well. It is limited to Windows PC using the IE6 browser (because of DRM technology) but content is essentially free to watch. More recently Netflix announced a partnership with Roku to offer a $99 hardware device similar to AppleTV.

Microsoft has had a download service on the Xbox and has now announced a partnership with Netflix.

In addition to all these products, there are also several small companies offering hardware devices for watching video on TV's that pull content from a LAN or off the Internet.

Its a lot of smoke but will any of these services catch fire?

As a Netflix customer, their service sounds great, at least in principle. The details are less exciting and illustrate the difficulties companies have in this area.

While iTunes is free to use (you pay only for the content), with the Netflix/Xbox service you have to pay Netflix a monthly fee and you have to pay Microsoft for Live just to use the service. You may pay even more for any content. Worse, the user experience requires both a browser on a PC and an Xbox. You have to use the Netflix website to queue up content before you can watch on it the Xbox.

I have tried the Netflix service but stopped using it because it forces me to leave my media program and use IE. (The picture quality was poor and the selection was small were other problems.) If Microsoft drops the fee for Live, I will try the Xbox service but so far I have not seen a video on demand product that I actually want to use. Maybe Amazon will add a plugin for SageTV? Maybe Sony will offer a great service with the PS3?

Maybe 2009.

I am about ready to make my first big network change since our move 14 months ago. Although network changes have been on my mind, our DSL modem fried itself last week so this is a good time to reconfigure (and document) everything.

This is going to be my second experiment with 802.11n networking. Back in mid-2007, I bought an Airport Extreme from Apple when it was first released. Although I never finished a blog post about it, I was not impressed with the performance so I returned the AE.

Now

Our current home network setup is probably very common and mostly works. We are renting a 2-story townhouse so our networking constraints are fixed and inflexible. We have to connect Mac's and PC's and several other devices that share a 1.5MB DSL connection.

Our DSL modem is upstairs in the office connected to 3 PC's and a NAS drive (Dlink DNS-323) with wired ethernet cables. We also have 3 devices downstairs in the living room which are connected wirelessly using the default DSL modem's 802.11g network our ISP provided.

The living room has an HTPC (Windows XP), a PS3 and an Xbox. The Xbox had an 802.11b wireless device which stopped working in our last move because it did not support WPA so the Xbox is not connected unless I feel like pulling out my 100' cable and running it through the house. We have tried to watch movies on the HTPC that are stored on our NAS but access too slowly to really watch them using a PCI 802.11g card. The PS3 works great wirelessly but is not able to access files on our NAS because of DLNA protocol errors. (No, I had never heard of DLNA before either.)

Goals

My goals for this network upgrade are the following:

• Access movies and music from a shared drive with HTPC and PS3
• Access the network faster (for movies) and lower latency (for games) using 802.11n (4x faster than 802.11g)
• Connect all 3 devices (PC, PS3, Xbox) wirelessly
• Simplify my HTPC by removing a PCI card for wireless networking

New

I will detail the results in a second post soon.

Tonight on local TV I watched a lecture Bill Gates recently gave to students at the University of Washington. As I watched, I got to thinking about the well publicized assertion that Microsoft "missed" the Internet. Recently I also heard that it was Gates and Paul Allen, not as I thought Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had the vision of a personal computer in every household.

These two ideas seem incongruous to me. What on Earth would people do with a computer in every household without the Internet?

Just this week I bought a headset microphone and started using Skype to talk with a friend in Portland while we play video games. I use email and instant messaging every single day and I am constantly looking up information on web pages.

Hindsight is easy but it just strikes me that the main use of a personal computer is communication. A personal computer IS the internet and visa versa. A personal computer in every household to run Visicalc or write your own compiler? I think not. Communication is a basic application and need that has value for everyone.

It is really quite amazing to think about how much the personal computer, the Internet and cell phones (a type of personal computer) have revolutionized human communication in the past 20 years. Fascinating stuff.

Last week, someone challenged me to design something. The conversation got me thinking about the challenges of design.

The first big huge problem of design is that people (as in customers) know what they like but they don't know what they want.

Or put another way, people who dont build things for a living are terrible at visualizing possibilities. They cannot picture it in their head until it is in their hands, especially with software. Most people know what they like and dislike but only after they are already using the product.

Another problem affects the people that do design things for a living. They immediately picture things in their head based on the limitations that they know. They can picture how you would build it but they also constrain the possibilities of what could be done. Sometimes it is a good thing to build on what you know but other times it keeps them from making breakthroughs.

Look at the MacBook Air. When you hold this laptop, you just go "Wow!"

One can easily imagine a focus group person saying they want a laptop that is so small it would fit in an envelop. Sounds cool. sounds simple. So why hadn't anyone built one before?

Probably because some engineers got that memo and concluded that it was impossible. The marketing guys said "Impossible?". The engineers said "Impossible. And let us list the 43 reasons why its impossible...."

But someone said make it possible. And every once in a while, the impossible becomes possible. It becomes real.

There are not many people who can visual products based on what people say, know enough about implementation to guide them and yet and are free enough not to be blocked by the possible-impossible.

Which is why our physical world is cluttered with so much unimaginative, mundane stuff

Is there some saying to the effect that the more you know, the more you know what you don't know?

Well there should be.

Recently I have been thinking about replacing my venerable 42" plasma TV with a newer model. That has me lurking in the (overwhelming) AVSforum's again and pondering the many features that differentiate plasma TV's.

Why pay 50% more for a Pioneer Plasma than a Panasonic plasma with the same screen resolution? the answer to that question is falling off a cliff into a sea of technical discussions about colors, contrast and reproducing an image accurately.

Did you know there are people that will come to your house and calibrate your TV? Who knew! And who knew how freaking complicated the process is. I am sure that I am not the only consumer who thought white was white and black was, well, black. How silly of me.

As the TV search got bogged down, I started to think about replacing my venerable PC monitor. It is 22" and has a resolution of 1600x1080. It has been a great monitor but pixels = productivity. I thought maybe it was time to move up to a 1900x1200 24" LCD.

Choosing a new monitor had me hunting for monitor reviews, which are surprisingly rare. Turns out the best monitor reviews are from the EU -- TFTcentral and xbitlabs. (TFTcentral even has a nice primer.)

Why is this 24" Samsung monitor, the 245T, 50% more than this Samsung 24" monitor, the 2493HM? The engineer in me thought there had to be a reason which led me to fall off the same silly cliff -- color and image reproduction.

Turns out the older 245T uses a different panel technology from the newer 2493HM which accounts for the price differences. But you would never know that by looking at Samsung's website as they actually say it is the same panel. Without detailed monitor reviews, it would be impossible to make a educated decision.

I suspect most consumers make their decisions based on price and "features". Quite frankly they would have to. Learning about color gamut and gamma curves has been interesting but it is also totally overwhelming. Not only is white not white and black not black but the same is true for red, green and blue. There are all kinds of details in reproducing color. And apparently its not just plasma tvs that are supposed to be calibrated -- the same is true for LCD monitors as well.

In the end, it appears that cost does impact quality and the salient question is how much performance you can afford. The good news is that the way prices continue to fall, if you cannot afford it this year, you probably can next year. Our $3,000 plasma TV from 4+ years ago is now worth about $500.

2007 was the year of digital music. 2008 is going to be the year of digital video.

At last week's Mac World Expo, we saw Apple and Fox take up this cause and turn attention on the living room. Again.

The battle for a device the unites the living room and offers multiple forms of media has been raging for years with no clear victor and not even much enthusiasm from consumers.

The goal is a single device that would offer multiple services and SIMPLIFY the user experience for a reasonable price.

To date, no one company has come close to this goal. Instead there is a whole roster of devices for watching TV, movies, downloads and music and and even larger list of ways to connect them to your TV and stereo. There is a lack of consumer understanding, too much complexity and prices are too high.

But companies keep trying, hoping to hit a home run. Will we see an iPhone of the living room in 2008? A device that breaks through past barriers and offers a totally new user experience?

CableTV

The most natural unifying device is your cable box. Most people already pay for cable TV (or satellite) and the box connects to their TV and stereo.

But the cable companies have been unable to offer a compelling product for years and years. Much like cell phone companies, they seem more interested in maintaining the monopoly of their closed networks than they are in offering new services.

Along these lines, cable has the problem of cost. In my area, getting an HD DVR from my cable company costs a mint: $70/mo for the basic digital cable channels, $9/mo for the HD digital DVR, and $9/mo for the HD channels. In other words, cable charges almost $1,000 a year to watch their TV and music channels, WITH commercials. Ouch! Downloaded movies are an extra cost and you can forget about the surfing the internet, youTube videos or watching a DVD or high-definition DVD. You will need an additional device for those features.

Tivo & other STB's

Another long-time set-top-box is Tivo. Tivo was the first big product to introduce the DVR functionality. The DVR raised the bar for living functionality but it pretty much languished until it was featured prominently in the script of HBO's Sex in the City.

Tivo is a great product but their problem was telling: consumers did not know what a DVR was. It is the kind of feature that you dont understand until you see it. Anyone that has one loves it but it is hard to make sales unless consumers know they want it.

Tivo has been around for years but has struggled financially. Recently they added download support from AmazonUnbox but at its heart the Tivo is basically a cable or satellite TV STB not a universal living room device.

Recently Slingbox and Netflix/LG are entering this space as well but they all face the same challenge Tivo does: They have to offer a service that consumers understand enough to want and at a price that is low enough for consumers to see value.

video game players

Video game companies are a natural fit for a unifying a device. Millions of households already have one. It is already connected to the TV and the stereo. All they have to do is add the cool new features and you have the universal device, right?

Xbox360

Microsoft made the first play for this position with the Xbox360 but the 360 solution is lacking.

On the hardware front, the cables they provide are not long enough to connect the TV and the stereo in households like mine; this requires the purchase of an additional cable which adds to cost and complexity. There is no HDMI cable option. No wireless ethernet. The device is loud, known for quality problems such as overheating, and does not have the sleek look many would like in their living room. The hard-drive is very small, very expensive and not something a user can upgrade themselves -- you HAVE to purchase one from Microsoft. DVD is included but an HD-DVD player is extra and there is no Blue-Ray option.

On the service side, Microsoft charges extra for online access (in addition to whatever you pay for the internet connection itself). There is no internet browser, and downloaded movies are an extra fee. If you have a Windows PC, you can serve music from it but not if you have a Mac or Linux PC.

PS3

The PS3 on the other hand is one of the best platforms out there. Although it too falls short, it addresses almost all of the short-comings the Xbox360 has, and represents a solid platform that could be improved with better software.

The PS3 has HDMI connections for your stereo and TV. It is solid hardware with no quality problems and looks nice enough for public display. It also has Blue-Ray for watching HD or DVD movies and it offers free wireless ethernet access. You get a decent HDD in the system and there are clear instructions for replacing it with your own, 3rd party drive. It will even let you install another O/S if you like that sort of thing.

The PS3 has media center features right out of the box with a (lousy) web browser and support for UPnP access to movies and music (although that feature does not work terribly well yet for remote content).

Similar to Tivo, the biggest headwind for Sony, if not all players, may be consumer mindset. During the Mac World Expo, a user of a mac website posted a question about whether he should buy a PS3 or an AppleTV device. Rather than get an evaluation of the pros and cons, he was flamed and his question was attacked with passion and vitriol. To those users the "PS3 and AppleTV are NOT THE SAME!!!"; they are "APPLES AND ORANGES!"; "the AppleTV is for watching low quality video; the PS3 is for high quality video and games."

The unexpected and harsh reaction suggests to me that many consumers are not ready for a unifying device. In their minds, you are EITHER a video device OR a game machine. You cannot be both. These consumers want a device that does one thing and are not able to grok a device that does all those things.

I see the PS3 as a mutli-media device that offers the game functionality for free but that is clearly not how many people see it.

closing

It appears that in addition to all the hardware, software and legal challenges out there, there is an additional struggle for the living room in consumer's minds. Before we can see demand for such a device, consumers need to understand that it could exist and they need to want it. As a result, we may be stuck with specialized devices for years to come.

I particularly enjoyed the rumor that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD to perpetuate FUD in the next-gen DVD format wars. I have no idea what Microsoft is contributing to HD-DVD's since they dont design or manufacture hardware, but they apparently paid movie studios big money to support HD=DVD over Blue-Ray. Their alleged goal was to keep things unsettled long enough that they can bypass discs altogether with direct downloads.

A fun rumor but not one that passes Occam's razor or even reasonableness.

Direct downloads have a LONG way to go for video. The USA is not even in the top 10 nations in regards to broadband penetration of households. I think we are at about 19% of all households. Many of those folks, like myself, have DSL with its lowly 1.5 Mbps speeds. Trying to download a 5GB movie is an exercise in patience at best.

No, it makes much more sense to think about video games.

If you could purchase a video game player that played hi-definition movies or you could purchase a player that did not -- which one would you buy? Obviously, Microsoft needed a next-gen movie player in the Xbox if they were to keep feature parity with Sony's PS3. Since Sony owns the Blue-Ray standard, it also stands to reason that Microsoft needed a different standard for the Xbox 360. Hence, HD-DVD.

By all accounts, users dont see much visual difference between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray, but that blue laser does push the technology envelope much further ahead than HD-DVD does. Indeed, the HD-DVD's main selling point appears to be that the players and the discs are cheaper.

The install base numbers I have seen are misleading because they do not include PS3's when they compare the number of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray players. Fortunately movie sales numbers shows the reality: there are a lot more BR folks out there buying movies.

With the recent announcements by Warner and other studios, it appears that the studios at least are starting to see the blue light. Im hopeful that HD-DVD will die in 2008 and all studios will be releasing content on Blue-Ray.

This situation might suck for Xbox owners but the HD-DVD drive is not included in the Xbox anyway. (And Microsoft customers are used to be abandoned -- just ask the Plays4Sure folks.) Hopefully the next 360 will include a blue-ray player too and the prices can start coming down.

If you are interested in technology startups in the Seattle-area, this is an interesting list. Although I am not a fan of Alexa, the list does give job-hoppers a good starting point.

There is also an interesting post on how to get on the list.

2007 - the year of music

At the start of 2007, I predicted it would be the year of audio. Things are taking longer to progress than I expected but I still think we will have seen big changes by the end of 2007.

At the start of this year, Apple's iTunes service completely dominated digital music with no competition in sight. Apple had the major label content but their system uses a proprietary DRM model.

As the year progressed, the sale of physical CD's continued to fall and Apple stayed on top despite the competition.

First came Zune. Then came the start of something of actual consequence: DRM-free content.

First EMI then Universal announced they would offer digital music DRM-free. DRM-free content is a watershed moment in the music industry. The music industry is under attack from digital alternatives and they need to change or die.

Apple and EMI offered DRM-free songs for a premium price. Amazon.com has also announced it would offer such a service this year and Wal-Mart quietly released their own digital music service - for their four Net-Zero dial-up customers that will use it.

As one of the largest physical CD stores and one of the most popular websites, Amazon may be the first to give Apple competition. Amazon will also be the first big name to push DRM-free content in a big way. DRM-free is a big win for customers; 3 to 6 months from now, we shall see whether or not customers agree.

2008 - the year of video

At the start of the year there was a ton of buzz about YouTube and I thought we would see big changes in video by the end of the year. Now i think it will be 2008. Music may have been the first industry to feel the wrath of the Internet, but TV and Cable will be the next.

Consumers want choice; they want individual programming. I live in Seattle but I want to watch Michigan basketball games. Immigrants live in the US but they want to watch World Cup or TV shows in other countries. Just because cable TV offers 100+ channels, it doesnt mean they offer what you want to watch nor does it mean you want to pay their toll.

The Internet could offer those options but the traditional broadcast industries stand in the way. Broadcast content is consumed very differently from music but it too will have to change or die.

This year we saw an expansion of downloadable video content, from movies on iTunes to free TV show episodes on ABC.com. Internet television products continue to inch forward, waiting for that big hit or that big license deal that will cause the mainstream to take notice.

I wish it would hurry up and happen.

I have already written that I think the signficance of the iPhone will be its impact on the nascent hand-held personal computer market.

But there is another huge change out there, a dark cloud looming over cell phone industry.

what have you done for me lately?

Like the cable companies, the phone and cellular phone industries began life as soul-crushing monopolies and "monopoly" is still how these industries think about busines. They provide a service most people need, they lock you into a contract and then bleed you to death with excessive monthly charges.

But monopolies invariably lose touch with their customers as they (rather transparently) put their own needs ahead of their customer's needs. Over time customers come to resent them even if they continue to pay. (Know anyone that loves their phone or cable company?) All of which creates an opportunity for competition.

Along comes that series of tubes we know of as the Internet, ready to ruffle yet another business model.

With an Internet connection for data transfers and VOIP software, suddenly one doesn't need a phone company anymore. So why pay $80, $120, $200 a month for one? We have all seen this technology in action - the question now is when someone will be able to deploy it in a way that provides a genuine alternative to cellular phone companies.

Vaitkadamas is starting to see that competition potential in a Google+Apple play.

Apple - the phone company

Apple has released the iPhone. Apple will gain experience in the cellular industry. They will build a brand for their telephones. When their exclusive contract with ATT will ends, will they flip the switch? Not a big stretch of the imagination since we already know Apple hates traditional cell phone products and the industry.

An iPhone with wifi+VOIP and GPS would make a nice platform for... Google.

Google air

Over the past month or two there have been a steady stream of comments from/about Google and "spectrum". Google has talked about buying spectrum and they have talked about having "open spectrum" to provide free wifi connections in all major cities. They have also unveiled plans for a Google phone.

When you have a consumer electronic company like Apple making hot phones and you have the big giant heads of google buying radio frequency spectrum... things that make you go "hmmm, this could be good for me".

The Google phone itself is worth a special mention. It would be a cell phone that shows ads but would also be free to users. A free cell phone would free up a nice chunk of monthly income to buy stuff - on your cell phone. Others disagree, but I see a big demand for this phone and I think the value proposition would be a win-win for consumers.

Especially interesting is the opportunity for location-based advertising on a cell phone using Google Maps. (Have you seen how nice Gmaps works on an iPhone?) Some complain that more advertising in our lives is a bad thing but the basic mission of marketing is a beneficial one: match customer needs with providers.

The GPS+Gmap solution could be a fantastic new service.

So keep your eyes open. Unlike Microsoft, Apple and Google have consistently sided with the customer to provide new features at lower costs, even if it hurts other traditional industries.

a long time coming

On the other hand, both cable TV and cell phones are in a bad spot. Instead of innovating, they choose to use legal methods and lobbying to cling to their historical position of power. They provide a generic commodity product with very little value-add yet they charge huge fees - and they are in an increasingly indefensible position. Cable will need to fight off attacks for on-demand entertainment via Internet TV (ipTV) while the cell phone carriers will need to justify their own existence against ubiquitous wi-fi and VOIP.

Change or die. Its a fundamental principle of capitalism.

It pains me that we spend so little money putting human beings into space and on other planets while we spend so much money and effort on oil. Whether it is fighting for oil fields in Iraq or messing with dictators for their oil, petroleum rules our modern lives.

Having said that, this oil drilling technology is freaking amazing. Drilling for oil under 2 miles of water is every bit as incredible as going into space. I just wish it did something more useful than keep our SUVs humming.

Wells Take Voyage to Bottom of the Sea

Smaller Oil and Gas Fields, Lower Costs Lead to a Boom In Pumps on the Ocean Floor

By RUSSELL GOLD and ANA CAMPOY

Wall Street Journal

July 26, 2007

Painted traffic-light yellow, the Independence Hub floats in the deepest water of any offshore platform. (The ocean floor is two miles below the surface.) Plans call for the hub to suck up to one billion cubic feet of natural gas from the earth every day. By itself, the platform is expected to produce enough gas to heat about 4.8 million U.S. homes.

Ten different gas fields are feeding into the Independence Hub, which is basically a floating pipeline hub, with an assortment of gas compressors. The remotest field, Cheyenne, is 30 miles south of the hub. Together, the fields hold an estimated two trillion cubic feet of discovered natural-gas reserves. If it were a single field, it would be one of the largest in the prolific gulf.

The fields are all stitched together by 125 miles of "umbilicals" -- thick flexible tubes that send electricity, orders and chemicals to the wells. It is so cold 9,000 feet below the waves that droplets of water in the gas can freeze and gum up the flow. To fight this, antifreeze stored in tanks over 40 feet tall is pumped down the umbilicals to the wells.

There are a lot of Apple-haters out there who are going to lose money shorting Apple stock.

Yesterday I got a chance to play with an iPhone (Thanks Gavin!). The pre-iPhone hype was off the charts but I will be damned if the little thing doesn't deliver. Simply put, the iPhone is amazing.

All jokes about the Newton aside, the iPhone will go down in history as a seminal moment in technology development. A 'computer in every home' is nice but I think the iPhone is going to be the first truly personal computer, one in every pocket.

Apple is on quite a role. They are better than anyone else at combining beautiful industrial design, cutting edge electronics, and user-friendly software. A lot of companies can do one of those three things well but Apple is just about the only company that consistently does all three. The Mac, the MacOS X, the iPod, iTunes, and now this. Wow. It is so rare to see a company live up to the marketing hype.

the first smart phone ever

A lot of hay has been made of the $600 price but the iPhone really replaces several of the gadgets you already have and pay for: a cell phone, an iPod, a PDA, and a Blackberry. And unlike most Swiss Army contraptions, it is actually better than every one of them.

The iPhone is a standard telephone. (Few cell phone carriers seem to care about phone call quality anymore.) It is an iPod with a totally new and much better interface. (And the old interface was already better than anyone else's.) It is also the best full-color PDA, with a calendar and text messaging and such, that I have ever seen.

As Steve Jobs said, it is the first "smart" phone that really seems smart. Once you get a quick demo, using the thing is just intuitive. The way a personal computer ought to be.

a truly personal computer

Having said all this, I think the most significant thing abut the iPhone is something no one is talking about. This really is not a phone to me so much as the first really great portable computer. This thing is the first truly personal computer, something that fits in your pocket and does everything you need: phone calls, text messages, surfing the web, watching video, listening to music, calendar and contact management, and games.

The iPhone is an example of a whole new world of devices. Portable computers with touchable screens and the power of a desktop computer.

A natural extension will be a tablet PC that really works. Instead of trying to make a Microsoft Windows PC smaller, Apple will be able to go from the other direction: making an iPhone larger. Using their touch technology and the always awesome MacOS, I see a future of small computers finally at hand.

Take the modular (and stable) UNIX kernal of the MacOS, add their touch-technology along with Apple's incredible flair for software interface design and the iPhone is going to morph into a huge software platform. (Once they open the doors to 3rd party developers.) Forget about the battle for our living rooms with all those junky "media PC's" - the next generation of personal computers are going to resemble the iPhone not an Xbox 360 or PS3.

Man of the year 2007 - the iPhone

But that is all the future - 12 to 24 months out. For the next 6 months, the iPhone is going to be THE gadget of the year the way the Razor was a hit for Motorola but more so. Once you see the darn thing in action, you will want one. You will need one. The iPhone has the eye-candy and animations that make guys eyes light up instantly. The word of mouth effect is going to create huge peer pressure for the Jones'.

Apple will keep the prices high until next year and the iPhone will be both insanely profitable for Apple and the new status symbol for those with money. If Apple is able to add in email capability for corporate Exchange servers, watch out RIM. Blackberry's are going to feel the heat. Only the truly hard-core are going to want to keep their Windows Mobile POS's.

2007. The year of the iPhone.

It is March Madness once again and I am glued to the TV set looking for MSU games. But this year is a little different.

There are 4 simultaneous games going on all day but there is only one CBS channel in any given area. Until this year, you were out of luck if your local CBS chose to show a different game.

This year CBS is showing two games at once. One on their HD channel and another on their secondary digital channel. (Although once Duke started playing, they showed them on both channels :( The picture quality of the second channel is not very good but at least you can see a different game. That bumps the odds of seeing the game you want from 1 in 4 to 2 in 4.

Even better, this year the NCAA is running a website that allows streaming video of all the games. While they had this service in previous years, it sucked. You got a tiny picture with a crappy image. This year is the first time it is really usable. The video quality is still awful but at least it zooms to full screen and almost looks like regular analog TV. Definitely watchable. Definitely an improvement over last year.

MMOD is an example of the future. Content streaming straight from the content owner, the NCAA, to your home TV set via the Internet. CBS's HD picture is still the best but I will be watching for any chance I can to see MSU.

As the cost of movie tickets rise to $10 and more and more households have high definition 40"+ TV's, not to mention kids, going to movies becomes less and less attractive. With the content owners (movie companies) talking about boosting overall revenues by simultaneously releasing movies in all formats at once, it is time for the movie theater to reinvent itself - and by that I dont mean time to add more pre-movie commercials. The industry is going to shrink unless it finds new reasons for people to go the theater.

Digital projectors will allow unprecedented movie variety. No more film. Now the theater can download and show any movie from its database on any screen. Advertisers are focusing on this to show more commercials but the theaters should also use the technology to create a new theater experience.

I would love to watch a giant screen high definition version of MSU basketball or NBA basketball.

Instead of showing the same 20 crappy box office movies, they could show twenty different movies a day, or a different movie each hour. They could show old movies, classic movies, themed movies. They could have a Harry Potter day and show all the previous movies to promote the new release. In other words, instead of new releases the theater could pull from the entire catalog of past movies.

Technology is already blurring the lines between homes and theaters but so far it has been to bring a theater experience to the home. It is time for theaters to start bringing the home experience back to the theater. Or face the consequences.

Hollywood could gain from release changes

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London

Published: March 11 2007 22:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 22:05

Financial Times

Film studios could boost their revenues up to 16 per cent if they released titles simultaneously in cinemas, to DVD rental chains and via video-on-demand, according to a new study.

Falling box office takings and a slowdown in the lucrative DVD market have prompted some studios to consider changes to the traditional four to six-month “window” in which new films are available exclusively in cinemas.

I think 2007 is going to be a rough year for computer manufacturers. Hardware architectures are changing too quickly for consumers to keep up, Vista is not a compelling reason to upgrade, and virtualization is pointing out that there is a lot overcapacity out there already. I think Apple will be the only company with strong PC sales this year.

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to buy new hardware than it is to actually get it working? How a small project often turns into a large one?

I recently bought a new wireless router, Apple's Airport Extreme, for our home network. Since it was expensive, I wanted to make sure that I was really getting my money's worth. In order to do that, I did some measurements of my existing network and then the new one. The process took a lot more time than I expected (always does) but the process was informative.

I will post a review of the Airport Express in another post but I wanted to start with a post on home networking.

Even though I am a techie, I was surprised to learn how much I was personally affected by advertising. My assumption when I started this process was that I needed a faster network. What I learned in the process is that a faster network WITHIN my house wont do me much good whereas a faster network TO my house would be huge.

Which leads us to the first topic. How we measure networks.

Everyone is talking about wireless devices these days. All those wires are indeed a pain but recently I have been having problems of the wireless variety.

• Our VOIP phone drops calls - is it the wireless handset or the VOIP system?
• Recently our wireless network is having frequent problems reaching from the office to the living room so our HTPC drops off the network. So much for streaming radio...
• With my new Apple laptop, I got this cool new remote control for iTunes. Unfortunately it talks to my laptop - and my wife's iMac on the other desk. Turning them BOTH on or off.

But my biggest problem has been with my wireless keyboard.

When in business school, I did a summer internship that involved building a business plan for a nanoparticle cancer treatment.

The idea was to take a nanoparticle and attach it to a targeting protein. The combined particles would then be released into the bloodstream where they would attach to cancer cells. In our case, we used laser light to heat the particles and kill the cancer cells without affecting the other cells but a number of cancer-fighting treatments could be used.

At the time, this was a cool idea but pie-in-the-sky. We saw a future for the technology but most people we spoke with were more likely to smirk.

Our team broke up and moved on to better things but now a year later I am starting to have sightings. This month there have been two articles on different applications of this nanoparticle cancer fighting idea.

Even though I will never do it, this is a very cool idea and I hope it leads to some amazing medical treatments.

Have you heard of eBay Express? What about Half.com? If not, you arent alone.

I have seen a lot of those goofy commercials for eBay on TV but I havent seen anything about Express or Half. While Half.com has been around for years, it never seemed to garner much attention. eBay Express is new this year and it too seems largely unknown although it is an emphasis of the company.

I think eBay is a victim of its own success in somwe ways. There is so much stuff there, the experience is overwhelming for many people and that creates a major barrier to entry for new customers.

One way to address this problem is by brand extension - create new companies that slice of pieces of the eBay pie and privide a specialized service that is more targeted and easier to use. Hence Half and Express. I totally think that is the right way to go for eBay but it is proving slow if not difficult for them.

Just when you thought there were enough search engines out there. A few more show up.

This article is interesting because of economics. Basic economic theory relies on the fact that people are rational beings and that we have perfect information. While these things are true in a classroom they are anything but true in teh real world.

However companies like these new search engines are really doing a great deal to change reality and arm consumers with much better information. (They cannot help with rationality but its a start.) We have already seen big changes in the economy due to better information but there is still a long ways to go, and opportunities for new companies to make money along the way.

Collecting and organizing this much information from so many different sources is a huge challenge but I continue to be impressed with the companies that are able to do it. We truly are living through an information revolution.

I studied software development in college and then spent a number of years building software products in different industries. I generally worked as a developer or project manager and my jobs have caused me to interact with people from just about every department in a normal company, including marketing, management, executives, HR, accounting, UI and QA.

Over the years, I have thought about the process of building better products and why there are so many failures and so few successes. My feeling is that the number one problem with software is not bugs; it is ease of use. Bugs can be quantified and fixed but products that are hard to use are not broken, they are built that way to begin with.

The root cause of this problem is threefold: the nature of design, the process and the people at most development companies.

A good article about usability and how important it is to overall system satisfaction and performance.

As a consumer, I know this lesson first hand: try as I might to make my HTPC easy to use, guests find it totally incomprehensible and I have lost a lot of hair trying to keep it working.

From personal experience I can say that user interface development is under-appreciated by developers. Most engineers are the guys that enjoy figuring out that 269-button remote - they are the problem because they dont see the problem.

Which is why companies that DO see the problem and design usable product, like Apple and Tivo, do so well. It is surprisingly hard to make something easy to use and you often have to make tough decisions to leave features out because they compromise ease of use, ie you cannot please everyone all the time.

Ease of use is one those pesky things that a lot of engineers miss when designing new hardware. The fact is, most consumers dont have the patience or inclination to figure out your newest gizmo. Companies just dont have much time to communicate value to busy consumers.

One aspect of ease of use is discoverability, or how easy it is to find things you want or dont even know you want, and it continues to be a huge issue for tech products. Whether it is how to show 300 inventory items in a webpage or how to show all the features of the latest "smart" phone. Discoverability of features through the user interface is both difficult and critical and it is a problem that only increases as devices get smaller and pile on more and more functions.

Most industries depend on data to make decisions. In some cases, companies gather their own research but in the television world, a single company, Nielsen, calls all the shots.

Just 4 months after Nielsen announced that they would (finally) use a DVR to gather real-time (and accurate) data on what people are really watching - they cancelled the idea.

What dont they want us to know?

It is rather surprising to learn that so much advertising money depends on such an archaic system. Compared to TV, Google really did revolutionize the advertising world with data.

This announcement makes a lot of sense but it totally caught me off guard. Most big companies struggle to release innovations and struggle even harder to release products that match the original idea. Microsoft has stuggled to get Vista and Office out the door but their other divisions have pushed out a lot of product in the past 12 months, from the Xbox360 to Zune.

Have you seen the Sony Reader yet? I just saw one on display at a Border's Books and I was impressed.

With all the fuss about Zune recently, I have been thinking about iPods and what I hope Apple will do in the future.

Like a lot of people, I thought this merger was crazy when I first heard about it. Now I can see the logic, at least from a strategy perspective.

Lately I have been getting a lot of "undeliverable email" in addiition to the regular spam. 100 junk emails per day get me thinking about how much the email system needs to be redesigned.

Netflix has a terrific product. Sadly, even with a terrific product you cannot rest for very long.

Two articles on Honda - one good, one less good.

Microsoft is a unique company in many ways.

If any other company put out a product with severe flaws that could be exploited by criminals, it would be punished by the market. Microsoft however is in a unique position where flaws in its products generate new businesses, even entire new industries. Rather than go out of business or get replaced by other products, Microsoft's weaknesses just generate even more revenue.

Such is the case with Security in Windows and this article is a sign of things to come with Vista. As Microsoft attempts to improve its own products, it now faces push-back from those companies that sprung up to fill holes in Window's leaky boat. A better Windows is better for consumers but it means less money for them.

Will Microsoft choose to fix its products or to honor its collaborators? A lot of ironic and awkward situations will arise as Microsoft tries to change the status quo.

Earlier in the year, I heard a lot of belly-aching about the "last mile" and how we need fiber optic cable in Seattle as though not having fiber was some huge injustice. Personally, I have been plenty happy with DSL service. At least until now.

These two articles on WiMax have me thinking about network speed in my home. And I have noticed that things are starting to change in a way that leaves me less satisfied than I was.

The tone of this article suggested to me that some people are crying foul about political video clips on YouTube but frankly, I think it might be a good thing. Possibly even a very good thing.

I am a huge fan of the radio, particularly of talk radio. When I am in the car or working around the house, I listen to the news. When I took the bus to work this summer, I listened to podcasts on my SLVR phone (which uses a simple version of iTunes).

Thus it comes as no surprise to me to read that millions of other American's are enjoying "the printed word" from their iPod. Radio has been around for decades and the spoken word is a powerful medium which is seeing a nice resurgence from portable music players and the Internet.

After putting it off for a long time, I am doing some work on my HTPC again. In the process of researching, I ran across this great article. Lots of nifty screenshots that explain different aspects of video technology and how ATI and NVidia products compare to stand-alone component.

(Of course, I read it after purchasing an NVidia card :)

ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players

HQV benchmark shows the overwhelming quality of current graphics cards

Koen Crijns / Editor: Martin Brijs

01/09/2006

<<link>>

Final scores

The total score for nVidia ends up being 93, where the total ATI score is 118. Both scores are extremely high, considering the score of the most best performing DVD player we tested (the Marantz DV6600) was only 63. The majority of the standalone players we used did not score more than 40 points in the test. The most expensive ones, the Denon DVD-3910 and Marantz DV9600 scored only 58 and 61 points.

For European readers the cadence tests are not of real importance, so we only take the first eight tests into consideration. The score then is slightly different, nVidia scored 58 in these tests, where as ATI scored 53. A pretty close result, and the slight advantage for nVidia is mainly due to the excellent PureVideo performance in the detail tests.

The Internet was not conceived or designed to become the commercial juggernaut that it is today. The dilemma is that as the Internet grew, its flaws as a commercial platform became more apparent at the same time it got harder to fix because there are increasing numbers of systems to migrate.

Even though scientists have been designing new systems, you cannot just install a software patch and reboot. It's just not easy to rebuild an airplane while its flying.

So what event will be large enough to force a dramatic shift in Internet architecture? It could be China.

Ive been reading this article on "personal information clouds" and the comments from people who "never want to give up my harddrive".

Hogwash, I say! I would gladly give up my hard drive and my USB dongles and backup DVD's and external hard drives and all the headaches of worrying about my data... It would be great to never have to think about where my data is, about backups, or about migrating my files when I change computers or buy a new computer.

Imagine a world where you can move to any computer anywhere and just start working with your data or listening to your music.

This month I have been using two new tools that help me stay on top of "breaking" news: Google Homepage and Digg. Both of these are so useful I thought others should know about them.

People use a lot of heuristics (rules) to help them make decisions about which product to buy.

One of the main indicators is price. "If it costs twice as much, it must be better."

Another indicator is market position. "If its the #1 seller, it must be the best one."

Apparently, when it comes to Windows virus protection both of these rules will lead you to the worst products.

Another thing to keep in mind is that malware (malicious software) is not designed to ruin your computer or erase your hard drive. Malware today is largely for business uses. This software is designed to hijack your computer and use it for illegal purposes, like denial of service attacks or click-fraud. This is why so many people are infected and are unaware of it. (Unless they use a Mac of course.) For more on this, the comments on Digg are quite interesting.

I was reading another article about new hardware and it struck me that 2006 is turning into a milestone year for computer hardware. I cannot remember a time with so many big hardware changes.

Generally speaking, Im not all that into hardware. "Incredible new hardware" is usually the same hardware you already have but it runs a little faster... *snooze*

Not so with the Playstation3 and the Cell processor from the combined efforts of IBM, Sony and Toshiba. The cell appears to be a radical change from previous designs and that makes it really exciting. I havent purchased a game console since the Sega Genesis but Im planing to pre-purchase a PS3 just to see it (although my wife doesnt know/hasnt approved of this critical expenditure this yet).

SRAM, DRAM, NVRAM, yah yah yah... But MRAM was a new one to me.

This Magnetic-RAM sound pretty amazing. I look forward to seeing products with it later this year.

Do you have an HDTV yet? I hope you get one soon.

As people upgrade to a next generation TV, they too will realize how crappy cable TV looks and this will create pressure to increase the amount of digital and HD content. Ive been waiting about a decade for this transition and it looks like the TV's are finally starting to take off as prices fall. A lot.

One concern now is that overproduction (and price cuts) kills the industry.

I didnt pay much attention to this issue so I dont know what the counter-arguments are, but I do think it is a good idea to put porn in a XXX domain. Pornographic commerce isnt a very big free speech issue for me, and I would feel better about porn being in one place on the Internet not everywhere.

This article continues previous threads about using the Internet for commercial purposes, something it wasnt designed for, as well as the issue of who should control the Internet and how long the rest of the world will be content with the USA calling the shots.

Suffice it to say, I dont think Jim Dobson should be calling the shots for anything at all. The idea that porn isn't already legitimately online is ridiculous to say the least. The idea that Jim Dobson and others like him run our country is equally disturbing.

More articles on digital media this week. ATT is launching a service that provides TV over DSL lines to compete with Cable TV. Cable TV is trying to offer video services to compete with websites. Oh what a tangled web we weave...

This article on Comcast is actually quite good and provides background on the industry and the forces at work to change the status quo. Hopefully Congress will pass some laws to protect our favorite monopolies - cable and telephone - before anything really changes.

I assume it is because of Steve Jobs, but Disney seems to be the first TV Turtle to stick its head of the shell and test the water. The broadcast model of the 1940's is woefully out of date so I hope they hurry up already.

As someone who has built their own custom Home Theater PC, I will say that it is an "experience" and not one for the faint of heart. Building it to begin with is a large project, and if you choose Windows as I did, supporting it never ends. My TIVO was rock-solid but my HTPC tends to break at the most inconvenient times and there are other snaffu's like DVD's that wont play because of their wonderful copy protection.

Despite the difficulty, it is nice have a single box in the living room that can watch regular TV or HDTV, play a movie on DVD or hard drive, pipe all my music to the stereo and play Internet radio stations. Which is probably why so many companies are chasing "convergence."

There have been several articles of late on downloading movies. Dont get your hopes up though; the hurdles are legal not technical.

A few articles on the platform of the future: the cell phone.

I have not experienced this personally, but one thing to remember is that the USA is generally considered the least advanced country in terms of cell phones. The features found in South Korea and Europe are years ahead of us and give some insight into features we can expect to see. Someday.

School is over and we have decided to stick around Seattle for the next 3 to 5 years, which means we are looking for a new place to live.

In the past, I cannot say that I have really enjoyed looking for property. The process was pretty discouraging and involved a lot of driving around to strange neighborhoods, lame MLS paperwork, anxiety and dealing with dumbass realtors who dont seem to know any more than I do.

Given my past experiences, I am blow away by the website tools that are available to me here in King County, WA.

Computer fraud these days involves sophisticated software. One has to really pay attention to keep up with each new scam. As technology continues to be way out ahead of consumers, this is something the average computer user will never be able to do. Case in point, I have yet to meet an average consumer that even understands how Google or Yahoo make their money in the first place.

One word that is not mentioned in this article is "Windows", yet these victims of bots are undoubtedly computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system, not Linux or MacOS.

Engineers like to think that success is all about the best idea or the best code. The reality is that success is all about execution. The code and the idea are part of execution but so is marketing and branding and finance and a lot of other, non-engineering, things.

This is a good article illustrating that Creative had the idea but Apple had the execution and the rest is history.

I keep hearing people on radio/TV say traditional TV commercials are ruined because everyone uses a DVR to skip commercials. It's annoying me.

People who have DRV's may use them to skip commercials but not many people have DVRs! Our class did a poll and found 6% had a DVR. According to Magna Global, 16% of US households will have DVRs by the end of 2006, which means it is less than that now. In other words, the vast majority of people are not skipping commercials because they dont have DVRs.

One of the surprising things I learned in business school was the value of ideas. Like a lot of people, I went in thinking that the key to startup fortunes was a good idea and I learned that this was wrong.

Ideas are cheap. Many people have similar ideas. The real key is execution. Very few people have what it takes to execute on a good idea.

Today I read a WSJ article on one of my ideas (at least very similar) which is being executed quite well by others :)

In talking about his company, Zillow, Rich Barton used the term "consumer intelligence". This is intelligence in the sense of information not the sense of IQ. I liked the things Rich had to say and it caused me to think more about this information age we live in.

This morning I had the pleasure of attending my first NWEN event. It was terrific and I cant wait to attend more events in the future. There is just something totally exciting about the idea-space - the place where people turn ideas into real companies.

Rich Barton, the CEO of Zillow, was the speaker.

How can some people can be so young, so attractive, so talented and so successful? Sometimes the high-flying entrepreneurs are just so frustrating :) I wanted to dislike Mr Barton just to exercise my envy-muslces but he was so down to earth and likable, I couldnt' do it. Now I just want to find a way to talk with him over drinks, he seems like a person that would be great to talk with.

Well isnt that interesting. The sale of personal audio devices (ie iPods) has passed the sale of home stereos for the first time.

The Bush administration has had a hard time improving infrastructure in Iraq and they havent done much better here in regards to broadband penetration of households.

Broadband access is essential to providing all kinds of neato services yet only 16% of homes in the US has it. What is worse is that we have dropped from 4th place in 2001 to 12th place. At least we are still ahead of that "old Europe" France and Germany.

As American's we are used to thinking of ourselves as the center of the tech-universe. Which makes it all the more hard to accept that other countries are passing us by. Korea in particular has much more advanced cell phones and internet access.

And the reason for our decline? Our lame-brain politicians and the resistance of the huge corporations. Big surprise there.

Holy crap, what happened to serving customer's needs?

I am trying to use the Home Banking service from National City bank and they only support two browsers: IE and Netscape. And when I say "support" I mean allow you to use. If you try any other browser, the server kicks you out of the system with a nice message that says they only support IE and Netscape.

That means they do NOT support Safari, they do NOT support Firefox, they do NOT support Camino, and they do NOT support Mozilla. I know this because I tried every one of them!

Kerist, who wrote this code? Who made this decision and what on earth was their reasoning? Some sites tell you use a specific browser that they have tested with but I have never seen a company that WILL NOT LET YOU use a browser of your choice.

The best part of this story is that Microsoft doesnt even support IE for the mac! If you go to Microsoft's website to get IE, they tell you to use a more modern browser like Safari and Firefox. Which I do for everything except this one dumbass bank.

This is HOME banking - I'm at home and I want to use my home computer, which is a Mac. I dont have market numbers but Apple sells 5% of ALL PC's in this country. Since no business buys macs, that means they are all going into homes so there are a lot of home users like myself with Mac's. If you are going to offer a home service, you need to support what people use in the home not the office.

If I could leave this bank I would because they dont show any respect for me, the customer.

Cmon people, it doesnt take an MBA to know that a company needs to support its customer's needs - not the other way around.

The other day I saw an interesting article in Newsweek while I was waiting in line. I couldn't get the magazine but I assumed I could look up the article online. Silly me.

I have just spent 10 minutes trying to find the article on the Newsweek/MSNBC page and Im giving up in frustration and disgust. Apparently there is a newer edition online and despite the mind numbing number of logos, advertisements and unnecessary animations on their webpage, I cannot find the article I wanted or anything related to the previous issue.

Give me a break.

OK, I'm a bit slow but I have finally discovered podcasts. They are really worth trying and I urge you to do so.

There are a few game magazines that I read. I checked out iTunes and found that they started doing weekly podcasts so I started listening to them. Now I get to read the magazine and hear the editors/writers themselves talk about their stories and the games they review. I also get to hear issues about the magazine itself and I get to hear updates before the issue comes out (it takes 6-8 weeks for a magazine to get printed and shipped). The magazine and the podcast are great complements to each other.

I also discovered IT Conversations, a website showcase of podcasts. I didn't get to go to the Web 2.0 conference but with IT Conversations, I can listen to the speakers anytime I want. Podcasting like this opens up a whole new realm of educational opportunities, as people from all over the world can now hear the same presentations whether they can attend the events or not. (The world just got a little smaller.)

Goodness, the number of technologies in development and in use today is simply overwhelming! What's worse, knowing what this stuff is and how it can be used isnt just for geeks and developers anymore. Business people need to understand this stuff more than ever because it affects business models, products and your company.

Even for someone like myself that enjoys tech, trying to keep up with all these innovations is a full time job. Whenever I start to feel like I have a handle on things, I meet someone who makes me feel like a buggy-whip salesman.

Here is a quick list of topics I have run across in the past 2 months.

PHP
I learned old-school computer languages lik C but applications today are often web-technologies and more and more websites are being built with PHP (not to be confused with PGP, which is a type of encryption). For someone wanting to try their hand at web creation, this is one of the tools to pick up early.

AdSense, AdWords
Does Google do search? Not so much. Google made $4B last year by connecting businesses with customers, ie advertising. While it is not obvious to most consumers, Google is an advertising innovator with programs like AdSense and they continue to push their creative business models into other advertising venues including radio, TV and print..

AJAX
Not quite Web2.0 but this technology promises to make websites more interactive. You can see AJAX in action at Amazon and Netflix who already have AJAX features such as mouse-overs that give you product descriptions. I think Google Maps is another example.

Google Maps
Speaking of Google Maps, would you like a free service to present your own data in a map form? How cool is that! I am a map junkie and this is a terrific tool that Google is literally giving away, presumably for the good of the Internet.

"Mashups"
Imagine taking someone's boring text data, combining it with Google Maps and presenting the whole thing on your own website. If you can picture that creation, you understand a 'mashup'. A friend showed me two sites that combine public data to provide an interactive, real-time map of the bus routes and bus positions here in Seattle. Not necessarily a big money maker but expect to see a lot of these mashups because they are very powerful/useful. Power to the people!

Tags
That computer from Star Trek, the one that answers questions in English, is still the stuff of science fiction not science fact. In human terms, computers are still pretty stupid; they simply cannot read or understand things the way we do. One way to help computers make "sense" of data is to mark or structure that data and one of the ways to do this organization that is getting popular is tags. Take a photo of angel cake and tag it <cake> so that people searching for faeries and angels wont find it while searching. Expect to see more tagging..

podcasts
This technology has been around for a long time but it seems to be taking off, thanks in large part to Apple's iTunes store. A podcast is simply a recording you can download and listen to on a computer or iPod. One interesting note is how podcasts are taking off in China, where the media is highly censored (and podcasts are hard to sensor because computers cannot understand recordings they way they can words).

iTunes (PPV video)
$60+/mo for cable TV or $2/episode for your favorite TV shows? People have been talking about downloadable music and video for some time (and running 'pilot' programs in mass-market hotspots like Idaho) but iTunes is the first successful mass-market product of this type. Whether it is a song, a TV show, movie or podcast, pay-per-view content is only going to get bigger. There are a lot of companies trying to get into this space, including Disney and Google, but iTunes seems to have the lead.

It wasnt all that long ago that a phone was, well, just a phone. One used it to talk to another person. It had to be easy to dial. It had to be comfortable to hold. It had to sound good.

These days a phone is anything but a phone. It plays iTunes. It has a calendar. It plays Java games or runs Windows applications. It does email and text messaging. It is so small, you need a special instrument to dial a phone number. You can use it to take photos. It has TDMA, CDMA, GSM, EDGE - whatever those things are.

Yep, phones today are all about features but I question how many people really understand or use all those features. I suspect that many customers use a different heuristic to pick a phone - fashion. They want something "cool", something "new", something that makes them different.

Just a little add-on to a thread I started earlier.

I dont see a huge threat at the moment but it opens the possibility for a group wanting a superior technology (Europe) or a group wanting superior control/censorship (China/Arab League) to build a new network domain. The new system could interface with the original Internet but it is interesting to ponder a "second mover" advantage in this type of market. China in particular poses an interesting concern as both their alphabet and government (not to mention size) are so different.

In Threat to Internet's Clout, Some Are Starting Alternatives

Rise of Developing Nations, Anti-U.S. Views Play Role; Pioneer Sounds the Alarm

A 'Root' Grows in Germany

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 19, 2006

More than a decade after the Internet became available for commercial use, other countries and organizations are erecting rivals to it -- raising fears that global interconnectivity will be diminished.

German computer engineers are building an alternative to the Internet to make a political statement. A Dutch company has built one to make money. China has created three suffixes in Chinese characters substituting for .com and the like, resulting in Web sites and email addresses inaccessible to users outside of China. The 22-nation Arab League has begun a similar system using Arabic suffixes.

Last year I read some interesting concerns about nanoparticles. Now there is concern about the possible danger of a substance we are all very familiar with, teflon. Teflon has been around so long, one would think we would know by now if it is safe.

EPA Probes Safety Of Key Chemical in Teflon

Majority of Advisory Panel Calls It a 'Likely' Carcinogen;

Changing French-Fry Cartons

By SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 31, 2006

The push by federal regulators last week to cut back on certain chemicals used to make nonstick, water-repellent and grease-resistant products could affect an array of consumer goods.

The Environmental Protection Agency is pressuring eight companies to reduce the presence of a group of chemicals that are used in the manufacture of such things as nonstick cookware, microwave popcorn bags, fast-food containers, carpeting, nail polish and stain-resistant clothing.

Yesterday, an EPA advisory group issued a statement, saying the majority of its members agree that the main chemical under review -- perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA -- is a "likely" cancer-causing agent. However the group, made up of outside experts, failed to agree unanimously on this likelihood and recommended further study. The findings come after a lengthy review of EPA data on the chemical, including studies linking it to cancer in rats, and indicating that PFOA is found in many people's blood.

...

DuPont, of Wilmington, Del., is the only U.S. manufacturer of PFOA, and is also the maker of Teflon, the popular nonstick coating. Teflon and other so-called fluoropolymers are manufactured using PFOA and constitute a $1.5 billion industry in the U.S. In addition to cookware, DuPont says the Teflon brand is used in products with water and stain-resistant coatings, like windshield wipers, carpeting and nail polish.

And again more recently.

Panel Considers Risks Of Chemical in Teflon

ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 16, 2006

DOVER, Del. -- A group of scientific advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency voted unanimously to approve a recommendation that a chemical used in the manufacture of Teflon and other nonstick and stain-resistant products should be considered a likely carcinogen.

The approval of the EPA's Science Advisory Board is conditioned on minor clarifications being made to a draft report, but no major changes will be made to the panel's findings. The revisions called for by the board include clarifying the scope of dissent among members of the advisory-board panel that reviewed the EPA's draft risk assessment of the chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, which is also known as C-8.

Board members also agreed the report should clarify that the panel's findings shouldn't be considered the last word on the chemical but should be updated as additional data become available.

The Internet is an American phenomenon. The addresses are in English characters. 10 of the 13 root mirrors are in the USA. The standards board that makes all the decisions is in the US with no international members... What should a "global" Internet look like?

In what would be a historic first, Vaitkadamas might have spotted a bona-fide trend here. This concerns in this article are about political control not technical issues, like spam and fraud, but expect to see more news on this topic over the next few years. It is a bit amusing to hear the US government say that they need to control the Internet because other governments, like the United Nations, is too bureaucratic. I wonder how many voters would agree that our government is the pillar of efficiency?

In Threat to Internet's Clout, Some Are Starting Alternatives

Rise of Developing Nations, Anti-U.S. Views Play Role; Pioneer Sounds the Alarm

A 'Root' Grows in Germany

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 19, 2006

More than a decade after the Internet became available for commercial use, other countries and organizations are erecting rivals to it -- raising fears that global interconnectivity will be diminished.

German computer engineers are building an alternative to the Internet to make a political statement. A Dutch company has built one to make money. China has created three suffixes in Chinese characters substituting for .com and the like, resulting in Web sites and email addresses inaccessible to users outside of China. The 22-nation Arab League has begun a similar system using Arabic suffixes.

The Internet, developed by U.S. government agencies beginning in the 1960s, uses a so-called domain-name system, also called the "root," that consists of 264 suffixes. These include .com, .net, .org and country codes such as .jp for Japan. The root is coordinated by a private, nonprofit group in Marina del Rey, Calif., called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or Icann. This body works under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which set up the organization in 1998.

As the Internet's role grows around the world, some are uneasy with the notion that a U.S.-based body overseen by the U.S. government has sole power over what domain names are used and who controls each name. Other countries such as China also say Icann is too slow in forming domain names in non-Roman languages, hindering the development of an Internet culture in those countries.

Concern about U.S. oversight increased last summer when the Commerce Department persuaded Icann to postpone the approval of a new domain-name suffix to be used for pornographic Web sites, .xxx. The department said it had received letters of complaint from Christian groups. While other countries also opposed the name, critics cited the incident as evidence of Washington's influence.

The matter of control came to a head last November at a United Nations summit in Tunis, where the U.S. delegation fought off demands from more than 170 countries to give up unilateral oversight of Icann.

More than half of the Internet's users today are outside the U.S. Governments increasingly are interested in how the Internet works. Brazil, for instance, collects much of its tax revenue online. "The Internet has become a critical part of our lives," says Abdullah Al-Darrab, Saudi Arabia's deputy governor for technical affairs. "These policies should not be left to a single country or entity."

Some countries with non-Roman alphabets are also taking matters into their own hands. China has created three domain names in Chinese characters -- .zhongguo, .gongsi and .wangluo -- and made them available for public and commercial use inside China only.

Similarly, Arab countries have in the past 18 months experimented with country code domain names in Arabic, distinct from the Icann system, says Khaled Fattal of Surrey, England. Mr. Fattal is head of Minc.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Internet multilingual.

"There is no such thing as a global Internet today," says Mr. Fattal. "You have only an English-language Internet that is deployed internationally. How is that empowering millions of Chinese or Arab citizens?"

First you have to learn the technology and its acronyms, like email, HTTP, the web, and blogs. Then you have to learn the ways people exploit said technology, like spam, phishing, and now splogs.

As i have mentioned in the past, the Internet was not designed or built for commercial use. Commercial use took over the Internet with the invention of web pages. As is usually the case when we use something that it wasnt designed for, the Internet is prone to all kinds of abuses, scams and problems.

The latest effort by those that make a living screwing with the system is splogs.

'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

By DAVID KESMODEL THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

October 19, 2005

Spam, long the scourge of email users, rapidly has become the bane of bloggers too.

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as "splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.

The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to let bloggers create blogs.

Just this past weekend, Google's popular blog-creation tool, Blogger, was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than 13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.

Many spammers are buying special software on the Web that allows them to automatically create scores of phony blogs in mere seconds. One program cited by splog critics is BlogBurner, which starts at $47 a month. The tool "creates a unique blog for your Web site in less than one minute -- even if you know nothing about computers," according to the BlogBurner.com5 site.

BlogBurner's founder, Rick Butts, denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites. He acknowledges that the blogs being created by BlogBurner are often used to help draw attention to a company's main Web site. "I'm not going to pretend to say we're altruistically creating blogs for humans to read," he says, adding that other companies have mimicked his software and sold it to spammers.

First music, then movies, then books. The genie is out of the bottle with digital technolgy. IF you can make a copy to use it, there doesnt seem to be any way to keep people from making illegal copies.

Digital media is a thorny problem where someone will have to think out of the box to create a system that balances freedom and ownership.

Repro Man

Meet the 21-year-old Norwegian who defied Hollywood to help the world copy DVDs -- and beat the studios in court. Now, he's liberating your iPod.

By STEVE STECKLOW Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

October 15, 2005

Jon Lech Johansen dropped out of high school after just one year. He lives alone most of the time, except when he stays with his parents in his native Norway. The 21-year-old doesn't drive, rarely goes to parties and says he has no close friends, except his father. He spends about nine hours a day in front of his computer screen.

Yet this reclusive young Norwegian is the man who may be the entertainment industry's worst nightmare. Mr. Johansen, Hollywood executives claim, has done more than almost anyone in the world to ignite the explosion of movie piracy on the Internet, costing them billions of dollars in lost sales. He scoffs at that.

Jon Lech Johansen says people should be able to use legally bought digital entertainment however they like.

At the age of 15, Mr. Johansen wrote a computer program that allowed users to copy DVDs. Then he posted it on the Internet. A Norwegian private school awarded him a prize for making an outstanding contribution to society. The Norwegian government indicted him.

Mr. Johansen may not be a household name in America. But he is lionized by people who, like him, believe that when they legally buy digital entertainment they should be free to use it as they please; fans have downloaded more than a million copies of his free software programs.

Piracy of copyrighted entertainment isn't new. For years, people copied record albums onto cassette tapes and traded them, a violation of copyright law that was generally overlooked because the quality of the copies wasn't great. But with the advent of digital entertainment on compact discs and more powerful personal computers, perfect copies could be made easily. The music industry initially took no technological steps to prevent copying from CDs. When DVDs were introduced in 1997, the film industry encrypted their content to try to avoid the piracy then already beginning to plague the music business.

In the past i wrote about US control of domain names and how the system may annoy other countries. Remember: The USA is the only country that does NOT need a country code in the domain name - we get Amazon.com not Amazon.com.uk or Amazon.com.tw. I happen to feel this system is inconsistent and confusing and said as much on Confab.

Today the issue is the GPS system, another American product that the rest of the world depends on. What i didnt know was that Bush threatened to suspend GPS functionality (in the name of terror of course) and that this threat understandably made the Europeans uncomfortable.

So they packed up their Freedom Fries and are building their own GPS system. Hmmm.

These issues make me think that this is a global world and national systems just wont cut it. What is even worse is taking a national system global and then pulling it back, or threatening to

Going global means your global stakeholders are just as important as your national stakeholders. If that isn't true then you arent a global system, and people have every right to desire and to build their own system.

EU Satellite Fuels Rivalry With U.S. Over Navigation

Associated Press

December 29, 2005

PARIS – A European satellite shot into space, launching the European Union's €3.4 billion ($4 billion) planned rival to the U.S.'s Global Positioning System.

"Galileo is made in Europe by Europeans," European Space Agency spokesman Franco Bonacina said. "If the Americans want to scramble GPS, they can do it whenever they want...whereas our system is a civilian-based system run by a civilian authority and would be completely autonomous."

Galileo -- which is interoperable with GPS -- will more than double existing GPS coverage, providing navigation for people from motorists to pilots to emergency-rescue teams. It is expected to improve coverage in high-latitude areas such as northern Europe, and in big cities where skyscrapers can block signals.

Galileo will also be more exact than GPS, with precision of one meter, compared with five meters with GPS technology, Mr. Bonacina said. With Galileo, for example, rescue services will be able to tell ambulances which lane to use on a highway, he said. For average users, like bikers or motorists, the precision will be three meters.

Three non-EU nations -- China, Israel and Ukraine -- have signed on to the program set up by the European Commission and European Space Agency, the EU says. Discussions are under way with India, Morocco, South Korea, Norway and Argentina.

An interesting commentary from Walter Mossberg where he implies that one reason computers are hard to use is because they are not designed for consumers in the first place. Although I had not thought about it this way before, he makes a lot of sense.

Computer Makers Cater to Big Business, Slight the Rest of Us

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

December 29, 2005

If you guessed that the industry cares most about customers who use all it has to offer and are most willing to try new things, you guessed wrong. The computer industry cares little about consumers and very small businesses. It is focused on serving the IT departments of large corporations and organizations.

This is true even though, by some estimates, twice as many computers are in the hands of individuals and very small organizations than are in the control of corporate IT departments.

This focus on the corporate world can have real, and sometimes negative, consequences for consumers and small businesses. For example, some of the big security problems in Microsoft's software in recent years came because the company included features used only by corporate IT staffs in the products it sold to everyone. One was a communications feature, meant for network administrators, which sleazy operators misused to bombard people with ads. Why was that on my PC in the first place?

Only one major computer company focuses mainly on the non-IT part of the computing world: Apple Computer. This is partly because Apple failed to make inroads in corporations, but it's also because it prefers to aim its products at actual users, not intermediary buyers.

Some of you wonder why reviewers like me, writing for the non-IT part of the world, have consistently praised Apple products in recent years. One reason is that they are good. Another is that they have been unaffected (so far) by the plague of viruses and spyware that makes Windows users miserable. But an underlying reason is the focus on individual users.

In my view, the world would be better off if the biggest computer companies started catering more to the non-IT part of the market, where most computers live.

I have had the pleasure of working on an electronic health record project... Medicine is a very difficult system to work with, not the least of which because of the strong personalities and egos involved.

I am a big support of technology solutions to problems but tech by itself usually causes more problems than it solves. System or process changes require more human changes than tech changes and that fact is often overlooked by tech-proponents. Few big tech projects work because few people can incorporate both the human and the tech in one package. (There is also a lot of poorly designed tech that really does slow things down.)

Tech Glitches Can Slow Patient Care

New Computers May Deliver Turmoil When They Arrive;

One Study Cites Death Rates

By LAURA LANDRO

December 28, 2005

A controversial study linking an increased death rate to the installation of a new computer system at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh reinforces growing concern that such technology, hailed as a panacea for medication errors, can slow down the delivery of care and cause unintentional harm to patients if not properly put into practice.

The study, by researchers at the hospital, was published in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics and describes multiple technology glitches after a computerized physician order entry system was installed at the hospital over a six-day period in October 2002 -- including doctors unable to preregister critically ill children and then laboring over terminals to enter medication orders and tests. Nurses were pulled away from the bedside to work on terminals, reducing the patient-to-staff ratio in critical-care units. System crashes froze terminal screens and delayed the delivery of vital medications from the pharmacy. During the 18-month study period, 75 children admitted from other facilities died. The mortality rate for that group increased to 6.57% in the first five months after the system was in place from 2.8% in the thirteen months before.

"The real lesson from this study is that there can be unintended adverse effects if hospitals don't carefully plan for and implement major clinical transformations" such as computerized physician order entry, or CPOE, they added.

Other experts say the study highlights the continuing struggle that hospitals face in training doctors, nurses and other staffers to interrupt their traditional ways of working to learn computer systems that can slow them down, requiring one or two minutes and as many as ten clicks of a mouse instead of seconds to scribble a note or to yell an order.

"These are very complex systems that completely disrupt, and hopefully improve, the work flow in a hospital," says Paul Tang, a health-information-technology expert and chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which operates multispecialty group practices in California that use computerized physician order entry systems. "If you don't do it right, it can fail miserably and cause harm to patients."

Will there come a time when everyone has a PC and there is no reason to buy a new one? Are we already there? I mean, how fast does your PC need to be to check your email and search on Google? (Of course Microsoft is planning to force you to upgrade your hardware if you want to run Windows Vista in 2006.)

It is interesting to see a connection between buying a PC or buying a new TV. TV prices have really dropped recently but there are a whole lot of people who dont have an HDTV yet...

Another interesting factoid is that laptop prices have reached $400. Wow. Maybe that $100 laptop is only another year or so away. Then again, i dont see how anyone can make money on these low prices.

We are stilling figuring out how to deal with toxic chemicals like Chromium-9. This is the next wave of technological products that may or may not hurt people.

I had no idea we were already using nano-particles in hand creams and suntan lotions. That is a bit scary...

Fears grow that tiny particles may pose major health risks

By MICHELLE R. SMITH The Associated Press

December 12, 2005

link

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Those stain-resistant khakis you just picked up at the mall, the tennis ball that holds its bounce longer and sunscreen that's clear instead of white have something in common — nanotechnology.

Scientists manipulating matter at the molecular level have improved on hundreds of everyday products in recent years and are promising dramatic breakthroughs in medicine and other industries as billions of dollars a year are pumped into the nascent sector.

But relatively little is known about the potential health and environmental effects of the tiny particles — atoms wide and small enough to easily penetrate cells in lungs, brains and other organs.

While governments and businesses have begun pumping millions of dollars into researching such effects, scientists and others say nowhere near enough is being spent to determine whether nanomaterials pose a danger to human health.

I have been talking with people about the idea of innovation.

In my mind, innovation is coming up with something novel, ie something that is totally new or something that does an existing function in a much better way. Innovation is a leap while refinement is a step. Innovation depends on some inherently creative insight while refinement is a matter of time and effort.

Given this definition, I have been thinking about the differences between innovation at big and small companies.

different rules

Small companies are more innovative. Even though they have fewer resources, small companies have fewer hindrances and more freedom to experiment. Experimenting means trying 10 things and hoping 1 of them sticks. For every big leap that works, there are 9 tries that fail. Since small companies have nothing to lose, they accept those 9:1 (or worse) odds and take the risks. Once in a while, a company hits on something that sticks and it takes off. (We never hear about the 9 other companies that never got a hit and died a quiet death.)

Big companies have all the resources in the world to pay people to be creative. The problem with big companies is that they have too much to lose and this fear of failure puts a huge damper on trying for innovation. If a startup does something stupid, no one notices; if IBM does something stupid it will be in the national news. In order to protect the brand, there is a line of people in a big company whose job it is to say no, who are there to prevent any stupid mistakes. While saying no prevents risks and embarrassing mistakes, it also prevents the occasional home-run success.

Another problem with big companies is the way financial accounting deals with innovation. At a small company, the inventors are spending (wasting) their own money or perhaps the money of professional investors who know they are taking a risk. Big companies however are expected to be stewards of their investors and big wild risks dont look so good on the profit and loss statements if they fail. Since 9 out of 10 tries fails, who's budget is going to pay for it? How do we account for these trials? Innovation just doesn't play nice with traditional accounting and corporate management practices.

different games

Since big companies and small companies play by different rules, they require different strategies. I would argue that innovation at a big company comes from acquiring winners not internal attempts.

Instead of trying to invent things internally, big companies should use their resources to survey the market and the invention-space looking for winners. Then it should purchase the innovative company, rework their design as needed, rebrand it, and market the hell out of it.

I think this acquisition strategy, which is used by Cisco and others, makes more sense although it is not pleasing to engineers. Every engineer in the labs dreams of doing his own startup, of making his ideas a reality. Few of them will take the chance so they all yearn for their large employer to invest more in internal development. I am sympathetic to this desire by dubious of its outcome relative to acquisition.

Small companies are pretty much small companies. They embody the hopes and dreams of their creators along with their personal drive, which may stem from frustration with big companies or just a desire to create. Little companies have nothing to lose so they play to win with reckless abandon; big companies have everything to lose so they play to maintain their lead. At the end of the day, I think most of the big breakthroughs will come from the small innovators.

As someone who lives with depression, I found this article mighty interesting. And more evidence (as if i needed it) that we would rather medicate our problems than fix them.

Some Drugs Work
To Treat Depression,
But It Isn't Clear How

By SHARON BEGLEY




November 18, 2005

Hardly any patients know how Lipitor lowers cholesterol, how Lotensin reduces blood pressure, or even how ibuprofen erases headaches. But when it comes to Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, ads and glowing accounts in the press have turned patients with depression into veritable pharmacologists, able to rattle off how these "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" keep more of the brain chemical serotonin hanging around in synapses, correcting the neurochemical imbalance that causes depression.

There is only one problem. "Not a single peer-reviewed article ... support[s] claims of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder," scientists write in the December issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.

How did so many smart people get it so wrong? Medicinal chemist Derek Lowe, who works in drug development for a pharmaceutical firm, offered an explanation in his "In the Pipeline" blog. "I worked on central nervous system drugs for eight years, and I can confidently state that we know just slightly more than jack" about how antidepressants work.

Most people treated for depression get pills rather than psychotherapy, and this week a study from Stanford University reported that drugs have been supplanting psychotherapy for depressed adolescents. Clinical guidelines call for using both, and for psychotherapy to be the first-line treatment for most kids. Psychotherapy "can be as effective as medications" for major depression, concluded a study in April of 240 patients, in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Numerous other studies find the same.

The hegemony of the serotonin hypothesis may be keeping patients from a therapy that will help them more in the long term. The relapse rate for patients on pills is higher than for those getting cognitive-behavior psychotherapy.

Some 19 million people in the U.S. suffer from depression in any given year. For many, SSRIs help little, if at all. To do better, we have to get the science right.

Two articles on the Internet. Together they got me thinking about what would happen if the rest of the world abandoned the existing Internet which is pretty-much controlled by the USA and moved to the so-called "internet 2.0" which they would control?

This is also an interesting issue to watch in terms of globalism. We dont have any government or legal systems that work on a global level because we have never needed anything like that before in history. But the Internet is pushing business to a global level which is bound to uncover a lot of new issues for mankind.

As reported by Gamasutra, IBM is delivering the CPU's for all three next generation game consoles? Interesting stuff...

IBM Details Production Of Xbox 360 CPU

David Jenkins

October 25, 2005

Officials from IBM have discussed details of its CPU for the Xbox 360 at the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, California, revealing that chips for the Xbox 360 are now in full production at both the company’s East Fishkill factory in New York state and at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore. 

Much of the information on the chip, which features a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core, is already known - however, the company noted that the chip was designed and developed by IBM and Microsoft specifically for the Xbox 360, and was delivered in less than 24 months from the original contract signing in the autumn of 2003, being developed at multiple IBM locations including Rochester, Minnesota; Austin, Texas; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

The chip includes three cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3 GHz. It features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90 nanometer Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology to reduce heat and improve performance. The chip's 21.6 GB/s Front Side Bus (FSB) architecture was customized to meet the throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 software.

"Microsoft's aggressive timetable required that IBM take the Xbox 360 chip design from concept to full execution in just 24 months," said Ilan Spillinger, IBM Distinguished Engineer and director of the IBM Design Center for Xbox 360. "IBM's success in delivering the chip to meet Microsoft's worldwide launch illustrates our commitment to innovative processor design that builds on IBM's wealth of intellectual property."

IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano recently singled out the console market as an important area of expansion for the company, which has recently divested its retail PC business. As well as the Xbox 360 CPU, IBM has also been involved with the creation of the PlayStation 3 Cell chip and the CPU, codenamed Broadway, for the Nintendo Revolution.