Notes From the Rocket

Take Two Tablets and Call Me in the Morning

2011-04-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

Alright, they're everywhere now. I've seen them in San Francisco for the past year, but San Francisco doesn't really count - it's sort of a technical data point outlier. (What other city can you safely say that you've seen not one, not two, but 10 guys biking around town with webcams on their helmets "lifecasting" for Christ's sake?)

Now though, I see them in downtown New York: walking around the streets, in restaurants, bars, browsing in stores, on Wall Street... you see them too, I know you do: In Milwaukee, Amsterdam, Sydney in east bum-f**k Minnesota...they are everywhere: the Tableticians. Like Moses coming down from the mount, they're consulting their tablets for everything from the weather to local restaurants. Business travelers are trying (struggling in most cases) to slim themselves down to just their tablets. People who don't have one, want one.

You can get your television on them. Your music. Your social net. The New York times just erected the first "holy crap this might actually work" paywall, and USA Today and CNN's apps are available on iOS and Android. Books and magazines have already begun the switch. (Although, I've written about my own issues with reading on one, but these problems haven't really stopped anyone from adopting tablets as readers.)

The world is turning into an episode of Star Trek. Finally.

For the record, it's not just the iPad. To be sure, the Jobsian Tablet is the dominant force, of course, with its overwhelming share of the market, and will be for at least the next year. However, its no longer the only game in town. About every 10 tablet users I've seen walking around the NYC are pulling Galaxy Tabs out of their pockets. I personally own a Xoom, and have talked about it ad nauseum.

OK - so They Live Among Us. Got it. I've accepted it. I think its fair to say I've embraced it. But seriously, what the hell are they?

Are they, as some people purport, oversized phones? Not really - the use case is much different. (Even if they had voice service, a tablet is something you take out to study, to ponder over, to read...not something you take out to quickly use and shove back in your pocket.) Are they an evolution of the PC, as Steve Job's is trying to proclaim? Not really - try to use one as for business document creation, for instance. I can't really write this blog post on the Xoom without dragging along a bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and stand to hold the screen...and then, what's the damn point?

It's this last idea that is the most interesting - and probably the most salient. Back in the last decade, tablets were attempted before by none other than Microsoft. They weren't a failure....well, not exactly...but they weren't very popular either. Confined to specialized niches, like hospitals and factory floors, these early tablets never caught on with the general public for one very important reason: Microsoft tried to force the laptop use case into a portable form factor.

Microsoft tried to train people, both through marketing and through their operating system extensions, that these devices were just like laptops, except they had a screen you could interact with directly. So, in the public's mind, these machines had to perform like laptops - which, very few of them did. To keep the cost down, at least a little bit, the raw computing power of the machine was reduced in favor of the electronics for the touch screen. For those who may have seen the benefit of them as portable devices, this resulted in a device that was far too expensive - many of them topped $2500 - and even at that price point they were not powerful enough to perform tasks normally attributed to laptops.

People thought twice: even in 2005 you could buy a hell of a laptop for $2500.

When Apple entered this space in 2010 - and, sorry, but I chose my words carefully: Apple entered the space, they didn't create the space - they did so with a sense of redesign that they learned from their previous years of making the iPhone: Keep the device simple, and to the point. This is not something to replace your laptop, nor is it something to augment the laptop. This was to be something that had the same relationship to a laptop that a book had to a typewriter. This was a device for you to consume your media, not create it.

I misunderstood this basic principle myself. Back in early 2010, I wrote a commentary about the iPad called the MacBook Air, Mark II. I pegged the device as a "tweener." Neither iPhone, nor MacBook. And as a tweener, I reasoned, it was confined to that simple content consumption space - and therefore destined to satisfy just a niche market.

What I failed to recognize was that content consumption on a larger-than-iPodish-screen was exactly what people were looking for. I also failed to realize that it came about at exactly the right point in our history - the iPad would have been a niche product back in the early 2000's because there wasn't a lot of content to consume on it. There was digital music, but digital video hadn't yet caught on the way it has, and digital books were just a niche market confined to glowing PDA screens. In fact, tablets back in the early 2000's had no choice but to be full-featured laptops: other than MP3s there were no tiny, digital media files to consume. There were no app stores to deliver small, tightly integrated applications and wifi speeds were too slow to stream anything meaningful over the air.

So what does that make tablets? I don't buy into the "evolution of PCs" theory - but perhaps it is the evolution of something else. I just confessed to being wrong back in 2010 about consumers wanting a content consumption device. I also suggested that we are in a unique time in history - we are at a point where all media - printed, recorded, photographed - is digital. Gone is papyrus and printing presses and kodachrome and beta max. Everything is bits. Everything every written is available online, every note warbled can be found, every movie...every television show. What if tablets are not just a media consumption device, but they are the penultimate media consumption device?

What if tablets - in all of their flavors - is the evolution of all things informational? All things entertainment? Is that how historians 100 years from now will write about this moment in time? Probably - but chances are they'll write it with something other than a tablet....

Of Course, Of Course...It's the Famous Mister EDid

2011-02-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

My life with a permanent Windows Media Center as my central "TV hub," began back in 2007 when I upgraded all of my home components to Vista. (You can read about those upgrades very early in this blog.) Before Vista, Window Media Center was confined to XP, which meant there were problems with the system with regards to multiple streams, user interface, etc. In essence, XP Media Center was a toy (sound familiar?), and home entertainment components were still pretty crude devices when it came to interactivity: there was no nice way to have the components operate with more than one remote reliably, devices didn't understand what they were connected to, and multi-zone systems were in the stratosphere of the very rich - or at least the well to do - and even then those systems required intervention from a CEDIA installation expert if you wanted to be audacious and add a new DVD player.

However, things began to change pretty quickly at this point. Components began to catch a clue as to what was on the other end of previously-dead wires, remotes began to work and play well with others (although, that is still lagging and will never be completely solved until most components have an IP hook), and a old standard for displays called Extended Display Identification Data, or EDID, began to be taken seriously by not only display manufacturers, but systems connected to displays.

The idea behind EDID is a simple, yet powerful, concept immediately familiar to computer engineers. It's a simple handshake protocol that allows one device to ask if anyone is at the other end of a wire, and get an acknowledgement. Well-behaved EDID compatible displays not only say "yes, I'm here," but identify themselves in gory detail. Again, this is a familiar concept to anyone that's ever done client-server application work, but to the consumer electronics companies this was a magical, mystical idea. (Device acknowledgements and uni-directional, stateless remotes singlehanded kept home theater components in the realm of wizards for decades. I have my own theories about this almost willful ignorance which revolve around OEM A not wanting to play nice with OEM B via a standards committee so the consumer would be compelled to by exclusively from the same OEM for all of his/her components. Too cynical?)

In the blog posts involving my move from XP Media Center to Vista Media Center, I explicitly call out my first encounter with EDID. I had a first generation Sony plasma TV that was connected to my Vista Media Center through a direct DVI connection. The first gen Sony and the new Vista had an EDID communication problem. You can read about in that blog post if you're interested, but the short story is: the Sony plasma did not implement EDID standards correctly, and would not identify itself again to the Media Center once the plasma was put in standby and then revived. It would send the "I am going into standby signal," but never told the Media Center it was awake when it was brought back from standby. The end result was that the Media Center thought the TV was off, so never sent a video signal. (The only solution at the time was a hardware one. I bought a device from Gefen for $60 that stored the EDID from the plasma when it was first turned on, and then continually presented that EDID to the Media Center so it never realized the plasma was in standby. Idiotic, but simple.)

Flash forward to a later in 2007 - I started a company in LA, and moved myself from the east coast to the west coast. In the process, I bought a new plasma (a Pioneer Elite 60") and a new A/V Receiver, a Sony 5200ES which not only did video switching, but converted lower resolution, non-digital sources to 1080p output. It was cool, and it worked really quite well...until it didn't... read on...

Over the course of the next few years, I upgraded Vista Media Center to Windows 7 Media Center - the improvements were as dramatic as moving from XP MC to Vista MC. 7MC really is currently the best way to record, store, search, and broadcast video from many discrete sources around the house. Put a 7MC server somewhere, load it up with cable cards, place XBox 360s around the house and you've got yourself multizone, HD video. It can be done on the "cheap," with the highest pricetag going to a nice 7MC server with 1-2TB of drive space. I repurposed an old Sony VAIO desktop - this one here, actually - with a better graphic card (an ATI 5600HD) to push a true 1080p monitor, 2TB of RAID0, and a couple of cable card adapters. I put 7MC on it, and never looked back.

It's long about now that I started to notice some ghosts in the machine. I use the video switching on the AV Receiver a lot - I began to notice that when I would move between devices of different screen resolutions, the 7MC would try to hold the resolution of the previous device. (For instance, dropping the screen resolution to 480p and leaving it there.) More annoyingly, when I would bring the entire system out of hibernate, the Pioneer plasma would stay black. It didn't take long for me to realize that the problem was, again, with EDID identification. It took me a little longer to realize that the problem was, again, with another Sony component: the 5200ES A/V Receiver.

The receiver, it turns out, was replacing the EDID from the Pioneer with one of its own. In other words, it wasn't allowing an EDID passthrough, it was identifying itself to the 7MC as a Sony A/V Receiver. This was causing dozens of unwanted side-effects inside the Media Center. The problem didn't materialize in Vista Media Center because of VMC's caching of the EDID. 7MC does not cache the EDID (which is "correct" behavior) - so it was getting a new EDID every time a component switched on, and the identity was coming from the receiver rather than the display.

Because I didn't want to replace the receiver, for about a year my solution to the problem was: anytime the Pioneer never turned on properly, I would get up, walk over to the receiver, unplug it, wait 2 minutes until it reset itself, and plug it back in...

...12 months was enough. Two things snapped in my head:

another expensive purchase seemed worth it to counteract a lifetime of unplugging a receiver
I was no longer a Sony fanboy

Normally, my first impulse would be to search for another Sony component, but after disappointment after disappointment with Sony gear (both home entertainment and computer), I just couldn't re-invest. So, I began a search into non-Sony waters to find an A/V Receiver that:

had the most recent rev of EDID
the most recent rev of HDMI
handled video switching of a wide variety of components
was internet upgradable
uprez capabilities
excellent sound reproduction/separation
excellent video output
on screen controls

This lead me to a couple of choices: the Onkyo TX-NR808 and the Denon ACR-3311CI. The price points and feature sets were pretty identical, and the reviews were about neck and neck. I am a fortunate man, in that I now work with both Robert Heron and Patrick Norton, of HD Nation fame. After some quick email back and forths, and bugging them both at their desks, Denon quickly rose to the top. (Both Robert and Patrick both claimed the sounds were a bit warmer with the Denon.)

The unit came quickly, and now the weekend I dreaded: pulling out the old Sony 5200ES and putting the Denon in it's place. It sounds easy, until you consider the rats nest of cables I had to deal with, plus the reprogramming of my Logitech Harmony 900 remote. (As an aside: really a great remote. The RF-to-IR functionality cannot be understated.) The components going into the new receiver? The 7MC, of course, plus a PS3, XBox 360, Roku, and Sonos. This still left me with enough space for expansion - so I can begin to play with some of the other 10' experience boxes out there.

Turning the Sony on for the last time, I wanted to make sure that the 7MC was "inert," and not recording anything important. (I also ran the check on all my other components.)

After turning it all off, the Sony went into a box and into the ever growing "I need to eBay this crap" pile in the basement. (Home to another Sony receiver, an old Shuttle computer, a TERC HD roof-mount antenna, old car stereo equipment, some pretty great floor-standing Infinity speakers and a dozen laptops of dubious variety. Yeah. eBay. Next weekend.)

Flipping the cabinet around revealed the Thing I Hate Most in the World: stereo wiring. It took a few hours of getting it under control, but once I did I was able to pull out the Sony and slide in the Denon. A little cable management and I now have a new back end to the A/V center.... ok, fine, not that much better....but better. (You can see photos of all the steps on my Flickr stream, if you're up for it. Excuse the dog, she was just curious.)

Bringing the system back up, I ran the setup for the sound field, and then put the system through its paces. The EDID problem was gone. The system operates as it was intended, moving easily from input source to input source, properly switching from unit to unit.

So, is EDID your friend? Now, yes. Device identification is one of the two keys required for all of these systems to interoperate properly - and the display component is probably the trickiest problem to solve. At the beginning of 2011, most new components now handshake correctly using EDID - but if you are wrestling with older components that were once "cutting edge" in this arena, you may run into some of the difficulties I've had plaguing me for a while. (HDMI 1.4a, which supports 3D output, is today's version of "cutting edge," so expect your components to act oddly for the next few years while that standard shakes itself out.)

Best of luck with all of this, and drop me a line to let me know how dark your particular entertainment hell is...

Die Me, Dichotomy

2010-06-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

"We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business"

- Steve Jobs, Spring 2010

There are about 2 gwuad-zillion blog postings and articles out there highlighting the differences between the iPhone 4 (and iOS 4), and Android 2.x - and you know what? This isn't going to be one of them.

What I do want to talk about, however, is the above quote by Jobs during an all-hands meeting this past spring. Reality is what Jobs spins it to be, but the essence of what he said is largely (not mostly) true: Google, the search behemoth, and Apple, the restyled consumer device and services company began life in two extremely different places. Yet, here they are a decade and some-spare-change later competing head to head in the mobile arena. How, and more importantly, why did that happen?

There's an interesting slide that Jobs keeps displaying during his keynotes - one that no one pays attention to unless he calls it out, as he did at this week's iphone-a-palooza. Its a simple street sign meant to imply that Apple is on the corner of technology and liberal arts. Jobs likes to spin a tale about Apple being this magical place that brings these two worlds in alignment. In reality, however, that story could be told about Google (technology) and Apple (liberal arts) being dead center at that intersection. Stretching the analogy to the breaking point, I'd throw in two cars headed towards a collision at the intersection: one piloted by an android, the other by an apple.

Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 while they were at Stanford on the PhD track. It was pure platform play from a couple of hard core computer scientists. "This World Wide Web thing seems to be taking off," they reasoned, "and all the ways to find content on it really blow." (Hey! They were looking directly at you, Alta Vista.) So, they figured out a new way to do it, one which involved web crawlers and indexers and taxonomy engines and warehouses full of servers. They slapped a simple front door on it, misspelled the word "Googol," and the rest - as they say - is history.

The important take away here is that Google, from start to finish, was a research project born from the PhD thesis material of a couple of hard core computer scientists. They focused on ideas as numbers - the world as a large, three-dimensional grid of information that could be searched, indexed and sorted at bizarrely fast speeds. For the first time in human history, it became physically possible to categorize, classify and search literally everything representing the human condition. As long as there was a way to digitize it, Google could organize it.

To Google, the world is The Matrix.

Along the way, Brin and Page realized that they had a perfect way to generate revenue: the digital version of targeted advertising. Caching the entire internet in memory was gonna be pricy, but if they could sell search trends and results back to advertisers, they might be able to keep this thing going. It worked, and the company became one of the most profitable on the planet, able to afford multiple research-projects-to-nowhere, and perform mind-boggling "busy work" tasks, such as photographing every single square foot of street space in the world, just so they could turn the physical into bits.

Jobs, Wozniak and Wayne (the missing Beatle) founded Apple in '76, and their story was a very different one from the Google boys. As the legend goes, Wozniak, an engineering student who never finished college, hand-constructed a wood-wrapped computer to present at the Homebrew Computer Club, a computer hobby club in the Silicon Valley area that functioned as sort of a Lifehacker.com of the pre-internet, swingin' 70's. Jobs, a Reed College student, saw the potential, as he always does, and they incorporated and sold the first Apple computer (the Apple I) in 1976.

Now, I say this not as a denigration, but as a point of discussion: neither Wozniak nor Jobs finished college. When asked if he dropped out, Wozniak's response was a very odd "Not exactly." Jobs, on the other hand, is a self-professed dropout (in fact, I think he only attended a semester or two, and lists "calligraphy" as an example course that set him thinking about typography) - and, in true Jobsian style in a 2009 Stanford graduation ceremony speech goes on to market his "dropping out, and then dropping back in" as having a positive effect on his life.

Jobs brand of esthetics, innate marketing savvy and forceful personality created a computer company that capitalized on societal lifestyle choices. Through 30 years of iterative refinement, Jobs (and, it was almost entirely Jobs) drove the company's business and technical development via trial and error, measuring people's responses to products at different points in time. It was almost as though the man who never finished (or even really started) college, was able to predict (some say define) societal zeitgeist. He literally gave people what they never knew they wanted, and in return they consumed.

To Apple, the world is What Dreams May Come.

Initially, Apple computers focused on home hobby enthusiasts and gamers, but when the machines moved into the design and print publishing realm, utilizing designer's sensibilities and catering specifically to the needs of publishers things began to change. People didn't just like Apple computers as tools, they began to classify them as necessary objects. Machines that somehow "got" the essence of them as people and problems they faced in their work and lives, and through that understanding the computer company's adherents became almost fetishistic in their desire for all things Apple.

Google and Apple moved forward.

Google slowly became an information juggernaut fueled by an endless stream of advertising revenue. Fear of Google's knowledge about our every purchase, every web click, every move in the physical world was trumped by the public's craving for information about anything, anywhere. It was an uneasy truce with the devil: give them your innermost secrets, and you can find anything your heart desires.

Apple iteratively, and precariously (it famously almost went out of business), climbed its way past Microsoft's market cap. Amusement at Apple's lack of realistically playing in the grown-up world of spreadsheets and word processors gave way to the ease and grace at which its software and devices charmed the populace. People were vaguely aware that as Apple moved deeper and deeper into consumer electronics its ecosystem was slowly becoming a walled garden, but it didn't seem to matter. If they all vowed to never leave Apple, it doesn't really matter if the walls go up. Apple became the epitome of living in a gilded cage.

...and so, here we are. Two companies who, due to their contrasts, would seem to be perfectly positioned more as comrades than foes, yet now stand face-to-face on the current field of battle: your pocket. How did the emergence of the new media marketplace (your mobile phone) become the site of a war that will make the Apple/Microsoft skirmish seem like frivolous playground politics?

Jobs didn't often find himself on the defensive prior to 2010, but when the Android quarterly sales number zoomed by the iPhone's in Q1 of 2010, that's exactly where he found himself. When he made the now famous "We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business," statement in response, it must have sounded alien to Google.

From Google's point of view, you see, they did not enter the phone business - they merely extended their search business. This was not about competing with Apple in the consumer marketplace, this was about adding an additional query tool to their bag of tricks. This time, however, its a physical device, not a query field in a web browser. Google did not enter the phone business, they simply provided a mechanism for users to provide Google with more information about themselves.

Likewise, Apple really didn't enter the search business. What they did do, however, was enter the advertising business using these same little devices in everyone's pocket. Through these mobile devices, Apple knows what its users want, what its users do, what its users feel, really... all without resorting to search. They are able to know all these things because their users willingly tell them. They tell them with their dollars and their application downloads. Apple didn't need a search engine, they needed another "thing" that they could present to the faithful and the soon-to-be-converted. Something shiny and pretty that the loyal would offer up their inner most desires to possess in order to remain part of the group.

Mobile phones have evolved to be statements of who we are as an individual. A mobile phone is an incredibly intimate device (insert your favorite sex toy joke here, please), more so than your television set or your laptop. You would allow your friend or family member to use your laptop to check email, but chances are you think twice before turning your phone over to someone. It has your music, your pictures, your memories, your conversations. Your phone is your inward self reflected outward.

They are also your tools - you need them to work. Calls cannot drop. Text messages need to go through. When you want information, you need the immediacy of action. The mobile web cannot pause, you don't have time for it to buffer. The applications on the phone need to tell you things before you know you need the information. Display it. Process it. Search it. Tell it to me. Do that for me now, because in 10 seconds I don't need it anymore.

This is the dichotomy of the mobile industry, perfectly represented by two companies that started in the last century doing very different things and solving very different problems. They were created by very different sets of people, one by a couple of Stanford eggheads looking to change how the world understands its information, and the other by a couple of college dropouts looking to change how society communicates with its technology.

To sum all this up another way:

Google users ask questions of Their Oracle.

Apple users share their desires with Their Creator.

These two world-views which meet so sharply to define their mobile environments and devices is perfectly captured in the ad campaigns for both products - both of which are worth watching, even if you've seen them before.

This 'droid ad is from Verizon, of course, but Google approved:

From Apple, ad-as-documentary:

...as in "Oh God. Oh God. We're All Gonna Die."

2010-05-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, then... while all of us were worried about the LHC and whether or not iPad would have a porn app, we inched that much closer to that lovely Terminator-eque future. A charming, grey, lovely place where none of us have to worry about taxes, political differences, or racial tensions because we are all grabbing the kids and running from the little brothers of Big Dog

Sheesh... at least it's just Terminators we have to worry about, not Cylons....

Ahhh, crap! Seriously?!

Finding a Stellar Grandpapa

2010-03-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

On March 3rd, Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, issued a press release that her team had discovered a really old star. Really old. Dawn-of-time old. While not earth shattering to those of us living in the twitter-timezone, Ms. Frebel's team completed a missing piece of a cosmological puzzle that's been plaguing astronomers and cosmologists since before I was in grad school: where the hell are the old stars? It's been a bit of an embarrassment, really, but before we go there I just want to explain the backstory, silly bookkeeping, and why this discovery is so important.

For the past several decades, astronomers and cosmologist have based the operating assumption of the physical universe on a few principles:

The Universe started from a singularity in a massive explosion, commonly referred to as "the Big Bang." For many years there was a competing theory called "steady state," which said that the Universe always was and always will be, but the mountain of evidence to the contrary has basically shouted that viewpoint down. Steady State was poetic, and vaguely religious, but wasn't consistent with observed facts.
After the Big Bang, the Universe went through a rapid evolutionary process during its first 3 minutes of existence, in which the literal framework of the Universe was established: all of its physical dimensionality, physics constructs, the flow of time, energy distribution... oh yeah, it was quite a party time.

OK, over simplified, but that's the basic gist of it - everything flows from here. After those first few minutes, everything else began to shake out, including primitive stars. In the beginning of the Universe, you see, there weren't a hell of a lot of building materials. Well, really just hydrogen and a little helium. So, stars that arose from that first boom, were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium (with a smattering of the early metals: lithium and beryllium, but such trace amounts that it only counts when dealing with really off-the-beaten-path cosmology issues).

After they lived a few billion years (call it 13B) and burned themselves out, they exploded and sprayed crap all over the bran', spankin' new Universe. They were the frat boys of the universe, beer bottles everywhere the morning after the party. And, by "beer bottles" I mean "heavier elements." Helium, nitrogen... but more importantly: the beginning of the metals...well, "metaloids," actually. Check the periodic table, you'll see them there on the right.

OK, now the fun starts - when these bad boys pop, the crap they spill out is pretty much everything else you see around you: oxygen, iron, heavy metals, the gold in your teeth.... all the rest of the elements. Essentially, the now.

The weird bookkeeping comes into play when you consider how cosmologists categorized these three groups of stars: essentially, in the order of observation. The sun, and all the stars you see when you look up on a cold night are called "Population I" stars. See? They were seen first...

...the second group? The bad boys above that exploded and filled the skies with all the current stuff? They are "Population II," cuz they were found next. Get it?

And the last group....well, yeah, "Population III" stars. When were they observed? They weren't ever observed. Not directly anyway. They are long gone corpses, dried up cinders of their former selves.

(As an aside: I call the bookkeeping "weird" because it never made intuitive sense to me. The first stars should be Pop I's, in my opinion, but that's just me.)

OK, back to Miss Anna at the CfA, and the missing link she just found. If you were following my stream-of-consciousness explanation above, you get the drift that modern stars arose from the ashes of older stars. Similarly, the formation of galaxies (collections of stars bound together by common gravity) such as our own Milky Way underwent their own evolution. Outside the Milky Way galaxy, and other big spiral galactic formations which contain 10's of millions of stars, are these weenie little malformed galaxies called Dwarf Galaxies. (I know, not Politically Correct, but "Little People Galaxies" didn't quite flow off the tongue.)

Dwarf Galaxies have a few 10's of 1000's of stars at best. You see, in the Population II era, there just weren't a lot of stars yet, so not too many buddies to gang together with... so, the Pop II's did the best they could... hung out together, went to the movies, and watched why all the big galaxies made fun of them. Eventually, some of the Dwarfs hung around to the modern age, because when their Pop II contents exploded, they made some new Pop III friends to hang with. A lot of these bigger, heavier stars were ejected, and they banded together to form the larger spirals.

It wasn't an even distribution, of course, because life isn't like that. Some Dwarf's had Pop III stars in them, and some Spirals had Pop II's. But, as time passed, the distribution of old versus new stars began to change - heavily weighted to the newer Pop IIIs. If you look in our own galaxy, near the center usually, you'll find the Pop II's sitting in their stellar old age retirement communities, taking Viagra and trying to be interested in the television.

And in the remaining Dwarf Galaxies? The ones older than our Milky Way? They should be chock-a-block full of Pop II's, right? Right? Yeah...uh...oops. There's the embarrassment. None. Nada.

Enter Anna and her team - 290,000 light years away, in the Dwarf Galaxy of Sculptor - which, I know, sounds like a Farscape villian - lies Lores: the first metal-poor (Pop II) star found in a Dwarf Galaxy.

Whew. The difficulty in finding a Dwarf Galaxy Pop II makes sense - a Dwarf has fewer stars, remember, so therefore a higher probability that most, if not all, of the Pop II's would have been swapped out for Pop IIIs.... still, it made everyone nervous that no one ever found one before. It called into question the theory of stellar evolution.

But, fortunately, Ms Frebel found Lores: Old, decrepit, and pinching the nurses asses at the nursing home. The Universe is as it should be.

Respect your elders, kids.

Side note: I don't want to leave you thinking that this story is as simple as I describe. Observing Pop II and Pop I stars becomes confusing and interesting the further you look from earth. Taking the speed of light into account means that the farther you look from us, the farther back in time you can see - and the harder it becomes to register and understand the light (diffusion, red-shifting, and other interesting artifacts come into play.). Pop II and even Pop I stars have been observed in abundance by using this lens back into the past. The issues with finding Pop II's in Dwarf galaxies arise when looking at Dwarf galaxies near us, so they are in the same relative "time frame" as we are here on earth.

Also, I'm hoping that the press release from Frebel's team misquoted her. She almost certainly did not say that Lores was as old as the Universe, since that would make it a Pop I star, but she probably said it was as old as the Milky Way galaxy, which would make more sense.

There, I think that does it...

...well, unless you start talking about Multiverses.....eh, next time.

Another Timelapse of the Milky Way...this time over Mauna Kea

2010-03-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

I posted one of these before last year, taken by an amateur at a Texas star party. This one was taken at the optical observatories at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and is far more "produced." It is, however, no less stunning.

It's a great way to end the week - enjoy.

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

The New(?) Microsoft Give Us a Three-Way Horserace

2010-02-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

For the last few months, my personal party-line has been that the cell phone OS wars are over: it's now iPhone and Android phones, with all other OS'es (BREW, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc) playing the role of Dead Man Walking.

I had heard of the "Zune Phone," of course, as well as "Project Pink," "Windows Mobile 7" and a dozen other working names out of Redmond. However, like everyone else, I had made the mistake of counting Microsoft out of the game. They're old. They're slow. They have crappy marketing. Everyone hates Windows Mobile. (I mean, a stylus? Seriously? Who uses that?)

That was stupid not only on my part, but on all the Apple Faithful out there who have been taking joy at the iPhone's trouncing of the mobile market. I don't blame them, I blame myself. I'm 900 years old, you would think I would have learned by now: Microsoft iterates towards a goal line. They take the criticism, the market hostility. And they wait and they watch and they learn. That's what they do. That's what they have always done.

They watched Atari and Commodore, and they built MS-DOS (tricking the Great IBM into both paying them to write the OS and allowing the proto-MS to keep it for themselves). They watched Apple and Atari and Commodore create GUIs as a new interface paradigm, and they slowly iterated their way into it with the horrible Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.1 (all of which were just interfaces on top of MS-DOS), while the world laughed. Then Windows 95 showed up, and people stopped laughing. They watched as Sony and Nintendo duked it out with console game stations, and then they showed up with the XBox. What does Microsoft know about gaming and hardware? Apparently, a tremendous amount.

What's happening now is a renaissance for the company - again. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs (who is both a physical embodiment of the apparently hip, new crowd occupying One Microsoft Way, and representative of the "new thinking" going on there) garnered a standing ovation at the TED conference last week when he demo'ed the new Bing-based augmented reality maps. In the space of 15 minutes, Google Maps seemed old, stale and decidedly MapQuest-ish. This bears repeating: a hip, handsome, charismatic, non-nerdish, young Microsoft architect was given a standing ovation.

And then, back to my main focus here, there was this little ditty from the Barcelona World Mobile Congress: Windows Phone 7. The Zune phone. Project Pink. The thing that had been the behind-the-back snickering at every mobile gathering I've been at for the last 2 years. There it was...and it was...

...not damned by faint praise in the press.
...not thrown out for ridicule.
...not considered to be "too little, too late"
...not requiring you to use a stylus

It is, by all videos and hands-on experiences and advanced reviews I can get my hands on, gorgeous. Intuitive. Fast. Easy. And, here's the kicker: undeniably hip. Hip? From Balmer's Boys? Really?

OK, so the remnants of Microsoft of the last decade are there: "Windows Phone 7"? Seriously? Wake the eff up, Microsoft Marketing. Hire someone who didn't come from the enterprise software marketing world to name your software products. Hell, just walk down the hall to the hardware guys who named XBox, XBox 360, XBox Live, Zune... they could have called the Zune "Windows Media Portability 1.3," but they didn't. The world does not respond to the formulaic:

(Company Name) (Product Category) (Revision Number)

It's effing bullshit, we hate it, and its killing your reputation. Just stop it!

Lame-ass marketing aside, everything about this combination of redesigned phone OS (Microsoft is wisely killing off the prior versions of WinMo OS'es, and starting fresh here - bad news for the developers, great news for everyone else in the world) plus strict OEM guidelines for phone construction screams that there's something new going on in Redmond.

Comparing this phone to it's competition, it has also taken a completely different approach to its architectural philosophy: where the iPhone and android are application driven architectures, the Windows Phone 7 (dammit! OK, let me try "WP7" and see if that's easier) is data driven. It's not a new philosophy, it's actually quite old - going back to the 70's. The idea surfaced a few times in a couple of consumer products, most notably the original Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton, the latter of which dubbed this architectural concept as data soup.

As opposed to an application driven architecture, which relies on file transfers, data pipes and object passing at the OS level, and "copy and paste" exposed at the user interface level to move information from application to application, information on data-centric operating systems lives together, with all applications sharing the same underlying "like" data structures.

How this manifests itself to the user is the most beneficial on portable devices where the user is often in a crowded environment, or harried. Rather than opening up a contacts entry and then locating a person's twitter name, Last.FM neighborhood and phone number, the workflow on a data-centric device is more fluid. You may be listening to streaming music in the Zune marketplace on the WP7 device, and notice that a friend who likes the same music is online at XBox Live and so you tweet her about her gaming choice. It's all together, live and connected all the time.

This sort of user workflow isn't for everyone, and some people will not want to adapt to it - but the point here is that it truly breaks the paradigm that we are all used to. Actually, the paradigm that we have been taught (by Apple, Google, Nokia and others) is the way it has to be: that there is an app for that. It's new, it's different, it is often more intuitive to a handheld device - and, most impressively, it comes from stodgy old Microsoft.

So, I'm changing my personal party-line sightly: the mobile OS wars are over, but now it's a three-way race: iPhone, Android and WP7...uh, WM7....uh, Windows Phone Mobi....Jesus...and that phone from Microsoft.

UPDATE: March 4, 2010. Sigh, bamboozled again. OK, this little piece of data doesn't obviate my contention that Windows Phone 7 makes it a three-way horse race, but it does kinda crap all over my assertion that Redmond has it together. I had assumed that when WP7 comes out, that all other phone projects from MS were sent to the land of misfit toys. Not so if today's post from Gizmodo is true: Confirmed: Project Pink Lives. Steve, Steve, Steve (no, not THAT Steve, the OTHER Steve)...what are you guys doing? Combine Pink and WP7 or whack one of them - when has marketplace confusion ever worked?

Hey - 2, Maybe 3 Years Late is Better than Nothing

2010-02-15T17:17:00.000-08:00

Back in 2008, and again in 2009, I was all hot and bothered by the potential for OLED and MEMS display technologies for both roll-up color displays and low power color eReaders. Well, both years didn't pan out, and so - like a bad gambler - I took my chips off the table for this year's predictions.

Well, great. The rollup, flexible displays aren't to market yet, but the Qualcomm MEMS tech looks poised to make it to market this year. Watch as Qualcomm's marketing director, Cheryl Goodman laughs at me not sticking it out with a prediction:

Read more about this coolness at the LA Times.

Tales of the Sync Demon: Getting Android, PCs and Macs to Give It Up

2010-02-09T00:59:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, your life is an amalgam of mobile devices, laptops, operating systems, and "clouds" (or whatever the effing buzz word is today). You've also got a job - maybe two - and a personal life - or, maybe not. (Sorry man...but you know who you are.) You aren't on your phone 100% of the time, and you aren't on your Mac or PC 100% of the time - yet you want your information on all devices.

My world consists of androids, iphones, macs, PCs and ubuntu boxes - so this conversation is confined to those worlds. It's the flip-side to the closed ecosystem argument: dictatorships make the trains run on time, but openness requires diplomacy. However, since Apple, Microsoft and Google hate each other with the passion of 1000 white hot burning suns, diplomacy isn't the easiest thing to come by...

So, after an evening of experimentation at the expense of my sanity, here's the deal for reliable sync'ing between google apps, exchange, android, and exchange clients for BOTH the PC and the Mac. (I've left the iPhone and Windows Mobile out of this conversation since once your PC or Mac is sync'ed as described below, the iPhone and WinMo devices will just work properly. I left Blackberry's out of this conversation because, well, what the hell are you doing with a blackberry?)

So, boiling it down to just android, macs and PCs, here's what you want:

...to be able to use the native applications on the Android phone to interact with exchange for work, and google apps for personal work, and have all information available to all client applications - yet remain separated.
...everything to happen in the background and over the air (OTA)
...all three platforms (Android, PC and Mac) to sync within a reasonable time.

And, here's the problems with just setting things up using OEM supplied applications:

...exchange sync for Android only works reliably for email, not for contacts. There is no calendar exchange sync for the Nexus yet (although there is for the Droid, since Motorola modded the exchange sync app)
...other Android sync solutions (such as Touchdown) replace the email, calendar and contact apps on the handset, which blows enormous chunks
...Google Apps to Exchange server direct sync'ers require additional software on the server side, and since most people have IT organizations who will laugh at you if you suggest modifying their exchange servers, you probably don't have that as an option.

Here's the solution methodology I decided to employ (yes, I said "solution methodology"):

The idea here is to have Google Apps, NOT exchange, be the propagation root for calendar and contact information, while email is harvested directly from the exchange server. This way, the Android phone is NOT the source of the sync - which is desirable. However, since we do not control our own exchange servers, the calendar and contact sync is reliant on the PC and Mac client applications. This means that the syncs can only happen when either the PC, Mac or both are on and connected to the internet. However, in practice, you'll see this isn't such a big deal.

If you are using, say, a PC with Outlook when a meeting request comes through and you respond, the PC will sync with Google calendar immediately and it will appear on your phone. If your PC is off, and you are just using your phone and a meeting request comes through, it will arrive as email on your phone's email client. You will accept the meeting and it will be placed immediately into your phone's calendar client, and therefore into your Google calendar. It will not sync to your PC (and back to exchange) until your turn your PC on, but who cares? The only downside here is that no one else will be able to see you have a meeting at the time you accepted until your PC is turned back on. (The same scenario I just described works for the Mac as well.)

What you need on each platform:

On the PC:

microsoft exchange (available for $1B from http://www.microsoft.com/)
gsyncit ($15 at http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/) *

On the Mac:

iCal, Address Book, Mail.app (I could not find apps that worked for Entourage or the far superior Thunderbird)
SpanningSync * ($25 at http://spanningsync.com/)

On the Android:

Exchange for Android (for reliable exchange mail) - It is important for offline calendar sync'ing that you use Exchange for Android and not IMAP for your email if you want to have the email-calendar interaction

* both gsyncit and spanningsync allow for sync'ing to specific google calendars and contact groups, allowing you to keep work and play separate.

To set everything up:
On the Android:

install Exchange for Android. This comes with Android 2.0 and above, and is available at Android Market for free for Android 1.5 and 1.6
set up Exchange for Android to point to your exchange server

On Google Apps:

Optional: Separate your calendar and your contacts into separate work and home groups

On the PC:

Install Outlook
Install gsyncit
Optional: have different outlook calendars and contact groups pointing to the correct corresponding calendars and contact groups on google apps

On the Mac:

activate iCal, Address Book, and Mail.app
install SpanningSync
optional: have different outlook calendars and contact groups pointing to the correct corresponding calendars and contact groups on Google apps

...and that, as they say, is that.

Now your phone, google apps online, your PC and your Mac will all be in sync within a delta measured in minutes. (If one or the other of your laptops is off, the delta is measured in the time it takes you to turn on your laptop(s).) If you also use an iPhone or WinMo phone, just set them up normally, and everything should work just fine.

Also, please be careful: a change in one object (say a contact) will quickly propagate through everything you do. You can seriously whack out your information.... Outlook is the easiest to back up, of course, since you just copy the OST or PST file around. However, until you are comfortable that everything is working well, you should engage the sync's one at a time until you are convinced they will do what you need them to do.

Anyway - that oughta do it. When Google fixes their exchange sync application for android, we'll all be able to turn off the 3rd party sync'ers (Actually, I'll leave gsynchit running, since one of its unintended consequences is to back up my personal contact info and calendars.)

This has been a public service announcement from your friendly IT department.

My Humblest Apologies for a Few Bad Apples...

2010-01-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post about Rocket Upkeep.

When I started this blog 3 years ago, I wanted to keep it very open. Anyone could comment on here, no requirement to log in or register, no moderation.

Unfortunately, over the past few months I've had to do quite a bit of comment deletion to remove SPAM postings. (Apparently, my posts attract the "how would you like to make zillions in foreign markets?" crowd.) So, as of today, I'm moving to a CAPTCHA method of verifying comment posting authenticity. Still no need for registering, still no moderation.

I'll leave the CAPTCHA in place for a few months, but if that doesn't do it, I'll have to put in a registration policy. Apologies for the extra inconvenience folks.

...I now return you to your regular scheduled tech rants.

The Macbook Air, Mark II....er, the iPad

2010-01-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

OK, disclaimer: I have not seen this in person, I have not held one, I have not used one in any sort of fashion. This is a first impression from the specifications and cost factor only, and I am going to try to not be influenced by Apple media hype or naysayer responses.

So, like everyone else in the gadget-sphere, I was watching the various feeds this morning (ironically on an Android phone) when the Jobster was out in front of the cameras, fondling the latest Apple fetish device: the unfortunately named iPad. (The NYTime's "leaked" device name of iSlate was so much cooler.) When The Steve was finished, I was immediately struck by two impressions:

This is exactly what we all thought it was going to be...
This is nothing like what we all thought it was going to be...

Ultimately, the iPad is on a slider somewhere between an iPhone and a Macbook Air, with some of the capabilities of both, and a lot missing from each.

The Good

This is, like all Apple products, a pretty device. It's a perfect size for slipping into a brief case or leave on the kitchen table, and it looks as though it rests comfortably in your hand/lap when browsing the web. The optional 3G radio will increase its usability in the field (well, except for the whole AT&T thing again), allowing me to get Wired Online wherever I'd happen to be sitting.

It also seems to be fast - the live demos and marketing spiels showed this thing zipping through files, photos and film (you like my alliteration techniques, don't'cha?) like a device should behave. Time will tell if it bogs down as you start to fill it up with apps and images, but we'll give the speed points to it now.

The user interface experience has that Apple magic to it: the company has more than learned a few lessons from the iPhone, iPod Touch and the new Macbook multitouch trackpads. All of the gestures and motions look completely intuitive, now that we've been trained by 3 years of iPhoneage.

The always-on nowness of it is perfect... being able to pick it to check movie times and order tickets as you're dashing out the door is excellent.

The Bad

There was a lot of build up to the iPad in the days leading up to this morning's announcement, some of it was justified (Apple getting into the tablet business), but some of it was misleading. The Apple invite ads (like the one to the right here) don't actually say what the device is about, but they imply a lot.

People and analysts have been reading into these Apple invitations for a long time, and for the most part the invitations have given a clear indication as to what was coming - so it was inevitable that the same logic would be applied to this multi-hued beauty above. The unspoken message is: We hear you artists, thanks for being our champions through the years, here's something for you now...

...except, of course, that's not what the iPad was about. There's no stylus for drawing, no iPaint specifically designed for the iPad (at least none that I've read about), no iMovie for the iPad...nothing specific to the creative artist at all. The iPad is designed for the consumer of art, not the creator of art. You can flip through photos, view the web, watch videos and listen to music. Yet, bizarrely, it lacks the simple inclusion of a $10 pen stylus and enhanced iPaint applications would have gone a long way to making the invitation fit the device - not to mention cemented "Apple" with "Creative Freedom" in the minds of the digerati for another generation.

Instead what we are left with is either a large iPhone, or a keyboardless Macbook Air - and strangely, it has left out some of the best features of both. What it borrowed from the iPhone (overall looks, applications, slick UIX), it left out in functionality: no voice or communications at all? A simple webcam and a relationship with Skype would have been all people wanted.

And from the Macbook Air? It's got the thin and light thing going on, plus the integration with all your Apple products at home - but doesn't have a keyboard, seems significantly more fragile, and 64G (the maximum memory) would get chewed up by even the most casual business user in about a day.

The other thing it doesn't have from the Macbook Air? It's operating system. The iPad is based off the same OS X derivation that the iPhone is based off of - which means: no multitasking. How's that supposed to work if this is a slip-in replacement for a Macbook Air?

How about reading a book? The new iPad bookstore looks sweet. Yes, it does, but people are forgetting the main purpose behind eInk: eyestrain. eInk, as I've written about before, is all about mimicking paper reflectivity. It doesn't generate eyestrain. Staring at a screen (even a pretty OLED screen) does. OLED is awesome for magazines, less so for Moby Dick.

But, let's swallow that one and say I'm wrong. Let's say that the iPad is perfect for reading Moby Dick, then what Apple is telling us is that you now need three products:

iPhone - for communications
MacBook Air or MacBook for laptop functionality
iPad for media consumption

Now my briefcase has less room when I travel then when I started?

Middle Ground?

Ok, so maybe the iPad is for the home. It's meant to be shared by families and friends as a kitchen or family room utility object for reading newspapers and magazine, controlling your home iTunes center, or ordering takeout food. That would be fine at CrunchPad prices, but what we have instead is this:

Wifi only models:

16 GB - $499
32 GB - $599
64 GB - $699

3G plus WiFi models:

16 GB - $629
32 GB - $729
64 GB - $829

And, since it's AT&T, you're looking at additional pricing. Apparently up to 250 MB for $14.99, or unlimited data for $29.99. Free use of AT&T hotspots.

So...how is all of that middle ground? Is the average family going to spend another $500-$800 on a device that allows you to consume media (as a single viewer consumer...well, two if you snuggle), surf the web (like that laptop you already own), or just "leave lying around" ready to order Fandango tickets?

I'll stick by my previous prediction: It will sell to the faithful, but not be a major hit for Apple or an influencer for a "new category" of devices. (Unless that category is Tablet Computer That Can't Quite Do Everything A Computer Can.)

Maybe I'll change my mind when I get one in my hands...but I kinda doubt it...

The Rocket 2010 (minus 3 Weeks) Predictions!

2010-01-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

Remember how all those other tech blogs were doing 2010 reports back in 2009? Remember how you were reading them in that awkward place between Christmas and New Years, when you had nothing else to do but see Avatar again? Ha! Plebes! Anyone can do a prediction list in the weeks before the year being predicted...but it takes a true prognosticator to peer into the future year while that year is actually underway!!

OK, fine. I'm late. This prediction list is late by three weeks. Whatever. At least now I have claim being right if I "predict" something that happened last week, right? No? Fine. Here we go...

Apple Tablet Lives, Receives Traditional Apple Fanboy Responses

Considering that the Apple event happens in, oh, 5 days now and that you'd have to be completely asleep at the switch to not realize there's a tablet just around the corner, all that remains is the prediction over the response to the unit. It's going to be priced in Apple dollars, that's for damn sure, so will people buy it? Undoubtedly yes. There's the Apple contingent who would buy anything and everything that Cupertino puts out, so the market success of the product will carry it through release #1. What remains to be seen here is whether this will be placed in the "iPhone" or "Apple TV" category of success.

The reality will be that it will appear somewhere in the middle. While portable consumer devices are an overwhelming success story for the company - and for technology at large - the success of Apple from a market acceptance point of view gets murkier as the devices become productivity tools. The Apple TV and Mac Air products were not a success by any real measure, and for all the hype around traditional Mac computers, they still can't seem to break into the double digits and stay there.

The success of the Apple Tablet will depend on a few points that none of us will be clear on for a few days: pricing (people are guessing in the upper $800's at the time of this writing), connectivity (AT&T? No thank you.), content (Apple does amazing things with content partner deals), usability (long their forte), and lifestyle niche. (How does this fit into the users current computer ecosystem?)

We'll know the full extent of the story after all the hullabaloo of the launch dies down and the numbers start to roll in - definitely by the end of Q2 - as to whether or not this thing is an iPhone or an Apple TV.... but for my money, it's going to be more like their Macbook line: popular among the cool kids (and so a money and PR generator for Apple), but too expensive for the mainstream to be considered "a hit."
T-Mobile Moves to the Second Place Spot Behind Verizon
Every year I shoot from the hip (and often hit my own foot in the process - thanks Yahoo!) on at least one prediction, and this one is it. Dissatisfaction over AT&T's service and arrogance has reached an all-time high, Verizon's at tack ads on the lackluster AT&T service are having a measurable impact, analysts have come out and said that they need to spend $5B just to reach par with their competition, and de la Vega has lo st his fraking mind by putting the "blame" for the networks woes on the cutting edge early adopters of AT&T technology. (The 10-point powerpoint slide presentation the charmless de la Vega gave as a "keynote" at CTIA back in October was mind-numbing in both its blindness to its future and in its stumping for why we need to charge for tiering.)

What does all this have to do with T-Mobile? Well, while de la Vega is out there blaming all of you iPhone users for breaking his network, T-Mobile has quietly built out the most stable 3G network outside of Verizon in less than 2 years, and is currently retrofitting its brand new infrastructure to support 4G (via LTE) and HSPA+. Combined with the continued rollout of Android handsets, better marketing, GSM reliance, and a still failing Sprint, it won't take long before frustrated subscribers jump ship.
eBooks Open Up
With the floodgates of eBook opened up (you should have seen the eBook section at CES 2010...companies I never heard of had some form of eBook reader), and the impending semi-thud of the Apple table showing up, eBook OEMs are going to have to stop their divvying up of content providers and open the doors to all comers.

Steps have started in this direction late last year: Although they provided support for the open EPUB format in 2008, Sony changed its primary distribution format from its proprietary Sony DRM format to exclusively use EPUB. This means that books I purchase on Sony's eReader store can now be used on any eBook that supports EPUB. Similarly, Amazon recently announced that it was cutting new deals with publishers, and allowing 3rd party developers to develop "apps" for the Kindle. (What a weird, lame, step sideways.)

All of this will culminate this year with the Kindle, Sony eReaders, Nook and other entrants to focus on selling hardware on its own merits, rather than locking readers into certain hardware based off of which book or periodical you want to buy.

Apple, of course, will continue to do its own thing and lock you into their ecosystem...and you'll just continue to buy into it, won't'ya? Sheesh.
3D Television Makes a Frightening Sound When It Expodes on Impact, Scares the Children

I just bitched about this in my CES 2010 review, but Jesus Christmas...seriously Sony / LG / Pioneer / Toshiba / DirectTV / etc? No one wants this. No one.

Sure, we all loved Avatar. I loved Avatar. The new TRON is going to be awe inspiring in 3D. It really will. But, good God, man...we all just spent a crapload of money on flatscreens in 2008, and you just convinced us to buy Lawrence of Arabia again on Blu-Ray. Do you think we're all gonna throw those out to buy $3000 3D monitors and new content in 2010 so we can, do what, watch the occasional effects movie or sporting event while wearing dork-vision spectacles? Do you seriously expect us to put those freakin' things on to watch Jay rape Conan?

I only hope that the amount of money you have put into R&D and rushing these things to production, as well as the money you are about to spend on marketing, doesn't lead us all into another recession as your rocket flames out at high altitude and slams into the pavement below at supersonic speeds.

Jeez, call me when you can do this 3D crap without the glasses, please. I'll be about ready to replace my flatscreen by then.
The New Cold War Begins

Google and Hillary Clinton on the same side of the fence. Oh, what wonders have we wrought?

Unless you have been living under a rock, or really absorbed in NBC late night politics, by now you've heard that...uh, China has allegedly been trying to hack gmail to get email from potential dissidents. This prompted a response from Google (ok, it was self-serving for a number of reasons, but still...a response) as well as the US state department. For it's response to all of this, spokespeople at the Chinese Foreign Ministry have issued a "bite me" statement, claiming that China has an "open internet" and the US should mind its own business if it doesn't want to harm Sino-American relations.

Part of the benefit of being 900 years old, is that I do have a bit o' a memory the last time this sort of talk was bandied about - all that's missing at this point is someone banging their shoe on a podium claiming that they will bury us.

China is huge, and becoming an economic superpower in a world where information can no longer be tightly controlled by nation-states. The United States is an economic superpower recovering from a huge blow to its populace and ego. The stage is set for a showdown that has happened before, and the results are often not pretty - patriotism takes a back seat to xenophobia, the good of the people takes a backseat to national principles. Global economic recovery in 2010 could be hurt by an internet-fueled cold war redux.

By the way, Ms Clinton? China? My gmail password is "WishIHadAProperGavel2." Just trying to save everybody some time.
Porn Goes the Way of Do-Do-Dildo

Jeez, I had lot I could have gone with for the header.

"Porn No Longer Thrusts Hard into Consumers"

...or...

"Porn Runs Out of Viagra, Millions Disappointed"

...or...

Alright, alright...I'll get to the point. CES shares its venue each year with the Adult Entertainment Expo. While not as large or throbbing (alright, alright...I'll stop) as CES, the AVN is an important event in the porn industry. Like every other industry, they spend a few days doling out awards, patting themselves on their backs, and discussing new tech and film potentials. The event is seriously hyped, and traditionally takes up a few floors of the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas.

While att endance was up over last year by 10%, mostly due to the low $10 admission price to get walk ins, the size of the venue was significantly reduced, taking up only a quarter of its space last year. In an excellent piece in the Daily Beast, Richard Abowitz discusses "Top 5 Reasons Porn-for-Profit is Dying." Among his arguments is, of course, file sharing - but more interestingly he holds the confluence of two interesting issues higher than piracy (or at least equal to piracy) for the rapid demise:

1) It's no longer taboo. The internet has demystified porn, and made it "acceptable" to a certain extent. (Parents, close your eyes for the next part.) It's no longer considered a big deal if your girlfriend lets it all hang out online, sometimes its even a matter of pride. (Oh sure, you'll never get a white collar job again, but why quibble?) The end result is the same effect you are seeing in online media vs traditional media: there's more free content out there, so why pay?

2) World of Warcraft. OK, not World of Warcraft specifically, but online gaming. Let's face it, the vast majority of porn-obsessed fans are the adolescent-to-20-something crowd who have a limited amount of time and money. It would appear that the discretionary dollars that used to go to "Nurse Nancy's Bedtime Videos" (I made that up, I swear!) now get converted to Linden Dollars to buy a virtual pair of jeans. It turns out when competing for dollars and time, porn loses.

Online pay-for porn killed the back-alley porn shops, and this new combination of pressures looks like it is doing the same to online pay-for-porn. Still a financial powerhouse, porn is no longer the 800-pound gorilla it once once. Rocket prediction: by Q4 of this year, online pay-for-porn will realize less than 25% of its 2007 numbers.

What will Ron Jeremy do now? Become a Starbucks Barista? (All together now: ewwww!)
Pressure is on IPv6 to Not Screw Up

A lot of natural resources are scarce these days: clean water, oil and gas, IP addresses.

Quick recap: the IPv4 protocol is the system of 4, 3-digit numbers that most of you see when you are setting up a new computer or internet device (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), but is the primary "phone number" system used over the internet for moving traffic from place to place. IPv4 was developed in the late 70's and put into place in January of 1980, replacing its aging predecessor. Like all technology from that era, it was planned with remarkable shortsightedness, and lack of imagination for the future.

OK, that's a little cruel - IPv4 is based on a 32-bit addressing scheme, anything more back then would have been expensive to implement. Still, I maintain it was a failure of imagination to not conceive of a future where every lightswitch and RFID tag would have its own internet address.

Well, like the old MS-DOS 640K memory limit, time's up kids. IPv4 can hold only about 18M private addresses (or about 270M multicast addresses), and it doesn't take a research analyst to imagine that the world is dangerously close to that many internet addressable devices. Not everyone can just use these addresses, there is an agency in existence, the NRO (Number Resource Organization) that doles these things out, but according to their most recent accounting this month, there's less then 10% addressable space left...which is annoying since just a few months prior, they were saying we had 18% of the addressable space left. Why? Uh, the geek equivalent of an accounting error.

Fortunately, there is a savior. IPv6 is the next iteration of the IP addressing standard, and the addition of those two extra triple-octal numbers allows for 64-bit addressing, as opposed to 32-bit addressing. This effectively gives IPv6 enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ (340 trillion trillion trillion) unique addresses. Yay! We're saved.

Sort of. IPv6 has been around for a few years: the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, for instance, were a notable event in terms of IPv6 deployment, being the first time a major world event has had a presence on the IPv6 Internet at http://ipv6.beijing2008.cn/en (IP addresses 2001:252:0:1::2008:6 and 2001:252:0:1::2008:8) and all network operations of the Games were conducted using IPv6. As cool as that was, OS's have been slow to adopt, and when they have it's not been pretty. Vista, Windows7 and recent OSx incantations have included IPv6 in their protocol stacks, but have added them in a ham-handed way, often causing collisions between in-use IPv4 protocols and the newer IPv6 protocols.

Nothing like a little pressure to help clear the mind, and running out of IP addresses might be just what the doctor ordered. Rocket prediction: 40% of traffic carried via IPv6 addresses by end of 2010.

Yeah. I think I'll lose this one too.
Bye-bye Hulu

At least in its current viewership numbers. I take no great pride in this prediction, but I do think that Hulu will be seriously crippled by year's end, if not completely shuttered.

With the purchasing of NBC by Comcast, Hulu's future is in serious doubt. NBC is a major stakeholder in the internet streaming service, and Comcast has just rolled out Fancast as its own streaming solution for its customer base. You do the corporate math.

And while you're cypherin', Jethro, factor in the dozens of other papercuts that Hulu has been dealt recently: content providers pressuring them to shut off alternative access channels, like Boxee; worse than expected ad revenue causing it to consider charging; and restricting content to less than a seasons worth for many of the shows that it carries.

Again, it doesn't fill me with joy to make this prediction, but I hope Hulu didn't spend all of its dollars on Superbowl ads and Seth McFarland.
FCC Not Withstanding, Tiered Pricing Internet and Mobile is Coming.
In January the DC district court posed to blow the legs out from underneath the FCC, by stating that the Comcast/Bittorrent throttling argument was a compelling argument to keep the FCC's hands out of internet regulation. (See, if I had written this in December, like I was supposed to, I would have come to a different conclusion. Yeah yeah...I know.)

Oddly, rather than doing handstands, Comcast's response to this was to back away slowly while muttering...uh, hahaha...uh...that's not exactly what we meant. Herold Feld has a good analysis of this on PublicKnowledge.org where he claims that the reason for Comcast's reaction is that ISP essentially do not want the FCC pulled from the debate because they need an adult in the room. If the FCC is removed from the conversation, then when a crisis occurs the blame and responsibility fall on the ISPs, not the federal government.

Suffice it to say, the story is far from over - but it will culminate in a tiered pricing structure from at least one of the major ISP (land or mobile) by end of 2010. Let's hope it doesn't wind up being a disaster - a tiered structure is fine, actually, if implemented correctly. If not, however, it could mean the difference between the promise of the internet and the greed of big business.
Good Out of Horrible: Technology Breaks the Logjam of Giving

The recent natural disasters in Haiti were horrible. People's futures and lives will never be the same - and the outpouring of understanding, solidarity and support from the rest of the world (except for that jag-off Pat Robertson) has been heartening and awe-inspiring.

Now, we've seen this story played out before: natural disasters and human atrocities claiming the attention and sympathy of the world. Yet, while people are concerned and give support, few take action. The reasons for this are entirely human. When tragedy strikes someone you don't know half a world away, there is a disconnect between the empathy and a call to action. Those who do should be praised, but all too often, most of us do not. Finding your credit card and a number to call to send relief funds to take time, and that time often jars your mind out of the empathy you are feeling. If we are honest with ourselves, we've all experienced this.

This time, however, there was a different component added: this time, the International Red Cross set up an SMS toll road for its international response fund. By texting “HAITI” to 90999 from your cell phone, $10 is donated to the relief effort and added to your cell phone bill. In today's cell obsessed environment, it was a no brainer. The message was distributed by the Red Cross via Twitter and Facebook, and response was immediate. By January 19th, this SMS campaign has raised $22m, or a full 1/5th of the relief dollars generated by the Red Cross for Haiti.

This was a watershed moment - prior to this, the Red Cross' highest bar for technology-based giving schemes was $400,000. (In other words, an increase of 55 times.) Social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the ubiquity of cell phones, the willingness and generosity of ordinary citizens, and the ease of the methodology have all converged at the right point in time to create a new way of giving that decades of tax breaks, philanthropy, and doe-eyed children pimped by last years actors on late night television have been unable to accomplish.

Over the next year, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and other organizations will begin to combine their databases and cross promote, using cell phone technologies and social networking to redistribute the wealth properly to areas of the world that could use it.

And it bears repeating: By texting “HAITI” to 90999 from your cell phone, $10 is donated to the relief effort and added to your cell phone bill.

OK...that's it for this year, minus 3 weeks. Let's see how I do in 11 months. (The Apple thing's a shoe-in tho...)

The Newst Who in Whoville...

2010-01-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

....ok, a brief break from the usual techie stuff so we can spend a brief moment to acknowledge David Tennant's passing into Who History with an unfortunately muddled final two-parter. Despite what was easily the worst written send-off for a Doctor, Tennant is a tough act to follow - but I said that about Chris Eccleston as well, so we'll see if the youngest actor to man the TARDIS, Matt Smith, can pull it off. The BBC press release pictures of him (on the right here) make him look like a direct response to "Edward" in the Twilight films, but last week's few moments of Smith after the transformation seemed to have placed a wee bit of doubt in my skepticism. Smith seems to have absorbed the same manic brilliance, human alienness, and neurotic clear-thinking that have blessed/plagued the 10 who came before him.

So, I'm up for it, let's see what he's got. To check it out for yourself, here's the new season trailer:

...and check out IO9 for a nifty breakdown of the above.

CES 2010...now in Amazing 3D!!!!!!!

2010-01-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm gonna 'fess up to cheating. My 2010 prediction post is late. Very late. I was waiting until I got to CES so that I could take a peek under the covers to see what there is to offer. So sue me.

I had assumed it would happen - so had everyone. This year's CES was gonna be all about EYE POPPING, EXCITING 3D TV!! I guess I wasn't mentally prepared for it though... Walking into the Las Vegas Convention Center was a little like a trip to a Best Buy in some alternative reality. I have no idea how many bazillions of dollars worth of display technology was littering the walls, ceilings, and the occasional floor, but it sure as hell didn't look like we ever had a recession. (Hell, even the drifters from the Adult Entertainment Expo at the Venetian were floored, and some of those people have been "3D augmented" for years.)

I would like to blame the success of Avatar on all these panels, but the reality is that it takes years for this stuff to hit production, and 3D television has been bandied about for at least a decade. So, call it a happy coincidence for James Cameron that his 3D Blu-Ray edition of Avatar will now have something to play on.

Nonetheless, the question remains - will this transparent attempt by the consumer electronics industry to get you to ditch your plasma's and LCD screens pay off? The OEMs seem to have convinced themselves that all of us have convinced ourselves that televisions sets are commodity items, requiring repurchases every few years like laptops. I don't think that way (I love my energy gobbling plasma, thank you very much), and I suspect that without a compelling reason to switch, most of you don't either.

So, is 3D compelling enough for you to ditch the $3000 machine you just hung on your wall a scant 2 years ago? I'll get to that in a minute, but let's just go over what I saw this afternoon...

I didn't have to try very hard. Every major OEM is out here in full force promoting 3D, thin, or, yes, even transparent display technology. LG, Samsung, Sony, and even no-one-has-ever-heard-of-it TCL are all vying for top "WOW" factor. The opening image above was from the double billboard sized display for LG's new Infinia line of panels. These things are thin. Razor thin. At only about a quarter inch in depth, they are beveled in glass, causing the display to appear to float out from the wall mounting. The Infinia line is more a marketing brand play, and less a technology - as Infinia's can appear in LCD or Plasma flavors.

The Infinia line also boasts 3D technology, in both active (LCD shutter glasses required) and passive (polarized non-shuttered glasses required) flavors - but both behave about the same, with a slight dip in color brightness in the passive models. As far as I know, the Infinia line of monitors from LG is available now....

Samsung is introducing a similar fleet of thin, 3D capable displays - although these are active matrix OLED (AMOLED) powered displays, stealing the thunder from Sony's OLED attempt a few years ago. Unlike the Sony, the Samsung's come in sizes bigger, than 11 inches. (This would be a perfect time for another crack at the Adult Expo going on next door, but it's too easy....oh, the hell with it: "...yet, next door at the Adult Expo, 11 inch technology is considered to be all the rage..." There. Happy now?)

The Samsung AMOLED displays are stunning. Not only are the specs on these things off the charts (100,000:1 contrast ratio for starters), but Samsung developed a sense of design somewhere along the way. These things range in size from 20" up to what looks like a 50" display, encased in stainless steel. Really. I know I drool over electronics a lot, but this is something else entirely. Click on the images I provided and take a look for yourself.

Samsung also had a transparent display. Really. Straight from Minority Report, Dollhouse or Avatar. It was unnamed, and connected up to a standard Windows 7 laptop to give the display something to drive it, but the applications for this type of thing are way beyond "cool prop for TV show" categories. I couldn't get a clear picture of it, cuz this guy below was filming for Wired - but he did a great job, so lets just use him, shall we?

The most interesting 3D display technology for my buck though, came from a company I've never heard of. The Creative Life out of China created a 3D display technology that did not require glasses. The photo I've attached here does not do the display justice. You have to trust me here when I say that the images popped off the screen, and allowed for about 100 degrees of viewing.

The "however" part of this announcement (you knew there had to be one) had to do with the tech they used to achieve this effect. It order to trick your eye in to seeing a 3D image, TCL turned their entire display surface in to a giant, lenticular lens.

The resulting images look great for 3D - although I have my doubts as to whether the system can properly support 2D since the lenticular patterns are cut into the display itself. The whole thing would probably look like it was being displayed through a giant Fresnel lens. The literature for the device claims it does display 2D, but the booth ba...uh, helpful TCL personnel couldn't really answer my question and were unable to play a 2D video on these displays...so.... I dunno.

Which brings us to the whole practicality and desire of 3D displays that I mentioned at the start of this posting. Is the tech compelling enough for hordes of people to run down to Best Buy next Christmas? There's the content argument (there isn't much of it), but that's not really important. If there's a big rush of orders for these things, there will be content. It's more a question of...does anyone care? There are specialized, niche reasons where 3D makes sense: football games, over-the-top "event" movies.... but, really, are you gonna put on a pair of goofy glasses to watch Modern Family or Craig Ferguson? I doubt it - but lord knows I've been wrong before.

There is one exception to this, though: gaming. I wandered over to the Sony booth, and played around with PS3's running 3D versions of existing games. The results were pretty incredible (Little Big Planet is already addicting enough without the third dimension), and gamers are already used to festooning (Yes, it's a freakin' word! Look it up.) themselves with all sorts of crap. They also spend huge amounts of money on their gaming systems, so it isn't out of the question that they would toss down another $5K on a 3D monitor.

So that's the 3D and thinness fun in today's little CES excursion, what else was there?

Well, for one thing, everyone seemed to be all about the blue this year. All the giant Veridian Dynamics companies must have shared the same space designers, because everything looked like a crappy nightclub....or a Virgin America flight.

And...let's see....oh yes, Sony needs to fire the product marketing genius who came up with the name "Bravia Monolithic Design" for their new line of high performance displays. In a show filled with wafer-thin little anorexic displays, was "Monolithic" really the best word you could come up with?

Finally, there was, poor Toshiba. Still feeling the sting of watching HD-DVD get the living crap kicked out of it by Blu-Ray, they refuse to give up... kinda like the ugly America tourist who thinks that if you just talk louder and slower at the Spanish, they will understand what you are saying. In the face of all odds, Toshiba was touting its "Cell TV" technology.

What's "Cell TV" technology? I have no idea. Furthermore, neither did anyone at the Toshiba booth. Really. I was passed from booth person to booth person in a sort of "that guy over there knows" fashion. It was very bizarre. (Fortunately, Gizmodo figured it out.) However, gleaning what I could from obliquely phrase posters and marketing hype videos, it has something to do with a combination of a number of technology to make the pixels brighter, convert 2D to 3D and, ahem, upscale a 1920×1080 image to a 4K image.

Yeah. I crap you not. Apparently, someone at Toshiba thinks that 1920x1080 on a 50" monitor just isn't going to cut it with the kids anymore. So, we need to uprez! More pixelizerers! More! Better!! Yeah! And then...they'll grow tired of uprezing and want the real deal! Then they'll need a physical media to support it! YES!! HD-DVD is BACK baby! HD-DVD II!!! YEAH! 4K.

Sigh. Here's the deal. They had this display running. Split screen. 1920x1080 on one side, uprezed 4K on the other. As God as my witness, I couldn't tell the difference. At all. I tried, I really did. I stared and squinted, and I got closer and farther away, and I tilted my head. I even have bionic eyes now. Nothing.

Dear Toshiba: Enough is enough. It's over. Just...stop it. You're embarassing me and your mother. Just...I dunno. Make thin screens or something. Love, Rocketman.

The 2009 Rocket Prediction Tally...

2009-12-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

God, I hate the year-end prediction wrap-up. The PREDICTIONS are fun, I can just sit here with a whiskey pounding them out, but the wrap-up? Gah!!! Fact checking, looking things up. This is actual WORK man...sigh.

Fine, fine....alrighty then. Let's see what sort of a score I can give myself this year - and see if I can outdo my 2008 75% hit ratio. I kinda doubt it since 2009 was so flippin' all over the place, but...let's get started:

I made 10 predictions at the start of 2009, and tried to cover the gambit from consumer electonics, to services, to the tech industry in general.

Economic recovery begins in early Q3 for the tech and housing industries.
WIN

It may not feel like it to everyone, but the economy is definitely picking up steam. In my professional life, I have seen ad revenues increase significantly, and the number of available startup opportunities is on the rise. Both of these things began around August-September of 2009.

In more measurable, and less subjective, trending - the numbers show that the number of layoffs dropped significantly in November, and the leading economic indicators began rising in the US around the end of the summer.

The Obama Administration revitalizes the tech industry within 6 months of taking office.
TOSS UP

OK, I'm going to play fair here. The tech industry is in the midst of a recovery, but this "prediction" I made was pretty vague. Could have meant anything - so I don't really want to claim it. (Of course, I'm not claiming it as a loss, either.) Also, Aneesh Chopra is currently defending himself against Jon Stewart, so, uh....

MEMS technology for low power / flexible displays hits the market.
WIN

OK, second time is the charm, but I'm still taking it. MEMS (microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems) display technologies are moving mainstream - whether its from the cleverly named Qualcomm spinoff (although its probably not a good sign that their COO just left at the end of December), or the nanotech from eInk and others, smaller, flatter, less-power-consuming displays are appearing everywhere. It powers your Kindle, Nook and Sony eReader, and its making its way into still more displays, but it's clear that the nano-based, low-power displays are here. (We'll know more after the Consumer Electronics Show in January.)
Android phone sales hit iPhone numbers before end of year
LOSS

Eh, chalk this one up to wishful thinking. Android, however, has started to show its promise in a major way as the year progressed. The plethora of Android based phones that we were promised last year, has started to make its way onto center stage. TMobile has the CLIQ and MyTouch, and, of course, the Verizon Droid needs no introduction. I can tell you from my professional experience, that video access by Android devices is way up, and info from AdMob shows both the distro of Android handsets as well as Android claiming 24% of all smartphone usage as of the end of November - mostly due to the Droid.

Still, total Android units are well below those of the iPhone, although a number of industry research firms are claiming Android will move into the top two spots within the next year or two.
Digital delivery of home media makes a measurable change in broadcast TV numbers
WIN

The numbers are speaking for themselves here, which is why I liked this prediction - its easy to show. it may not be your grandpa and grandma, or even your parents, but viewers are beginning their shift to online - or at least - digitally stored media. Not only has iTunes, Amazon VoD, and Netflix experienced rapid adoption this year, but so has streaming services like Hulu, which now gets as many views as pay cable. In addition, DVR (digital recording and local storage of broadcast television) content has finally been started to be taken seriously.

In the fall, TheCW and Fox unwittingly entered an experiment. Both networks pitted popular genre shows (Fringe, and Supernatural) against each other. The result was that the Nielsen ratings for both shows (along with CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Flash Forward, and others) tanked. In fact, they dropped so much that Fringe, bizarrely enough, was moved to a "on the bubble" (for cancellation) category. However, once people woke up and Nieslen published it's DVR view numbers, it became clear that these shows maintained their viewship numbers, but were simply timeshifted. I suspect the viewing numbers will increase again, once digital downloads from Amazon and iTunes, and digital streaming from Hulu and the network websites are taken into account.

Significant drops in Blu-Ray player prices combined with content publisher pressure to release existing titles in a new format will push Blu-Ray disc sales past DVD disc sales
WIN

Note: all units in the graphs below are in millions. At first glance, this doesn't appear to be a win. Using sales information available from HMM/Nielsen, unit sale market share of Blu-Ray is about 14%. However, when plotted on a dual access along side of DVD sales, an interesting trend occurs.

Spurred on by a 12% drop in Blu-Ray disc prices throughout the year, plus the availability of inexpensive Blu-Ray players and the ubiquity of Blu-Ray titles, 2009 Blu-Ray sales trajectory is outpacing the 2009 DVD sales trajectory. This indicates the beginning of the adoption curve for Blu-Ray and the end of the adoption curve for DVD.

Although the raw sales numbers won't catch up until mid-2010 at this rate, I'm a big enough of an asshole to still claim the win for this prediction.
As Apple pushes deeper into double-digit territory for laptop sales, several serious viral attacks begin in the Mac community. Lack of adequate protection combined with consumer hubris will make the problems significant.
WIN

It began right in the beginning of 2009, actually, in late January - coming on board your lovely OS X laptop with, you guessed it, pirated versions of iWork '09. First recognized as a threat by Intego Securities on January 22, and calling itself Black Orange (these virus writers have awesome marketing departments, I must say!) it spread like wildfire through the community, indicating the number of people in the union of the Venn Diagram who think its a) ok to cop a piece of software, b) safe to be on a Mac. The virus was so efficient (well, the host was) that it was still prevalent as late as April.

The iWorks virus was followed by a parade of virus, malware and other yummy bits on the Mac, which - through no lack of coincidence - hit the 10% market share magic number briefly in Q2. The heightened sense of reality finally caused the "gold standard" in windows and linux based antivirus protection, Kasperksy, to release a version its antivirus software for the Mac....in frakin' October.

Mac boards have been all a swirl with confusion this year, some folks still claiming it wasn't possible for Macs to get a virus, and some irresponsible download services blogging that anti-virus companies were fear-mongering to get Mac users to buy anti-virus software. Yeah, not so much.

At least one other additional security exploits occur in the basic structure of the aging internet protocol and backbones, forcing a rethink of the way packets are carried over the Internets
Win

Late in 2008, Dan Kaminsky's now famous DNS security flaw was revealed to a stunned panel of internet backbone companies. Many complied (thank you Comcast) many did not (screw you Time Warner), but once patched, the 20+ year old security flaw seemed under control, and the fears were to be put at rest...

...until this year. When not one, but three other DNS flaws were uncovered.
- In January, a security flaw in BIND was quietly patched.
- In February it was revealed that a DNS caching error could allow people to redirect you to a false website, much like last year's Kaminsky error.
- On November 23rd, ISC reported another flaw with BIND.
Seriously, guys. It's over 25 years old. It was invented by a newly minted PhD at the request of guy who just wanted to clear up his own bookkeeping for 12 friggin' computers.

OK, I'm not giving these guys enough due, but come on. My bank records are using this thing. Let's clean it up and start again, please.
Windows 7 arrives at the latter-half of the year, but the PR damage done by the mishandling of Vista's public perception plus the stillborn Microsoft marketing campaign PLUS John Hodgman ensures a tepid reception to the new OS.
LOSS

Ok, I'm kinda happy about being wrong about this one. I'm not a big Microsoft torch bearer, but I'm not an Apple apostle either. Competition is a good thing, and having viable operating system on the market that hasn't been pre-tarred and feathered is an excellent thing. (Apologies, Linix ...but, come on...be serious please. And Google OS, you're still vaporware, at least in '09.)

Windows 7 is pretty damn remarkable - it made a 1G, 5 year old laptop of mine run like I just bought it yesterday, whereas Vista had it crawling to a stop upon boot up. All indications are that the market loves it too, and its been a critical darling since the reviewers got ahold of the alpha versions of the OS. If Microsoft's ass-backwards, destined-to-get-in-its-own-way marketing crew couldn't stop this product, Hodgman never stood a chance.
Yahoo breaks up into its original component companies, or at least puts them on the auction block, before Q4.
Loss

Effing Yahoos. No, they didn't divest....
...or spit up.
...or fall apart.
...or grow.
...or shrink.
...or fade away.
...or come on strong.

What they did do was spend the year playing c-tease with Microsoft, and coming up with this winning multi-bazillion dollar ad campaign. "Yahoo! It's You?"

Eff You! Seriously. What EXACTLY do you guys do for a living? Search? Ads? Email? IM? WHAT? Really, I'd love to know. Oh, that's right, you reactivated rocketmail! Sweet! You know what? I've been missing Compuserve lately, think you could re-animate that dead tissue, too?

Sorry...I'm just bitter at losing a point on this one.

OK...let's just total these puppies up and see how I did...

10 predictions...I was right or dead even....7 times. 7 out of 10. 70%. That's a drop from last year. Huh. Uh...well...uh....

...damn Yahoo.

Don't Cross the Streams...Why? It Would Be Bad.

2009-12-23T23:41:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is less of a blog post and more like one of those public safety announcement thingies... I spent the better part of today, when I should have been making damn certain I remembered how to fillet a bronzini in time for Christmas dinner, straightening out a Chrome and Firefox mess.

It started as all of these things do: an impulsive swapping out of a beloved piece of software over a minor "difference of opinion." I thought if I strolled around town with Chrome for a few days, Firefox would see the error of her ways and come crawling back on hands and knees...

It, uh, didn't quite work out that way, of course.

Like a lot of folks out there, I use XMarks (formerly "FoxMarks," until they realized that locking themselves into a specific vendor in this market was most likely foolish) to sync my browser bookmarks cross platform between instances of Firefox on windows, mac and ubuntu. I had previous played with Chrome before, but didn't use it in earnest because it never had addons/extensions. Now, of course, it does - meaning I could use most of the tools I had previously used over in Firefox, including XMarks.

After installing Chrome on Ubuntu, I added the XMarks extension, fired it up, and...Voilà! Bookmarks in Chrome, nicely organized. It worked so well, I installed Chrome + XMarks on Windows7 and OSX. (See where this is going?) Look! HA! See that Firefox? She new and shiny, and she has all the accessories that you have. I don't need you anymore...and I never think about you....

...well...you were really nice to me all those years. Maybe I can forgive your weight problem. I mean, what's a half a megabyte of extra poundage anyway? It's just baby fat! Oh....come here, you saucy minx....I'm sorry. Chrome didn't mean anything, she was just a fling...

Uh oh.

When Firefox came back up, XMarks engaged....within 15 seconds consumed 99% of the CPU, and the hard drive was pounding.

Now, XMarks has never been very good about admiting problems: they have a tendency to ignore the really tricky, hard-to-reproduce stuff and concentrate on the easier issues in their forums. (Last year when Foxmarks was transitioning to XMarks, 100's of us in their forums started complaining that XMarks would often not install in Firefox. There were little to no responses from them on the topic, and the problem mysteriously disappeared during one of their releases.) So, I didn't expect to find much in their forums about this issue, and then I happened across this little ditty:

"...after syncing Chrome, Firefox gets an "Other Bookmarks" folder added, which is really just the name of Chrome's bookmark root..."

Oops.

The XMarks people have yet to respond to this thread, and the other folks in the forum have so far just noted that its an "annoyance" to have Other Bookmarks in the bookmark tree - but, no kids, its much more insidious than that. Since Other Bookmarks is the root of the Chrome bookmark tree, but to the Firefox bookmark manager it appears as a folder, when sync'ing a Chrome-written bookmark tree back to Firefox, you've just established this nice little recursion:

Firefox Tree ->
Other Bookmarks Folder ->
Chrome Root ->
Firefox Tree ->
Other Bookmarks Folder ->
Rinse ->
Repeat...

And, as an added bonus, if you use the "automatic sync" function inside of XMarks, you are guaranteed to pass this recursion rule on to the XMarks Mother Ship, who will propagate it down to all of your other Firefox instances that have auto sync turned on. Yay! The longer you let XMarks attempt additional syncs while you figure out what is happening (yeah, that's me) the deeper the recursion layer, and very shortly your CPU and hard drive will be maxed out. Double yay!

How do you get out of this mess? XMarks isn't sayin', and if you try to delete the recursive folder Other Bookmarks from your myxmarks.com account, XMarks refuses to let you do it because it's identified that folder as the root folder of your bookmark tree - which, of course, it is on Chrome.

After a day of fiddling, there are really only three ways to do this, ranging in frustration from "Oh Thank God I'm so lucky" to "Sigh." (Oh, and needless to say, all of these methods require you to uninstall XMarks - or disable it - from Chrome first, or you'll be back where you started.)

Locate a machine that does not have XMarks set to auto sync, yet still has your most recent bookmark list. You can then use the XMarks "force overwrite of server" function to push your local bookmark tree up to the XMarks server, which will then propagate the corrected tree to your other Firefox instances. No harm, no foul.
Log into myxmarks.com and restore your bookmark tree from a point prior to your first Chrome sync. This will, of course, lose your most recent bookmarks, but stop whining like a little baby and grow a set...you'll find that porn again.
Turn off XMarks auto sync, then use your bookmark manager in Firefox to delete the Other Bookmarks folder. This will take some time if XMarks did many sync attempts before you figured out what was going on. Alternatively, you can delete it manually by going to the location of your Foxmarks bookmarks on your drive and blowing away the Other Bookmarks entry. On Windows7 this is located here:

..Users\[your XP user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\bookmarksbackups

So, there you have it. XMarks is a great tool if you have multiple browser installations, multiple laptops, or just want a good way to back up all those bookmarks...but, like all sync'ing solutions since the dawn of time, it's also a good way to propagate mistakes really, really fast.

The Nerdliness of Language

2009-12-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

I spent my college years (undergraduate and graduate) steeped in science and math. Practically every waking moment which was not spent studying science and technology was spent reading about science and technology. (Well, ok... there were illicit substances, poker, certain ladies of my acquaintance, and God knows what else ....but...after all that then there was science! ...well...bratwurst....then science...er, bratwurst and sandwiches. Crap. Ok: Illicit substances, poker, women, bratwurst, and sandwiches...and THEN science.)

Those hours were spent both in the pursuit of science (experiments, study, history of science) and in the camaraderie of people who - while not necessarily like minded - believed in the same constructs and principles. It framed our conversations, and moved us to a common point of conversation where we could agree, argue, discuss, and laugh. Thought of another way, it gave us a reason to drink together.

All of those hours, days, weeks, years of being in that community - the commonalities of prose became apparent. There is an elegance to this distortion of language that is very similar to any collection of people searching to find a common ground: sports fans, religious adherents, vegetarians, punk rockers, opera buffs, comic book fans...every subculture under the sun. It's a slang, of sorts, applied to descriptions of terms, ideas and concepts. A way of communicating complex ideas with a minimum of words. It's almost a subconscious attempt of the mind to contract the language. The slang is picked up from contractions of scientific, engineering or mathematics terms, of course, but more interestingly, some is picked up from the street, from pop culture, and from the daily banter of everyday life.

Limiting the conversation to computers for a moment, much of the slang is famously known - the world knows what a virus is when applied to computers, or morphing when it comes to computer graphics. Curiously, the language of the digerati sometimes migrates in the opposite direction, back out to the street: Crashing almost needed no explanation when it was introduced to a population newly enamoured with personal computers. People were more than happy to apply the term to themselves when they stayed up to late, or couldn't work any more for the day. Busy executives are quick to tell people that they are multitasking, even though few of them understand what that term actually means.

Perhaps it is because computers have a symbiotic relationship with the public that the language barrier between the geek and the street is two-way permeable, but other, more esoteric, fields of study that isn't quite the case. To the outsider, hearing common, everyday terms used in technical or scientific descriptions may sound odd, harsh, or lend themselves to misinterpretation. The field of mathematics is chalk o' block full of an odd juxtaposition of language, phraseology and street slang. The use of the word trivial doesn't necessary mean that something is easy, but rather that something is "well understood by everyone in the room, so shut the eff up so we can get on with the real conversation." ("There's no need to go into the proof of the prime-number theorem here, Bob, it's trivial.")

Because of this re-purposing of common words, whenever the outside world hears mathematicians, computer scientists, or comic book fanboys talk - the result is often confusion or misinterpretation. While this is understandable - and should be predictable by most of "inside language" participants - real trouble begins when the press gets involved. Having worked at government science labs for the first half of my career, I was often interviewed by the press and media - and the resulting, published "interviews" were most illuminating. I very quickly learned to change the use of my language whenever I wished to convey information to anyone outside the group.

This misinterpretation of common words and terms can lead to amusing confusion in the public discourse, often revolving around computers and the internet - a "computer virus" although likened to biological viruses, are not biological viruses. Other times, this language makes its way out into the public discourse and is disastrously misinterpreted. The Large Hadron Collider has captured the public imagination, largely due to these language misinterpretations. (Thank you, Dan Brown, for adding to the mess....and I'm sure the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and the Vatican also thank you for adding to the popularization of misinterpretation.)

Scientists, because of the nature of their work and the natural honesty that comes with scientific inquiry, cannot say anything is certain - even if all evidence brought to bear on a topic confirms a theory or model, a (good) scientist will always feel compelled to say "I am 99% certain that this is true." So, when LHC researchers were asked if the LHC could generate a singularity that could destroy the earth, the physicists responded that they were 99.999% sure that it would not. This, of course, was picked up by the news media and translated as THERE IS A SLIGHT POSSIBILITY THAT THE LHC COULD GENERATE A BLACK HOLE THAT WOULD DESTROY THE EARTH. Don't even get me started on the press and H1N1.

Occasionally, however, there are people who fully understand the disparity between language inside a specific group and laypeople, and deliberately exploit those differences to further their own agendas. This isn't comical misinterpretation or unfortunate misreadings, it is a deliberate manipulation of the media and, by extemtion, public opinion by using what looks like corroboratory evidence. Most recently, we've had the e-mail that was stolen (I won't use the word "hacked") from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit - apparently by...well, no one knows who, or at least no one is saying anything.

The American and British press were all over this, with the usual screaming headlines, like this doosy from, of all places, the New York Times:

Hacked E-Mail is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

In the NY Times article, Andrew Revkin discusses how the email appears to underscore a belief in a conspiracy of climatologists who seek to convince the world that our climate is crumbling before our eyes. The language device that Revkin uses to passive-aggressively enforce the possibility of a conspiracy is of the worst kind of direct manipulation: The infamous double-ditto! (Or, rather, "double ditto,")

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

There is more, of course. The article is laced with names, double-dittos, nefarious snippets from the stolen correspondence, and "I told you so's!" from fringe climatologists, like Patrick J. Michaels. Michaels may or may not have been a climatologist for the state of Virginia - no one really can tell - but he is most definitely a climatologist at The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank cum lobby group in Washington DC that strives "to achieve greater involvement of the intelligent, lay public in questions of (public) policy and the proper role of government." Conveniently located in DC, Cato Institute members are frequent guests on chatty panel and talk shows aimed at public policy. Michael's himself has a number of books on the market on how climate change isn't gonna be so bad, and potentially beneficial, so between the books and the Face-The-Nation circuit, he's doin' just fine, thank you very much.

Swinging the spotlight back on Mr. Revkin and his word-play article in the NY Times - perhaps I can help him out a bit. The email that was stolen (again, not hacked) from the CRU contained hand-wringing (choice bits like “the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t..." are sprinkled throughout the article), insults lobbed at the anti-global warming camp, and - most importantly - the use of the word "trick" in conjunction with showing trending.

To his credit, Revkin does include a not-quite-a-quote from Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State, where Mann explains the use of the word "trick:"

He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

Even thought Revkin didn't properly include a quote from Mann, that explanation is something any mathematician would understand. Having spent years in a math department at my university, "trick" was a word that was used over and over again. It is not used to imply that something is being covered up or misled, but rather that something clever is being done to remove some steps from a process. Essentially, it means that a sort of mathematical shorthand is about to be employed - a way to get from point A to point C by skipping B.

With the hand wringing, that's just good science. Predictions made in the 80's about warmer climates appearing in the 00's have not happened. The implication is not that climate change is wrong necessarily, but rather that the model used to show the climate shift in the 80's was most likely faulty. (Actually, if climatologists had not mentioned the temperature not fitting the model, then there would be grounds for a conspiracy.) In my travels through science, business and public relations, I have found that the hardest concept for laypersons to understand about science is it's most basic precept: science is, by its nature, self-correcting. It holds no public office, it has no allegiances, it is not loyal to the men and women who study it. No matter how beloved a theory is, no matter how many careers depends on a specific conjecture, no matter how old and established an idea is: if data surfaces to contradict the established model, the scientific method demands you throw the model out or find a way that a legitimate modification adjusts for the new data.

To the layperson, this mode of being is 0ften interpreted as waffling, knowing all along that a theory or model was wrong, or a simply as a reason why science doesn't work. Rather than a principle of great objectiveness, it's often used as an excuse to doubt the validity of the scientific method in public discourse. Is it better to steadfastly believe in something that has long been proven to be inaccurate, or is it better to course correct as you move forward, adjusting to new information as it comes in?

Finally, the insults. Yup - I don't doubt it. I think that anti-climate change folks have been insulted by climatologists who believe in climate change. I think that climate change believers have been insulted by anti-climate changers... both, probably pretty frequently. In public and in private. It's human nature. If you're honest with yourself, you do it all the time - I sure as hell do. (Allow me to prove a point by throwing myself on the alter of demonstration: vegans are dinks. There. Was that so bad, really?)

The point here is not whether climate change is happening, or if there is a Giant Global Conspiracy (tm) of climatologists to scaremonger, as some believe - the point is that, taken out of context, words are tools. If used as intended and left in the context in which they are placed, they are sharp, efficient, surgical. If, however, they are separated from their owner's intent through careless or malicious use, they are blunt, crude instruments causing more harm than good.

If you read something that sounds outrageous - in science or politics - chances are pretty good you should listen to your inner editor. Do yourself (and the originator of the words) a favor and google a few things: look up the author, look up the sources, look up the facts.

*Cartoon by Chris Madden http://www.chrismadden.co.uk/

LHC Whacked by Artifacts from the Future? ... or God? ...or... Something?

2009-10-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

Two points of disclosure here before we continue:

1) I am not religious. Not even a tiny bit. I respect other people's right to be religious, as long as they respect my right to not be religious. I have Omnipotence Avoidance Issues. New term. You like it?

2) I like soup. Often for lunch, I go and grab a soup. It's healthy. It's nutritious. It's relatively low-fat. Well, except for the cream based soups, but that's another story.

Here's how those two life principles of mine come into play: Sometimes after I grab my lunch-soup, I come back to the office to eat and wipe my brain clean by reading websites that have nothing to do with my line of work - a guy eating soup needs a break, you know? So, there I was today, slurping my soup (minestrone, quite good actually) and reading IO9, a pop-culture science fiction website, and this little diddy popped up:

Is the Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

I, uh, choked on my soup a bit.

Ok, IO9 is a Gawker property, which is all about the snarky, so I put my tongue in my cheek as I read the article...which linked to a more serious New York Times article on the topic...and, that led me to research this a wee bit more.

For those that have missed the story up 'til this point, the Large Hadron Collider is one of the largest, and, as of today, still unrealized physics experiments in human history. It is a particle accelerator - a 17-mile long loop of a giant circus ride used to slam high energy particles together, so that we can look at the wreckage to see from what the original particles were made. Particle accelerators are nothing new in physics, but the LHC is another beast entirely. At €3 billion all in, 10,000 collaborators strong, and 100 countries supporting the effort, the LHC has a lot of eyes on it, and a lot of tasks on its plate once it gets lit up. The most important of which (and this fits into our little story here) is the tracking down of the Higgs-Boson particle. Or, as the kids like to call it these days: The God Particle. (Fox News didn't even give it this name, physicist Leon Lederman did.)

To understand why the Higgs-Boson particle is called The God Particle, requires just a cursory understanding of the current theory of what is the base level construct of matter. This theory, referred to as the Standard Theory, posits (oh lord, I used the word "posits" in my own blog. Kill. Me.) that there are four basic interactions (from weakest to strongest, first the two you've heard of: gravity, electromagnetism, and then the two with unsexy, unimaginative names: the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) between all matter in the Universe. Those interactions are conveyed through physical particles operating at quantum level scales: massless photons, W bosons, Z bosons, bleh bleh bleh. Physicists have observed all of the particles in this soup that are vector particles - i.e. elementary particles that have a vector or tensor component. Theoretically, there are scalar particles (single, unitary particles that impart no vector component to whatever system they belong to)...well, ok, really just one scalar particle.

Guess which one?

If the Higgs-Boson particle exists, and it can be observed by the LHC, it is the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle to understand how everything is constructed. All mass. All matter. Everywhere. It's a big deal. It is the Thing That Binds Us All, and that is not an understatement. Physicists with more poetic bent like to say that observing the Higgs-Boson particle would be like looking into the face of God...

...but, hell. Poetic physicists say a lot of crap like that for dramatic effect, so that their spouses know that all those nights "working" down "at the lab" is really worth it...and...they're real sorry you can't relate to what they're doing. Sure, it's not making a new marketing slogan for beer...or...writing a new iPhone application that burps when you shake it...or...anything tangible, really....but...it's like looking at the face of God, dammit...doesn't that mean anything, Wanda? Wanda? No...don't leave...where are you taking the kids...? Hey!! Get back here!

...oh, sorry. Uh, where was I...?

Right... Standard Models...right right... ok...

So, finding the Higgs-Boson particle is the missing link, and has been a holy grail of particle physics since it's existence was first hypothesized in 1964. Attempts have been made before, most notably at Fermilab, and the results have been tantalizing, inferring that the particle does exist. Inference, however, is not enough to convince rabid physics wonks. Without a direct observation of the God Particle, the science community cannot accept its existence. (Which, honestly, is fair. I mean, the financial community accepted the existence of the viability of giving $1M home loans to people making $30,000 a year without direct proof they can pay it back, and look where that got us.)

Enter the Large Hadron Collider. First proposed in the 90's, costs on the LHC were kept down (hahah, I love saying that) by reusing a tunnel at CERN that was used to house the LHC's smaller cousin, the Large Electron–Positron Collider.

As the LHC startup date of Sept 2008 approached, the blogosphere and mainstream media alike were filled with crackpot theories about the LHC bringing about the end of the world because it could spontaneously call into existence a black hole, causing the earth to fall in upon itself in huge Michael Bay-esque sorta deal.

The world waited, and on the morning of September 10th, 2008 the fuse was lit (just kidding) and two tiny particles were whipped through the 17 mile long circular tunnel, 3 kilometers at a time. Successful first test! Yay science, yay! No black hole, no Michael Bay, no Bruce Willis, just two subatomic particles goin' for a ride.

The official inauguration of the LHC was to take place on October 21, 2008 with continuous operation after that date. However, on September 19th, 2008, 6 tons of liquid helium was found venting through several of the bends in the magnets. This was the high-energy physics equivalent of the Challenger disaster, and the LHC was shut down until the problem was sussed out, and the system shaken down...

...waiting time is over, as the LHC is scheduled to go into operation in a few weeks, sometime in mid-November, 2009.

Alright, back to my choking-on-my-soup story...

In early October, 2009, two of the 10,000 physicists connected to the LHC, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, published a series of papers on the Cornell University physics website arXiv.org with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC ." Yup, the wacky duo of Nielsen&Ninomiya are saying that some measurable, physical force from the future is preventing the LHC from starting up and showing humans the God Particle.

That isn't too preposterous -well, ok, it really is, but stick with me here for sake of argument. The main thrust of the theory is that exposing the Higgs-Boson particle propagates events backwards through time preventing the LHC from functioning correctly. There's precedent for this in physics already - it is not possible, for instance, to observe the actual physicality in spacetime that we like to call a singularity, an infinite gravity well which is caused by the existence of an infinite mass. A singularity can never be directly observed because it comes with a cosmic bathrobe called an event horizon, beneath which no observational evidence can escape. The outer boundary of the event horizon is observed as the object we call a black hole. (In other words, a black hole is not a thing in and of itself, but an effect caused by the thing at its center: the singularity. A singularity not enshrouded by an event horizon is called a naked singularity, and is considered to be impossible.

The effect of the theory put forward by the comedy stylings of Nielsen&Ninomiya is the temporal equivalent. In essence, they propose that the exposure of the Higgs-Boson particle causes a ripple effect in spacetime that propagates backwards (rather than forwards) and extinguishes the cause of the Higgs-Boson exposure in the first place. In this case, I assume, by causing the venting of the aforementioned liquid hydrogen.

I guess I would have been fine with a theory which was expressed along pure physical cause-and-effect (or in this case: effect-and-cause) terms, but....there's more to this story. In an unpublished essay referenced by the New York Times, Nielsen supposedly made the statement “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God...that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Yeah. God. That God. I'm hoping he's being glib, as when Einstein expressed his distaste for quantum mechanics with the now famous phrase "God doesn't play dice with the Universe." (Einstein was not literally saying "God would never do this," he was simply expressing a rabid distaste of any physical principle in which the outcome could not be mathematically predicted.) I'm hoping that's the sorta meaning that Nielsen had in mind, but...uh...I kinda doubt it.

In the early 90's, looking for the Higgs-Boson particle was attempted before - this time as a sole effort by the United States. The Superconducting Supercollider was another BASC (Big Ass Supercollider) in a tunnel underneath Texas. $3B in, the US Congress canceled the project in 1993. An attempt by congress to control spending? Maybe. A panic move by reluctant Texas Governor Ann Richards? Possibly. A Bill Clinton "fuck you" to a project championed by Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush in Bush's home state of Texas? Sure, why not?

Calling the cancellation of the project an "anti-miracle," Nielsen has a different explanation: the future called, and they want their Higgs-Boson back. The cancellation of the project, he is suggesting, was caused by the effect of reverse propagation through time with the cause being the actual observation of the Higgs-Boson particle. Can a pure physical effect like a temporal shroud cause the US Congress to cancel funding? Or is Nielsen suggesting that God did it? Is he suggesting that people from the future did it? I'm not sure that he's sure.

For all my love of making fun of them (and I do so enjoy it), Nielsen&Ninomiya are not idiots. Nielsen was one of the co-founders of string theory, and Ninomiya won the Partical Physics Medal from the Japanese CiNii. These are smart guys, who sometimes take a road less traveled a bit too far, perhaps. Fortunately, they realize how their theories could be viewed - and they proposed an experiment:

CERN, it is argued, should engage in a game of chance - sort of a physics roulette. The activation of the LHC to look for the Higgs-Bose particle, should be triggered by an unpredictable event. A random number generation method, of some sort, could be connected to the big, giant "GO" button on the device. They even wrote a paper on it: Card Game Restriction on LHC. If the experiment occurs as planned, there is no effect from the future, if it doesn't occur, then there is some sort of physical response propagating backwards through time to prevent the LHC from conduction the particle observation.

What Would Einstein Do?

UPDATE: November 7th, 2009: Yeah. A bagel bit. Dropped by a bird. I'm just sayin'...

UPDATE: Dec 10th, 2009: So far, no Hand of God or Future Mettling: LHC One Step Closer to Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe

Relaxing with a Book in the Age of Digital

2009-10-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I was (pretty) convinced that everything I was going to do for entertainment would be available to me in my pocket - or at least through some sort of magic panels in the walls of my home. This was back in the late 60's early 70's, so most people just assumed I was nuts. (Of course I also thought I'd be living on the moon, so they were sorta right.)

I blame Star Trek for these thoughts. People walked around the cardboard sets of the Enterprise with little "memory cards" (ok, painted pieces of wood) that they would place into ubiquitous slots in walls or desks and entertainment, information, communication, etc would appear on the nearest wall panel. When walking around the surface of a planet (or, more appropriately, the redressed backlots of Desilu studios), they would put their little wooden memory cards in their tricorders to get the same information. (Incidentally, when you are 10, a binoculars case makes an excellent tricorder.)

Now, of course, that scenario is pretty much my Life In Information. (Actually, I'm willing to bet it's pretty much the Lives of Information of all you folks that read blogs like this.) My home is wired for gigabit ethernet, which is wired to the outside world at whatever speed Comcast decides to give me for the day. My body is bathed in wifi signals capable of 300Mb/s transmission, and the little memory cards in my phone, laptop, camera and camcorders contain portable files that I just haven't moved to my house network yet. Whenever I wish I can call up information, communication or entertainment on panels throughout the walls of my house, or on portable devices when I'm not at home.

Gone are my CDs, DVDs, albums, photographic prints, and other paraphernalia of the era of physical media, which - for the record - lasted from 3100 BC until, oh, a maybe few years ago. 5000 years, give or take a few decades, is a good run for any technology trend, dontcha think?

One of the last pillars of the era of physical media to fall is the printed word. There's a myriad of conversations going on right now, of course, about the fall of newspapers and magazines - and as much as I love my beloved weekend New York Times, I easily made the transition to nytimes.com.

However, the one form of printed word that seems to be taking forever to make the transition from atoms to bits is the book. Ironically, this was the first physical-to-digital medium that came under attack back when the internet was young. It made sense that it should have been the first to go, since even Moby Dick can be compressed down to about 200K when converted to a text file. 200K was the perfect size for dialup modem transfer rates of the day. So, what happened? After music, television and now high-definition film has made the move, why has it taken about 15 years before anyone was considering digitally consuming literature seriously?

Back in the day, electronic books (eBooks, or digital books, or whatever you want to call it) were displayed first on computer screens, and later on PDAs. While there were adherents to this, they were mostly the bleeding edge crowd - people who didn't mind ruining their vision by staring at small, glowing screens of maybe a few sentences. It was a horrible experience, and a terrible way to read. (Society has a short memory, and it seems to have forgotten about this period of eReading - as is evidenced by the Kindle Reader for the iPhone. The type of folks that would use this little glowing perversion of a book are the modern day equivalents of those of us in the early 90's that would stare at books on our Palm Pilots. Good luck with that.)

The Kindle, Sony eReader, Plastic Logic and others have improved upon the experience by making use of a display screen from eInk, which manipulates physical particles to display text on a screen. I've written about this experience before, but in short eInk technology duplicates the reflective properties of paper almost exactly. The effect is astonishing, and reading Moby Dick becomes a pleasure again.

So, why are Amazon, Sony and others hiding their sales figures? Obviously because the success of these devices is moderate, not groundbreaking as it was with the iPod's conquering of digital music. The reasons for lackluster sales are many: licensing deals with publishers are still strange (the publishers still think it's reasonable to charge 80% the cost of a physical book), the eReaders themselves are still too expensive (think printer ink, Sony and Amazon), and the DRM issues are still too restrictive (why the hell can't I read something I bought on the Sony Reader store on my Kindle?). Marketing around these devices has also been terrible - there's still confusion in the market as to why someone would want a single purpose device that doesn't display color images when they have their laptops, macbooks and iPhones. The explanation is simple (i.e. my rant on reading long form content on glowing screens), but I rarely hear any of these companies come out and talk about it.

Nonetheless, all of these reasons are really just business problems which will get sorted out...but even when those problems are solved, there is still more to the story on the slow adoption rate, and it may be emotional and very hard to duplicate digitally. It's really complicated. Ready? Here is it is...

People like books.

Books are big, bulky, a bitch to move from home to home, they get lost at the beach or when you lend it to a friend, and they smell mildewy if left out in the backyard overnight. None of that matters.

People like books.

People like books more than they like DVDs, CDs, record albums, liner notes, or anything else that the digital revolution has supplanted. They line our walls, they tell people who you are and what you are about when they walk into your house, they have author's signatures, they just feel good when you pick them up and hold them. It's entrenched in us. In our culture. In all cultures. The oldest thing that you can call a book (no, it's not the Bible, chill the eff out) is probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, at around 2150BC. Books have been used for trade, for securing power, as seats of knowledge for kings, and have been the source of global memory since long before the internet. (Award for the Greatest Information Crash Without Backing Up has to go to the sacking of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.)

So, there is an emotional tie here that is going to be hard to move past - and I include myself in this mix. I have whole-heartedly embraced the eBook: you'd have a hard time prying my Sony eReader from my hands - its more convenient, takes up almost no space, makes my business travel load a hell of a lot lighter, and my book consumption has gone WAY up in the last few years since owning it. But....I like books. They still cover my walls. I still schlepped them from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Pasadena to Boston to LA to San Francisco, and all the intercity moves in between, over the years. It was expensive. It was a pain in the ass. Yet, I still did it. We all do it.

What kind of marketing does it take to move past thousands of years of emotional attachment to a bulky, inefficient, easy to destroy form of media? Honestly, I don't have one of my glib, well-you-just-do-this, technology-will-solve-it answers. I just pose the question.

Update:

So I put the Star Trek reference in as sort of a joking referral to what a proto-geek I was growing up, but it turns out - Star Trek was precognizant about the durability of books in the human condition as well. Check out the clip below from the episode "Court Martial," starting at about 3:30 as Kirk's lawyer explains why he doesn't use computers.

Returning to Rapture, a Tale of Two Machines

2009-07-31T14:10:00.001-07:00

Alright, let's get this pre-amble outta the way: I started out 2009 with a promise to blog once a week. Here we are 8 months in, and I've only done a handful of posts. Where the hell did I go? Well, it's been a busy year, obviously. Work has been intense as we put more and more into the marketspace, there was the move up to SF, and...

...fine, I've been playing video games. Lots of them. I now play games more than I watch TV or read during my precious few hours of downtime each week. For some reason, I find it relaxing to sit on my couch blasting the crap out of aliens and zombies...as Rome burns, Master Chief fiddles... or something like that. I know I should be blogging (readership is way down), and hell - even the number of my twitter posts is down.

So, here's the deal: I could write about MicroHooBing, or iPhone zombies, the need for Palm to get the hell out of Sprintville, or the emotional importance of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing - I am the RocketMan, after all - but others have covered that while I worked my joystick cramped hands to the nubs. What prompted me to come out of the stupor and return to the blogging fold was the video gaming itself.

I have two systems at home: an XBox360 and a PS3. I bought them both for other primary purposes (the XBox is a great media extender, and the PS3 plays blu-ray discs), but, hell, the gaming is there and I used to be a computer graphics architect...and I do have a few hours to kill... where IS that Bioshock disc I bought...? So, I started to play - and I wanted to give both machines a shot, so - yes - I did get eventually get Halo3 on the XBox...and, since the marketing of PS3 games was nowhere near as overwhelming in my consciousness as XBox games, I had to do a little more research on the PS3 to get the "right" game, so I bought Resistance: The Fall of Man.

As I began to play, I noticed myself on the PS3 more, which I thought was strange and I chalked up to the gameplay. In fact, I finished up Resistance just as Resistance 2 became available. Released 18 months after the original, Resistance 2 was a leap forward in the graphics, response time and interactivity. Blowing Halo3 out of the water for look and feel of the virtual world and critters that inhabit it.

Even so, the similarities in the gameplay between Resistance 2 and in Halo3 were uncanny. As in: they are basically the same game. Oh come now, fanboys, substitute the Chimera aliens and WWII soldiers of Resistance with the Covenant and UNSC of Halo3 and you have the same story. (Let the hate comments commence!) Why then, when I finished Resistance2 was I so reluctant to return to Halo3? Whenever I tried, the colors of the Halo universe seemed washed out, the game play seemed (for lack of a better term) "wonkier," and programming errors (like polygon collision) seemed more frequent.

OK, OK... yeah, these are two different games from two different companies separated in time by almost 2 years. Of course Resistance2 seemed to be brighter, zippier and more photo-realistic. Still, something didn't seem quite right...

Shrugging it off, I went out and picked up Left4Dead...this game had pulled in a legion of fans, and was relatively new - surely it was a better way to show off what the XBox could do... So, I popped it in and played for an hour or so, but I couldn't get into it. The gameplay felt contrived, confusing and stifling, the engineering errors were everywhere (you can make your character "float" by standing on a raised surface and stepping off slightly, for instance) and, once again, that "washed out" feeling was present everywhere in the zombie-infected streets of New York.

Now I was on a quest: was there a significant difference between these two consoles? As I mentioned, when I first got the XBox360, the game I took home with it was Bioshock. I have to say I was mesmerized. A lot has been written about the Ayn Rand nature of the story, and the moral choices that you make inside of the submerged city of Rapture. How many video games can you name that are set in 1960 and start with a monologue like this:

I am Andrew Ryan and I am here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

No, says the man in Washington; it belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican; it belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow; it belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something
different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
Rapture.

— — Andrew Ryan

It's an interesting game providing the player with sometimes disturbing moral choices, up to and including killing infected children called Little Sisters in order to increase your potential for surviving through the game. This particular game plot point sparked controversy from the anti-videogame contingent at the time, and landed Bioshock in the list of controversial games. (For the record, I couldn't bring myself to kill the Little Sisters either - they squirm and scream, for god's sake! - so I found other ways through to the endgame.)

My interest in Bioshock gave me an opportunity: the game was available not only for the XBox360, but also for the PS3 - the moral choices made throughout the game allowed the plot to change significantly enough for me to play again from start to finish without getting bored. Developed by the same engineers, using the same graphics and physics engines, and released during the same time frame, Bioshock provided me with a reasonable way to compare two pieces of hardware against each other. So, back to Rapture I went...

Just a note for you whiny-one-system-or-another zealots out there: Both boxes route via HDMI through a Sony DA5200ES AV switching receiver, which is connected (also via HDMI) to a Pioneer Elite 50 inch plasma display. Audio is out through a Bose Acoustimass 16, 6.1 speaker system. I used the Sound&Vision calibration DVD to make sure that the consoles were set to as close to the same saturation and color levels as I could get. (Bioshock itself provides a simple, initial set up slider that allows you to set your relative black level.) So, as far as I am concerned, these systems run through the same audio and video pathways - the only difference is the obvious one: the pathways within the video game consoles themselves.

Popping the game into the PS3 console, the familiar strains of 1950's of music playing on a scratchy record came on my entertainment system speakers, and I immediately remembered the feeling of being engulfed by Rapture.... but, there was one more thing: quietness. I don't think I ever noticed it so acutely before, but the PS3 is damn quiet - especially when you compare it to the room-heater that is the XBox360. This time through Rapture I could actually hear the water lapping behind me, the sighs and insane ramblings of the splicers and the echoing of footsteps down the hall.

Controlling the fictional character "Jack" through the game, it was easy for me to confirm that the PS3 version of the game was a direct port from the XBox version - it had the same software bugs. (Walk down the flooding "skywalk" leading away from the medical pavilion to the half-closed bulkhead door, for instance, and you can easily insert your POV inside the polygons forming the bulkhead to become part of the door. ) I was glad to see the error which frustrated me so the first time I played - it indicated this was as close as I was going to get to an apples-to-apples comparison of machines.

Strange as it was to step back a few years in state-of-the-art graphics, the Art Deco world of Rapture still felt like moving through a living painting, with gorgeous gold-inlaid walls covered with deconstructionist period murals and creepy marketing slogans on billboards smeared with dried blood. The 5.1 audio is disquietingly convincing - especially playing with the lights out. All of these little cues made it easy to get lost in the game once again.

The controls on the PS3 version were similar to the XBox360 version, with Jack's genetically altered abilities available with your left hand, and the traditional weapons and tools available with the right. The PS3 DualShock controller vibrated in the same disturbing manner as the XBox controllers. (I do think the publishers 2K missed an opportunity not taking advantage of the accelerometer in the DualShock, but that would be a rewrite to the UIX rather than a direct port.) Because of this similarity, plus the speed of the processors on both consoles, motions through the world of Bioshock are seamless and quick on both systems. Still...the game just felt better on the PS3. What was that about?

Part of my subjective impression may be due to the differences in how the boxes render the graphics on the screen. I can only imagine that the bitmaps and rendered flatfiles are the same on both versions of the game. However, on the XBox360 I had the same issue that did with worlds portrayed in Halo3, Left4Dead and others: colors and contrasts on the XBox360 seem muted and washed out to my eye. Contrasts are low, and similar color schemes blend together in my visual field. The same imagery on the PS3 is clear, crisp and high contrast. The splicers and "Big Daddies" in Bioshock popped off the screen at me, whereas on the XBox I often had a hard time pulling them out of the shadows. (Never a good scenario when, you know, they're running at you screaming.)

So what have we learned from this, aside from the fact that Uncle Robby needs to get out more? The consoles themselves seem to operate basically the same when given the same set of physics engines and other algorithms. The controllers are essentially identical, and gameplay on both feels good.

There is, however, a perceived difference in the unquantifiable "enjoyment" between the two due to the quieter PS3 console, plus the PS3's apparent ability to render crisper, high contrast graphics with a higher dynamic color range...

...oh, yeah...and the PS3 has never failed in 2 years of use, the XBox360 however has already given me one red eyed glare in the same time frame.

Alright - back to blinding people with science! Well....maybe after I pop just one more Big Daddy.

Stunning Timelapse of Galactic Center passing over a Texas Star Party

2009-05-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

OK, no pithy titles or clever sayings here - this video from William Castleman is truly gorgeous.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

I'm glad that folks are still throwing star parties.

For those of you that have never been to one, they are at once highly geeky events akin to Star Trek conventions, enormous opportunities for learning and shared wonder, excuses to stand out in a field and drink beer/whiskey/hot chocolate, and wonderful chances to really understand what this universe is all about and how to observe and appreciate it.

When I was growing up in the 70's (1970's, smart ass) in northern Minnesota, the opportunity to have star parties were pretty plentiful - no light pollution (because who the hell would live up there) coupled with being basically equidistant between the equator and the north pole (think access to Aurora Borealis) and - lets face it - there being little else to do, led to 1-2 of these things a month. 20-30 people with the latest in telescopes, cameras, night vision gear, and beer (usually Hamm's) resulted in dozens of amazing experiences. Including non-astronomical experiences, such as the time that Dabs - my dad - nearly decked my high school astronomy teacher because he didn't quite get the concept of a grown man going out to a frozen field in the middle of the night with 20 highschoolers. (Thanks for not backing down, Dale!)

By the time I left that town when I was 18, I had seen eclipses (lunar and solar), meteor showers, transits, and more aurora displays then I can comfortably tell you about here. I learned how to photograph on night plates, constructed reflector telescopes (including spending a year grinding the primary mirror by hand), help fund-raise for a planetarium, and - later - helped run the projector at that planetarium.

Looking at this video from Monsieur Castleman brings back a lot of memories - as well as making me green with envy that I didn't grow up in an era of high definition digital video and GPS-based telescopes. Growing up in the waning years of photographic negatives, all of my equipment was extremely analog and required patience - instant gratification was out of the question, as you had to wait until at least the next day to process the photos or video...uh, film. It was only after I went to college later in that decade, I was able to construct a then-new charged-couple device (CCD) as project for an astronomy class. It was extremely expensive to build, and was a whopping 100x100 pixels, each able to hold 64 shades of gray - but it was a start. (Alright, Castleman, you got me there - but do you know how to process a photographic glass plate in a darkroom? Hah! No. No you don't!)

Even more important than the amazing view of the Milky Way rising in that video, however, is what you see along the horizon: people. Dozens of them milling about, their red flashlights (LED based, of course) coming on and off, configuring their laptops and calibrating their GPS-ized telescopes, checking exposure times, and drinking beer (probably Lone Star, not Hamms, since the video is from Texas). Star parties are still going on and are still popular, which means people and kids are still learning...which...gives me hope.

...well, at the very least it makes me feel better about the coming robot apocalypse.

The End of Human Life as We Know It: Great, Now They Don't Even Need an Exoskeleton

2009-04-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

OK, yes - it's been 2 months since I have posted anything, despite my New Year's resolution to post once a week. (Hey, I've been occupied, ok? JOB. I have a JOB.... ok, fine... I also have a PS3. Like I said, I've been occupied!)

At any rate, I come with a warning. They've started to evolve. First they swam, then they could get back up when knocked down, now they don't even need metal. Seal the doors and windows, get the kids and the dogs in from the yard...

My Year With The Zune....

2009-02-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

....comes to an end.

But before I go there - first my apologies at the lack of posts in January. As a twitter friend has been reminding me (daily, Maria!), I already blew my New Year's resolution to post weekly. Hey, I do have an excuse: I was moving cities again! (This time to San Francisco - and here I'll stay...well, at least for a while.)

Now, back to the end of the Rocket Zune.

As everyone who reads this little diatribe knows, despite all the jeers and being the butt of all jokes on this topic, I'm a Zune fan. What's more, I enjoy the Zune Marketplace a great deal - it's a pleasure to use, and gives me access to millions of DRM free MP3 files, and has a great interface for dealing with podcasts. Also, for as much maligning as "Welcome to the Social" has taken, the Zune is - well - extremely social. The built in social networking aspect of the Zune actually works well. No, I've never "squirted" (ew), but I have taken advantage of the LastFM-esque aspects of the Zune Marketplace. Discovered a lot of good tunes that way.

So, if it's working for me, why stop now?

My current Zune is a Zune 80Gig model - works great, updated to version 3.0 of ZM without a hitch, and all the cool new features came along for the ride. However, my music collection has grown, as has my appetite for video-on-the-go: all of which has pushed me to upgrade to a higher capacity model: the Zune 120. So, when it came down to another $250 outlay, I had to think carefully...

First, there was the bad news from Zuneland this past quarter: Zune revenue declined by a frightening 54%. You might be tempted to blame that on the ailing world economy, until you realize that Apple's iPod sales increase 3% during the same time frame. (I haven't sat down to work out the math, but I bet the numbers come close to balancing out.) People have jumped ship - or, rather, not gotten on board the ship - in record numbers. As a WSJ editorial states, the Zune's market share is now flirting with 0%.

I have a theory about the decline, BTW: it corresponded with the release of the Zune Marketplace 3.0, and corresponding firmware upgrade, at the end of Q3 '08. Unlike Apple or any other media players on the market, Microsoft did not force you to buy a new Zune. All Zunes could be upgraded with the new software, and worked perfectly within the range of their older hardware limitations. (The equalizer software didn't work on the first gen Zunes, for instance, because they had no hardware to support it.) Everything worked: wireless synching, OTA buys from the Zune Marketplace, clicking on FM songs to purchase... all of it. And that may have been the problem...

By respecting their current user base and applying the backward-compatibility ethos which, like it or not, worked as a strategy for PCs, Microsoft may have shot itself in the foot. Who would spend another $250 on a new Zune if you didn't need increased storage capacity and you could get all the cool new features for free? Turns out: no one.

At any rate, even without the sales figure decline, I probably would have made the same call: the weight of the overwhelming market share of the iPod was taking it's toll: my cars have iPod ports, not Zune ports, for instance...and getting something as simple as an armband for the gym was problematic. (As it turns out, the armbands for the iPhones work perfectly with the Zunes...who says we all can't get along?)

So, with a $250 upgrade to make, I set the Zune aside (I won't sell it, I will keep it in a nice little shrine) and headed over to the Apple store to pick up a 120gig 6th generation iPod. (The iPod touch stalled out at 32gig? I crap bigger than 32gig!) I sat down at my laptop, cleaned up my music collection, transferred my podcast subscriptions over to iTunes 8.x, sync'ed it and fired it up.

There it was: my shiny new iPod looking all... well, iPod-ish. After a year of absence, its depressingly the same. Sure, there's cover flow and the sync icon is now orange (ooooo!), but other than that: the system is basically exactly the same. No wifi, no stereo bluetooth, no FM radio... no real changes of any kind. (The damn font still looks like it came from the first generation 64K Macintoshes from the 80's.) Moving from the Zune interface and feature set back to the iPod is, well, a step backwards in look-n-feel and features.

...and then there is iTunes. The "music management" system, and front end to the iTunes store, still looks like it was written by a first year college engineering student as a final project. Same old interface. Oh, sorry, it has "cover flow" too...right. (Do you really use cover flow to find albums, people? Really? I doubt it.) It also has "Genius" now, which doesn't seem to be using the information from the music genome project, like Pandora does, to get its relationships between songs. As best as I can tell does a simple stochastic match between what you've got in your library and what other people have in their libraries to determine what songs you have that possibly sound like other songs you have. (What's a good playlist that sounds like "Dani California?" Well, here's the union of songs that you have in your collection with songs other people have in playlists containing "Dani California." Genius.)

The final affront to my logic centers? iTunes is on Version 8, and it still can't tell that you've put new music into a watched directory. Moving from the Zune Marketplace to iTunes is like trading in the Porsche for a Volkswagen - sure, they are both German cars, but...come on. Seriously? I'm not the only one who thinks so - there's been a lot of articles about ZM lately, such as David Chartier's excellent piece in ARS Technica last week. (David: you almost had me reversing my decision.)

So, market forces win (remember when market competition was a good thing?) and I turn my back on the Zune to move back in with my old girlfriend, Apple. She has a new dress on, and pretty shoes - but I suspect she still can't dance - but everyone seems to think she's just awesome and she's kinda the only one at the party, so I'll give her one more chance.

...hmmm...wait, who's the iRiver girl over there by the bar...?

Throwing in my Two Cents: The Rocket's 2009 Tech Predictions

2009-01-04T09:20:00.001-08:00

Nostradamus hat? Check. Crystal ball? Check. Number of my bookie in Jersey? Check. OK, let me throw myself into the circus act of bloggers out there trying to stake some claims over the next 365 days...

Last year I hit a sad 75% on my predictions for 2008 -- let's see if we can crank it up a notch. (I'm also trying to beat the clock and get this crap out before CES this year.)

Economic recovery begins in early Q3 for the tech and housing industries.

OK, this one goes against nearly every piece of bad press that I have read for the last 6 months, but I still believe it.

Since this is a tech column, we'll leave the housing industry aside for a moment - aside from the incredible resiliency of the the US economy, the tech sector in the US has fallen behind in several key areas: broadband penetration, high-speed wireless penetration, consumer electronic technology, low power technologies (drives, displays, etc), and battery technology. Any entity that misses one industrial or technological innovation leap-frogs over that innovation to the Next Big Thing. (Europe has an unparalleled infrastructure of train tracks, the US creates automobiles and roadways. The US creates unparalleled wired phone lines, Asian-Pacific markets surpass the US for wireless phone systems. Etc etc.)

Being behind in the technology leadership in the above (and other) areas will provide a window of opportunity for investors, entrepreneurs and established tech companies. Many of the missed opportunities above already exist as half-constructed ventures, lab experiments and business plans... execution out of desperation is sure to follow in the first half of 2009.

Update: January 16th - Looks like the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis agrees with me, at least. Thanks to J. McCartie at http://www.volasail.com for bringing this to my attention.
The Obama Administration revitalizes the tech industry within 6 months of taking office.

Slightly related to the first bullet point, the Obama Administration is on top of things enough to realize what the economic engine in the US really is, and where we are failing on delivering. After 8 years of starved technology ecosystems, Obama will begin to place money and resources into crumbling technical infrastructures, and lower the barrier of entry for new companies to compete against established companies. The creation of a "Chief Technology Officer" position for his administration is the first sign that they will get this right.
MEMS technology for low power / flexible displays hits the market.

OK, fine - I made this same prediction last year and it didn't pan out - but it's pissing me off that it didn't, so I'm plopping it back on the table, damn it.

Qualcomm's spin off company (Qualcomm MEMS Technology) is one of the companies focusing on low-power displays through nanotechnology. (In this case, small shutters control the filtering of light from LEDs, as opposed to digital filters which require energy.) As mobile devices get more and more complex, power management becomes a ridiculously huge issue. (I thought the iPhone was bad, but the Android phone with its multitasking OS fires off its various radios in the background without you even being aware of it. The power meter looks like a sweep second hand on a watch.) One of the biggest consumers of power in these devices - minus the radios - is the display. QMT's nanotech shutter system produces the same screen brightness for 1/5th the power consumption.

In Cambridge, Mass, eInk has created a flexible, color version of its digital ink technology currently found in the Kindle and the Sony eReader. Just because newspapers and magazines are headed the way of "instant photography," CD publishing, and terrestrial radio doesn't mean that people don't want the content - but reading a newspaper on a laptop or iPhone isn't for everyone, and it doesn't duplicate the newspapers current distribution model. (Wake up, stumble outside, pick up newspaper of the wet pavement.) The first instances of eInk's flexible, color digital "paper" will no doubt be to receive your subscription to the NY Times or Newsweek directly to a portable, always on device. (It will put a crimp in the "taking the paper to the toilet" market, tho.)

My bet (again): expect one or both of these technologies on the market in other OEM's device by Q4.
Android phone sales hit iPhone numbers before end of year

The T-Mobile G1 is projected to hit 1,000,000 units sold when the final tally for Q4 2008 is done. Keep in mind that the phone has hit the 1M mark having only been on the market since late October 2008, and for sale in only 19 markets because of T-Mobile's late-to-the-game nascent 3G service. There are several more phones expected in the next few months that run on any 3G service out of the box, with form factors that mimic both the iPhone and the Blackberry.
Digital delivery of home media makes a measurable change in broadcast TV numbers
I know, everyone is either predicting this or laughing at people who predict it - but you gotta take a stand, baby! We've seen UPN and The WB merge over the past 18 months to the oddly named "The CW." (I miss the Frog, actually.) It's not unreasonable to expect to see additional kerfuffle amongst the traditional TV networks due to erosion of a viable audience base.

The additional changes could be consolidation or dissolution of one of the four remaining broadcasters, or it could be something more subtle - there is a very good chance that this is the year that a major network or studio backed network begins using the internet as a direct means of distribution to it's audiences.
Significant drops in Blu-Ray player prices combined with content publisher pressure to release existing titles in a new format will push Blu-Ray disc sales past DVD disc sales

I know the debate: did Blu-Ray win too late in this era of media downloads? Do people really want to switch from their DVD collection when upscaling DVD players are just fine?

Well, all things being equal: no. However, content companies are hungry for ways of monetizing existing content in their catalogs. As the price of Blu-Ray players falls below the $120 mark, content publishers will be incented to migrate more of their catalogs over to Blu-Ray in an attempt to sell you the Star Wars Trilogy...again. (This is the same logic that pushed music content publishers to move from album to tape to CD.)

With all those brand spanking new flatscreens out there and sub-$120 Blu-Ray players out there, consumers walking into a Tower Records and faced with their favorite movie or TV show in both DVD and Blu-Ray, which do you think you would choose?
As Apple pushes deeper into double-digit territory for laptop sales, several serious viral attacks begin in the Mac community. Lack of adequate protection combined with consumer hubris will make the problems significant.

This one I'll take some heat from the fanboys for - but I'll get through it somehow. Again.

You've all heard the argument before: the Apple ecosystem is unprepared for coordinated security attacks on their object of desire - but it's a valid argument. As Apple computers push deeper into double digit territory, they become a target for virus writers. It's not really important that there aren't a lot of virus protection software out there for Mac's, what's more damning is the Mac demographic is woefully under prepared.

Having not grown up in a culture of locking your backdoor, Mac denizens are not in the ritualistic habit of installing virus protection software, updating it and taking all the usual precautions against Very Bad People that windows and linux people have had to deal with for years.

Pwn2Own 2008 people: 2 minutes. MINUTES. 'Nuff said.
At least one other additional security exploits occur in the basic structure of the aging internet protocol and backbones, forcing a rethink of the way packets are carried over the Internets

It was designed to survive a nuclear attack on the united states... it was not designed to power everything from television sets to light switches. Last year Dan Kaminski discovered and reported a serious flaw deep in the bowels of the stalwart Domain Name System. That code has been in there since Christ was a corporal, and there's more - trust me.

Like bad roads and crumbling bridges built during WWII, the internet substructure is due for an overhaul - and I'm not talking about move from IPv4 to IPv6.
Windows 7 arrives at the latter-half of the year, but the PR damage done by the mishandling of Vista's public perception plus the stillborn Microsoft marketing campaign PLUS John Hodgman ensures a tepid reception to the new OS.

By all accounts, Windows 7 really is all that. All the reviewers that have advanced copies are tripping over themselves to say lovely things to Leo Laporte on TWiT about Windows 7. "Better." "Faster." "Prettier."

After the public shitfest that was heaped upon Vista over the past two years it isn't gonna matter a wit. The OS will be released to sound of crickets, and the windows community will be stuck with having to support "downgrades" from Windows 7 to XP - and maintain the codeline for Vista at the same time.
Yahoo breaks up into its original component companies, or at least puts them on the auction block, before Q4.

Yup - it's over kids. Do you Yahoo!?? Uh, no. No you don't. Prepare for recent and distant tech purchases like Flickr, Geocities and Maven to be divested and scattered upon the wind like seeds from a dandelion.

OK, there you go. Take me to task on Dec 31, 2009...but I'm shootin' to beat that 75%, dammit.

Have a great year everyone - let's go make some tech now, shall we?

Fessing up! A tally of RocketMan's 2008 Predictions...

2008-12-31T08:58:00.000-08:00

OK, it takes a big man to admit when he's wrong -- and an even bigger man to gloat about being right... or....something like that.

On this, the eve of the last day of a fairly weird year, let's take a quick trip back and see how I did for tech predictions for 2008...

The end of the RIAA Reign of Terror
WIN. Rolling score +1

Ironically, it wasn't all of us fighting against the RIAA that made them stop stalking single mothers, it was the economic downturn. Apparently, record labels have better things to do with their money then give it to thugs who sue hospitalized teens?. Who knew? Now they are going to turn to ISPs to "help stop piracy." Good luck with that, guys.
Massive adoption of non-DRM'ed digital music from the recording industry.
WIN. Rolling score +2

And, done. Turns out that people LIKE having the ability to move their digital music from machine to machine without restrictions... and that by removing digital rights management from digital music, people actually...and this is amazing... buy more music then they steal! Who knew? Oh, that's right... everyone else in the world except the record labels.

BTW, personal Rocket-Fav? Amazon MP3 store. Just...wonderful.
The age of digital books begins in ernest.
EH..call it a WIN. Rolling score: +3

I can't really tell, but I'm taking the credit anyway.

Sale figures for Amazon's Kindle are still hidden by Amazon, but there's indication that the sales have been at 400,000 through this Christmas season. Sales figures for Sony's eBook reader are estimated at 300,000 for the same time period. Now there are indications that eBook sales on the iPhone have added to the mix. So, those numbers total out at about +1M eBook capable devices in the field just between those three companies. (For comparison, iPod sales hit 1.3M within its first 2 years of operation.) In addition, audio book companies, like Audible, seem to be gaining traction.

Despite Steve Jobs famous, and idiotic, comment that people don't read anymore, it seems that they do - they are just changing how they read. Newspapers are dying, but the content is moving to the web. Physical book sales are dropping, but people are getting their read on in other ways.

For the record, I would never expect that eBook sales will keep pace with other forms of digital media, it's a different audience and consumption model, but I would expect the same ratio of readable media to audio/video media that has always existed...it will just move from the physical realm to the digital realm.

RocketMan's personal fave? It's still the Sony eReader. Granted, I'm a Sony fanboy, but the design of the 505 eReader is just too sexy... plus it's smaller and ergonomically better - you don't accidently flip pages. The eReader store is getting larger by the day, and there's indications that Amazon will open up it's book content to other eBook manufactures...which makes sense - it just enlarges their content sales channel.
Fold-up, roll-up displays.
LOSS. Rolling score: +3

This one really bums me out - I was expecting to see more out of this technology, and it looked promising at the end of 2007. But, nadda. I'm assuming manufacturing costs coupled with the "are people turning to ebooks" angst has kept the funding low for for foldable displays.

I think we need to put this one back in the oven for 1 more year.
GPS enabled, well, everything really
WIN. Rolling score: +4

Do you really need me to document this one? Hell, my fracking toothbrush has GPS now.
The mainstream emergence of "new media."
EH...Jury is still out. Rolling score: +4

Ok, something is happening - but I'm not sure you can call it a "mainstream emergence," yet. Jobs says idiotic things here too, in order to make himself feel better about the poor sales of the Apple iTV. (Which, honestly, is owing in part to the trademarked captive environment of the Apple ecosystem.) However, TV viewership is down, digital video downloads from all sources are up, Netflix and Blockbuster got into the set-top box game, movie theater ticket sales have remained crazy-constant over the past decade... so, who knows?

Does granny have a set-top box streaming movies from Amazon yet? No. Are people moving to a completely digital realm? Yes.

So, no - it's not "mainstream" yet -- but as long as "mainstream" means "people who have just figured out that a computer is more than just a porn machine," that answer will remain "no." However, that demographic is going to, in a very short time, wonder why there's nothing good on the telly anymore...its because the content channels have moved out from under them.
Verizon will pick up the 700Mhz spectrum.
WIN. Running score: +5

Yup, they got it. Now the real war starts: LTE, WiMax, 4G, or...something else?
Porn and Wal-Mart don't matter! (The HD-DVD/BluRay war)
WIN. Running score: +6

Jeez, this was over literally as I was writing the words last January. (Thank you Warner...or, rather, thank you Sony for paying off Warner.)

Now the question is: will physical media remain relevant, and what will happen to Blu-Ray versus downloadable media? If the Blu-Ray OEMs don't take a loss leader with their hardware and start selling those boxes for sub-$100, then Blu-Ray's "win" will be a hollow victory

Ok, 6 out of 8. 75%. Not bad.

Nah, crap! I can do better. Let's see what I come up with for 2009 this weekend...

Anyone up for a game of Scrobble?

2008-12-17T00:22:00.015-08:00

Unable to sleep tonight (what else is new), I started listening to some of my favorite tunes - and fiddling with Last.FM. I quickly hit the annoyance I always had - it's easy to scrobble from iTunes and the iPod, but those aren't my only music players. In fact, they aren't even my primary music players (the iPod relegated to my car only, and iTunes...well, I never listen to anything in iTunes)... so, how do I get music playing anywhere in my little world up and into Last.FM?

Note: for the purpose of this posting, I am leaving out all Last.FM specific applications which just stream Last.FM stations and reside on devices like the Nokia, the iPhone and laptops - and instead I am focusing just on plugins to existing native media playback applications. 'Cuz, I mean, who the hell actually listens through those little Last.FM streamers?

First, what's my music ecosystem these days? Well, as it should be, its a variety of devices and internet services:

That's quite a collection, but they all have different purposes in my life - the Zune for traveling and listening to my music collection, the Android for internet streaming, WMP and Banshee for when I am on my laptops, etc. Until recently, it was difficult to find applications to allow scrobbling on these devices.

In the last few months, however, a boatload of scrobblers has shown up out of nowhere. It's either a full moon, or I'm not the only one who was having these issues.

So, after a few hours tonight, I was able to pull together enough of these scrobblers to cover each and every media player in my ecosystem. (Again: skipping the iTunes/iPod and Windows Media player solutions, since these are easily provided via Last.FM itself.)

Zune / Zune Marketplace = Zenses
(Last.Fm Group: http://www.last.fm/group/Zenses)

This one was the trickiest to find, actually. The Zune and Zune Marketplace don't have a published API for plugins (jeez, of COURSE they don't), so Zune owners have been frustrated for years. Then along came Zenses, the open source brainchild of Last.FM junky Adam Livesley. Not a conventional scrobbling tool - in that it isn't a plugin - Zenses was originally written for the Creative Zen, which has the same issue as the Zune. As it turns out, the same trick it Zenses uses to work with the Creative Zen works with Zune Marketplace.

Zenses runs in the background of your Vista machine. When Zune Marketplace fires up and the Zune syncs its information with Marketplace, it changes the "last access" date field in the media files that were played - this change in state is detected by Zenses and registered as a hit suitable for scobbling, and reports it to Last.FM.

If you think about if for a minute, its the same trick that backup utilities use for determining that a file has changed and is ready for backup. If you think about it for 2 minutes, you also realize that in order for Zenses to work, it needs a "baseline" of file states to compare against. So the very first time you install and run Zenses, go and get lunch as it creates that baseline for your all your files. The good news is that it only needs to do this once, then it's scobble-as-usual from then on.

Sonos Music System - Sonos Upgrade 2.7
(Last.FM Group: http://www.last.fm/group/Sonos+Multi-Room+Music+System)

If you have a house, or even a multiroom condo or apartment, and you don't want to spend $100K on a whole house audio system that will be obsolete in a year, then you want a Sonos system. For about $500/room, Sonos will shuttle all of your digital music around (regardless of whether or not its on a hard drive, your Rhapsody account, Sirius satellite, local radio stations, Pandora, Napster, etc) , and even sync the room playbacks together.

This is how I listen to all of my music at home - so the fact that there was never a scrobbler for Sonos was incredibly frustrating to me. That changed with the release of Sonos 2.7 software late last month. Sonos 2.7 includes a Last.FM integration that is seamless: it not only scrobbles all your playbacks, but allows you access to your Last.FM account from the Sonos Controllers. Problem solved.

RadioParadise.com - The Radio Paradise Scrobble r
(Last.FM Group: none)

Based off of Markus Palme's scrobbler for a local radio station, Last.FMer RichPr built the Radio Paradise Scrobbler.

The use of the application is fairly simple: after installing it, you access radio paradise through the RP Scrobbler - which does the task of passing the stream off to Windows Media Player for playback of the stream, and recording the RP track changes and passing the information off to Last.FM as you go.

Easy-Peasy.

Banshee Media Player - Banshee Media Player
(Last.FM Group: http://www.last.fm/group/Banshee)

The Banshee Media Player is an all-inclusive media player for several flavors of Linux, including Ubuntu. Banshee takes the place of RhythmBox on Ubuntu, and indeed replaces all of that players features - and adds a few such as podcast catching and, of course, scrobbling. It's clean, easy and works like a champ.

Android G1 - ScrobbleDroid
(Last.FM Group: http://www.lastfm.com.br/forum/21716/_/474481/1#f7946498)

Lightweight and sporting a cutsey icon, ScrobbleDroid is available from the Android Market. It operates silently in the background listening to anything being played through the Android's default "Music" application and scrobbles it out to Last.FM. It works pretty flawlessly - to the point that you forget it is there at all.

The only complaint I have about it so far is that it does stick to parasiting itself on the Android music app... so, when I listen to RadioParadise through "AntPlayer" on the Android, nothing gets scrobbled. Well, the damn phone has only been out for a month and a half, I can cut it some slack, right?

Update: January 26th: At the end of last week, Last.FM released it's Android Last.FM application to the Android Market. It's a full-featured Last.FM client, complete with your profile information, stations, friends, neighbors and other Last.FM goodies. (The only thing missing, I think, is editing your profile.) Playing off of the Android Last.FM app automatically scrobbles your plays. A very sweet application. Nicely done.

Vista Media Center - MceFM (Last.FM Group: http://build.last.fm/item/335)

The MceFM plugin for Vista Media Center is both a Last.FM client streamer, and a scrobbler for the Vista Music Playback center. Providing an additional interface to the Music playback that allows for the Last.FM streaming, and if you just listen to your music normally, it scrobbles what you are listening to up to the mother ship.

Bonus extra-credit points: the freakin' thing works with the XBox360 in Media Extender Mode.

OK - that's not an exhaustive list, by any means, but it covers a lot of my personal ground...and, well, it's all about me, isn't it?

BTW, if you'd like, feel free to follow my listening exploits on Last.FM, since I scrobble now: http://www.last.fm/user/UberRocket

Ho-Ho-Ho from The Doctor...

2008-11-28T17:19:00.001-08:00

...he's back, and not a moment too soon. TV needs the TARDIS...

Welcome back.

The Reasons to Go Outside Get Fewer and Fewer. Seriously.

2008-11-15T11:46:00.012-08:00

OK, this is something that deserves a bit more fanfare than it's receiving... Despite the Hollywood-ending-butchering (uh, sorry, "re-imagining") of Phillp K. Dick's short story, and despite the inclusion of Tom Cruise, who...well....is a crazy person, the 2002 film "Minority Report" was chock-a-block full of "just around the corner" predictions of advances in technology and social evolution.

None of the technology was impossible to imagine, and the societal impact that these advances predict are quite close at hand. From personal transport pods on individual tracks, fully robotic auto manufacturing facilities, advertising personalization gone horribly wrong, home videos with depth (which I am convinced was based of "depth-maps" we created at long-dead Synapix in the late 90's) and even the miracle of eye transplants reduced to the disturbing mundane reality usually equated with back-alley abortions - none of these future predictions grabbed the immediacy of the gesture-based operating system used by Cruise and his buds at the "Precrime" police facility in Washington DC. The science advisers and futurists working on the film tried to imagine a logical evolution of current operating systems based off current human interaction devices (uh, mice and motion capture suiots, people) and extended it to gestures of operators wearing special gloves with sensors in the fingertips.

To add the extra spark of "wow," the film depicts the interface projected not on giant flat screens (how Star Trek, pffft) but on large transparent plates hanging from the ceiling. The result is a visually stunning scene, that was the first realistic portrayal of a future operating system I have seen for quite some time.

Apparently, John Underkoffler at MIT thought so too, because he got together with some ex-Raytheon folks, moved to LA (and, somehow, Barcellona) and formed Oblong Industries. And Oblong's first achievement? A gesture based operating system (or Spacial Operating Environment, SOE, for you kids in the know) called g-speak. g-speak (no caps) is, for all intents and purposes, the same operating environment and workflow model that is depicted in the film.

Screw multi-touch iPhones and Microsoft Surface, for complete technolust and total mind-fuckage, check out this demo reel of g-speak in action....

Bringing hollywood-tech to life has happened time and time again, from the original bridge of the Enterprise being duplicated for modern aircraft carrier bridges, to human assistance exoskeletons that allowed Ripley to beat the crap out of Momma Bug in Aliens...but I haven't seen something so exactingly executed as g-speak before.

Just one request: please do not duplicate those freaking spider-robots, please. I have enough robo-phobia as it is, thank you.

....uh, oh crap.

Living with an Android

2008-10-23T16:56:00.015-07:00

OK, I realize how pedestrian it is to write about a new gadget as that gadget is hitting the streets - and yet, while I normally leave that sort of activity to David Pogue (ha-ha, David. I kid. Really.), this is device worth a bit of mention.

For about 8 months now, I've been extremely happy with my little Nokia N82 - it not only passes the fits-in-jeans-front-pocket test with flying colors, but packs a wallop of a camera (5 megapixel) with geotargeting, easy access to Flickr, great web browsing, tons of seriously useful applications, etc... oh, and I haven't yet smashed this one against a curb. (Sorry, Sony Ericsson PL1, I really am.) So - why did I feel the need to replace it with something bigger, uglier and with a less powerful camera?

Well...not really need so much as curiosity. Being a gadget addict, heavily involved in the mobile industry, and sick to death of the smug satisfication of the iPhone fanboys and girls, the HTC Dream (dubbed the G1 by the T-Mobile marketing folks), the first ever Android phone, was way too compelling to just watch go to my guys' QA lab. I wanted...nay, needed... to live with one for a while. (Besides, T-Mo is offering a 30 day return policy in Cali, so I figured what the hell?)

Going into the T-Mobile store as an existing T-Mobile customer to pick up a G1 was a pretty simple affair. Interestingly, everyone in there was buying a G1, but still I was in and out in under a half an hour. (I spent the longest amount of time deciding between black or bronze. Really. I'm pathetic that way.) Hightailing it back to office, I stuck the SIM card in from my Nokia and fired it up.

From here, I could do one of those pro/con things, but I won't - that way, you'll be forced to read prose rather than bullet points. It's my little way of preserving the English language. Ahem...

The phone itself was a breeze to set up and get running - but, recall, I was already a T-Mobile customer, so take that into consideration. The apps were easy to locate in the Android Market (more on that in a bit), and the T-Mobile 3G network here in San Francisco is quite zippy. I was also delighted to see that my company's mobile web applications (we do mobile video distribution) ran on the G1 without modifications.

First issue hit: getting contacts, calendar and email aligned between this phone and my corporate and personal accounts. The Android platform, you see, doesn't have a native Exchange client - but rather uses the entire Google application suite. I anticipated that this would be a problem for me from the start, since I use Google apps only for my personal life, and not my corporate life. Enter Cemaphore Sytems, and their clever little application MailShadow. Whereas other Google-app-to-exchange sync'ing requires a bunch of crap set up between the corporate exchange server and Google, Cemaphore took a different approach: you already have an exchange client setup on your laptop for Outlook, so, uh, just use that. Sync'ing email, calendar and contacts only took a few minutes once it was set up properly. Voila, I'm running.

Now, because MailShadow requires your laptop running before sync'ing can take place, this wasn't a viable option for email in the long run (calendar and contacts - eh, I can wait until I boot the laptop, not so with email), I just configured the mail client on the G1 to IMAP into our corporate email. Done. Email, contacts and calendar sync'ed perfectly...

...well, almost perfectly. MailShadow doesn't allow for contact pictures to be transferred. But...I like my contact pictures...so, a few minutes hunting around the web revealed this little experiment in funness from Koushik Dutta on his blog My Brain Hurts (free plug there for you Mr. D.) on how to sync Google contacts with Facebook photos. After a quick godless prayer to hope that Mr. D's little app wasn't accidentally erasing my Google contacts, I ran his app and...pictures galore in Google contacts. Ok, now done.

Prediction: as more and more G1 owners run into this problem, MailShadow and Dutta's GoogleFacebookSync are going to become must-have items.

So, now that the phone's set up and I can actually live comfortably with it - how the hell is it?

On one hand, this is a very impressive phone. Is it the prettiest girl at the dance? No,its actually sort of an odd shape - slightly chubbier than its iPhone counterpart, but not that much chubbier. Most of the weight-gain is due to the sliding mechanism for the screen so that it can move out of the way to reveal: ta-da, a keyboard! (My one objection to the N82, and the sole remaining reason I will not purchase an iPhone, is lack of a real keyboard.)

The smattering of applications in the market (and I use the term "smattering" correctly), are almost all 100% useful - no light-saber apps here, just pure goodness. Plus, the lack of Apple iTunes Appstore-esque controls means, of course, apps don't even have to go through the Android Market. (Although it is more convenient for the user if they do.) There are a number of freeware and shareware sites already popping up for quick distribution of these applications. Check out http://www.android-freeware.org/ for several pages of examples of the types of apps you can get.

The most striking thing about the majority of the Android apps is how tightly intergrated they are with the machine's built-in GPS and aGPS systems... not just gratuitous "where's the nearest sushi restaurant" applications (although, believe me, there are plenty of those) but also very clever ideas realized. The app Locale, for instance, will allow you to set configuration properties of your phone based off of where you are currently located. Walking into the office and you don't want your Sex and the City ringtone to go off during a meeting? Locale will detect that you've entered your office building and put the phone in vibrate mode. Efficient, useful, clever and not gratuitous.

Now, the omissions on the G1 are just as striking as the cleverness of much of the phone. There is, for example, no support for A2DP in the firmware of the bluetooth radio, which means of course no bluetooth stereo headsets or speakers. Excuse me?? Really? You're trying to market one of the advantages of this device as being an audio and media player and you don't support A2DP out of the gate? Well, no problem, I'll just plug in my Shure headset and...hey...wtf? There's no jack for a headset? Yup, that's right. Just the goofy USB port on the bottom of the device. Oh sure, HTC sells a dongle that will allow you to plug in the headset, but...wtf?? One more little thingy to lose in the depths of my briefcase?

So, all told, do I think the G1 is going to make a dent in the iPhone onslaught? No, of course not - but, and this is the beauty of Google's Android ecosystem: it doesn't really matter. The very reason that Apple's desktop and laptop market share is so low is their closed ecosystem. They have to make the devices themselves, maintain the OS themselves, and compete against all the other PC makers out there. The result is higher prices and lower market penetration.

The same principle will apply to the Android-vs-iPhone frackus: it doesn't matter that HTC's G1 offering for T-Mobile is lacking A2DP or a headset port or that its, let's face it, kinda ugly. There are two dozen other OEMs in the Android Open Handset Allianc e building their own handsets. One of them is going to get it very, very right.

...and that's when things will get very interesting.

Taking off the Rocket Helmet

2008-09-05T14:04:00.006-07:00

First off, many apologies.

I went from 1 post a week to, uh, never since July. It's been a wild few months since Dabs passed, but I'm psyched to get back into the rocketship and talk about all the fun n' weird crap that's happened in tech and science since I last wrote.

Which brings us to my first blog post since my last one about my father: and, this one will also be self-indulgent. I've gotten a goofy number of emails along the lines of...

"...nice posts...but who the hell are you...?"
"...been reading...for awhile, you sound like I should know you..."

and, my personal favorite:

"...what the fuck...do you think Comcast is gonna sue you? They're busy!"

OK, fine. Fine. You're all right...it's time for the big reveal...

As you can see on my revamped "about me" section, my name is Rob DeMillo, and I've been in tech for a very long time. (Does dismantling the tube - and that's vacuum tube, not cathode-ray tube - TV at age 8 count?) I began my professional carrier in the public sector doing work for JPL, NASA, Lincoln Laboratory and the F.A.A, wandered through the world of 3D computer graphics when it was still young, and ended up a serial entrepreneur. Currently, I am the CTO and co-founder of a startup in California creating technology for delivering video and video advertising to mobile phones.

See, was that so hard? So, why all the mystery?

Well - anonymity breeds honest discourse. I've been around, know a lot of people, seen a lot of things in a lot of different industries and agencies...and, well, I write about them. Not always favorably...but, that's the way it goes, ya know?

So, I'm back in the rocket ship, and I'm gonna continue to write about what I see and hear around me - and reflect a bit on how what I'm currently observing may effect the course of the rocket, or of society...or how we're traveling over ground that we've already covered - but no one (chooses?) to remember. I'll keep being honest in my opinion, and if I accidentally (or otherwise) kick people and things I personally know, please feel free to kick back.

At least now you know how to get ahold of me...fair is fair, after all. See y'all next week for a new series of posts...

Dabs Lights the Rocket Fuse....

2008-06-15T08:02:00.011-07:00

If you want to ignore this blog entry, you won't be held responsible - this is less my usual musings on science, tech and society then it is a self-induldgent reminiscing about the town of my birth. Hey, I'm allowed....

My father's death this week brought me back to my town of origin: a small, edge-of-the-wilderness place called Hibbing just south of the Canadian border. (For a cartoon point of reference, it's 60 miles due south of International Falls, Minnesota - the non de plume of which was "Frostbite Falls" in Rocky & Bullwinkle.) My father, or as his family and close friends called him, "Dabs," was a soft-spoken man, an Italian-American (his father, Dominic, was one of those gangs-of-New-York-off-the-boat Italian immigrants from a small Abburzo town, Rocca Morice), fought in the marine corp after World War II, was a barber for most of his civilian life...and, was not well educated. It served him, tho - an education was a luxury for a man of his time.

I got my start in Hibbing, obviously - attended Hibbing High School (a beautiful high school with imported marble, chandeliers, and mahogany and oak wood - a bribe, from the Oliver Mining Company in 1915, given to the town when OMC found iron ore under the town's original location), and started programming after school for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (now defunct)...

There are two surprising things about this mini-bio for Young UberRocket:

It took place between 1974 and 1978, long before PCs and Apple ]['s were a gleam in Gates & Jobs collective eyes
It took place in one of the coldest, most remote locales in the continental US. (Go ahead, Northern Tip of Maine, debate me on this!)

I was reminded of both of these facts when I went back to Minnesota this week to bury Dabs - the town is a shadow of it's former-self, which is really saying something - since it's former-self was on life-support 30 years ago... Oliver Mining Company is long since gone, with the larger Mesabi Mining Company having taken control of the mine. The mine itself is the largest open pit mine on the planet - a testament to raping the landscape - however, in its heyday it employed 10,000 miners. Now, however, thanks to automation it takes only about 700 people to produce the same output...which leaves Hibbing residents scrambling for a new vocation.

So, in short:

northern minnesota + short growing season + mining operation - miners = ghost town in the making

Which leads me back to: how could I have even found the technology rocket, let alone boarded it, in a place that had - shall we say - other things on it's mind?

To be fair, some of this had to do with the desire/need/intensity to get the hell out of Dodge. It was pretty clear, even to an Iron Range adolescent, that this was Not The Place To Stay. The only road out was through education. That beautiful High School was good for more than just admiring the chandeliers, it attracted teaching talent -- which meant that the math, science and english teachers and curriculum were significantly above average. (I didn't realize this until after I got to college, and realized that I could test out of calculus, entry computer science and certain physics courses, because I already had been given that education.)

There's more to the story, of course - out of a graduating class of 460, a full 420 stayed behind in Hibbing -- so it wasn't just the opportunity provided by that high school... there was something else going on: my siblings and I all high-tailed it outta town to take some pretty serious tech jobs in various cities around the planet.

Which brings me back to Dabs - when I was writing his eulogy this past weekend, something occurred to me about the old man: despite his lack of formal education (it's unclear if he even graduated from high school, actually), Dabs was something of an engineer wannabe. When I was barely old enough to hold a wrench, he had me in that fucking frozen garage in the middle of a Minnesota winter re-gapping spark plugs. When I was given a chemistry set (note to the 20-something crowds who have had Jarts, Klackers and model rocketry taken away from them by a paranoid, whacked out 1980's-era, ruling parent class: chemistry sets in the 60's were honest-to-god chemistry sets. Real chemicals, working Bunsen burners...the whole nine yards), Dabs dragged out the encyclopedia Brittannica (note to the same 20-somethings: encyclopedia Brittannica == Wikipedia with a slower information refresh rate), opened it to "gun powder" and walked away before mom got suspicious. (Yes, I did succeed in blowing a hole in the basement floor.) He would come to pick me up at 3am from the "star parties" thrown by my astronomy teacher - yes, he was swearing the whole time, but he did it...

As I got older and more into electronics, Dabs would try to keep up -- the gadgets would break, and he and I would haul the mechanical carcasses into the basement workshop or the hardware store down the street, and 9 times out of 10 get the damn thing working again.

However at some point in my late teens, I started to drag primitive computers into the house - and Dabs met his match. He would sheepishly come into my room or wherever I had the large, clunky things set up (think Altair and Tandy computers), and ask me questions. I'd answer him in the hauty arrogance of a 16 year old...he'd shrug and leave. Eventually, he stopped coming. (Later, I would find him at the corner hardware store or in the garage among the tubes and wires and rubber that he felt most at home with....)

So...I blame both nature and nurture for lighting the fuse of the Rocket - thank you Dabs, I'm forever in your debt. (Note: Dabs is the little guy leaning against the gas pump in front of the hardware store where he'd later teach me how to solder.)

Twitter's Potential Monetization Path: Marketing via the Antithesis of SPAM...uh, MAPS?

2008-05-14T18:31:00.005-07:00

If you've living in the murky, smog-like haze of a next-gen web, social networking, and mobile networking reality - you know about twitter. For those of you that don't, twitter is a short messaging/party-line system where you can broadcast up to 140 characters at a pop to your friends and family, oh....and anyone else on Planet Earth who cares to listen in.

Despite well-publicized issues with Ruby as the root of their platform scalability problems, twitter is -by any measure - a runaway success:

Officially a year old as of the last SouthxSouthWest conference, twitter experienced user community growth from 1M users to 3M users in the last 6 months. (Approximate, since no one knows the exact figures.)
A plethora of twitter applications have sprung up (I just wanted to say "plethora") with more coming every day.
Twitter is gaining mind share in the non-twitter community, with twitter stories popping up on CNN, the New York Times, and other major news outlets. (Sure, they get it wrong 3/4ths of the time, but, hey - they're trying.)
Twitter competitors Jaiku and Pownce have been largely ignored by the media, and have underwhelming user numbers, as far as anyone can tell.
Websites are including "Twitter Alerts" on their main pages next to the RSS feeds so that users can be sent a tweet when a new item appears.
Twitter received $5.4M in funding in 2007, and another $15-$20M earlier this spring.

Yet, in spite of all this traction Twitter has not found a way to monetize:

Any broadcasted marketing message on Twitter is seen as SPAM, and - being an opt-in system anyway, who is going to see it except people who follow the SPAMmers? (Well, alright, to be fair - I do follow some "SPAMmers," such as Blu_ray, because it tweets information to me that I want to know.)
The Twitter platform could be used to attach advertisements to twitter messages, but with only 140 characters to play with that leaves no room in the payload for any meaningful ad message.
The twitter.com website really only exists as a posting portal, and due to twitters excellent public web services API, people are using sexier twitter clients - leaving not too many people go to twitter.com anymore.
The sexier twitter clients could be ad supported, but the monetization would go to the client development houses, rather than to twitter.

OK, now what?

Well, twitter is definitely experimenting with ways of getting dollars out of eyeballs. Part of the twitter web services API includes calls to allow developers to tap into the constant stream of public twitter traffic and take action. (Check out the most-excellent Twistori, as one such experimental visualization application.) Over the last few months I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: several followers of mine (like Tripixdesign) are not people, but companies.

These companies don't post anything with their twitter accounts, rather they just lurk in my twitter stream...listening to what I post. How did they find my twitter stream? With access to the public twitter feed, that part is easy: maybe I posted the tweet "I hate Comcast," and suddenly I find myself being followed by comcastcares . (Yeah, that really exists.) I believe what we are seeing with these lurkers is the birth of a different kind of marketing effort... not traditional SPAM, but some sort of Black-Spiderman/Bizarro-World SPAM, which I'll call MAPS.

On the surface, this might sound similar to a move made by Google's Gmail. Late last year, Gmail added a feature that I would have thought would have made a far bigger farting noise in the public forums than it did: targeted advertising based off of content in your email. Yeah, Gmail "reads" your email, looking for keywords that it uses for targeting advertising in the pane surrounding your messages.

Google's Gmail doesn't quite fit the MAPS model - Gmail places the user into an apriori contract: you are using the Google mail service without fees, and by doing so you implicitly agree to certain conditions: placing your personal email on their servers, for instance - and, if you were to actually read their ridiculously broad and open-ended EULA, you would realize that you allowed them certain rights - such as the right to pull keywords out of your email and use that information for ad targeting. This is a form of a forced-feedback loop: marketing information is not pushed back to the user after the targeting information is pulled from the same user. No input, no targeting.

In the MAPS model, on the other hand, information is simply collected from the user, and...never seen directly by that user. The information is collected and aggregated into a targeting database unencumbered by any sort of direct marketing connection. With a couple of simple web service calls, a MAPS data collection system can:

read from your twitter stream
pull out keywords
compare it against keywords pulled from your followers
draw a conclusion about your potential path through both the real world and the web world

By going through those steps, marketers can determine where people like you (not necessarily you, however) are most likely to spend their time over the next hour, 12 hours, or 24 hours. The more you tweet, the more you tell them what you are like, dislike, plan on doing, concerts you are going to, bars you are at, trips you are taking, and people you are communicating with in the real and virtual worlds.

So - that's how other agencies, ad companies and marketers are potentially using twitter to capitalize on twitter's public twitter stream and the twitterati themselves, but what about twitter.com itself? Do it better, twitter: you received between $20M and $25M in funding, and you don't have a large staff - after operational and staff costs you probably have between $15M and $20M left. (Unless you spend more on those parties of yours than I thought.) So, with all the cash: spend your way to monetization by creating a MAPS engine for which you can charge platform fees. Do this in three steps:

Get the hell off of Ruby. It's clearly not doing you any favors. (Thanks for the 2 hour outage yesterday, btw.)
Hire analysts and statisticians to create an advanced targeting, forecasting and inference engine that uses your database of tweets to forecast where masses of eyeballs might turn to for upcoming events, and return results to agencies and marketers based off of web services queries for a fee. Marketers and advertisers could use such a tool for both checking the results of a promotion ("How'd that price drop on HP laptops do?") and forecasting what people might be interested in ("Where is the best bar in LA to promote our new light beer this weekend?")
Change your EULA so twitterers know what you are doing.

Powerful stuff, kids - for the first time in history, MAPS allows advertisers a way to accurately predict where whole packs of people are spending their time, energy and - most importantly - money, and they can use that information to more accurately place their billboards, hold their promotions, and sell their products.

...if that is what they are doing. I'm sure they aren't...those lurkers are probably just...listening....watching...waiting. Uh, wait that's far creeper than MAPS marketing.

Drive Swap: Tearing open the Trusty Sony VAIO SZ370P

2008-05-11T15:58:00.029-07:00

OK - Taking a brief break from pontification to discuss a little computer brain surgery.

Anyone who's been reading my nonsense for the past year knows that my workhorse laptop in a Sony VAIO SZ370P - a great machine that was purchased just before the Vista releases. In late Spring of '07 I upgraded the little bastard to Vista - and it ran beautifully.

Well, the SZ series from VAIO is now up to series 9 (SZ9xx), and includes faster processors, more memory and faster drives. Although I have my traditional Uber Gadget Lust for the newer SZ's, I don't want to shell out the coin for a new SZ until Sony throws a Blu-Ray drive in there... in the meantime, the 100Gig, 5400rpm drive that came with the SZ370 is starting to feel a little cramped and slow... a quick run down the Information Super Highway (tm) shows that 200Gig, 7200 rpm Seagate drives (Seagate Momentus 7200 2, or the ST9200420AS) are going for about $130 a pop.

No brainer, time to crack open this sucker...

This post will give readers a step-by-step guide to breaking into their SZ series (the cases on the SZ series are all the same), as well as how to replace to replace a drive in a Vista laptop without Vista screaming rape on the Internets back to the mothership. Last thing I need is freakin' Balmer showing up at my door with a baseball bat. (Oh, and you all know he'd do it.)

Ok, stuff you need:

a small phillips screwdriver
a smaller phillips screwdriver (a watch repair screwdriver is best)
a small flathead screwdriver (for prying)
a copy of Acronis True Image (TI) Echo Workstation
an external SATA chassis
a bottle of Knob Creek whisky
a supreme lack of common sense

Got it all, chief?

Oh sure, we could do this the safe way: copy the data on the old drive to a backup location, format the new drive and put a fresh copy of Vista on it, find all your applications from the old drive and re-install them on the new drive, etc.... Or, we can do this my way: just ghost the eff'ing thing to a new drive and hope for the best. Hey, that's what the Knob Creek is for...

So, fine - let's get this over with...

Step 1: Getting the new hard drive connected to the laptop

The new SATA drive has to be attached to the existing computer for ghosting - because the Seagate Momentus series SATA, and the SZ series doesn't have an external SATA port, you'll need a SATA external enclosure that translates SATA to USB-2 or Firewire. Rather than buy one specifically for the 2.5" drives, I took an enclosure that I had purchased last April for the Vista upgrade which houses 3.5" drives... since this wasn't going to be a permanent arrangement, who cares?

Step 2: Scaring up a Ghost...boo!

Ghosting is the act of making a bit-by-bit copy of one drive to another drive: the whole deal - boot sector, data, applications, file access tables...all of it. It's not a straight-forward operating system copy, and - in fact - can't be done from the native operating system at all. (Modern operation systems are always running, swapping cache data back and forth to the drive - meaning, that the OS itself is changing the contents of the drive as the drive is being copied.)

To successfully ghost, you need a application that will cause the system to boot up using a small little kernel that is resident in the computer memory - and doesn't fill up the drive with crap of its own. I picked Acronis Workstation 9.1, an application that was recommended to me last April for my RAID0 issue with my tower station, and did an amazing job. I upgraded the application to True Image Echo Workstation (or TI for short), and went to work.

Arconis starts in Vista, to give you a nice user interface, sets up a configuration file, and then reboots the computer - loading the smaller kernel in memory with the information from the configuration file.

When fired up, Acronis TI asks you what you want to do - although you may be tempted to hit "Backup," don't. What you really want to do is "Manage Hard Disks." Selecting this reveals a second screen that gives you the option of cloning your drive - cloning is another name for ghosting.

Very bad Acronis Action #1: Selecting on "Clone a Drive" reveals a very important screen that will make you swear like a sailor with the clap: "Automatic vs Manual" cloning. If you do what I did and pick "Automatic," Acronis TI will walk you through the appropriate steps for cloning, take just as long as an actual drive ghosting (about 3 hours) and....do absolutely nothing. Nice. Real eff'ing nice.

So...go with me here, and hit "Manual." Really. Trust me.

Hitting manual brings you through the drive selection process. You should see at least two drives listed here: the original drive still onboard the SZ370, and the new drive sitting on the enclosure that you have attached to the system. Selecting which one is the source and which one is the target is left as an exercise to the reader. As the new drive is larger that the original, Acronis TI's default action is to partition the new drive to its fullest capacity and then just move the contents of the old drive to comfortably into that space. You do, however, have the option at this point to play with partitions, making a second virtual drive.

After you've made your selections, Acronis TI examines both drives, reads the file allocation table on the old drive looking for sizing information, and sets up the boot partition on the old drive.

When it's done, it will present you with an information screen telling you what it plans to do, the number of steps it will take, and then asks you if your want to go ahead and do the deed.

At this point, take another shot of Knob Creek, and go for it. Your system will lock your old drive down so it can't be written to, and then commence a reboot.

Step 3: Creating the Clone...uh...Ghost...uh...Exact Same Drive

At this point, the SZ370 will reboot, but the operating system will not engage - instead the Acronis micro kernel will take over and start the ghosting process. Suck it up, grab a bigger glass, and pour a larger glass of the ol' Knob Creek, because you're here for a while. 3 hours to be exact. Sure - you could go play Halo3 on your XBox and not fret over the fact that the ghosting software that you purchased from a company you've never heard of before could be thrashing your hard drive. Well, I'm not that relaxed, ok? I'm just not...

The first think you'll see TI do is reanalysize all the partitions, defragment them, lock them down, and then check the new partitions on both drives to see if they are incapable of the clone process. Once this is done, the actual bit-by-bit cloning takes place. This process, referred to as "Operation 2 of 3" by Acronis TI is the step that takes the longest, and can be the most destructive to the drives.

Have a drink...be patient.

Very Bad Acronis Action #2: OK, here's another way that Acronis can waste three hours of your life through bad user experience testing. When the cloning is done, you get the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!" screen - "Congratulations! You have successfully completed the hard drive cloning procedure."

Well, yes, that's very true. As is the "Press any key to reboot" suggestion at the bottom of the screen. What TI does not, in its exuberance at completing it's complicated ghosting task, tell you is this: If you reboot with the ghosted drive still attached, Vista will come back from the reboot, see two boot enabled drives, and remove the boot sector from the second drive - effectively effing up your ghosted edition. Three hours. Gone. Again.

Trust me here: when you get the congratulations screen immediately unplug the ghosted drive before touching any other bleeding button on your laptop. It's like religion at this point: just have faith that the ghosting worked without any proof whatsoever.

Step 3: Rip the Puppy Open!!

OK, all the namby-pamby software crap is out of the way, let's grab some manful, manly tools and get to work.

Like a helpless turtle found on the calm shores of life, flip the SZ over on its back. (Analogy too much?) Remove the battery before proceeding. You don't need to pull this off to work on the unit, but it makes it lighter, and removes the last remaining power source. (Uh, you did unplug the laptop, didn't you?)

There are four phillips-head screws that have to be removed at this point. These screws release the keyboard and the case covering on the front of the unit.

Flipping the unit back over, you can now ease the keyboard off. Between the F1 and F2 keys, and between the INSERT and DELETE keys, you will see barely visible little spring-loaded tabs that need to be eased back with the flathead screwdriver while you slowly pull the keyboard up. (This is where Niven and Pournelle's "Gripping Hand" would come in handy.)

At this point, the keyboard easily flips up. You can pull out the little flat ribbon cable connecting the keyboard to the motherboard, but its not necessary and not worth the risk of ripping the thin little cable. Simply lay the keyboard flat against the laptop's wrist-plate, or (preferably) up against the screen.

With the keyboard out of the way, three little screws that lock the wrist-plate in place are revealed. It's for these screws that you will need the little watch screwdriver - they are small, delicate and can be very easily stripped. Be careful taking them off, and - more importantly - be careful putting them back. Just tighten "to feel" when you do.

At this point, the wrist-guard can be slid away from the screen, revealing the hard drive. Like the keyboard, the wrist-guard has a few ribbon cables that connect the biometric scanner and the trackpad. It's not necessary to remove these either, as the wrist-plate can be flipped over and put on top of where the keyboard rested.

With the hard drive clearly revealed, yet another three screws (why always three, Sony??) need to removed in order to get the old drive out.

OK - scariest hardware move coming up: removing the ribbon cable to the drive. This thing is packed in there tight. Even with the drive screws removed, the drive cannot be lifted until the thin ribbon cable is removed. Unfortunately, Sony taped the damn ribbon cable from underneath. You need to spend a nice, relaxed, long period of time easing that cable off -- if you rip it, you're screwed. You'd have to order a new ribbon cable from Sony, and I have no dea what the part number is...so, uh, careful kids.

It's out! Excellent. All that's left to do now, is to take the two small rails off the side of the old drive, put them on the new one, and then your ready for Step 4!

Step 4: Uh...Repeat Step 3. Backwards.

Seriously. That's it. No pictures. No step by step. Just drink your Knob Creek, and put everything back together...I hope you were paying attention.

Step 5: Turn the Damn Thing On and Hope for the Best.

Ok - you've reassembled the unit, battery is back and the power is plugged in. If you've done everything right, you'll be greated by a final Acronis TI screen during the reboot cycle that says "Cloning Completed." Oh, happy day. The machine should now boot, with Vista being none the wiser.

After logging in, you will see Vista establish the drivers for the new hardware it has detected. At this point, one more reboot (the last one, I promise) needs to be performed, so that the drivers for the new drive can be firmly established. That's it, you're done.

Step 6: There is No Step 6

Seriously. You're done.

Let's prove it. A quick glance at the drive size reveals that you are now beefed up to a whopping 200gigs. (Well, minus 10Gigs for the boot sector and some lost clusters.)

What about the speed? Opening up the Vista performance rating test (Computer->Properties->Performance) will show the previous rating from the old drive - in my case, a paltry 4.6 out of 10.

Now, run the test again - it takes a few minutes. When it's done, you should see a noticeable increase in the disk transfer rate - in my case it went from 4.6 to 5.4...a 15% increase.

Done.

Aftermath

I did the upgrade about 2 weeks ago - so far, absolutely no problems, and nothing is lost. The unit generates a bit more heat (not much more, actually), but applications and data load noticeably faster - and the drive has plenty of space for all those Media Center videos I watch on the road.

OK, back to pontificating.

Folding@Home: Johnny Molecular Biologist!

2008-05-01T23:10:00.006-07:00

This afternoon I was having an IM conversation with someone about the Sony Playstation 3 - and after extolling a few of the system virtues, I off-handedly remarked that the real reason I bought it was that I like to cure cancer... which, of course, got the ??? in the IM window.

In a nutshell, here's the deal - if you're 900 years old like I am, you'll remember when SETI@Home was all the rage. (Ok, I'm being a dick. With 3Million users, SETI@Home is still all the rage.) In the mid-90's, a group of plucky astronomers at Berkeley realized that their distributed network funding required to complete the massively parallel channel search for signals from extraterrestrials wasn't going to come through, no matter how many Carl Sagan-inspired movies starring Jodie Foster appeared... however, all those new fangled 386's on those brand new cable modems were just sitting there downloading porn. Surely, there must be some better way of utilizing all of those spare cycles out in the world that didn't actually annoy the wife.

Installed as a screen saver on Windows boxes, SETI@Home was the first, true distributed computing application that made use of the real power of the internet: in very poetic turn, all of the people who were making use of the internet (which was created out of the ashes of DARPAnet, USEnet and EDUnet) to buy books from Amazon and pretend they are Brad Pitt in chat rooms, could now give back to the world by donating spare cycles on their computers in a massive cooperation effort to search for intelligent life beyond the earth.

Flash forward to 2000, and Prof. Vijay Pande at Stanford was having the same trouble: how to fund a computing effort that consumed massive quanitities of CPU cycles on a limited budget to crack the simulation of kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids? The problem was this: Pande, and other molecular biologists, knew the sequences of atoms required to construct a protein if placed in the wrong order could contribute to amyloid-related illnesses such as Alzheimer's Disease. If they could change the protein back to the correct order, it would go far to helping cure the disease. But without a roadmap, molecular biologists have no idea how to change the sequencing to get a proper structure out of the protein. (It's a bit like knowing the pile of lego blocks scattered on the floor infront of you forms a race car, but the only way you have to put the car together is to try to assemble the blocks without a pattern.)

This act of bending and twisting and playing with the individual atoms of a protein molecule (a process called "folding") is a required "next step" to being able to predict the structure of the molecule. Fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. Unfortunately, the myrad ways that a the atoms of a protein molecule can be arranged is legion.

Professor Pande, taking a cue from the extraterrestial hunters on the other side of San Francisco, created Folding@Home in 2000, which - also installed as a screen saver - used the untapped power of idle home PCs to brute force the folding problem: literally trying every possible combination of atomic sequencing in a protein molecule to see what works.
On September 16, 2007, the Folding@Home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to hit that kind of peak performance. (Uh, a petaFLOP is 1,000 TeraFlops...and, uh, a TeraFlop is 1,000 MegaFlops...which is...fast.)

However, it wasn't enough - there was still far more work to do...

...enter the First Person Shooter crowd. With rapid advances in GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) speeds, modern gaming consoles like Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3 have power to burn: the sustained speed of a PS3 at full tilt is 30,191MFlops. Pande and crew began to salivate. Most gamers only use their machines several hours a week, the rest of the time the machine remain idle or off.

Pande's group (Uh, really. His homies are now officially known as the Pande Group inside Stanford) approached Sony and struck a deal - the Sony Entertainment group would slap a user interface on the project worthy of the PS3 interface, the application couild be downloaded from the Sony Marketplace and installed by the user (sort of a forced "opt in"), and the user was free to run the app in the background when the system would otherwise be idle. There is a cost to the user for this, of course - the GPU and CPU would be always working, which chews up a bit more of the home electric bill. In the end, however, a typical user feels good about the project, Sony looks like an altrusitic uncle, and Pande gets to fold and unfold his proteins until the cows come home...which is good, because bovine spongiform encephalopathy (uh, mad cow disease) is one of the nuts that can be cracked by protein folding.

Below is a 5 minute video where I walk through the current version of Folding@Home on the Sony PS3.

Oh, by the way - the Folding@Home computing cluser, since going Ps3 in 2007 and hitting 1 million users in Febuary of 2008 - currently operates above 1 Petaflop at all times. That's a lot of Grand Theft Auto, kids.

As promised, here's the links of interest:

Vijay Pande's Folding@Home blog
Berkeley's SETI@Home blog
Wikipedia's explanation of the protein folding problem

Image at top of posting courtesy of Peter G. Wolynes,
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of California - San Diego

Protein Folding Explained

Going Out on a Limb: the Universe is NOT a Giant Brain Cell

2008-04-27T14:33:00.018-07:00

I twittered last night about an interesting blurb that cycled up to the top of Digg, called "A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe." I broadcasted the URL for the article, because I thought that the similarities were quite striking, and that something interesting could be learned about both structures because of this comparison....

...then I went to sleep - or tried to - and thought about this in bed for awhile. It occurred to me that the title of the article wasn't that the structures were similar, so much as they were the same. It was probably that title alone - plus the astonishing photos that accompanied it - that moved this article into the top of the Digg heap.

There are a few interesting fields in several branches of the sciences that focus on taxonomy - these fields are usually called "comparative," (as in "comparative biology"), and were quite popular when I was a college student back in the dawn of time. In a nutshell, the idea is that if something quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Ok, that was ridiculously simplifed and probably insulting, but - hell's bells - it was fun to get to finally put that phrase in print.

In a larger nutshell, it works like this: if the structure of an organism allows it to operate in a certain fashion (say, a duck's respiratory system, vocal cords and gullet size allows it to make noise of a certain harmonic), it's a safe bet that if you find an unknown, unclassified organsim that has the same structure (say, lungs, simple vocal cords and same sized gullet) that it probably utilizes that structure in a similar fashion. (It probably quacks just like a duck.) There are other versions of this comparison study: comparative physics, comparative chemistry, etc.

This type of logic served us well enough - and, people will argue still does - until two things started to occur:

Science & Technology got better.

Before we had the ability to peer inside of structures (both large and small scale) and really understand (instead of just playing the "inferring game") how a given structure of an unknown construct functions, comparative xxx was really the only way science had to make assumptions about the unknown.

Case in point: Venus has Dinosaurs. Until sometime in the 60's, there was a belief among some comparative astronomers that Venus had dinosaurs - this was a belief popularized by chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1918, which was picked up by Science Fiction writers everywhere. Now, before we make fun of long, dead Svante - consider this: he was a real guy. An honest-to-god scientist who was taken very seriously. He was not some I-had-a-beer-with-an-alien loony-tune, and his logic (which employed comparative sciences) was not bad:

We cannot see the surface of Venus with a telescope. (True)

Venus must be covered with clouds. (True)

Venus is close to the sun, so if it's overcast all the time, it must be very hot due to greenhouse effects. (True)

Clouds have water. (Uh, well...kinda true, but...)

If it's hot and cloudy and wet there, it must be raining all the time! (Um, wait a second...)

So, the surface of Venus must be swampy!!!!!!!!!! (Well, if it's raining water, I guess, but...)

What do we have in our past that reminds us of a rainy, swampy surface?? (Uh...hold on...)

The Carboniferous Period!!! (Wait, wait...stop!)

There were dinosaurs in the Carboniferous Period!!!!!!!!! (Well, that's true, but...)

Ergo, Venus has dinosaurs!!!!!! (Ergo???)

Fortunately, it was soon after that humans developed the ability to do spectroscopic analysis using telescope data, and found that the Venusian clouds are composed of sulfuric acid, not water. Ergo, no dinosaurs -- however, the whole episode does remind us that making comparisons of anything is treading on dangerous waters. It's best to say "I have NO idea what the hell that thing is!" then to make comparative analysis.
Comparative Analysis Started Jumping Disciplines.

..and this is where the field really jumped the shark, because two things happened at once:

a) The rapid pace of science discovery and technological innovation outstripped the general layman's ability to keep track of what was going on in any particular field. (Well, that and the rise of reality television and the evangelical right, but I digress.) This causes a public relations problem, of course, and increases the need for trust in scientific opinions and publications.

and

b) Reportedly real scientists like Clifford Pickover of Yale, have begun to engage in dangerous public speculations using comparative anaylsis between diciplines (in this case neurobiology and cosmology) as a base. (See? I brought this back around to the subject of this post in the first place! Yay!)

Pickover, in his "A Brain Cell is the Same as a the Universe" blog posting is absolutely violating this construct: he is clearly comparing the structure of a nanometer object in neurobiology (a brain cell), to the largest scaled cosmological structure that we know (the Universe) and QED'ing a ridiculous conclusion.

Now, there is nothing wrong with doing the comparison, and both fields of study might actually learn something: Take a look at the two objects: clearly there are structural similarities that are worth investigating. Gravitational and string forces holding the structure of the universe together (and allowing information to flow back and forth) are clearly arranged in similar pathways to neural tendrils which perform basically the same function of holding the neurons together and facilitating communications.

Where Pickover goes dangerously off the rails - and judging by the forum posts in the Digg article, a lot of layman have followed him - is his implication (because he never actually says anything in his blog posting aside from his exclamatory title and a few wizened passages from Abdu’l-Bahá) that the structures aren't just similar (thereby performing similar functions) but that they are exactly the same (thereby implying that the Universe a giant brain cell in someone else's head - how hermonculous of him).

I'll go on record here for all to see: uh, the Universe is not a giant, fucking brain cell. I'm not using any fancy-pants science or technology here to make that leap of logic, just common sense, a reasonable understanding of how the world works, and no book of my to hock in my blog...ok, I am using a little comparative analysis of my own:

Pickover is a respected, published scientist on-the-fringe. (True)

Arrhenius was a respected, publish scientist on-the-fringe (True)

Both Pickover and Arrhenius engaged in wild, public speculation in order to gain attention (True)

Arrhenius was so far wrong that history only remembers him as a crackpot. (True)

...uh...ergo....uh.....well, you get the idea.

Credits to Mark Miller of Brandeis University for the micrograph of the neural structure, and to Astrophysical Union for the computer representation of the large scale structure of the Universe.

...Chumby Decended from Audrey, Cornelius?! Heresy!

2008-04-14T23:33:00.009-07:00

I read an interesting article in Wired the other week, which claimed that a growing amount of traffic on the internet was from "hidden devices." Meaning that non-obvious consumer products were using the internet for various reasons: updating information, exchanging status data, accessing internet radio, etc.

This idea was presented as though it was a new trend - but the practice has been around for quite a while - TiVo and ReplayTV being a few of the first consumer devices to "hide" their internet activity. In the mid- to late-90's, these little gizmos were called "Internet Appliances," a term that has been revived by the now popular "Chumby."

For those of you living a reasonable life, reading the New York Times and eschewing anything to do with any pop culture relavence for the past 6 months, "Chumby" is a cute little device with a screen that looks like a digital picture frame. It's encased in what can only be described as a "beanbag." It's adorable, really.

So, what does Chumby do? Anything - sort of. It's a WiFi enabled, fully web configurable internet device that can do everything from simply display the time and digital pictures, to play internet radio and display Twitter Tweets. It will dock to multiple iPods, playing the content through its cheery little speakers. The API is extremely open, and has become a plaything not only for weekend hackers, but also soccer moms who want something cushy next to the Sanyo coffee maker. It's captured the imagination of a lot of people, and has gotten quite a bit of media attention. "Why didn't anyone think of this before?" decried one reviewer...?

...they did. Allow me to (re) introduce you to "Audrey," which was manufactured by 3Com (remember them?) during the heyday of the dot-com era. (1999-2000.) Audery was, well, a fully web configurable internet appliance that could do everything from simply display the time and digital pictures, to play internet radio and display email. It would dock to multiple Palm Pilots, happily aggregating and resync'ing the families address books and calendars. The OS was a Linux varient that could be accessed via an xterm window, and had become a plaything not only for weekend hackers, but also soccer moms who wanted something friendly next to the Krups coffee maker. (The device got its name from the daughter of one of the designers, and the thing actually giggled when you turned it on.)

The difference between the two machines? Chumby's exterior is squishy, Audrey's is kitchen-appliance sleek. Oh, and Chumby appears to be poised for commercial success, while the Audrey contributed to the downfall of 3Com. Why? Oh what a difference 10 years makes...

Back in the late 90's, dot-com companies were everywhere, and promising to change your life via the internet. Few companies made good on that promise, of course - but several companies attempted more than just new takes on shitty web site concepts...a few tried creating actual, physical products that did specific tasks. The problem with 99% of these products was that they did those specific tasks extraordinarily badly. While their aim was nobile enough (i.e. be as easy to use as a piece of stereo equipment), the consumer electronics industry didn't have the experience under its belt to create easy-to-use internet devices, and the animosity between the CE manufacturers and the computer manufacturers practically guaranteed mutually assured destruction if these two worlds ever tried to cooperate. (There were exceptions, of course, such as TiVo and the iPod - both of which filled a niche that no one realized needed to be filled, and both did so with an exceptional user experience coupled with a slick, seamless connection to the net.)

The Audrey was a device that stands nearly alone in that it was a machine that provided a slick, user friendly experience, and filled a distinct need in the home (it functioned primarily as an "always on" computer, aggregating information about the user family's daily life so that the home could exchange information as easy as could an enterprise business. Preprogrammed websites could be "dialed" into via the single knob on the front, to display new, weather and movie times.) It was relatively inexpensive (tallying in at slightly less than $300 vs. Chumby's $180 price tag), came in about 12 colors to fit in with most home kitchen color schemes, and was waterproof incase little Muffy spilled the orange juice on it.

So what went wrong? Classic, really: the device was too early. In 1999, which was only 9 years ago, computers were still large, expensive, confusing things...iPods were just catching on...and Palm Pilots were still considered nerdly toys. In other words, most family members were not part of the digerati, and most homes were not wired for allways-on internet. (A requirement for both Audrey and Chumby.) Essentially, no one needed what it offered...yet. Today, however, Audrey would be quite happy nestled into the kitchen, giggling away as the family sync'ed their iPods to it, its glowing touch pen happily shining green whenever a Tweet appeared.

So - be proud of your ancestry, Chumby - you have much to be thankful for...

The End of Human Life as We Know It, Part Three

2008-04-14T23:24:00.003-07:00

...ok, the final piece of evidence (well, for a while)... meet "SWORDS," the fully-autonomous, all-terrain, artificially intelligent kick-ass robot solider. Oh - did I mention it's packing heat? And, uh, did I also mention it started to, quote, "move [it's gun] where it was not intended to move?"

DARPA, the defense agency responsible for building and deploying this little gem in Iraq, decided - wisely - to pull the plug on the project. Hopefully, that's it for a while - according to the Army's Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, "Once you've done something that's really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again."

How old was John Conner in 2008 in the movies? Doesn't 10-20 years make it just about right? Sigh.

The End of Human Life as We Know It, Part 2

2008-03-19T11:48:00.003-07:00

OK, that's it...I'm getting a little shack up in the mountains and going off the grid.

Evidence #2:

Awesome Lifelike Robotic Dog

Evidence #3:
Dextre, The Giant Space Robot

In all seriousness - all of this is pretty incredible. The advances in the past couple of years have been amazing. The "Robot Dog" is courtesy of research done at Boston Dynamics, a 20 year old "start up" in Cambridge that was started by a professor at the MIT Robotics Lab. They've been working on this stuff longer than mechanical engineering could support robotics by embedding their motion and recovery algorithms into computer graphic generated characters and older, tethered robotic devices. (Anyone besides me old enough to remember videos from the late 80's of a pogo-stick legged jumping and somersaulting robot? That was them.)

Nonetheless, I'm packing heat just in case this all goes horribly wrong.

That's it. The End of Human Life as We Know It.

2008-03-06T15:54:00.004-08:00

Oh lord...that's all she wrote, folks. The Human-Robot war just took an ugly turn...

...oh, dear God! It swims. Swims! Sigh, I hope the screams of the fallen isn't too loud.

He's Ugly. He's Animated. He's not real...

2008-02-19T15:28:00.003-08:00

Back when I was a 3D Graphics weenie working at a company creating 3D effect for film and television, there were two holy grails:

Create a virtual room or environment that was indistinguishable from and actual photograph of the same environment.
Create a virtual human being that looks, behaves and acts like the real thing -- oh, and do it in real time.

Number 1 happened quite a while ago now...but number 2 has proven to be quite elusive...there are subtleties to the range of human emotion, expression and verbal nuance that is difficult not only for the graphics engines involved, but for the algorithms that control the motion and react to the audio.

However, at the Game Developer's Conference currently going on in San Francisco, a motion capture company (of all people), Mova, has achieved this goal with spooky accuracy using their Contour Reality Capture System (an array of motion capture camera mapping out 100,000 polygons and mapping the texture captured directly on them), plus their Unreal Engine 3 renderer.

Check it out - then just try and get to sleep tonight:

Mova Contour Reality Capture - Gangster Demo (not real-time) from Joy Stiq on Vimeo.

Beavis and Butthead: Prognosticators! Dear God...

2008-02-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

Please correct me if I am wrong, but...

Does not this article in Wired, "The Natural History of the Only Child," sound disturbingly, frighteningly, like Mike Judge's Idiocracy?

TranCESformer...

2008-01-12T11:52:00.001-08:00

...best part of CES.

....I'll do my real wrap-up next week...the Rocket is still in flight...

Wow. "Ho fatto un errore" so early into '08??

2008-01-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

Ok - half way through the complex tech love-hate relationship that is "CES," just barely into week #2 of the new year, freshly back from vacation...and two of my Nostradamus-esque "predictions" for 2008 are checked off my list, one completely correct, the other...eh...not so much. So I'm batting 0.500 so far... not too bad, I'll take it.

"Massive adoption of non-DRM'ed digital music from the recording industry."
With the bizarre-I-really-didn't-think-this-would-happen-in-my-lifetime announcement from Sony BMG that they plan on joining the human race and dropping DRM from their digital catalog. Their entire catalog. Yipes.

So, that announcement, following on the heels of Warner Music's similar announcement in December, and the same announcement from Vivendi and EMI in the late fall, all four major labels have made the strange decision to stop pissing off their consumer base. Go figure.

The effect this is going to have on the proprietary stranglehold iTunes has on the download industry, combined with Warner throwing its weight behind Amazon's download service is going to be anyone's guess... but at least, now, we can all guess. Thanks Mr. Sony! I feel good about buying your stuff again...
"Porn and Wal-Mart don't matter!" (the HD-DVD/BluRay cluster-eff)
Ok, I predicted here that the Great Video Format War XIX would continue throughout 2008, to the detriment of the market who would represent their confusion over the formats as apathy for the players.

However, Warner - fresh from their recent slap down of DRM with their music group, has decided to keep stealing headlines by reversing its decision to support HD-DVD and move their entire catalog to the Blu-Ray format. This isn't just another production company, this is Warner, who owns the lion's share of all digital video content. Although Paramount and others haven't thrown in the towel yet, they may as well - because they are going to be wasting a lot of money on those HD-DVD burning facilities. Player manufacturers are now going to think twice about making players for less than 40% of the market space, and the Guys in Blue at Best Buy are gonna have a real hard time coming up with sales floor double-speak when a customer asks "Which should I buy?"

On a related story, the HD-DVD cooperative booth here at CES was a little, uh, gloomy this week.

So, there. Mea Culpa.

Quick CES Field Report...Thin is In

2008-01-07T17:20:00.000-08:00

Ok, never blogged from a mobile phone before, so be patient.

There's a lot of themes running through the CES floor this year, but one of them is clearly "thin is in." It seems everyone and their mother is trying to get a "waffer thin" HD screen out to market successfully to try and beat Sony's OLED to the punch.

A lot of these screens are impressive - but none came close to the thinness, brightness, color and just plain "cool factor" of the Sony OLED. Oh sure, its only 11" diagonal and obscenely expensive, but Sony also had their prototype 40" model on display...and that was tasty.

In no particular order (primarily cuz I can't figure out how to order pictures on this blog from a flippin' cell phone), here's some of the more noteworthy contenders: The Hitachi "1.5" series, the Sharp 20mm prototype, and the Sony OLEDs...

What Time Is It? Why, It's Perpetual Motion Time Again!

2008-01-05T23:49:00.000-08:00

Ok, let's all look at the video below:

Got that? Ok, great.

Brief primer: Perpetual motion refers to a system that, once placed in motion, generates its own energy to sustain the motion indefinitely.

Briefer primer: it's pseudo-science.

Every 20 years or so - for, like, the last 4000 years - some joker pops up with an "invention" or paper that professes to maintain a system in motion without outside influence. (For the past few hundred years, it almost always involves magnets...excuse me..."loadstones") Some of these people even try and pull one off on the US Patent Office. Ironically, several of the inventors seem to believe their own a-think-I-went-to-high-school-but-I'm-not-certain theories.

The Perpetual Motion Lunatic Fringe (or, the PMLF) like to point out that a system that generates enough energy to maintain its own motion doesn't violate Newton's First Law of Motion: basically that any nudged into motion will stay in motion until acted upon by another force. Well, you know what? They're right. Perpetual motion doesn't violate Newton's 1st law. Sadly for the PMLF, though, there are more laws to physics than Mr. Newton could conceive of under his apple tree, and perpetual motion violates most of them...the most egregious abuse being against the Conservation of Energy, which states that even though the total amount of energy in a closed system cannot be added to or subtracted from, it is completely free to change forms.

As a matter of fact, it changes forms all the time... actually, constantly. Take our weird little magnet video above - which is getting a disturbing amount of Diggs, by the way. The magnets seem to be doing a good job of maintaining that spin, aren't they? Sure, but give it time, and it will stop. Everything that system is doing is transferring energy around - the spin around the axis causes friction which translates the spin into heat, the magnets themselves are transferring electromagnetic energy into rotational velocity, the whizzing sound you hear is noise energy created by the disc frictioning with the surrounding air, etc. (Uh, and the whole "speeding up" thing - implying that this system is actually generating more energy than it is consuming? I'm betting on a motor powered by an energizer battery...but I digress.)

This is true for every contained system - including the good ol' universe. It's a closed system too - all those stars? All that gravitational energy? The Big Bang? Surely we are in a giant PM machine, aren't we? Nope. Sorry. Depending on which theory you subscribe, the universe is either slowing down to collapse in upon itself (my personal fav), or expanding forever. In either case, entropy (which is the measure of the unavailability of the amount of work a system can do) is increasing. Entropy is, basically, a measure of the decay of energy available to do work -- the energy is there, but it migrates to a form that is, for all intents and purposes, useless. Entropy is king. Everything decays. Including the grand ol' universe...and, especially, that stupid magnet-on-a-pinwheel thing above.

So, moral of the story:

Diggers: just stop giving that guy any cred, please.
VC community: Don't put your cash into a PM machine, no matter how whizzy the Power Point presentation is...

Pop Goes the Nano-weasel

2008-01-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what happens when explosions occur at the tiniest fraction of a micron? Me too - apparently, it looks like a teeny-tiny nuclear fireball.

Check out what happens when you overload a CoFeB magnetic array, as Fanny Beron from the École Polytechnique de Montréal attempted. This micrograph won first prize at last year's "Science as Art" competition.

If you question why, you need your head examined. (Although the itty-bitty dice are way effing cool as well.) Ah. Fun with science again - thank you, Ghost of Mister Wizard!

New Year, New Tech - Happy 2008 Everyone

2008-01-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

It's a new year, and it promises to be even a faster path of acceleration for the Rocket than 2007. We're already looking at wafer thin OLED technology from Sony, rumors of touch screen Apple laptop/tablet computers, mesh networks of XBox360's and - of course - a bazillion new cell phones.

Here's the Rocket predictions for '08 - let's see how they hold through the year - in no particular order:

The end of the RIAA Reign of Terror.
They jumped the shark a while back, of course, but the final straw probably came a few weeks ago in December when the RIAA went after a private citizen for ripping his own, legally purchased CDs to his hard disk without any intent or means to share the resulting files. Combined with weird crap like writing its own new stories for local TV stations, the RIAA has probably finally garnered the illusive "what the fuck?" factor from Congress.

...which leads us to...
Massive adoption of non-DRM'ed digital music from the recording industry.
OK, this one has a huge "Duh!" factor on it, but I'm throwing it in here to get an easy prediction in. With iTunes, Zune Marketplace, Amazon MP3, Yahoo, and eMusic all moving their inventory as quick as possible to high quality, non-DRM crippled MP3 files - plus the number of music groups (yay, RadioHead) eschewing record labels in search of new business models - the message is clear: crippling the use of your product for your own consumer base is a really shitty business model.
The age of digital books begins in ernest.
OK, maybe two easy predictions. Yeah, it's ugly. Yeah, its got production problems. Yeah, its nowhere near as slick as the Sony eReader. Amazon, however, is absolutely on to something with the Kindle. Having a digital book that gets its contact magically from the ether is the missing link. Amazon is big enough to convince more and more publishers (and, independent authors) to leave the paper on the trees and provide its content directly to the consumer, whenever they want it. Reading long format, non-web based content is suddenly hip again.
Fold-up, roll-up displays.
They've been predicted since 2001: A Space Oddysey came out in 1968, but with the advent of OLED tech in the past few years - culminating the sale of Sony's amazing (and amazingly tiny/expensive) paper-thin OLED TV, the dawn of truly portable computing may be arriving in 2008. Look for the first OLED screens to be mated with newer, larger solid-state drive technology. Sony is in the best position to put out these devices, lets see if they have enough cash and cache to get the job done.
GPS enabled, well, everything really.
Cars, cameras, IM clients, laptops, wallets, dogs, briefcases, kids, watches, and condoms. Whether that is a good thing or not, I have my doubts. I was more than a little annoyed the other day when I realized Twibbler (a Symbian Twitter client) was accessing the GPS chip on my Nokia and broadcasting my exact position. Hmmm... not sure I want this kindofa world, but its coming regardless.
The mainstream emergence of "new media."
Declining viewership for live network television will accelerate. The onslaught faced by the major networks from cable, time-shifting technologies, durect purchases from sources like iTunes and Amazon Unbox will be accelerated by lack of original content from the ongoing writer's strike. The end result is that more and more people will turn to video podcasts and user generated content as a source of entertainment. So - all you video podcasters out there with just a touch of production value better find a lawyer or two, because Hollywood is gonna go shoppin' for new property.
Verizon will pick up the 700Mhz spectrum.
I cannot believe I am saying this - and I wouldn't be saying this if it wasn't for Verizon's sudden reversal of its "Walled Garden Uber Alles" mentality in December. Google will be putting out the greenbacks for the 700MHz spectrum as they announced, but Verizon will outbid in order to keep them from stepping into their world.
Porn and Wal-Mart don't matter!
Well, ok...they matter...just, uh, not in the high-definition disk format wars. Despite the porn industry and Wal-Mart throwing their muscle into the HD-DVD camp in 2007, the outlook for the HD-DVD/BluRay war will remain murky through 2008 and well into 2009. The last time porn got involved in a format war, there was no internet as we know it - so, uh, connoisseurs didn't have the luxury of downloading stay-at-home-action, now they do. As for Wal-Mart, rumor mill says that now that BluRay player prices are dropping down to the levels of HD-DVD player prices, Wal-Mart may reverse its HD-DVD only stance. It's gonna be a long, cold stalemate.

CES is next week, and the Rocket will be there, of course. Getting a glimpse into the crystal ball for this year is a way to cheat on the Jan 1 predictions, but - eh - I'm not above that kind of fake prognostication. So, more "predicitions" next week.

A Year is Way Too Long to Wait: Wecome Back, Doctor...

2007-12-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

..he's back. So very very excellent...

...and thank you, Doctor, for bringing Kylie Minogue along for the ride. Seriously.

Happy holidays.

What's All This About T-Mobile & Twitter...oh. Nevermind.

2007-12-17T23:44:00.000-08:00

So...I got fooled. It happens, even to 900 year old tech geeks...

Turns out, a series of technical problems, a misinformed T-Mobile technical support person, and a couple of inflammatory blogs (mine included, I suspect) let to the appearance of Twitter being banned from T-Mobile. No such thing, claims T-Mo... and, sure enough, my SMS is happily chattering away again.

"...the Times regrets the error."

"Nevermind."

T-Mobile to Customers: Tweet This

2007-12-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

So I got into my morning groove this morning the way that I normally do: picking up my cell and preparing to delete the 50 or so twitter messages from when I was asleep, and I saw....about 4 twitter messages (or tweets).

Really? Seriously? My entire twitter community slept in? Didn't seem possible...

...and then this afternoon I get shot an IM from a friend with a link to this Techcrunch article. Apparently, I am not alone - T-Mobile US customers awoke to the same issue. It seems like T-Mobile is blocking short code 40404 and telling their customers that if they don't like it, fine - pay the $200 to get out of your contract:

…Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and therefore you are not able to utilize service from this provide any longer…. T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.

Oooookkkkkkk then. Thanks. Nice note.

So - that's fine. I get it. I spend years of my life heavily involved in SMS text trafficing (sounds like a movie staring Michael Douglas), and carriers always get the last word on authorizing short codes (the 4-9 digit codes that allow SMS messages to pass through many-to-many gateway). Their stated goal is to protect their clientèle from expensive, unwanted text traffic. However, in this case, short code 40404 (the Twitter short code) must have already been authorized by T-Mo, or it never would have been carried on it in the first place. Also, Twitter is an opt-in service, so its the user's decision to carry the text traffic anyway.

T-Mo? Any response here? What's the deal with reversing the decision to carry tweets?

...ok, time for me to install Twibble, then.

The Microsoft-Zune Conundrum

2007-12-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

This was going to be a posting about the Zune2, about it's utter awesomeness, and how - after 3 weeks of Zuning, I picked up my iPod Video (sorry "classic") and thought "Hmmm...how lifeless, how dull, how clunky." Really, I thought those things.

Then the professional reviewers chimed, all ranging from "Hey, we're surprised this thing is so good" to 5 star ratings.... and then I thought. "Eh, why write another me-too posting?" (The best of the lot, btw, was this interesting 3-way comparison review by the CNET folks.)

So - yeah, quick synopsis of my (now deleted) Me Too review: the Zune Marketplace / Zune2 combination blows past the iTunes/iPod Classic combination in almost every dimension. There - you can argue with me about that if you like, but I got 'em both. I use 'em both.

Why then, am I going to add the following to the conclusion:

Microsoft is going to lose in the marketplace.

Because, as is true of most things in this world, its not the better man (machine) that wins, necessarily.

Apple's iPod has - deservedly so - captured the lion's share of the marketplace. With over 100M iPods of various versions, shapes and capacities in the marketplace, the word "iPod" has become synonymous with digital music.

Apple's legendary marketing campaign (which has continued non-stop since the thing came out 6 years ago) is partially responsible, but so is their coordination and grudging cooperation with accessories manufacturers. The shapes, forms, functions and - in some cases - ludicrousness of iPod accessories (seriously, an iPod toilet paper dispenser? Really?) is shocking in the depths of its penetration into vertical markets. Auto manufactures have even jumped on the bandwagon, designing their internal sound systems around the ubiquitous little device.

It was the shear force of the accessories marketplace that caused me to abandon my beloved iRiver years ago in favor of the iPod. I travel a great deal, and when I am stuck at the airport and need a power cable, or a new case...anything, really, the iRiver and I were sadly out of luck. And, honestly, I've been very happy with the iPod - it's served me well.

When I started to get disenchanted with it was during the last Jobsian round of iPod releases this past summer. I didn't really care about the iPod Touch...the interface was cute, but I sneeze things bigger than 16Gig, Steve-o...would it have killed you to make a model with a hard drive on it? Sheesh. Anyway, I digress... So the iPod "classics" (whatever) had larger storage capacities. My music and video consumption is pretty huge, and my iPod Video 60 Gig is bursting at the seams... so I set my sites on the high capacity "classics." More storage, basically the same design, and...uh, wait a minute. The pinouts changed? I need new A/V adapters to make my already existing accessories run? What the hell is the point of that?

...the answer, of course, is - sell more accessories. There is no technical reason the iPod pinouts changed, they just did so Logitech and Connectix and the rest of the iPod coattail companies could get additional revenue boosts from the new iPod family.

Then I turned my head to the right slightly and saw the new Zunes coming out:

hardware redesigned from the ground up
Zune marketplace redesigned from ground up - including DRM-free music and podcasts
WiFi synching enabled
high capacity drives
thinner machines
new navigation widget (The "squirkle." Don't ask.)
integration with both Media Center and XBox360

and, something Apple would never do: free upgrades to the firmware of the original Zunes - essentially bringing them to the same level of functionality as the Zune2's.

I bought in. I got one - and it, as I said previously, magnificently hit all the goals. (Wireless sync is my personal favorite. I walk into my house after work, and by the time I get to my home office, a new days' set of podcasts are on the Zune in my pocket.) However, almost immediately upon purchase of the Zune, I realized all the items in my life that I had iPodified. The one that keeps me from eBaying my iPod? The Alpine x001 head decks in my cars.

There are only a handful of tech companies out there with the clout to enter a hopelessly stacked-against-you game like this and hope to become a serious threat - and Microsoft is one of those companies. There stock is lagging behind Apple's now, but they still have enough money in the bank to buy and sell able several times over.

If Microsoft is serious about wanting to capture the digital media experience with its Media Center-Xbox360-Zune triad, it needs to do 2 things immediately:

Outspend Apple dollar for dollar on its marketing campaigns. Not these weird Zune-As-60's-Acid-Flashback ads I see on TV, but saturated marketing that gets the message out - and that never stops. Not just ad spots that inform and are informational, but billboards, internet campaigns, etc.

I was discussing this over the weekend with a friend, an avid Machead, and he said something interesting about the effectiveness of Apple's marketing over the iPhone this summer. He watched people in the Apple store on 5th Ave in NYC walk into the store, and without reading a manual or talking to an assistant, pick up an iPhone and start to use it. Was this because of its "intuitive" interface? Or was it because we had all already been exposed to 6 months of those goofy TV spots that showed us how to use 2 fingers to stretch open a webpage in Safari?
Work your partnerships, people! Get in tight with the Case Logics, the Alpines, the Logitechs... offer out subsidies to accessory providers to get them to support the product. (How hard would it be for Alpine, for instance, to sell a $20 adapter and firmware upgrade for the x001 to support the Zune?)

Without these two extreme spends, Microsoft will never sell anything close to a significant percentage of the portable media marketplace - and people will point at the failure of the Zune in the marketplace as another episode of Apple's Mac vs. PC ads. Hmmm... maybe John Hodgemen can be holding a Zune in the form of a "Mini Me"?

Ok, It's Official - Aliens Have Landed and Abducted Verizon Executives

2007-11-29T22:13:00.000-08:00

Alright. Joke's over. What is going on?

Still reeling from the announcement earlier in the week that Verizon is opening up its network to 3rd party developers, I open up my new reader today I find this little gem:

"Verizon decides on LTE for 4G Wireless."

Huh. Really?

In one week, the Big Bad of the wireless industry - the company who told its OEM partners to cripple bluetooth on their handsets - decided to all cute and cuddly with developers? Oh, AND abandon EV-DO (excuse me - offer an offering in addition to EV-DO) in lieu of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks and go toe-to-toe with WiMax?

...I have to go lie down.

Wired Took The Title I Wanted, so I'll just say: Verizon now equals Open Apps? WTF?

2007-11-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

Wired stole the title I wanted to use...

"Pig Fly, Hell Freezes Over and Verizon Opens Up Its Network - No, Really."

Undoubted feeling the pressure of Apple's SDK and Google's Android, Verizon changed course so fast everyone of them must have gotten whiplash.

Oh, believe me - I'll have quite a bit more to say about this once I digest every morsel...

"Where's Irony? Just go straight down Democracy, take a sharp left at Profit."

2007-11-17T00:51:00.000-08:00

Consider the two quotes below, and see if you can tell me the difference - because I can't...

"...There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped,or turned back, for their private benefit...."

- Robert Heinlein, Life-Line, Published: 1939

"...the House Education and Labor Committee unanimously passed the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. Among other things, the COAA would require colleges and universities to adopt strict antipiracy policies and possibly offer students access to subscription-based music services like Napster...the bill would put colleges and universities on the front lines of the war against file-sharing. As part of the financial aid administration process, schools would have to inform students about their official policies about copyright infringement, as well as possible civil and criminal penalties. They would also have to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity..."

- Eric Bangeman, ARSTechnica.com, Published: 11/15/2007