a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
I’ve received several hundred comment spam attempts here in the past 12 hours and my Spaminator plugin has smacked them all down which rocks. If you use WordPress, I can’t recommend this enough!
Actually they just keep on coming… there have been at least another hundred since I initially deleted the notes in my email. Pretty amazing… mainly Poker BS. So far none have successfully posted to my blog, which is great.
They want your machine to go down down down…
BoingBoing reports on a hole in some Windows DRM that is being fully exploited by record industry pal Overpeer to infect user machines. Lovely.
Stanley Bing writes a regular humor column in Fortune but this one’s a keeper! Driving while replying… please! I only check messages on my Treo while cruising at highway speeds. Well, OK, I guess I’ve replied to a few including IM. ahem…
Ah, sweet and capable instrument! The things you have shown me in our time! Information about new business prospects that pop up like truffles overnight in your digital field. Amusing messages from friends speaking through their implements to mine, one BlackBerry to another. Important data that shaped my thinking when my mind was occupied with nothing but which wine to select, which exit to take on the Interstate …
Ah, dangerous love! How many times have I fired off messages, thumbs blazing, while driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour! Was I mad? Yes. I was insane with the potential of our relationship. It was you and I, and when we were in a zone where we could not communicate, when your bars went down to zero, how often did I lean out the window, drive to high ground, weasel my way to another location to see whether I could bring you to life?
Ah! How often did you and I wait together in a restaurant for a tardy companion, only to look around and see everyone else peering into his electronic pal and thumbing madly like a raccoon washing its food in a frosty river? Oh, my plastic fantastic love! My heart is breaking! Hear it breaking? Or at least buzzing with an unhealthy rattle that signifies catastrophic systemic failure?
Because I don’t love you anymore.
It started when I got a new incarnation of you. This one is blue. The screen is odd. The font is skinny and sans serif and tough to read. The backlight, too, is feeble and intermittent. You’re now ultrasleek and a little bit plump and so up-to-the-minute. Like everything else in this technologically intensive society, you’ve been improved to the point of being slightly less satisfying in some way. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. [Fortune]
There’s a great feature piece on Comcast running on this week’s cover at Barrons. They present the current financials of the company and talk about the 98% upgraded network which is running quite an array of enhanced services. Most recently the dual-tuner HD DVR has been rolling out but the enhanced VOD service, something that has been touted in advance for some time sounds really killer.
Comcast’s brass is particularly excited about its aggressive rollout of video on demand. The company has begun to make thousands of hours of programming available for download, most of it at no extra charge to its digital-cable subscribers. Comcast customers already can choose from 4,000 hours of programs, including movies, television episodes, advertorials and original content. While there are pay movies — and Comcast officials note that pay-per-view’s popularity has jumped with the introduction of VOD — the real story here is the ability to go a step beyond the DVR and give viewers more flexibility about what they want to watch and when they can watch it.
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“The idea is that a subscription to cable is no longer just a subscription to basic cable, plus premium and digital channels,” says Moffett. “It means access to a nearly unlimited library of movies and educational programming and episodes of television shows. This is not pay per view. This is a complete rethinking of the way customers buy video service.”
The company’s video-on-demand ambitions were a key factor in its $60 billion bid for Disney, which the leaders of Mousedom spurned as too low. If it had succeeded, Comcast could have had a stranglehold on family-oriented programming. (The company already owns a small group of cable channels, including E!, the Golf Channel, G4TechTV, the Style Network, the International Channel and Outdoor Life Network.) While Roberts contends that Comcast isn’t likely to attempt anything else on the scale of the Disney foray again, the company has been working diligently to generate a pool of differentiated programs. It recently gained access to the film libraries at MGM and Sony, which include 45,000 TV episodes and 7,500 feature films — according to Roberts, almost half the color movies ever made. The deal is part of the pending $2.9 billion acquisition of MGM by a group of investors led by Sony. Comcast invested $300 million in the transaction.
The company early next year will start offering a rotating roster of about 200 free films from the Sony and MGM libraries to video-on-demand customers each month. Also planned: VOD access to old TV favorites, such as The Three Stooges, The Partridge Family and Starsky & Hutch. The companies have also agreed to roll out three new cable channels, to capitalize on the rich library of films and television programs.
The other key piece from the article that I took away is that Comcast, like the recent Time Warner quadruple-play development, is considering a serious move into wireless. The real difference though is that they are thinking a combination of mobile on the road with a WiFi VOIP phone at home will come through in a single piece of hardware. Sounds excellent! It’s actually great to see large companies — not just the outlaws in VOIP going for it with public thinking like this. It’s this sort of product that will make the tech seemless — assuming the hardware allows it of course — for consumers which should stimulate demand. VOIP makes it pretty easy to move about with your number already, but having it across devices in an easy manner is just great.
Comcast continues to bet well on the future…
David Pogue tells all on Cable Cards in his latest Circuits column. It’s clearly a version 1 product which might be right for certain customers… for most however, a cable box is in the cards (pun intended) for years to come. Aside from the fact that today’s TVs won’t work with the 2-way cards coming next, your cable company won’t be able to sell you enhanced services… like on-demand, enhanced guides and PPV.
Think Secret reports that Apple is going to make an announcement of a headless (no monitor) iMac at MacWorld san Francisco and I am very excited at the prospect.
According to the report, the idea is to get a machine below $500 to attract Windows users currently using iPods who might buy Macs if the prices were just a bit lower. This machine certainly would achieve that goal, feeling like an iBook, but looking more like a white XServe / or closed laptop. To me, this type of box represents a machine most Mac users would want!
A headless machine is perfect for a home server! It takes little space either under an existing iMac (I have the 15″ 800MHz version) or taking up a small corner on your desk, or even in a closet. You can operate the whole thing via Apple Remote Desktop connect all your peripherals and run iTunes, file and print sharing, scheduling, sync your handhelds etc and etc…
Even though it would be considered a lower end machine by desktop standards there would be more than enough juice to handle all of the tasks and more I just mentioned. Our current home machine, that trusty iMac has been doing just that for a few years and has yet to let me down. You could utilize the DVI or VGA connector to use the machine as a great home theater mac as well … something I’ve often wondered just how to do with my current iMac since the monitor, while nice to look at, would stand out a bit much in my stereo rack. Home automation would be another simple to add feature / task for a machine like this…
I really hope this is true. A machine like this would really be a great addition to any Mac home.
With the right aggregator and enclosures within feeds, you can enjoy video and audio quite easily…
Though the movement is only in its early stages, it’s easy to imagine that video blogs could have as big an impact as the text blogs. Indeed, they’re already doing what has been the real strength of traditional blogging — promoting one another’s work. And even if the vast majority of the videos remain a novelty, the explosion of experimentation is a welcome sight. [BusinessWeek]
John Dvorak chums the water today with some serious Mac bait and I just can’t help but comment.
He initiates his silly rant stating that the Mac is stagnant, having maintained the market share rather than growing. I can’t argue that point actually, but I don’t even think it matters since there are plenty of people buying new macs as both new customers and as repeat customers. Dvorak starts to make a point that Apple has secured its niche but makes no actually point other than loud obnoxious forum users ruin it for everyone with their noise… right. I guess those jerks do ruin the fun, but I can’t really see how they make a damned bit of difference in mainstream views or in any outward marketing by Apple or anyone else.
Dvorak also points to Job’s division of attention through Pixar and the iPod and iTunes making a distraction and again not impacting Mac market share. I can’t say I disagree more… The iPod, while dual platform has led to quite a few switchers and has put the Apple brand in more people’s minds than ever before. Imagine what’s next that will capture our attention again and shake up the industry again and again? Where’s the PC side innovation? Oh that’s right, it’s cheaper faster, yet no simpler and still ridden with issues like viruses, worms and spam sent from your systems thanks to unattended security holes in the OS.
Comparing the PC to the Mac is a poor comparison. They are both computers, but I’ll gladly pay for style, ease of use and reliability. I don’t usually consider Mercedes and BMW in the same class of car as say a Ford or Chevy. Sure, many people won’t care about some of those details… that’s why Ford and Chevy outsell Mercedes and BMW. It’s not a volume game. It’s about the quality of the experience. It’s yours to choose.
AOL reports on a considerable spam decline for the year… check out that graph – those are BILLIONS of emails. And it’s just AOL…
Time Warner Inc. unit America Online said it has seen a big decline in overall junk e-mail volume this year, in a reversal of a five-year escalation in spam aimed at AOL members. AOL said the decline is evidence that its efforts to fight spam are working.
“We used to be the largest target,” said AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham. “The target’s becoming a lot smaller,” in the face of aggressive filtering and spammer prosecutions that have made sending junk mail to AOL members less financially rewarding, he said.
In late 2004, AOL blocked half as much spam at the front door of its network as it blocked in the worst point of 2003, when it stopped about 2.4 billion e-mails a day, the company said. And the number of messages diverted to members’ “Spam Folders” fell 60% to 40 million a day in November compared with a year earlier. The drop in spam helped reduce AOL’s overall e-mail load by 22%, AOL said. [WSJ]
As you probably know the Treo 650 is still only available through Sprint and will continue to be the exclusive carrier through year end. January should bring Cingular on board with their GSM / EDGE capable device, but the unlocked GSM version I’ve got on order seems to be in queue for a February delivery.
Disappointing news for sure… I got word today from a friend traveling through Newark Airport today who happened to stop at the PalmOne Store and asked. I can understand favoring the carriers first as they are the first line of business for any phone maker, but it still stinks having to wait even longer.
Scoble just pointed me to Indeed, a very cool Job Search Engine. You can search by title or keyword and by geography. A killer feature is that you can then add that search as an email or RSS agent so you can stay in touch. Very slick.
I don’t care what anyone says about the Treo 650’s memory issues, lack of WiFi support, limited Bluetooth functionality, poor sound quality, dialing delays or the fact that it’s only available on Sprint PCS. It’s the still the best Smartphone on the market. Mobile business professionals who want an integrated device should look no further, especially if your organization uses Microsoft Exchange for email and calendaring. [BargainPDA]
I just learned today that Dish Network offers Sirius as an add-on package. Seem like a great and actually logical combo when you consider the addition of Music Choice on DirecTV and many cable systems. I’ve been finding the programming much stronger on Sirius than I’ve heard in the past on Music Choice, for what it’s worth.
While all the rumors say that Sirius has something cooking with Apple, I just caught an XM exclusive album on iTunes via my newsreader. A quick search revealed another XM album as well as well as a track from Sirius…
I guess they’ve both been dabbling…
Time Warner is working on a special feature for digital cable subscribers called Start Over, the WSJ reports. The cool thing about this idea is that you don’t have to be recording or even using a DVR to enable it. You simply tune to a program and press “Start Over” on your remote and the TV obeys.
This level of simplicity delivers a powerful tool to the TV watching masses and will definitely be both an intuitive and useful feature to have. Some tricks for Time Warner include getting revised programming rights from the various acting guilds, music producers, studios and of course the networks. This is apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back with Mystro TV, Time Warner’s recently killed fully on-demand system. The WSJ assumes that the FF feature will be disabled during commercials in order to help the approval process, which changes a significant detail in the DVR / Time-shifting experience – eliminating the Time Shift! One of the perks in catching up when you start watching a program being recorded after it starts (or after it’s been recorded) is watching it in less time since you can skip over commercials. as noted earlier, this is not a DVR service, but perhaps it will be added to those boxes as well. I’d imagine pressing the button would activate some lovely Macrovision to block FF or 30-sec skip features you might have on your remotes.
I had previously noted MystroTV here and here. Too bad it’s dead.
If you’ve been contemplating a move to the future Trump-land on the UWS of NYC, I’m sure you knew you’d get a big bang for the buck you’ll be shelling out. A bonus for early movers is a new super high speed network…
A pact between GigaBeam, Microwave Satellite Technologies (MST) and Trump properties will see ultra high-speed wireless links installed in twenty of Trump’s buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The high-speed connections, as fast as 1.5Gbps, will bring to the apartment and business dwellers in the buildings VoIP, data, and even HDTV.
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GigaBeam will start installing the high-speed connection within the Trump International Hotel and other Trump properties this quarter. MST will then deploy additional links throughout the remainder of 2005. [Infoworld]
Walt Mossberg has been spending some quality time with the HP z545-b Digital Entertainment Center and it’s Media Extender counterpart and came away reasonably satisfied, but in no way recommending the experience for anyone but techies. It’s too bad that $2,000 of kit still does not make it easy enough to just watch and play with your media. Perhaps 2005 will be the year companies finally get that this stuff has to be simple, and tech transparent.
In general, both worked well. But they also had some drawbacks, and it was impossible to escape two of the worst problems of using a Windows computer — security issues and networking complexities.
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And the realities of the Windows security mess can intrude on your entertainment experience. For instance, while I was watching TV, I was repeatedly interrupted by pop-up notices urging me to configure Norton AntiVirus. To do so, I had to exit the Media Center software.
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I also tested the $299 Media Center Extender, which uses a wired or wireless home network to stream video and audio from the Media Center PC to a television or stereo system in another room. The basic setup for the extender went well. And music and photos were beamed perfectly over my wireless network, which uses a popular Wi-Fi flavor, called 802.11g. (The extender doesn’t work with the most common flavor of Wi-Fi, called 802.11b.)
But video was a problem. When I tried to watch recorded TV shows on the remote TV, the picture stuttered noticeably, and it was grainy. Microsoft and H-P attributed this to the speed of my network, which was being degraded by other computers doing e-mail and Web browsing.
Microsoft says that, for optimal video streaming, Media Center users should buy and install a separate wireless network based on the less-common 802.11a standard and dedicate it to the Media Center extender connection.
This is likely to add another $100 or so to the cost of the setup. Worse, it will plunge users into the morass of installing another network. The complexity of this task is increased by the fact that the H-P computer doesn’t work with the “a” flavor of Wi-Fi, even though the Extender does. H-P and Microsoft provide instructions on how to do this, but it isn’t simple for nontechies. [WSJ]
I can’t imagine having to install a second network for media sharing and distribution as recommended… I’ve got enough stuff pumping through my multiple routers and switch to drive my wife insane. If I had to add another order of complexity to things I would be asked very quickly to just get rid of it. Designing the product to look like a home component is only part of the equation. It has to work like an appliance – which means to plug it in and go. I realize that is way simpler than will probably be possible in the near-term, but that has to be the goal.
Media Adapter / Servers and their networks need to auto-configure while content needs to be found and easily shared and distributed within your home environment. Oh and the UI has to be simple. It’s great that Windows is beneath Media Center but Keep it hidden!! Make me believe it’s just a media center.
Simon Woodside at MobileWhack delivers some good thoughts on iPhone and is certainly worth a read. I can’t see UWB happening in the first edition only since they’ll be targeting the mid-line according the report at Forbes. Who knows, I am sure it will be full of surprises when iPhone arrives.
Timewise, iPhone could be out within a year or a month. All of the technology I’ve covered exists now. Margins in the phone business are totally different from Pods and PCs, but you can bet that Apple will get a good deal because of what their star power will do for whatever carrier they grace their first offering on. They’ll cut a surprising deal and could well change the way that handset makers and operators interact (much the way iTunes Music Store changed the online music business and forced the industry and other companies, like Microsoft, to respond).
does well, like the iPod, it will drive more people to Macs, which is a good thing for both Apple and its fans. [MobileWhack ]